Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (2 page)

 • • • 

T
he trip was her idea, really. On an August afternoon, a few weeks before I was to leave Guatemala, we were walking back toward San Pedro, having just spent a few hours at an ugly but secluded beach on the shore of Lake Atitlán—
el lago
. An immense crater formed by an ancient volcano and filled with sapphire blue water, this was our go-to vacation spot when we needed a break from the tough life of getting paid to play music in a foreign country.

The path back to town was bumpy and overgrown, and I was out front as always. Whenever I’d walk behind Rachel, I’d fall prey to my long legs and unbridled extroversion and ride her heels, so she always insisted I lead. We’d been walking in silence, enjoying the sun and the lake view, when Rachel spoke.

“Es matamoscas.”

She barely got the words out before bursting into a laughing fit.

I flipped her off.
Matamoscas
. The night before, we had been making gnocchi in our hotel. We were cooking with a cheap pan, and the onions were starting to scald, so I scrambled around, found what looked like a spatula, and poked at the veggies. A few seconds later, the hotel’s housekeeper walked into the kitchen, gasped, and said, “Es matamoscas.”

I hadn’t heard the word before, but it sounded familiar, because, yes, I knew
mosca
,
and it meant . . . Fuck. I was cooking with a flyswatter.

“Hey, it looked like a spatula,” I muttered.

Rachel, who could accelerate from zero to gasping and teary- eyed in a matter of seconds, paused in the path and started laughing so hard that she was barely producing sound. I turned to find her doubled over, heaving, tears coating her cheeks. I had been mortified about the flyswatter, but I no longer felt embarrassed. Just happy. Happy that I was here with Rachel, this woman who was so full of life, so dynamic, and so completely with me, even if I had stirred dead flies into our marinara sauce.

After a solid minute of laughing, nearly composing herself, then losing her shit all over again, Rachel caught her breath. I kissed her, and when I pulled back, I had the overwhelming urge to tell her I loved her. But I wasn’t sure those were the right words or, for that matter, what they even meant. What I did know was that I was leaving town in two weeks, and two weeks didn’t feel like enough. Not at all.

My mind drifted to a conversation we’d had earlier that day about backpacking and its pitfalls. Rachel had mentioned that while she couldn’t see herself traveling that way ever again, she had for years dreamed of biking across the States. When I asked why, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It just kind of sounds fun.” I waited for one, two, five seconds, and then she added, in concise, bullet-pointed afterthoughts, that she (a) biked everywhere in Portland but had never ridden farther than forty miles, (b) hadn’t really seen the Midwest or the Plains, and (c) figured that riding the Rockies would give her “really tight buns.”

I got the impression she’d produced those bullets on the spot. And I knew she’d now repeat them verbatim. This was how Rachel made decisions. Clearly. Finally.

I turned and started down the path, and Rachel fell in behind me. After trying to come up with a clever segue, and failing, I looked over my shoulder, and not breaking stride, said, “So, this bike trip. Is it really something you’re thinking about?”

“Yeah, I guess.” She wiped the final tears from her eyes. “I’ll finish school next May, and I was hoping to maybe go then.”

“Sounds amazing. I’ve been thinking about taking that kind of trip forever.” Depending on one’s conception of space and time, this was true. I had indeed been thinking about it incessantly since Rachel first mentioned it, twenty-five minutes ear- lier.

“What if we did it together?” I asked, still walking.

“Well, it
would
be nice to have someone carry my gear. And, yeah, of course I’d love to ride with you.”

For the rest of the walk and the bus ride back to Xela, and during my final weeks in town, we batted the idea around. We figured we’d start in my rural Wisconsin hometown and head to—or at least toward—Portland, Oregon, where Rachel had grown up. We weren’t sure which states we’d ride through or when we’d leave or what gear we’d need. The details could be worked out later. The important thing was to have an idea, a commitment, and
this
was it.

Time came, we said good-bye. As I sat on my Wisconsin-bound flight, I was already missing her but thrilled I had something to hold on to. I would follow Rachel into this bike trip, and she would pull me westward, over lakes and plains and mountains, over a twenty-five-hundred-mile bridge, toward something new, something shared. And when we reached the horizon, breathless and ecstatic, we would have solved its mysteries and begun searching for new ones, on new horizons.

A
s usual, the intersection of East Buckatabon and West Buckatabon was sprinkled with loose sand and gravel, and, as usual, I was coming in way too fast—because how could you
not
bomb that corkscrew downhill?—so I veered into the opposing lane and slalomed through a gap in the debris, dropped a hand from the bars, and pointed tireward in hopes that Rachel would follow my lead. And, what with all the slaloming and stones and signals, I didn’t even notice the bald eagle until it was right there, maybe thirty feet overhead, its shadow slicing across the pavement like a giant black boomerang.

I coasted to a stop on the shoulder. Rachel parked beside me, and together we watched the bird soar south over the marsh, its snow-white tail feathers popping out against the latticed evergreen and sun-silvered water.

“I still can’t believe you grew up here,” Rachel said.

I shrugged. “Believe it, lady.”

She pulled a water bottle from the silver cage on her down tube and, her eyes still on the eagle, took a long pull. She swallowed and asked, “Do we really need to leave?”

“Nope,” I said. “We can totally move in with my parents. It’ll be romantic.”

“Deal.” She smiled and nodded eastward. “Let’s go tell them.”

She pushed off and, after a few unsuccessful clacks of metal on metal, snapped her cleated shoe into its pedal and started spinning. I slid onto my saddle and followed behind.

We had been in northern Wisconsin for nearly a month, staying with my folks, playing some gigs—on the patio of a local country store, at the wedding of family friends—and, of late, trying out all the gear we’d acquired during a bewildering three-day shopping spree in Madison. We now owned panniers and racks, headlights and headlamps, Lycra shorts and moisture-wicking shirts. Also bikes. Matching
bikes.

We’d had them for weeks, but even now, as I watched Rachel power hers up a steep, pine-shaded slope, I had to shake my head. Hers was a silver and black 52 cm, mine a brown and gold 58 cm, but in all other ways they were identical. Both had “Fuji Touring” emblazoned in a sloping font on the top and down tubes. Both had wide bars with a second set of brake levers near the stem, so we could change hand position as we rode. Both had black seats, black bar tape, black spokes and rims, black tires, and black racks that held our black-and-gray panniers. And both had small square stickers down by the gears, stickers that screamed in big black capital letters that the bikes had indeed been purchased from the same shop.

We hadn’t planned it this way. Hadn’t planned it, period. No, we’d just shown up in Madison with a monster shopping list and a fantastically unrealistic timeline and pretty much zero idea what we were doing, and we’d quickly discovered that Madisonian shops had a limited selection of the affordable, steel-frame bikes that, according to our sources (my daddy and Rachel’s Internet), were the only option for long tours. It turned out Fuji’s touring bike was the only “only option” in Madison, and so after visiting every shop in the city, after manically scouring Craigslist posts and estate sales, we’d sucked it up and bought the same bike.

Brown and silver. His and hers.

By now Rachel was well ahead of me, nearly at the top of the hill. I downshifted and gripped the bars tight and drove the pedals, and the Fuji rocketed forward. I gripped tighter, pushed harder, and the bike responded so instantly and enthusiastically that I had the urge to dismount, carry it into the woods, and cuddle it for a little while.

Until a week ago, I’d only ever owned a one-speed blue Huffy and, come puberty, a Trek that I’d theretofore believed to be the best bike in the universe. But now I’d found the Fuji. After test-riding it for like six minutes, I’d come to the conclusion that the Fuji and Huffy were both bikes in the way a greyhound and papillon were both dogs. Even with twenty pounds of cargo—we’d half-packed our panniers for this, our first loaded training ride—it felt impossibly fast and light and powerful. This was a bike that could take me anywhere.

I rode up beside Rachel and said, “I’m surprised how easy this is. I mean, the bags are kind of heavy, but my legs feel good. Like they’re inflated or something.”

Rachel nodded, kept riding.

“How about you?” I asked.

“My legs are tired.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, mine are kind of tired too. But in a good way. It feels good, right?”

“Yes, Brian. I’m tired in a good way.” She flashed a toothy smile of questionable sincerity, then said, “Honestly, this does feel a little hard, but I like it. I’m going to be so buff and hot by the time we get to Portland.”

I was about to tell her she was already pretty buff and hot, but I got tripped up on that last word: Portland
.
“Well,” I said. “I’m glad you’ve made that decision for us.”

She smiled, brought her eyes to mine. “Excuse me. By the time we get to the end—wherever in this big, bright world that may be. Is that better?”

“Yes,” I said. “Much better.”

This was by now a familiar exchange. Rachel obviously saw us ending up in Portland. I did not. I didn’t know where I wanted us to end up, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Portland.

It wasn’t that I disliked the city. Quite the contrary. Months earlier, at about the halfway point between my departure from Xela and our rendezvous in Wisconsin, I’d taken the train out to visit Rachel and had fallen in love with her city, with its cozy neighborhoods and laid-back feel, its cool color palette and damp, mossy intimacy. But Rachel
owned
the place. She had all kinds of odd jobs and volunteer gigs, and tons of friends, and this immutable morning routine of sipping coffee and eating granola and listening to OPB and chiming in with her own opinions. She had a hundred favorite cafés and parks and bars, and knew multiple equally awesome bike routes to all of them, and understood which stop signs to blow and which to respect, and was always wearing this one outfit, a form-fitting black jacket over faded gray corduroys, that made her look put together and sexy even while riding through pissing rain. As she led me through her Portland life, a life that seemed to reflect exactly who she was and wanted to be, I felt swoony and off-balance and aroused and terrified.

I knew she’d spent years building that life.

I wasn’t sure I’d fit into it.

I didn’t want to find out.

What I wanted was to find a new place, a place unlike Xela or Portland, a place where she’d be as wide-eyed and clueless as I was. And at the moment, I was enjoying having her here in Wisconsin. In
my
place.

From behind, I heard the growl of an engine. I stood on the cranks and pedaled hard, pulled past Rachel, and waved on the boat-towing truck that had crept up behind us. It rumbled past, the passenger power-waving through an open window. I coasted, waiting for Rachel to pull beside me, and as she did I caught a glimpse of the little lake glimmering through the pine.

A couple of years earlier, after graduating from school but before leaving on my ill-fated backpacking trip, I’d spent the autumn up here, staining cabins and coaching soccer while living with my folks in their beautiful lakeside home. Halfway through my stay, they’d left town on a trip, and I found myself alone, in the woods, for three weeks. I’d never spent much time on my own and feared I might be lonely, bored, sad. But I loved it: loved the quiet, the lack of dizzying choice, the unusual joy I felt whenever I walked deep into the woods to read a book on a bed of pine duff, or whenever I dove into still black water under a star-studded sky, or whenever I did something—anything—just because I wanted to, even (especially) if nobody else knew I was doing it. It always felt like I was telling myself a secret.

The little pine-rimmed lake was my favorite secret of all. Most nights, just as dusk was settling in I’d grab a beer, step into the canoe, and paddle across the lake my parents lived on, up to the northwestern corner, where a finger of water disappeared into marshland. I’d move slow and quiet, my paddle barely breaking the surface as I slipped past lily pads and high grass, bullfrogs and blue herons, painted turtles on downed trees and, on lucky nights, a beaver with a mouthful of branches. Soon enough, the creek would open into a tiny, placid lake whose name I never learned, and I would lay the paddle across my lap and open the beer and sip it as I floated. A few houses dotted the south shore, but no one ever seemed to be home. It was just me out there, alone and unseen, and upon recognizing this, I’d swell up with the unusual joy, just about the sweetest feeling I’d ever felt. But by the third week of feeling that feeling, I found myself wanting someone else there with me: someone who would know better than to speak, someone who would sit with me and sip beer and listen for loons and know when and how to smile in such a way that I understood they understood what neither of us could ever say.

I turned from the lake and looked at Rachel. Her eyes were on the trees, maybe on the water beyond. And I’m pretty sure she was smiling.

 • • • 

W
e leaned our bikes against the house, then unracked the panniers and carried them into the garage. On the opposite wall, between the cross-country skis and bags of birdseed, was our gear. It was a knee-high pile, about four feet wide, a mess of bags and poles and bright fabric. Somehow we were going to carry it all, for thousands of miles, on two bicycles.

I wasn’t sure how we’d ended up with all this crap. I mean, of course I remembered those days in Madison, rushing around, hemorrhaging money. But the gear still felt separate from, even at odds with
,
the
idea
of the bike trip. Since the day we’d dreamed it up, I’d envisioned an exodus from the trappings of society, an iconoclastic, anticonsumerist journey into the unknown. And yet here were the Camelbaks and Clif Bars, the shiny new helmets and factory-fresh panniers.

For the millionth time, I asked myself if we really needed any of this—if we needed anything more than a bike and a bag. That, after all, was what Galen had.

Galen—the guy who had moved to Guatemala at sixteen and started a jazz band; the guy who had dreamed up an epic concert that featured music from across the Americas and packed an eight-hundred-seat theater; the guy who could play piano like nobody I’d ever heard and make these fantastically weird balloon animals and speak flawless Spanish, on the phone, with octogenarian Cubans; the guy who, on better days, I looked to for inspiration and, on other days, I wanted to bury in a deep, deep hole—was, as it turned out, about to embark on his own cross-country bike trip. From Boston to Who Knows? Maybe even the same Who Knows? as Rachel and me.

A few days earlier, I’d called him and we’d talked routes and gear. Apparently he had bought a hammock, rather than a tent, so he could sleep wherever he found two trees or an abandoned barn. He’d made himself a stove, from two beer cans and a penny, that ran on HEET, the stuff I’d once used to prevent gas-line freeze during Wisconsin winters. He’d found a sweet steel-framed eighties road bike and was bringing little more than shirt and shoes and shorts and jacket, and was now on the hunt for his final bit of gear, a duffel bag—not a trailer or set of panniers but a fucking
duffel bag—
in which he would carry his meager supplies.

By the time I’d hung up the phone, I’d convinced myself that we were doing it all wrong. But when I mentioned my doubts to Rachel, and told her about Galen’s super-spartan setup, she’d said, “A hammock?
That sounds awful. And I’d much rather haul some weight than wake up every morning and put on the same sweaty socks and poopy shorts.”

Now, as I stared down at our piled panniers, at the tent and rain fly, the cleated shoes and moisture-wicking socks, I told myself that Rachel was right, that these purchases were not exorbitant but practical, that Galen would end up regretting his thrift, that—

“Hey.” Rachel was waving a hand in front of my face.

I blinked and turned toward her.

“Something interesting down there?” She smiled and set her panniers on the pile.

“No,” I said. “I was just zoning out.”

“You sound like your dad.”

“You sound like my mom.”

“Your mom sounds like your mom.”

I nodded, vanquished, and followed Rachel from the garage into the kitchen, where we found my mom sounding very much like my mom, singing “Nappy Pooby Time” (a Barb Benson original) to our astronomically dumb golden retriever, who, gauging by the glassy eyes and open mouth and statuesque stillness, seemed convinced that “Nappy Pooby Time” was edible.

Now Mom turned to ask us how the ride went, and if the bags were too heavy, and if we’d maybe decided we were just going to stay in Wisconsin forever. Rachel told her we’d decided exactly that. Then she headed upstairs, to change into a bathing suit, and I moved to follow her. But Mom stopped me, her hand on my shoulder, her eyes on the Lump.

A couple of weeks earlier, a Ping-Pong-ball-size growth had appeared on the right side of my neck. It looked like an overly pronounced Adam’s apple running away from home. Rock-hard and hot to the touch, the Lump had pulled my skin taut, reddening the flesh so my neck appeared to be permanently blushing. And throbbing. It hurt whenever I moved my head, which is to say, whenever I was awake and often when I was asleep. I had no idea why the Lump had appeared. Luckily, my crack team of nonexperts was more than happy to offer opinions. Everyone and their mother—mine especially—was convinced it was a harbinger of something terrible. Pneumonia. Cancer. An embryo sac full of flesh-eating aliens. At first I’d figured it was just a lymph node—I’d once had an equally gross inflammation in my armpit—but I eventually got paranoid enough to see a doctor. He’d looked it over for a minute, sat back on his stool, and told me that, yes, it’s an inflamed lymph node and likely nothing to worry about, though it could be something worse, and that’ll be two hundred dollars. I left with a new flavor of paranoia and a deepened hatred for our health care system.

Now Mom was touching the Lump. I recoiled, less in pain than embarrassment.

“Mom, I’m fine.”