Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (5 page)

A few minutes later, we were again moving westward. Moving
fast
. I peered into the cab, convinced we were about to break the sound barrier, but the speedometer read fifty-two. Fifty-two miles an hour. Under the legal limit, but at this rate he’d still cover more ground in a couple of hours than we could in a full day on the bikes, even if said bikes were in working order. And at present there was no reason to believe they would be. We’d spend the next few months breaking things, hitching rides, and finding someone else to solve our problems.

My hand found its way to the Lump. It felt bigger than ever and lava hot. I was more sure than ever that something was in there, something more than blood cells and swollen tissue. I had no idea what it was, but it felt like an omen. I couldn’t control my body or my bike, let alone the miles that lay before us.

I leaned against the wheel well and looked at Rachel. She had her arms spread across the bed’s rusty sidewall, her eyes closed. Her hair danced in the breeze, trailing behind her like a meteor tail. I had to smile. As a kid, I had loved few things more than riding in the back of Dad’s truck. Even when it was just parked in the driveway, I’d climb in and poke around the bed liner for treasures, watch Dad chop wood or just sit and daydream about going somewhere. We are going somewhere, I told myself. I closed my eyes and repeated the words. Once. Twice. Five times. And then, for a few moments, I thought nothing. Just listened to the engine’s muted drone and felt the wind tousle my hair.

 • • • 

A
half hour later, our chauffeur dropped us off at Hines Park, a pretty little spot that hugged the river running through Park Falls. After offering a few suggestions for what to check out and refusing our offer to give him some gas money, he gave us a wave and drove back in the direction he’d come from. I got the feeling he hadn’t really needed to go to Butternut, much less Park Falls, and was probably headed straight back to work.

I moped as we set up the tent. We’d ridden a mere thirty-four miles, hitched another nineteen, and now we were going to pay five bucks apiece to camp in a cushy park with picnic tables, bathrooms, and barbecue grills. I figured we’d occasionally pay for camping, but only when we craved luxury after some particularly hard riding. Only when we’d earned it.

“Ridiculous,” I muttered, loud enough for Rachel to hear. I wanted to make sure she noted my turmoil. “On the second day. This is so goddamn frustrating.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah, I know, but I just feel bad. I mean, it’d be different if it was just me.” As I said this, I noted it was utter bullshit. Then continued. “But now you have to wait while I figure out why my bike hates me.”

Rachel stood and wrapped her arms around my waist. “Brian,” she said, hanging on the
i
in the way people often did when I was making them feel tender or exasperated, “I’m fine. I mean, I wish you didn’t have to hitch to Ashland, but why worry? This is a beautiful park and we get to check out a new town.”

I considered this. It
was
a pretty nice park, with bathrooms, picnic tables, and barbecue grills. And though I’d grown up close to Park Falls, had watched their basketball team destroy ours on a regular basis, I’d never seen the town.

“Want to take a walk?” she asked. “We can set this stuff up later.”

We threw everything in the tent and locked our bikes to a pine. Just north of the park was a bridge spanning the river, and we crossed it, staring up at a wall of concrete. The entire eastern bank seemed to be property of Flambeau River Papers, whose logo was pasted onto an array of profoundly drab buildings, most prominent among them a windowless mill that looked not unlike a prison. We continued past the mill and into town, passing the standard beacons: grocery store, post office, seven bars. As we walked by an old theater, which, owing to a neon marquee that spelled out “Park,” looked like the world’s classiest parking garage, a man on a bike rode past, towing a yellow trailer containing one bag of groceries and one tiny child.

Rachel gave me a pat on the ass and mouthed, “Go.”

I caught him at the intersection, where he’d dutifully stopped and looked both ways. Turned out he was a middle-school teacher and was headed for the library to return some books. We were going there too, I mentioned, but seeing him had made me wonder if there wasn’t a bike shop in town. He sort of shrugged and nodded at the same time, and pointed to a corner store a couple of blocks up. It was more of a secondhand shop, he said, but the guy who owned it always had bikes for sale and probably knew how to fix them.

We walked to the store. Through the windows, I could see dusty chairs, stuffed animals, board games, and, yes, bikes. Some items sat on shelves, but most were piled on the floor, on each other. The place looked like it hadn’t been open for some time. We were just about to turn for the library when we heard a boy’s voice behind us.

“Can I help you?” The kid looked to be thirteen or fourteen, brown haired and scrawny. He was carrying some DVDs from the tiny rental spot across the street.

Nope, I thought. But it was sweet that he’d asked. I quickly explained our plight.

“That’s my dad’s store,” he said.

“Really?” I was suddenly interested in this conversation. “Will he be open tomorrow?”

The kid sat with this for a second, then replied, “I can call him right now. He’s at home.” He pulled a phone from his pocket and dialed. There was something oddly severe about him. I didn’t think he’d blinked since we started talking, and he definitely hadn’t smiled. Now he spoke quickly, mentioning only that someone needed help. I wanted to snatch the device from his hands, or at least coach him on how to sell this situation, but in a few seconds he was folding the phone and putting it back in his pocket.

“He’ll be here in a half hour.”

 • • • 

T
wenty minutes later, an old blue Chevy coughed to a stop in front of us. The driver’s door swung open, creaking loudly, and out slid one booted foot, followed by another, followed by a man. A big man. When he pulled his frame from the cab, the entire truck relaxed off its shocks. The big man walked slowly around the front of the truck, his hand sliding across the hood. At six foot one, I’d always felt fairly tall, but this guy made me look like one of the toys inside his store. He had to be pushing seven feet and four hundred pounds.

“I understand you two are in a bit of a bind,” he said, a smile spreading across his face. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but his voice was kind, as was his face, wrinkled in the right places. He put out his hand and I did the same, noting how delicate my fingers felt as they disappeared into his. I watched as he turned to Rachel, taking hold of her even tinier hand.

“I’m Jeff,” he said, looking back and forth between us. “How can I be of service?”

I explained the problem. Better said, I tried to. My bike vocabulary was for shit. So Jeff just asked where the bike was, and before we knew it he was driving us back to Hines Park. On the way, we covered our essentials: coming from the Eagle River area, headed to Oregon; yes, we were dating; no, we’d never done anything like this; no, we didn’t have a clue about how to fix our bikes. At the park I tossed my wheel and spare spokes into his truck, and by the time I hopped back in the cab Rachel had turned the questions on Jeff. He wasn’t from Park Falls, but he’d been there for a decade or so and had opened his shop a few years back. Aside from running the store and doing some odd jobs, Jeff spent a lot of time working with the church.

“The church,” he said, “gave me a second chance.” I tried to figure out a vague question to get him to say more, but before I’d found the words, we pulled up to the store.

Jeff led us through the back entrance and went in search of his “truing stand.” This was apparently a thing you used to straighten wheels, but I’d never heard of it. As he waded through a maze of boxes, toward what appeared to be an office, Rachel and I poked around the store. It was a disaster. The shelves teemed with old board games and ugly vases, and the floor was covered with more of the same, much of it sports related: a pyramid of tennis rackets, a dirty Playskool basketball hoop, half a dozen kids’ bikes in various states of disrepair.

Jeff appeared from the office, walking as gingerly as was possible for a man of his size and hoisting up what I guessed was a truing stand. He stepped up to a long metal table, pushed aside a pile of papers, and set the stand down. “Let’s have a look at that wheel, eh?”

Using another tool called a “chain whip,” which despite its medieval-sounding name was little more than a length of chain bolted to a steel shaft, Jeff removed the cassette and set it aside. He pulled off the tire, popped out the broken spoke, and slid in a new one—bing, bang, boom—and sat the wheel in the stand. To my eyes, the stand had looked like some sort of giant staple remover, but now it made sense. Two steel columns rose perpendicular to a square platform, and they each accepted one side of the hub. Another shaft angled out from the base of the columns, sporting two opposing claws—“calipers,” Jeff called them—that could be adjusted to trace the rim as the wheel spun. Wherever the rim surface scraped the caliper, Jeff explained, he’d make adjustments. I’d done the same thing using my brake pads, but this seemed way more precise.

Rachel stepped out back to make some calls, and I stayed inside, chatting with Jeff while he worked. Turned out he’d been an auto mechanic for years, and had always enjoyed working on bikes, though he hadn’t been able to ride one since he was a kid. “They don’t make bikes for my size,” he said, chuckling. “I’ve broken quite a few and just don’t try anymore. I can fix ’em, but I’ll never ride ’em.”

Ten minutes passed, then twenty more. He was having trouble with the wheel, and his good mood was souring. I appreciated the situation. It was one thing not to know how to fix something and quite another to fail in front of an audience. I busied myself as much as possible, checking on Rachel, scoping out his shop, trying to make conversation about the ramshackle inventory. “Yeah, I’ve got people coming by all the time to look at that stuff,” he said, still squinting at the spokes. Based on the reply, I guessed he was close to having to shutter the store.

By now he was sweating and breathing hard. Truing wheels wasn’t exactly a workout, but it was hot in his shop and the work was tedious, and I was starting to feel bad about taking up his night with said tedium, especially because I’d just realized I only had ten bucks in cash.

“Jeff, it’s no problem if you can’t fix it,” I said, not fully meaning it. “I rode a few miles after blowing the first spoke and might have screwed something up. If I have to hitch to Ashland, it’s my own fault.”

He grunted but didn’t look up. I took the hint and went outside and found Rachel on the phone with her mom. I got her attention, waved my ten around, then pointed at her and raised my eyebrows. She frowned and held up one hand. Five dollars. So we had fifteen total. And my debit card was at the park. Shit. I headed inside and Jeff was on his feet, spinning the wheel. Sweat swam on his brow and through his hair. His baggy T-shirt now clung to his frame.

He turned at the sound of the door shutting, smiled weakly, and said, “It’s ready to go.”

“Really? Wow! Thank you, Jeff. I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate this.”

I started to explain our cash situation, but he walked back to the office, as if he hadn’t heard. I figured he maybe just wanted to settle up at the park, so I circled the shop, shutting off lights, trying to appear helpful, and then followed him out the door. We all piled back into the truck, and I again thanked him for his help.

“No need to thank me. I’ve needed help and haven’t always gotten it,” he said. “I’ve done some bad things, but I’ve got a second chance to do some right.” He shot us a sidelong glance, then started the engine. It seemed like he wanted to say more about this. So I fished for it.

“You don’t seem like such a bad guy to me,” I said.

“Well, you didn’t know me when I was beating up cops. They chased me halfway around the state. Took four of ’em to wrestle me down, and two ended up in the hospital.”

Rachel shifted beside me. Jeff had said this without remorse, almost boastfully, as if describing a football game where he’d scored a big touchdown. I pictured him beating up cops. Pictured him angry. The image was terrifying.

“That’s behind me now,” he said, as if reading our thoughts. “I’ve got a second chance and I’m taking it.”

For the rest of the drive he talked jovially about his church, his relationship with God, his conviction that life was about helping others. To his credit, he didn’t ask the questions I was expecting, didn’t try to tie up the night with a “this is what Christians do—now, why don’t you become one?” sermon. He just invited us to see where he’d come from and where he’d arrived. He didn’t invite us to pay him, though. Didn’t permit us, despite my blubbering protestations. “That’s not what this is about,” he said finally, and I understood I’d better leave it alone.

By the time he dropped us at our tent, night had fallen. Jeff had spent nearly three hours of a beautiful Monday night driving around and tinkering in his shop, all for two hapless strangers. We asked if we could get him breakfast in the morning, but he said he had work to do. And with that, he got back into his truck, accepted our final thank-yous, and drove out of the park, leaving Rachel and me to eat a string cheese and cookie dinner and gaze up at the stars and wonder what, exactly, we’d done to deserve all this.

I
woke to the sound of a distant lawn mower. For a few minutes, I lay in my bag, drifting in and out of sleep, but the drone of the engine got louder and louder, until eventually, through the door of the tent fly, which Rachel or I must have left unzipped after the last of our overnight trips to our pine-tree bathroom, I saw a flannel-clad man ride by on a John Deere.

Hines Park was getting a haircut.

Rachel sat up and stretched. It had been a cool night, and she was covered head to toe in the blindingly white long underwear she’d picked up before we left. The first night she donned the outfit, we’d discovered it glowed in the dark, and now, even in the low light of morning, there was a powdery aura about her. With the form-fitting fabric, its snow-white radiant glow, and her long, flowing hair, she looked like some kind of winter-themed superheroine.

I stuck my head out of the tent. It was another gorgeous summer day, popcorn clouds on blue sky, and we were going to spend all of it riding toward a small town called Washburn, seventy miles to the north, on the shore of Lake Superior.

We dropped the tent, packed and racked the bags, and got dressed. Today I opted for the gray T-shirt, having decided I’d only wear that shiny, blue, I’m-a-stupid-rich-tourist shirt when I absolutely had to. Rachel had similarly buried her eyeball-burning pink tank top, opting instead for the beige number she’d worn on our first day out.

I was about to saddle up when Rachel asked, “Should we butter up today?”

“Yeah. I guess we should.”

I dug into a pannier, found the tube of chamois butter. Squirted a dollop into my palm, shoved my hand down my shorts, and coated every inch of skin that might contact the saddle.

“Mmmm,” Rachel purred, throwing her arms over my shoulders. “That . . . is so . . .
hot
.”

I yanked my hand up and wiped the final traces of lotion on her arm. She shrieked, then smeared the mess on my neck.

Chamois butter. The name sounded innocuous enough, like something you might spread on a baguette. It was not something you might spread on a baguette. It was crotch lubricant.

My dad had told me about chamois butter—a trademarked product, spelled (groan) Chamois Butt’r—years before, when I’d taken a long ride with him and some of his biking buddies. We were to ride a hundred miles that day, and though I’d never ridden half that far, I was nineteen, which meant I was all knowing and indestructible and didn’t need to rub any stupid-old-man cream on my butt. By the end of the day, I felt like someone had attacked my perineum with a belt sander. I’d been a Chamois Butt’r true believer ever since, and had sold Rachel on the stuff.

Now she rubbed a palmful between her legs, scrunching up her nose in disgust. “I feel,” she said, “like I just sat in a bucket of mayonnaise.”

We were on the road by eight. Despite the previous day’s short ride, my legs now felt weak. Not sore. Just heavy. Like they’d been injected with pudding. Thankfully, we had a light tailwind nudging us northward, and we rode the first seventeen miles, to Glidden, without a break.

Just south of town, I noticed a hand-carved “Black Bear Capital” sign atop a roadside berm, and then, a few hundred feet farther along, a gas station with “Bear Crossing” emblazoned across its canopy. We turned onto the main drag, and I looked left to find a white, two-story bungalow that housed a restaurant called the Bruin. On my right, in a squat brick building, sat the Glidden Black Bear Bakery. This place knew how to project an image.

Rachel and I bought some bear claws, and at the baker’s urging, headed across the road to check out Mr. Bear, a town mascot of sorts. Back in the sixties, apparently, some hunters near Glidden had shot, killed, and stuffed the largest black bear ever seen, and he now lived next to the elementary school, in a little log cabin with floor-to-ceiling windows. A brushed steel sign said that Mr. Bear weighed 665 pounds, and that it had taken seven men to drag him from the woods. I believed it. He was immense, a mountain of fur and teeth and claws. As I looked him over, I thought about how it must have felt to install him here. To take the wild and rugged, place it behind lock and key. In his new digs, Mr. Bear was looking not rugged but regal. It appeared he had recently been groomed. His fur was luminous, his eyeballs polished, his nose gleaming.

I leaned my forehead on the glass, stared into those shiny, lifeless eyes. I got it, this scene—knew Mr. Bear was a symbol for the big bad world, his stuffed carcass a celebration of Glidden’s residents and their mastery of their surroundings. And I knew that Mr. Bear was a gimmick. Glidden had gussied him up and adopted the whole black bear theme with the hope of attracting folks from the big city (i.e., anywhere with a highway off-ramp, an outlet mall, and/or a Fuddruckers), because that was where the tourists came from, and those tourists brought the tourist dollars that kept so many Wisconsin towns from shriveling up and dying.

Rachel and I had already encountered several such towns. There was Boulder Junction, musky capital of the world; Mercer, loon capital of the world; Park Falls, ruffed grouse capital of the world; Butternut, which isn’t world capital of anything but does boast the “best-tasting water” in Wisconsin; and, of course, the town where I went to high school, Eagle River, also known as the snowmobile capital of (you guessed it) the world. Every one was holding up a billboard to tourists, inviting them to come catch the musky, drink the water, listen to the loons, get shitfaced and snowmobile from bar to bar, go ahead and shoot all the fucking grouse, but please, please, please just come and rent a cottage and buy a T-shirt and have a hamburger.

I pulled back from the glass, turned to look at the street. Empty. Something inside me flipped. I had loved growing up in a small town, but as soon as I graduated, and without a second thought, I’d left the area. I came back for countless visits, even returned for a few summers to work construction and play in the area lakes and bars with my friends. We visited, all of us, and then, like the tourists, we left. Not for a moment did we consider staying. This was the other half of the small town equation. Glidden and Conover wouldn’t have had to work so hard to get tourists to come if they could only get their young to stay.

“Hey.” Rachel’s hand was on my shoulder. “You ready to ride?”

I snapped out of my daze and looked at her. Now she was pulling on her helmet, squinting into the late-morning sun. In front of me, in this woman and these bikes and the bags that adorned them, was everything I was moving toward. And behind me, Mr. Bear.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

 • • • 

W
e rode north through a sliver of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, a 1.5 million-acre, second-growth preserve planted after loggers failed to preserve the first growth. To either side, pine and maple and fir stretched and stopped as one, as if the entire forest had been trimmed with a giant lawn mower. On our super-map, the Chequamegon appeared as a chunky green polygon, and I’d been looking forward to riding through it, had expected the world to go all mossy and majestic. Life imitating cartography imitating life. But now that we were inside, I found it didn’t really look or feel or smell different from the stretches we’d just ridden through. On the map those areas had simply been the white space between the towns and forests. But this stretch, this Forest, had the same mix of deciduous and evergreen, the same lava-hot pavement, the same scent, that oddly sweet blend of pine needles and animal droppings and decomposing leaves, and gasoline.

“CB!” Rachel yelled. She was behind me, but from the way she said it, I could tell she was smiling. “Wait, no, BFTB!”

I knew this meant something but couldn’t recall what. The day before, we’d begun to develop a code language to communicate essentials out on the road, and I knew CB stood for “car back,” TB for “truck back.” But BFTB? I glanced at the rearview. In the glass I could see Rachel hunkered over the handlebars and, behind her, a wall of twisted metal. As an oddly localized gust rushed up my spine, I remembered.

A big fucking truck blew by, not three feet from my shoulder. It was a double-trailer semi, loaded to the brim with thick slabs of hardwood, and as it passed I couldn’t help but think of the opening scene from
Star Wars
. This semi was the Imperial Star Destroyer, appearing from the periphery and floating, slow and sinister, into full view. As it thundered past, I inhaled its sickly sweet diesel-pine perfume, felt its pulsing heat on my neck, struggled to keep my bike from getting sucked into the lane. In its wake the Destroyer left a yawning vacuum, and I careened toward it, pedaling furiously, riding the current, feeling for a brief, ecstatic moment like I might be capable of flight. And then, just like that, the wind was gone, and with it the semi, disappearing around a bend in the road ahead.

“Holy shit,” I said. “That was incredible!”

Rachel appeared to have other thoughts on the matter, but before she had the chance to respond, my rear wheel cut in.

Ping!

Rachel heard it too. “Was that . . . ?” she asked.

I slid over to the shoulder, got off the bike, and discovered that, yes, it was
that
. Another broken fucking spoke.

This time it was on the nondrive side, meaning I could, in theory, fix it without removing the cassette. I did my best to ignore the rising anxiety and looked up at Rachel. “You might want to get comfortable,” I said, straining to smile.

Her face betrayed a hint of impatience, or maybe doubt, but she shrugged and waddled toward the grass. “I’m going to make a couple of calls, ’kay?”

I nodded and set to undressing the bike. As I pulled the uke and sleeping pad from the rack, detached the panniers, and flipped the bike over, I thought about Jeff and how he had worked with the wheel. My mind started to travel to an awfully ungracious place, and I shooed away the thought. Jeff had done all he could to help, for free, and this wasn’t his fault.

I followed the steps he had taken: removed the wheel, pried away the rim liner, and extracted the broken spoke. Once I got the replacement situated, I slid the wheel back into the dropouts, prayed a godless prayer, and, using the brake pads as a guide, set to straightening it. I remembered Jeff saying that if I made tiny adjustments on the spokes, using quarter turns, loosening and tightening, all would go well. And, miraculously, it did. After ten minutes, the wheel was clearing the pads. After twenty, it almost spun true. It appeared I had fixed something.

Soon enough I was back on the road, riding hard, Rachel hugging my back tire, the forest filling my vision, the wheel doing precisely what a wheel was supposed to do, and even though I couldn’t quite pin who I was competing against, I knew I was totally winning.

 • • • 

M
y sense of triumph lasted about a half hour. As we rode north toward Ashland, I began to feel sluggish, and I kept hearing these disconcerting clicks and clacks from below, and so every five minutes I found myself pulling over, kneeling and searching for blown spokes. But I found no blown spokes, no flat tires, nothing worse than a stray pannier strap smacking against the tent poles. Eventually, begrudgingly, I accepted that this had nothing to do with the bike. I was just plain beat. My legs were saturated with lactic acid, my back and neck knifed by the slightest of movements. My temples were claustrophobic in my stupid fucking helmet, and I felt like a county road crew had spent all day jackhammering my crotch. I’d heard somewhere that male cyclists not seeking a DIY vasectomy should stand from the saddle every thirty minutes, for thirty seconds, and I was doing so, but still I was aching, and soon enough I was numb.

I asked Rachel if we could take a break. She said, “Oh my God, yes.” As we dined on candy in the driveway of an abandoned lumber mill/steampunk playground, she complained of aching knees and pain in both wrists. I mumbled something about changing hand position, but she interrupted. She’d been doing that all day. I didn’t know what else to tell her. This didn’t seem like something that would fade over time. I imagined it would only get worse. But it was just beginning, and neither of us knew what to do about it, short of taking breaks before it got to be too much.

 • • • 

I
t was late afternoon by the time we rolled up to Ashland, a small college town on the Superior shore. Well before the water came into view, I felt its breath curling through city streets, up my arms, into my helmet. And that scent. So subtle and singular, the no-salt-please alternative to your standard ocean breeze. Superior, as ever, smelled just how it felt. Cold.

We pulled up to a shoreline park, and I called Donn and Ann Christensen, some friends of the Simeones who had invited us to camp on their lawn. Donn answered, his voice sweet and mellow, saying things like “welcome” and “take your time” and “spaghetti.”

I liked him already.

It was eleven more miles to Washburn. Eleven
windy
miles. Though the lake was now out of sight, hidden behind a finger of forest, its icy breath wound around tree trunks, up over undergrowth, and into our faces. The wind was low, maybe ten miles an hour, but that was enough to make us fight for every foot, and by the halfway point I was tanking hard. Unreasonably hard, come to think of it. All day I’d blamed my aching muscles and raspy throat on the climbs and smoke-belching semis, but the present aches and rasps felt, well, different. I released the bars and raised my fingers to my neck. The Lump. It was throbbing, up to something.

 • • • 

D
onn and Ann were the sort of well-muscled, ruddy-cheeked fiftysomethings who appeared casually, almost accidentally fit, and as I sat with them at a tastefully ginghamed picnic table, inhaling garden-fresh salad and homemade marinara with the desperate velocity of a six-year-old from a ten-child family, I learned—thanks to Rachel, who had the composure to speak, and breathe, between bites—that they both skied all winter, biked all summer, and had taken many tours of their own, including a four-thousand-mile journey that put ours to shame. They were bike-trip sages, and total sweethearts. By sunset, when Rachel and I retreated to the tent, I was full and content and barely thinking about the Lump.