Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (22 page)

 • • • 

W
est of Umatilla, I-84 was the only Oregonian option. Riding the interstate sounded nightmarish, so we opted to cross back into Washington and take Route 14. On this stretch, shade trees were few and far between, and there were no towns aside from Paterson, a three-shack cluster where we stopped to refill water bottles and inhale diner pie, and it was outside said diner that we met Emily, the first fellow cyclist we’d seen in a month. She was heading east, from Portland, and when Rachel mentioned we were headed that way, Emily dug around in her handlebar bag and produced a glossy pamphlet.

“Have you guys heard of Adventure Cycling?” she asked. “A friend gifted me the maps for the Lewis and Clark route, and I don’t need the gorge section anymore. Want it?”

I was about to launch into a poignant monologue about finding my own way when Galen said, “Totally! We’ve just got this crappy Washington map.”

Galen and Rachel huddled up as Emily pointed out the spots where she’d camped, the roads she’d ridden. I folded my arms and looked away. After twenty-four hundred miles of principled resistance to prepackaged experience, I wasn’t about to give in now, wasn’t going to pollute these final—

“There’s a nice free campground in Roosevelt,” I heard Emily say. “It’s pretty much the only good spot in the next fifty miles, so you should definitely stop there. Also, there’s a sweet little fruit stand right by this bridge. Great peaches.”

I inched a bit closer and peeked at the map. I liked peaches. And free campgrounds. I kept listening, and as I watched Emily point out more of her favorite spots, I had this epiphany. The map in her hands, it was not a threat, not a constraint. It was a fucking map.

We thanked Emily, wished her well, and got back on 14. West of Paterson, it was more heat and headwind. I’d somehow expected the final miles to be easy, but I was as exhausted and bored as I’d been on any Dakotan day. My eyes were sweat stung, my legs aching. By the time we reached the aspiring ghost town of Roosevelt, I was thrilled that we’d met Emily, that we knew we had a safe place to sleep.

We made our way to the park and found the camping area. It was ugly and rocky, and the park was empty, and none of us could see why we shouldn’t set up in the lush grass that hugged the river, so we did, and we slept good, heavy sleep, until about two o’clock, when I woke to what sounded like a metallic heartbeat. I unzipped the tent door just in time to catch a faceful of water. A whole lot of shrieking and stake pulling and tent dragging followed. Rachel and I ended up on the beach, safe from the attacking sprinklers, and Galen tucked up in the corner of a little gazebo, his hammock just out of the blast zone. I dried off, spooned Rachel, and smiled up at the stars, thinking of how and to whom I’d tell this little anecdote. And then I fell asleep.

 • • • 

T
he next morning, it was more dry heat and grinding climbs, gorge-force winds and infinite dirt. We fell into formation and pushed, stopping only for snack breaks, riding past the wineries, the scenic viewpoints, the cliff-top Stonehenge replica. We were so close, just a hundred-some miles from Portland, and could no longer be bothered with frivolous detours.

By midafternoon we’d crossed back into Oregon for good. It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome. The bridge from Maryhill to Biggs Junction had no shoulder and a glut of traffic, and by the time we’d reached Oregon, a half-dozen growling cars were queued up behind us. Since Biggs was just a concrete island amid a sea of dirt, we ate our gas station sandwiches, loaded up on Newtons and Nutty Bars, and left as quickly as possible.

Emily had prepped us for the next stretch: ten miles on a frontage road, which she described as “meh,” then thirteen more on I-84. The interstate. She’d insisted there was no other option, unless we wanted to climb a thousand feet on gravel roads, and that the highway wasn’t so bad. “The shoulder is super wide,” she’d said, “and I had this great tailwind . . . Oh. Dang. Yeah, tomorrow’s gonna suck for you guys.”

The frontage road did indeed suck. It was one of those ferociously gusty stretches where I wondered why the hell we’d chosen to ride cross-country against prevailing winds. For well over an hour, we pushed into the wind, leapfrogging at mile markers, taking turns facing the current.

But I-84? A revelation.

The shoulder was six feet wide, and we rode right along the Columbia, and the thick traffic ended up generating this localized tailwind that pretty much canceled out the westerly we’d been battling. Locked as I was between cars and water, between Rachel and Galen, I felt this unnatural momentum, like I was being sucked westward, like everything was definite and life was acceleration and all that lay before me was perfectly inevitable. For the hundredth time, I dropped my eyes to the Fuji, my hand to the top tube, and I said, if only to myself, thank you.

A few miles up the road, just east of The Dalles, Galen got another flat. While he patched his tube, and Rachel called her folks, I climbed atop some roadside rocks and looked across the river at the train tracks that had first carried me to Portland. I remembered this stretch. I’d been staring out the window, peering into mist and fog, squirming in my seat and wondering what lay ahead. A year later, here I was again. Approaching. Wondering. I didn’t know what, if anything, it meant to have traveled so far only to arrive at such a familiar place, and with such familiar questions. I just knew I’d traveled.

 • • • 

T
he plan had been to make Hood River by sunset, or midnight, or sunrise. Just as long as we got there before tomorrow, so as to begin day sixty-two, our final day, within sixty miles of Portland. But Galen’s fix took a long time, and as soon as we got back on the road, Rachel got her first flat and, shortly thereafter, her second. By the time we’d ridden through The Dalles, the sky had gone black, and only when we escaped the glow of the town’s last streetlamp did I realize how dark it was. Also, windy. And cold. I shared my observations with Rachel, and we had a quick conference, then told Galen that this was nuts, that we were going to stay in The Dalles. And though I’m sure he would have continued on had he been alone, he just nodded and said okay.

There was nowhere obvious to camp, so Galen set off in search of abandoned buildings while Rachel and I sat in a grocery deli, eating mealy fried chicken and lukewarm mac ’n’ cheese and justifying why it was acceptable, even appropriate, for us to drop the cash and get a room on this, our final night. Galen could do his vagabond-hobo thing, and we could buy a bottle of wine and do what you do with a wine drunk and a cheap hotel room, and then the three of us could meet up in the morning and head for home. I was about to call Galen and break the news when a short, bespectacled guy asked if those bikes outside were ours. Five minutes later, we had an offer for a backyard campsite and a home-cooked breakfast.

Our benefactor, Dale, was a former Marines sharpshooter who now spent his days throwing pottery and smoking salmon and making thinly veiled references to having killed people. He insisted that he never slept, and indeed, when I got up at two thirty and stumbled inside to pee, I found him sitting in the dimly lit kitchen. He looked up from a
National Geographic
and asked if I’d ever seen a puma in the wild. Four hours later, he woke us with salmon-and-goat-cheese omelets and sludgy coffee and wild-eyed, pure-hearted reminders to “Pay it forward, okay, guys?” And an hour after that, he stood on the front porch and waved until we disappeared from sight.

 • • • 

I
t was September 14. Exactly two months, and 2,428 miles, from the day Rachel and I left Conover. The skies were clear, the air cool. We’d all had a good sleep and a big breakfast, and we were ready. Ready to ride ninety miles to Portland. Ready to arrive. Maybe.

Galen, at least, was dead set on making it by nightfall. He’d even made plans to cook dinner with his cousin, a Portlander. Rachel, too, had let her folks know to expect us, and the previous night, during our romantic deli dinner, she’d talked about how excited she was to get off the bike and into her bed, her favorite sweatshirt, her routines. I’d nodded and mumbled my agreement, though I wasn’t sure I meant it. Even if part of me was ready to find out if these miles had mattered, if they’d vested me with whatever powers one needed to stay somewhere, a far more familiar part of me wanted to be here, on the brink, in anticipation, forever.

We were on the road by seven thirty. Per Emily’s suggestion, we took Route 30, and about a mile past The Dalles, pretty much exactly where we’d turned around the night before, the road disappeared into a nest of evergreen. The change was instant. Arid to lush. Autumnal to vernal. More than the border crossing, more even than the sight of tracks tracing the Columbia, this felt like the end. Or the beginning. Either way. I was glad we’d waited for daybreak. I wanted to see where I was going.

For five miles, Route 30 wound through rock and pine, deep into the gorge—eroded bluffs to the north, the sprawling Columbia to the south, and between, picket fences and thirsty pastures, chirping birds and whining engines. I-84 was just a few hundred feet away, and though it was noisy, it was also a magnet for all but the most local of traffic, and so the three of us rode side by side by side, talking about Dale and Portland and the etymology of the word “gorgeous,” until the road started to climb and we all went quiet. I felt lactic acid saturating my legs, a throbbing knot between my shoulders. I took a long, slow drag of pine and time-traveled back to the Mesabi Trail, the hills above Lewistown, the crossing into Idaho. This felt right. As much as I’d enjoyed the propulsive tumult of the interstate, I wanted to spend the final miles here, in the quiet carless nowhere, in the in-between.

It was one o’clock when we pulled into Hood River—plenty of time to make it to Portland, provided we skipped the scenic highway and banged out the final miles on I-84. Galen was all about this plan. I was not. Sixty miles of interstate headwind seemed like the wrong kind of ending. I wanted more grinding climbs, more carless quiet, more time to reflect, to ponder, to figure out what all these miles had meant and where they should take me and what I really wanted and who I could and should and would be. So when we stopped for bagels and coffee, I proposed staying the night in Hood River, then taking the final day slow.

“What do you guys think?” I asked.

Rachel nodded. “I’d be into that.”

Galen took a slow sip of coffee, looked back and forth between us. “Nope,” he said. “I’m getting there tonight.”

He stood and excused himself to call his cousin, and Rachel and I leaned over the table and whispered, even though he’d gone outside, about what to do. She said maybe we should let him go it alone, and I said yes, we should, we should stay here and rent that room and buy that wine, should end how we’d begun, alone and apart, but then Galen came back to the table, and we hadn’t settled on an answer, and it seemed weird to keep discussing it in front of him, so we made a sort of nondecision to just keep going.

As I followed Galen and Rachel down the on-ramp, as I merged with the motorists, I told myself I’d keep my head up, mind clear, eyes on distant purple. But soon enough I’d surrendered my precious attention to broken glass and rumble strips, to swirling winds and foot-to-forehead aches, to signs whose names and numbers were changing too fast for my mind to process but too slow for my body to bear. The farther we rode, the more I felt like I’d made a bad choice, like Rachel and I should head back to Hood River and get that room and end this thing right. But somewhere in there I looked down at my legs, watched them pumping like pistons, and then off toward the water, where I could barely make out what looked like a crumbling old dock. And I started thinking that maybe this river-gorge-highway hellride, this mile-by-mile slog through something I couldn’t quite see, was in fact the perfect ending, if it was an ending at all.

I
rise from the saddle, lock my knees, and coast. My quads scream, but I stay standing, because my ass has never, ever hurt this much. The pulsing, tip-to-tail throb I can deal with, but as of the past few days, I’ve also been suffering these eye-popping, localized jolts. Whenever I so much as shift a centimeter, it’s as if I just sat on a pack of lit cigarettes.

The term, I believe, is “saddle sore.”

I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s been two weeks since I last took a break. A couple of days ago, I rode 102 miles. Yesterday, it was 128. And today, if my legs don’t melt, I’ll be hitting 140.

I pull off at a gas station, inhale five bucks’ worth of corn syrup, return to the road. It’s going to be dark soon. The sun dipped behind the pines a half hour ago, and the light is grainy. Passing cars are switching on headlights, and drivers are slowing and staring, furrowing brows, waiting for me to raise a hand or a white flag. I’ll do nothing of the sort. I’m finishing this ride.

It’s September 14, five years to the day from that final push to Portland. I’m back on the road, heading east, on a breakneck solo ride that’s taken me through Oregon and Idaho, Montana and Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. I’ve been riding fast, faster than I thought I could, faster than I ever will again, not because I like midnight calf cramps or heatstroke dry heaves, not because I’m trying to prove something, but rather because I’m equal parts impulsive and ragingly sentimental, and so, even though I didn’t decide to do this until mid-August, even though it’s meant riding twenty-two hundred miles in a month, even though I know it matters to no one but me, I’ve been racing time to make it home on this day, in this way.

I no longer own a speedometer, but if I had to guess, I’d say I’m now going somewhere between nine miles per hour and backwards. My joints are full of concrete, back spasming, quads liquefying and pooling in my socks. I know I’m close—twenty-some miles close—but I can’t fathom actually riding this final stretch. And yet, I’m going to.

I drop my head and bite my cheeks and make myself think about something. About anything. About Rachel. About how I probably wouldn’t be out here if she hadn’t—on a crisp November night, just as I was emerging from that first Portlandian year, a year full of anxiety attacks and depressive funks and incessant moaning about how we should get back on
our
bikes and leave
her
city and ride somewhere, anywhere, forever—stopped and turned and met my eyes and said the worst words in the English language: “I need to talk to you about something.”

And I get it now. Though I wasn’t ready to see it then—not that night, that week, that year—I get it now. I get that, just as I’d never have found Portland without Rachel, I’d never have left it with her. I owe her my second trip as much as our first.

The air is getting downright autumnal, too cool for short sleeves, so I pull over and dig around in a pannier for my flannel. I’ve still got the same panniers. They’re a lot dirtier now, and I’ve had to repair hooks and clasps, but I’ve still got them, just as I’ve still got my sleeping bag and pad, my dented tin cookware, my trusty beer-can stove. I pull the flannel from the top of the rear right bag, and underneath it is a mess of unwashed clothes, including the soccer shorts I haven’t worn for days. For much of the past week—for much of the trip, really—I’ve been hiding the Lycra under a pair of frayed jean shorts. I’ve similarly ditched the sweat-wicking shirt and dorky fleece, the cleated shoes and expensive sunglasses, have ridden most of these miles in a baby blue Donald Duck T-shirt, a red and white flannel, a pair of Sambas, and some chipped yellow shades I found on the ground at a music festival.

On second thought, maybe I
am
trying to prove something.

I tug on the flannel, get back in the saddle, and force my legs to push the pedals. My legs are not happy. My legs are saying things like “never forgive you” and “permanent damage.” But I’m so close, and I don’t think my legs, or any other part of me, really want to ditch-camp beside a county highway on a sub-forty night, and so I pedal on, and as the pain dulls from “I might cry” to “I still might cry but who cares?” I try to recall if riding a bike has ever hurt this much. And, yes, as a matter of fact it has; as a matter of fact that’s why I’m not riding the Fuji.

Exactly one year after Rachel left me, I was riding downtown on a Portland-population-control kind of night—rain pissing sideways, wind torpedoing down from the West Hills and shoving me toward a queue of honking, lurching cars—when out of nowhere a big black box flashed in front of me. I strangled the brakes but still I hit hard, my shoulder into metal, my head through glass, and then I was on my back, feeling rain and something thicker on my forehead. Much later that night, after the police report and ambulance ride, after the drugs and stitches, I lay in bed, unable to sleep, because my shoulder was melting, forehead throbbing, mind racing, trying to make sense of why I wasn’t more busted up about the grisly death of the bike that had carried me all the way from Wisconsin. But I didn’t care. At the time, I couldn’t quite say why. I just didn’t.

And now, I especially don’t, because I’m riding
this
bike. Riding Rudolph. I chose the name in honor of my gramps, who, upon joining the army to fight in World War II, noticed that all the other infantrymen had middle names, and, in a bout of self-conscious genius, chose Rudolph on the spot. My Rudolph is lighter than the Fuji—and with his matte blue powder coat and copper-bedazzled leather saddle, much prettier—and his wheels, which I myself built, have blown exactly zero spokes.

I lean forward, and though this shift in balance shoots off fireworks in my groin, and causes me to swerve left, then right, then left again, I persist, until I manage to plant a kiss on Rudolph’s headset. I don’t miss the Fuji at all. I adore Rudolph. I chose him. I
built him. Well, okay, I mostly built him. Admittedly, I had a lot of help from some seriously patient coworkers at the nonprofit bike shop where, for the better part of four years, I’d worked as a volunteer manager–cum–event organizer–cum–everything else. The day after arriving with Rachel, I’d googled “portland+community+bicycle” and found the shop, a scrappy nonprofit that got bikes to people who couldn’t afford them. I fell in love with the place, and its volunteer program in particular. They had these drop-in nights when dozens of people came together to fix old bikes, and they tolerated, even welcomed, doofy unskilled hacks like me. The guy in charge of the program was effusive and charming and clearly loved what he was doing, and I soon decided that his was the best job ever. So I haunted the place, and applied for every position they posted, and when, a year after I’d arrived in Portland, the best job ever opened up, I actually got it, and I was euphoric, until two months later, when Rachel said the worst words.

I lean back from the bars, look up past the pines, catch a few timid stars peeking through deep purple. Suddenly I’m getting nostalgia needles; I’m remembering those Dakotan nights when Rachel and I had pedaled side by side, alone, our solitude like a secret. It’s the same sweet secret now, has been for an entire month, really. Because the whole time, it’s just been me out here, moving forward, not needing or wanting anyone else to know how or where or why.

That’s not to say I haven’t been lonely. I’ve missed my sister. I’ve missed my friends. And I’ve missed my job, which I’ve loved almost as blindly and fully as I loved Rachel. For a long, long time, I thought it was perfect—absurdly fitting. A bike brought me to Portland, gave me joy and purpose, and somehow I found a way to get paid to basically cheerlead the world’s kindest people as they—joyfully, purposefully—built bikes for the bikeless. I loved knowing I was making their work possible, loved knowing I was doing right by Dale from The Dalles, was “paying it forward,” was giving what I had to people I hardly knew.

Um, wow. I’m really sucking air now. Seeing stars both natural and man made. My pinkies are numb, and the pain in my legs is whatever pain-scale number means “unable to think clearly.” I recalled County K as a carless, quiet, pine-lined beauty, and though it is indeed all of those things, it is also mercilessly hilly. Well, bring it on, I say. I’ve got thousands of miles behind me, and no more than ten to go, and I want this final push to hurt. I want to feel every inch. I want to end this trip by remembering why I chose it. That I chose it.

It was a sunny Saturday morning, and I was sitting at my favorite café, trying to squeeze in a few fleeting hours of writing. After three-plus years, my job was no longer energizing, just exhausting, and I’d been having bimonthly panic attacks about where it was taking me, about where I was going, and why, and why I could no longer answer such a simple fucking question. I was too scattered to really write, on that and every morning, and so I was just clicking through the street view of Washburn, Wisconsin, calling it research, when, without quite knowing why, I slid the cursor over the minus sign and tapped the party end of the zoom bar. In the span of about twenty seconds, I floated from Washburn to Bayfield County, from Chequamegon Bay to Lake Superior, from trees and towns to green space and white space, from a two-year gut twist to the sudden realization that I knew exactly where and why and how I needed to go.

And so here I am, turning right onto West Buckatabon Road, under familiar pine boughs, over familiar pavement. Until today, I made a point of making my own route, steered well south of the roads I rode with Rachel. But now I want the beacons, the reminders of where I started and where I’ve ended up. I’ve already passed the site of the spoke explosion, a sign for the loon capital of the world, a shimmery lake that, though it’s still cattail peppered and evergreen rimmed, has surrendered one small, sun-bleached dock. And now, as I ride past roadside pine I once thought I was seeing for the last time, I’m thinking what I’ve thought every day for the past month: that maybe this is how I move—in search, in circles, incessant.

It’s pitch-black now. My light is low on batteries, flickering and fading, and so I turn it off. I can’t see more than ten feet in front of me. I don’t need to. I just listen to my tires on the pavement, my chain on the cogs. I take a deep breath, and the air smells like pine tar, like dried sweat, like aged summer. My calves are seizing, my eyelids sandbagged. My neck is packed with glass shards, and I don’t even have words for my crotch. But I keep riding, at a jogger’s pace, past the tiny lake whose breath I can feel through the trees, past the marsh where Rachel and I watched the eagle, past the boat landing and over rolling hills and up to the foot of the driveway. It’s dotted with tiny pillars of dancing light. I pull up beside one, see that it’s a candle. My dear, ragingly sentimental parents have lined their driveway with candles. For a moment, I hesitate, because I kind of wanted to end this night alone, wanted to have myself a moment. But I’ve already done that. I’m doing
it. And, anyway, my folks are up there, waiting, as are the things I left behind, the things I hope to carry back to the city I hope is home. And so I get back in the saddle, and I follow the lights, one by one, toward something like an ending.