Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (3 page)

“Does it still hurt?” she asked.

“Mom, I’m
fine
.”

“Do you want some ibuprofen?” My mom believed everything—headaches, fevers, racism—could be cured with ibuprofen.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “It actually feels like it’s a bit less swollen today.”

This was a lie, but Mom seemed to buy it. She looked off at the steps leading to my room, then back at me. “I know this is going to be a great trip for you two,” she said. “But I’m only half-kidding about wanting you to stay. We’ll miss having Rachel here. And you too, I guess.”

My folks hadn’t met Rachel until I’d brought her to their doorstep, some three weeks before, but already they loved her and were stunned—as was I—by her utter comfort in Conover, this tiny Northwoods town where she knew no one and spent all her time with the family. I mean, I’d expected her to enjoy the Friday fish fries and Fourth of July fireworks, the afternoon swims and walks in the woods, whitetail deer and pileated woodpeckers, and she certainly had, but what she seemed to like most of all was just being at the house, reading books, hanging out on the dock with my family, and, of course, indulging in her immutable morning routine. Every day around eight, she’d pull on a hoodie and head downstairs, yawning and stretching and moaning “Coffee”—and looking, as Mom described it, like a baby bird waiting to be fed. Even if no one else was up, she’d eat and read and opine, just as she had in Portland.

For the past few weeks, I’d again been thinking what I’d thought the night we met: I not only wanted Rachel but wanted to
be
her. She was self-confident enough to lean into the unknown and self-aware enough to be herself wherever she landed. I wanted that: I wanted to keep moving. I wanted to figure out how to be myself anywhere. And I wanted to do it all with her.

Now Rachel came back to the kitchen, in swimsuit and towel, and I lifted swim trunks from the porch railing and followed her down to the lake. We stayed all afternoon, diving into the water and drying on the dock, diving and drying, again and again, Rachel shrieking when her toes got tangled in slimy stalks of invasive Eurasian milfoil, me yanking up handfuls and sticking them in her hair. Later, after helping with dinner, we returned to the dock, to play music and watch the sunset, then lingered as stars burned the blue-black sky. And as I lay beside Rachel, staring up at the night, my legs faintly aching from our afternoon ride, I thought not of Galen or gear, of Portland or Who Knows? but only of this quiet moment. I wondered how many such moments might await us out there. I was ready to find out.

W
e stood alone in my parents’ driveway, I in a freshly laundered gray polyester T-shirt, Rachel in a sleeveless beige version of the same, both of us in crotch-hugging Lycra and baggy black shorts whose sole purpose was to hide said Lycra. Our heads were helmeted, our laces tied. Tires pumped, chains lubed, panniers packed and racked. It was a prime photo op—golden light peeking through pine needles, dappling bikes and bikers—but nobody was around to take the photo, and I hadn’t figured out the timer on my clunky old digital, so I settled for an extended-arm head shot, the kind that fills the albums of many a mediocre photographer.

I pulled up the image and we huddled over the screen. Our huge helmets blotted out the bikes, but we were smiling, leaning into each other.

“Look, honey!” I said. “This was back before we hated each other.”

Rachel nuzzled her helmet into my armpit. “You always know just what to say.”

We had by this point heard every imaginable quip about how the bike trip would destroy us. We would break down after weeks of sore butts and scarce showers, brutal winds and grueling climbs. We’d explode under the pressure of having to agree on decision after decision. I’d want to go faster, and she slower, and sometimes one of us wouldn’t want to go at all, and, well, what were we going to do about that? We’d shrugged this off, all of it. Wisconsin had been good to us, and we’d never been more confident about our ability to take this trip and move forward, together.

“This is pretty good, right?” Rachel said, still staring at the screen. “I’m sure your mom will appreciate that we took it. Speaking of, I’m surprised she hasn’t called again.”

I nodded, shaking off a mild guilt tremor. My folks were in Chicago, and I knew it was killing them to miss out on a dramatic send-off. But it felt right, leaving like this: alone and unseen.

“Do you have the map?” Rachel asked.

“Of course.” I gave her an are-you-really-asking-me-that smile, but as soon as she looked away, I slid my fingers into the pannier pocket and dug for the folded sheets in question. She looked back from the lake just in time to catch my hand releasing the paper. Busted.

The map was actually nine separate maps photocopied from a gazetteer and taped at the seams. I’d sketched out our route with a yellow highlighter, and it stretched from edge to edge, bottom right to upper left. We’d had other options—an association called Adventure Cycling offers dozens of compact, waterproof, intricate route maps for cross-country bikers—but we’d agreed that buying those babies was out of the question. Our trip was about independence, about adventure, about us, and we didn’t need to be coddled or constrained.

This super-map was just one of a hundred things in my four panniers. Port side, I’d packed my blue goose-down mummy bag and school-bus-yellow tent, a one-quart Ziploc full of tools (patch kit and tire levers, spoke wrench and chain breaker, adjustable wrench and multitool with screwdrivers and hex heads galore), and a smaller bag with my toothbrush and paste, my deodorant and peppermint Dr. Bronner’s. The pannier on the starboard bow held two sporks, a spice kit, some hand-me-down tinware, and the penny-alcohol stove I’d built days earlier with a drill bit, needle-nose pliers, three tin cans, and a lot of long-distance tech support from Galen. My final bag teemed with clothes: extra shirt and shorts, wool hat and thermals, socks and boxers, flip-flops and rain poncho, some hideous but functional quick-dry pants, and a gray fleece with a dime-size hole in the breast, courtesy of a rogue campfire ember I hadn’t noticed in time. Atop the rear rack, I’d bungeed on tent poles, a sleeping pad, and a pleather case that held my brand-new ukulele. And in the front panniers’ zippered pockets, I’d packed the stuff I’d use most often: on the left, I had the super-map, a dog-eared copy of
The God of Small Things
, two rollerball pens, and a hardback journal with a blue and silver honeycomb cover; and on the right, my camera and sunscreen and Cub Scouts pocketknife, the latter a welcome-to-manhood reward I’d earned, at age nine, by selling the requisite load of corporate candy to my sweet, defenseless neighbors.

Rachel’s bags brimmed with clothing and gear nearly identical to mine. The main pouches held shorts and shirts and socks and sandals, and in the zippered pockets were her journal and pens, postcards and stamps, Tom Robbins paperback and blocky flip phone. In exchange for my taking the tools and tent, she had packed the rain fly and all the food we’d carefully chosen: flour and baking soda and powdered milk for pancakes, a huge bag of homemade granola, some energy bars that Dad had pulled from his dresser drawer, and a dozen other things I can’t remember now because we would discard them within days. One full pannier was reserved for her enormous, and enormously cheap, sleeping bag. Bulky and built for fifty-degree nights, it was the antithesis of “performance” gear. Its pannier bulged, tumorous.

As I looked down at said tumor, I instinctively raised my hand to the Lump. It was bigger and throbbier than ever, had gotten painful enough that I’d at last made the Mom-pleasing decision to start eating ibuprofen a couple of times a day. And though I’d never have admitted this to her, it was starting to worry me. I couldn’t help but wonder if the Lump might indeed be a harbinger, not of any specific illness, but of my all-around unfitness for this trip. Maybe it was a sign that I should do it more like Galen, or shouldn’t do it at all.

Or maybe it was just some inflamed tissue.

I shook away the thought and looked back to the bikes. Including the Lump, which was hard to isolate on a scale but probably weighed at least two ounces, we’d be hauling over forty pounds apiece, not including the Fujis, which weighed over twenty pounds themselves.

I raised my eyes to meet Rachel’s. “I think we have everything, right?”

“Yeah, I think so.” She stared down at her bike for a moment, then snapped her fingers and said, “Wait! Did you remember the bowling ball?”

“Yep.” I pointed at one of the rear bags. “It’s right under the shingles.”

“Great. I’d have forgotten those.” She looked down the driveway, turned back to me, and shrugged. “Well? Ready?”

I nodded. I didn’t quite feel ready, didn’t feel the moment was momentous enough. But we were as ready as we’d ever be. We’d made our plans, survived the anticipation, amassed the gear. Now there was nothing to do but pedal to the Pacific.

 • • • 

W
e rolled down the driveway, whooping at any forest creatures that may have been listening, and when the gravel met the asphalt, we turned west, coasting, laughing, and looking at each other with twinkling eyes, as if one of us had just told the other “I love you” for the first time. We were doing it. After months and months of daydreams, we were riding, together, away from here or there, toward somewhere west, and Rachel was all gooey-eyed, and I was too, because this was a glorious beginning, the chickadees chirping, sun shining, overhead oak nudging paisley shadows across the—

I winced, grunted. We’d hit our first hill and it was steep and my legs were pissed. I geared down and squeezed the bars and strained to pull my bike and body and bags up the slope. This was hard. I was now carrying twice as much as I had on any of our training laps around the lake, and on those rides I’d known where we were going and how long it would take to get there. Now, as heavy as the weight was the knowledge that I’d be bearing it for the foreseeable future. We crested the hill, and I found myself too out of breath to cheer. Already, maybe a minute into the trip, I felt like we were just taking a bike ride. Which, well, duh. But I really was surprised. I hadn’t spent much time considering the details, by which I mean anything beyond the romantic idea of disappearing into the world with a woman I loved, and so I’d figured we would just sort of float over the American West, as if in hot-air balloons, incorporating localized swatches of topography and culture into a big picture that would always stay in sight.

I started up a second hill. My bike was not a hot-air balloon. It was a tank. I’d always loved bikes because they were so sleek, so fluid, so simple—because I could go from zero to twenty in seconds, bunny-hop onto curbs, shimmy through two-foot gaps in fences, and tuck hard into turns, all atop two wheels and a few steel tubes. But now I was riding a bike-tank, and there would be no rapid acceleration, no hopping, no shimmying or tucking. Just hauling freight.

I looked over my shoulder at Rachel, who was five feet behind, her eyes on the pavement. She glanced up, puffed out her cheeks, and said, “Is it nap time yet?”

I turned back to the road, rose from my saddle, and pedaled hard. The Fuji began wobbling with every stroke, tilting right, then left, then right, then veering hard to port. I regained control and sat back in the saddle; bike-tanks, apparently, weren’t meant to be ridden standing up.

Now the grade leveled off into a gentle, winding downhill, and I relaxed off the bars, leaned back in the saddle, and took a deep gulp of lake breeze. Twigs snapped as squirrels scurried through underbrush and a hint of spilled gas wafted over from the boat landing. Maybe, I thought, I couldn’t see the big picture, but I owned the little moment.

I turned to Rachel, eager to share this revelation, but I couldn’t figure out how to word it, and what ended up coming out was, “This is awesome.”

Rachel nodded encouragingly, as if I were a child just learning to speak.

We followed West Buckatabon past the marsh where we’d seen the eagle, past the tidy little cabin with its towers of exquisitely stacked firewood. We’d ridden these miles many times, and I couldn’t help but feel we were just taking a lap around the lake, headed not for the horizon but for the house, where we’d spend yet another afternoon sipping pints of Spotted Cow and playing Gillian Welch covers on the dock. But then Buckatabon dead-ended at County K, and rather than turning right, back toward home, we headed leftward, westward. Just like that, the big picture came back into focus. The potholed pavement had never looked so potholed, the roadside pine so lush. I’d traveled this road for years, but always as part of a loop, a predictable path where the beginning was the end. This was my first time seeing it for the last time.

“I’ve always loved these trees,” I said, glancing at Rachel and then shifting my gaze to the boughs above, hoping her eyes might follow. They did, and I rejoiced, because appreciating these sun-dappled trees—
these
sun-dappled trees—felt like a fleeting moment, and I was determined to engage with this moment, to have a dialogue or at least a monologue, to make it a Moment. If I had my way, the trip’s every moment would be a Moment—ripe with meaning, worthy of at least a sidebar or infographic in my personal history book.

I looked back to the road, followed the pavement to the point where it disappeared into oak and pine. At last it was happening. We were out here, moving forward, focused on the few things that now mattered. Pine and pavement, moments and Moments.

 • • • 

T
he next dozen miles were hilly as hell, and since Rachel didn’t quite share my affinity for charging up or bombing down, our average speed took a nasty hit, dropping down into the tweens, which, really, was for the better. Had I been alone, I might have succumbed to the speedometer and lowered my head and all but missed this quiet, lake-spattered, tree-lined stretch that had long been one of my favorites. But now, thanks to Rachel, my head was up, my breath slow, my mind full of County K memories: the lakeside birthday party for my one true middle school love, the countless bike rides to visit my only friend within a ten-mile radius, the nine hundred deer I barely missed hitting while speeding to soccer practice.

Fifteen miles in, we stopped for a swim at Lost Canoe Lake. As we sat on the sand, looking out over the water, Rachel said, “I’m really going to miss this place.”

To which I nearly responded, “I love you too.”

We headed back to the bikes, which we’d “parked” by dropping them on their sides, the overstuffed panniers acting like big cushions. Easy enough. Pulling out of the lot, though, was proving to be a more involved operation. First you had to pick the bike up, which was a lot like row-lifting a sixty-five-pound barbell. Then you needed to somehow swing a leg over the top tube without letting the overloaded front wheel pivot and squirrel away. And finally you had to push off and attempt to snap your cleated shoe into its pedal while sustaining enough forward momentum to keep your bike from falling over.

“This was a lot easier when I was leaning against the garage,” Rachel said.

I agreed, though I refused to admit it.

We continued on, past pine groves and waveless lakes, and mile by mile the grade relaxed from hilly to bumpy to steamrolled. By the time we passed through the town of Boulder Junction, and on to an even quieter stretch of County K, the light was dusky. Birds stopped chirping. Evergreen blackened. The sky went windless and golden and nectar sweet. After a few miles, we turned onto a one-lane dirt road, and I looked at Rachel, and she at me, and a thousand words came to mind but none could compete with the backwoods silence. I drank it up. For so long, I had envisioned the two of us melting into the countryside. Now I could feel it happening. We were disappearing, tucked under a canopy of maple, massaging gravel on a winding road.

The road led to a cabin owned by Bob and Terry Simeone, longtime friends of my family. They’d offered to let us crash in their yard, and we’d accepted, figuring we may as well take advantage of cush campsites while we still had the chance. The plan had been to roll in quietly and set up our tent by the lake, taking pains not to disturb the family’s peaceful evening, but as we turned in to the driveway, I heard laughter bouncing off the trees. We continued into a clearing, where we came upon a picture-perfect log cabin, a pine-laden bank backlit by sun-freckled water, and in front of all this, a crowd of bearded men, Bob among them, hoisting beers and tossing golf-ball nunchakus at PVC goalposts.

Bob dropped his chucks and gave us bear hugs and backslaps, and Terry stepped off the porch smiling with such warmth that I couldn’t help but feel I’d gotten an A+ on my big book report, and as the two of them wheeled our bikes away, Bob’s brothers handed us beers and bright blue golf-chucks, which we tossed for one game, then two, then many more. Somewhere in there the night just kind of sped up, as nights do, away from sun-dappled trees and potholed pavement, toward comfort food and conversation, and soon it was pushing eleven, and I was half-drunk and bloated, my cheeks sore from laughter, my mind racing from cozy kitchen to county highway to moments whose meaning I was already questioning, doubting, forgetting. Just before midnight, Rachel and I tiptoed to the lake, set up the tent, and walked to the end of the dock. I closed my eyes and took a deep pull of Wisconsin summer and listened to the feral howl of a distant loon. And I remembered.