Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (4 page)

W
e were on the move at the crack of ten, riding quiet county roads through classic Wisconsin. The sun was low, the wind a whisper, water everywhere. Here were Big Lake and Clear Lake, Rest Lake and a dozen nameless ponds and puddles, all nestled in a carpet of coniferous bog. I was feeling proud of the landscape, as if I’d designed it myself, but also sad, because I was leaving it behind, and so when we came upon the little boat landing at North Bass Lake, and Rachel suggested we stop for some snacks, I said yes, because snacks, and also because I just wanted to sit and stare and soak this all up one last time.

We pulled into the lot and dropped the bikes in the gravel. Rachel dug up a tub of yogurt, and I grabbed some cookies, and we walked to the end of the small, sun-bleached dock. The lot behind us was empty of cars, the water untouched but for a bright orange canoe skirting reeds on the opposite shore. It was all ours.

I pulled off my shoes and socks, dipped my toes in the water, and looked at Rachel looking across the lake. I followed her gaze, hoped she was noticing the right things. How the canoe’s Day-Glo orange played off cattail brown. The way the lily pads and reeds, the tamarack and pine, the maple and oak formed a spectral ring of green around the water, and how the wispy clouds sat so perfectly on its glassy surface. And maybe she did notice all that. Maybe that’s exactly what she was thinking about as she sat there, in silence.

Just like that I wanted her. Yogurt-stained spoon in my hand, cookie crumbs on my lap.

I leaned in, brushed her hair back, and kissed her. And when she kissed back, it wasn’t the being-a-good-sport kiss I’d been expecting. It was a yes-I-notice-the-Day-Glo-and-cattails-now-get-this-fucking-Lycra-off-me kind of kiss.

If you think putting on a condom can kill the moment, try helping your partner, who is straddling you, peel away a second skin of Lycra. I pulled off her hide-the-stupid-Lycra shorts with a snap of the wrist, but the Lycra . . . the
fucking
Lycra. Rachel hovered over me and buried her face in my neck while I fought the fabric. After a few seconds, she called it in favor of the fabric and rolled off. Lying on her back and squirming around, she managed to get the shorts past her knees, then pulled herself back on top. I wrapped an arm up the curve of her back, and with the other I braced my weight against the dock. My fingers slipped over a jagged ridge in the wood, and for an instant I found myself worrying about taking a splinter in the ass. Or worse.

Then Rachel pulled me inside, and I forgot about splinters, real or imagined. Her hands found the steel pipes supporting the dock, shaking it beneath us, and my hands clawed for her hair, her hips, anything I could hold on to. My vision tunneled, and I burrowed my face into her chest, and still the world followed, closing in on itself, on me. I felt the breeze curling up my neck, the sun hot on my cheek. Shimmering diamonds jumped from the lake and sunk into the soles of my feet. The blues and browns and greens bled into each other, into me, filling every capillary, filling me completely, and I held it all in, I held it, I—

Moans melted into gasps, then into laughter and some standard postcoital eloquence.

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

Rachel pulled away and, after some rather deft cleanup work, settled onto her back and resumed battle with the Lycra. Just as the waistband made its satisfying snap against her hips, I heard a low rumble behind us. A beat-up Ford Ranger was pulling into the lot, kicking up dust and tugging an equally beat-up boat.

I put my hand on Rachel’s knee, trying to look as wholesome as possible. Behind us, a door slammed shut, and I looked back to see two men popping the latch on their topper window and pulling out a pair of poles. The one nearer to us turned, peering out from under the brim of a camo trucker hat, and gave us a wave and a nod. I waved back, then returned my attention to the lake. The canoe had drifted from sight, but the cattails still traced the shoreline, and the clouds still hung in the sky and peered up from the waters below.

“Can you believe this?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“We’re out here,” I said. “This is where everything happens from now on.”

I let my eyes wander across the lake, over the evergreen, up to the open sky. Rachel smiled, then looked down and dragged her spoon around the container, finding the final pockets of yogurt. She cleaned the plastic deliberately, completely, just as if she were in the kitchen at my folks’ house or on the couch in her old Portland apartment. As if this dock were home.

 • • • 

“F
uck. Me.”

This was
not
happening.

“Is it a flat?” Rachel asked, pressing her elbows onto the bars and waddling toward me.

We’d ridden just fifteen miles from the lake, but gone was the pleasant bright of morning. Now it was sunny in the bad way. No breeze, no water. Just harsh light filtered through floating dust. And there was plenty of dust. Bob Simeone had said County Road FF would be winding, gentle, and tree lined, and that it was. But it was also being repaved and at the moment wasn’t paved at all.

I dropped to a squat and rolled my bike fore and aft, keeping my eyes focused on the hub of my rear wheel. The hub’s outer lips—I would soon learn that “flange” was the technical term—were both drilled with eighteen holes, each of which was meant to accept the nubbed head of a highly tensioned spoke. Thirty-six spokes in all, exerting equal force on the rim, sucking it in toward the hub. But one of these spokes had snapped, right where it emerged from the hub. The head spun freely in the flange, while the rest of the shaft dangled from the rim, amputated. One out of thirty-six, I thought, was small peas. My wheel disagreed. The injury to one spoke had distressed the whole system. I lifted the bike and spun the wheel, and the section of rim with the broken spoke swayed to the left, dragging on the brake pad with every revolution.

“No, it’s not a flat,” I said, looking up at Rachel. “I blew a spoke.”

“Already?” she asked. “Wow.”

“I know.”

I looked back to the Fuji, shook my head, and said, “I thought we were friends.”

Rachel stepped off her bike. “Well, at least we’ve got extra spokes, right?”

We did have extras, neatly attached to special notches that had been brazed onto each of our frames. And replacing spokes, in theory, had always seemed easy enough. Just pop off the tire, pull out the bad spoke, and slide in a new one. Bing, bang, boom. But my blown spoke was on the drive side of the rear wheel, the side facing the chain, and I could see I wouldn’t be able to do anything until I removed the cassette: the cluster of gears that hugged the hub. I thought back to the weeks before Rachel and I left. We’d made a couple of trips to the nearby town of Minocqua, where we learned basic repairs and nifty roadside tricks from my dad’s local mechanic, a kindhearted if laconic guy named Jeff. He had explained how to boot torn tires with dollar bills, had insisted on the importance of regularly oiling our chains and tightening every bolt on the bike. He had even mentioned a few things about replacing spokes. But I couldn’t recall him saying anything about removing a cassette.

I squeezed my eyes shut and exhaled through my nose, the breath forceful enough to whip up dust from the earth between my knees. This was, in fact, happening. Thirty miles into our second day, I had already come across a problem I couldn’t fix.

I spent a few minutes trying to use my pliers to loosen the nut holding the gear cluster on the axle, then tossed them in the dirt, feeling ridiculous. There was clearly a tool for this, and I didn’t have it.

“Want one?” Rachel asked.

I looked up and saw her holding a couple of sandwiches. I had been looking forward to these sandwiches all day, had envisioned us eating them beside a placid lake while whitetail deer tiptoed through the forest and a lone bald eagle soared overhead. It was going to be beautiful.

“I guess so,” I said, not making eye contact. I grabbed one of the sandwiches with my greasy, incompetent hands and began pawing at the plastic. Then I caught myself. It wasn’t Rachel’s fault we were stuck here, eating in the dirt. She was just trying to help.

“Thanks, Rach.” I forced a smile. “This might take a little while.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” she said. “Let me know if you need the phone or anything.”

I joylessly inhaled the sandwich and considered my options. I knew there was a solution to this problem but also knew it was going to take a while and would probably entail hitching a ride. I didn’t want to hitch a ride. I wanted to figure this out on my own. I stuffed the sandwich bag into a pannier and dug around for my tools. The spoke wrench, I decided, would at least buy me time. Using said tool, which looked like a cross-section from a tiny light bulb, I could loosen and tighten spokes until the wheel was somewhat true. Dad had given me pointers on this, and I felt confident I’d understood them. I would just straighten the wheel out, and then I’d ride to the next town, where I’d find someone who could help me remove the cassette.

As I worked, I stole glances at Rachel, who had propped herself against a stump and opened
Still Life With Woodpecker
. She looked content and had given no inclination that she was impatient. But I was. It was forty miles to the campsite we were shooting for, and now we were going to have to move fast, especially since we’d be stopping again in nearby Butternut to get everything really fixed. I worked anxiously, feverishly. Within ten minutes, I had the wheel back on the bike. I rode a couple of circles, twisting around and watching my wheel as I pedaled. It looked wobbly but good enough to get me to Butternut.

 • • • 

T
he construction only lasted a few miles, and the next stretch of road was beautiful. Here the pavement was perfectly flat, an arrow shot straight to the western horizon. The sun still shone above, its heat pulsing down and rebounding off the asphalt, but it was now joined by a light easterly. West-bearing winds, we’d heard, were a midwestern rarity. Something to be savored.

I considered this as I walked.

When Rachel and I had gotten back on the move, we’d almost immediately come upon a half-dozen guys working for the county. They told us the next two miles would be impassable on bikes, and one of them, seeing the defeated looks on our faces, offered to ferry us past the rough patch. In five minutes we were back on asphalt, on our way west. My bike felt weird, but I told myself it was in my head. I’d made a temporary fix, and soon we’d be in Butternut, and—

Ping!

The sound was muffled and benign, like an egg timer ringing under a throw pillow. I hadn’t heard anything like it when the first spoke blew, but I just knew. Head hung, I hit the brakes. I started to say something to Rachel, but she must have heard it too and was already slowing to a stop. I didn’t even need to get off the bike to see that a second spoke had snapped.

So now we were walking, straining to balance our bikes as we lugged them along. Walking a bike had always felt easy enough, like pulling a wheeled suitcase, but with loaded panniers, the experience was more akin to taking a rowdy Saint Bernard for a leashed walk. I had to use both hands to keep my bike from veering toward the ditch or the center stripe. My feet pointed due west but my upper body contorted in more of a northwesterly direction.

This was no way to cross the country.

“Not a bad place for it to happen,” Rachel said. She was being a real champ. I forced a smile, and she pulled her hand from the stem and reached up to squeeze my arm. Her bike made a break for the ditch, and she caught it just as the front tire hit the shoulder. She walked in silence for a few moments, then said, “This isn’t a huge deal, Brian. We’ll figure it out.”

I nodded, unconvinced. It
was
a huge deal. I had two blown spokes that I couldn’t fix, we weren’t eating our sandwiches by a lake, and on the second day of our trip we were going to have to get a ride. In a car.

We soon came upon a group of men framing up a shed just off the road. Their pickups were lined up on the shoulder, and the one nearest the site had its passenger door open, its radio blaring Heart’s “Barracuda.” I had worked on dozens of similar sites over the years, and the scene felt familiar. Too familiar. I found myself avoiding eye contact, staring at the stud walls as if inspecting them for shoddy craftsmanship. I was suddenly very aware of my bright blue, moisture-wicking shirt. My brand-new bike and brand-new gear. And my inability to operate my fancy equipment. In my teenage years, I’d sat on many a tailgate, sipping soda and wiping crumbs on Carhartts while watching a tourist ineptly try to back his brand-new boat, on its brand-new trailer, down a driveway. Now I was that tourist.

So it was Rachel who rolled her bike up to the music-playing truck, where one of the men was digging around in the passenger seat. He looked to be well into his sixties, tall but sagging, as were his pants, which were held up with suspenders. Rachel introduced herself and asked how far it was to Butternut. She was fearless, shameless, about asking strangers for help, asking for what she needed. It was one of the first things I’d noticed about her in Xela, one of the first things I’d fallen in love with. But now she was asking for what
I
needed.

“Butternut?” he asked. “What are you looking for in Butternut?”

“I blew a spoke,” I cut in, grasping at a shred of dignity. “And I don’t have the tool I need. Hoping I can find one there.”

“In Butternut? Doubt it. Closest bike shop is up in Ashland.” He cocked his head and looked up the road. “You know, I’m headed to Butternut in a couple of minutes. I’d be happy to take you to Park Falls. Just a bit further, and if you’re lucky you might find someone there. Either way, there’s a nice park you can camp in.”

We thanked him, climbed into the bed of the pickup, and discussed our options. It was already midafternoon, and even if we were able to fix the wheel in Park Falls, it would probably take all day. This “nice park” sounded like a solid fallback. If we couldn’t find help, Rachel could hang out there the next day while I hitched to Ashland, sixty miles north. I’d visit the bike shop, get the wheel sorted out, and hitch back. This plan made me want to puke. But it was a plan.