Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson

  I spat onto my shoes, Rachel onto the dirt between us.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She spat again.

  The water, if you could call it that, was hot enough to bathe in. And rotten. I’d had some nasty, sulfur-saturated sludge in my day, but nothing like this. It tasted like a sewer smelled.

  Rachel dug out the toothpaste, and we both started finger-brushing our teeth and tongues and gums, and soon we were laughing, because boiling-hot sulfur-lava, because heatstroke delirium, because here was this truck speeding on by, the driver watching two sweaty idiots standing over two crash-parked bike-tanks, before a house they obviously did not own, with fingers in their mouths. And now I was laughing even harder, because I’d somehow forgotten that there were people in the passing cars, that they could help us if things really got dire, and that, anyway, I’d chosen this, had even secretly hoped I’d find myself in absurd situations just like this one, and so why not stop pouting and just appreciate it for a second? I mounted my bike-tank, and Rachel mounted hers, and with some poison in our bottles, some toothpaste close at hand, we rode on.

  • • •

  There was a park on the outskirts of Watford City, and we pulled in and drank cramp-inducing quantities of water and sat for a while on the swing set. Once my body temperature dropped below the boiling point, I stood up and started pulling the tent from the rack. But Rachel stopped me, suggested we maybe take a spin through town first, see what was going on.

  And so now we were riding past the Dakota West Credit Union, the Do-It Best hardware store, Mike’s SuperValu grocery. Stars and stripes billowed from every lamppost, and the only cars in sight were clustered near the bar, the steakhouse, the American Legion. This all felt very familiar, a slight variation on what we’d seen in so many other Dakotan towns, and really the only exception was that . . . actually, what was that? Over on the south side of the street, across from the puny pharmacy and even punier insurance office, was a grotesquely large, brand-new building, with a rainbow of earth tones on its sandblasted walls, a block-long parade of spotless windows, a gaudy sign for businesses like Six Shooters Showhall and Outlaws’ Bar and Grill.

  We pulled up to the curb. “Well,” Rachel said, “can’t say I was expecting this.”

  “Um, no. Definitely not.”

  “It’s like an art exhibit.” She gestured grandly at the building. “Presenting . . . North Dakota! As imagined by suburban Chicago.”

  “Maybe I should call my aunt in Buffalo Grove,” I said. “See if someone’s reported a stolen mini-mall.”

  “Wait.” Rachel was now peering through the doors. “Is that a movie theater?”

  It was. Six Shooters Showhall was a cinema, a huge, spotless cinema with giant tubs of popcorn and cushy seats and surround sound. And in forty-one minutes, it would be showing a big-budget action film that both of us actually wanted to see. We asked no further questions about what this was doing in Watford City, just sprinted back to the park, threw up the tent, lit up the beer can and shoveled in some undercooked pasta and tepid marinara, not caring how crappy dinner was, because movie. We rushed back through the theater doors, loaded up on soda and candy and popcorn, and slid into our seats just in time to catch the final preview.

  The next two hours were embarrassingly good ones. After a week of wheat and wind and the subtlest subtleties, I wanted to be beaten over the head. And this film delivered. Car chases! Roundhouse kicks! Snappy dialogue and booms and crashes and bright, flashing colors! My whole being was awash in caffeine and adrenaline, my heart rate less human than hummingbird, my mouth frozen into a kid-at-a-candy-store smile, and when I looked over at Rachel, I saw she was wearing the same bewildered grin. Both of us were laughing at all the wrong times, which is to say at all times, because this film was not in any way comedic, but it was taking us for a ride, and we were both so happy to be taken for a ride by something, anything, other than ourselves.

  • • •

  It was barely noon, and we’d ridden not thirty miles, and already I was broken. My lips were cracked, my skin flaking off. Legs soupy, butt ravaged. All morning, I’d been doing what I could to democratize the pain—sliding left and right and forward and backward, standing from the saddle until the quad burn was worse than the taint ache—but it wasn’t working. Nothing was. Not on my body, not in my brain. I mean, I was trying to think happy thoughts, trying to remind myself that if the previous day’s ride had transmuted Hollywood brain candy into sacred treasure, then tonight’s arrival in Montana—a place that embodied the West, a place that was very close to wherever the hell we were going—should feel like some kind of existential orgasm. But those were some complicated happy thoughts, and, at the moment, I couldn’t do complicated. In fact, the only thing I could do was: Hooooooome, home on the range, where the deer and the—

  “I want it to be over.”

  Rachel had pulled up alongside me. She looked like hell. Bleary eyes and blotchy skin, loose strands of hair stuck to her forehead.

  I nodded tentatively. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by “it.”

  “Everything is starting to look the same out here,” she said. “I want Montana.”

  Now I smiled, and said, “Me too. I mean, I know it’s just an imaginary line, but it’s got to be at least a little bit different over there.”

  “I hope so. I need a break from this.” She nodded vaguely at everything.

  I nodded back but could think of nothing more to say. Rachel again dropped behind me, and we rode for five, ten, fifteen miles, deeper and deeper into the harsh high afternoon, until the temperature was pushing one hundred, the wind pummeling our chests. Still I was empty of words, as was Rachel, and soon enough I began doing what one inevitably does with an overabundance of silence and self-pity. I blamed.

  In a whiny, nasal, and—thankfully—internal voice, I reflected on how incredibly unfair it was that at a moment like this, when I just wanted to push myself and get this over with and make Montana, I had to putter around and wait for Rachel, who was holding steady at eleven miles an hour, while I wanted to go more like fourteen and, okay, so maybe she had told me many times to just fucking go fourteen already, but come on now, I could not do that, I would not do that, because I was a noble man, and I would do the noble thing, would silently and resentfully sacrifice for Rachel, even if she didn’t want me to, because—

  “I’m bored.” Rachel had snuck up beside me again. “Wanna play twenty questions?”

  “Okay,” I heard myself say.

  It took me a moment to get into it, and out of my head, but soon enough I was thinking not of eleven or fourteen but of “is it edible?” I pretty quickly guessed Rachel’s subject—Nutty Bars—and she in turn got my Lake Superior with a few questions to spare, and after a few more rounds, we switched to this game where one of us would name a city and the other would come back with another city whose name started with the last letter of the one just named. This kept us busy for the better part of an hour, and when we found ourselves running out of new cities, we moved on to countries, and then bodies of water, and then nineties bands, and then I was picking my head up and squinting at a distant sign and realizing it said “Montana.”

  • • •

  We’d arranged to spend a night in Sidney with Kelly and Forest Markle, friends of Kim from Sykeston. For the first time in almost a week, we’d have a home, a bed, a break from the road. And we needed it. I needed it. On top of the now-familiar biking-related aches, I was feeling the effects of sleeping, day after day, on an inch-thick mat, with a dirty-clothes pillow. My body felt not just sore but sharp. Angular. And Rachel looked just as jagged. After we crossed the Montana border, she’d taken the lead for a bit, and I’d noticed for the first time how muscular her calves had gotten. It was kind of gross. I was hoping a couple of days of comfort food and armchairs and blankies might soften up the both of us.

  Forest and Kelly were a
lready outside when we pulled into their driveway. From the moment I saw the pair, I felt I knew what to expect. Kelly, with her warm eyes and wild hair, would be spunky and inquisitive. And Forest, a closed-mouth smile crinkling his cheeks, his hand wrapped around a pint glass of clear liquid I correctly assumed was not water, would be self-contained but sweet, possessed of a downright midwestern sort of stoic generosity.

  Over a spaghetti and salad feast made with garden-grown produce, each of them played to type. Kelly peppered us with the frequently asked questions—the where and when and for Pete’s sake why?—then steered talk toward other topics: her knitting, Forest’s love of cooking, their thoughts on small-town living. Forest, throughout, smiled and sipped, from time to time sharing a spare but fully formed thought. At some point I mentioned our beer-can stove, which led to a bit of show-and-tell, which led Kelly to demand we stay a second day and help her build one. We agreed to both proposals—the stove building and, especially, the second day.

  After the meal, Forest actually let us help with dishes, and once we finished, Kelly showed us to our room, a little cave with an enormous bed. Though it wasn’t yet eight, she and Forest were bidding us good-night. This was apparently their custom, heading to bed before sunset and waking up at what-the-fuck o’clock to sip coffee, skim headlines, and start the day. I couldn’t imagine keeping that schedule. But at the moment, it felt perfect. Rachel and I were beat, so we too stuffed a blanket in front of our room’s tiny window and slid into bed.

  • • •

  The next day was gloriously lazy. Our hosts spoiled us rotten. Football-size omelets at sunrise, an afternoon snack of peaches and cream, another food-coma-inducing dinner. It was clear that Forest and Kelly didn’t have a lot of money, and yet they were sharing so much, so freely and joyfully, with two strangers. Beyond the food, they were simply great hosts. Hosts who understood balance. For every minute they spent with us, they took two more to do their own thing, leaving us to do ours. Even better, they actually requested our help. I’d always felt weird staying with people who insisted on doing everything—“Oh, I’ll flush that, you just relax”—so I was glad to be not just allowed but asked to wash dishes, was thrilled to help Kelly build her stove, to know I’d leave behind something more permanent than tire tracks and dirty sheets.

  Building the stove felt great, and when it was finished, I suggested to Rachel that we give the Fujis some long-overdue attention. Lubing the chains, for starters. Mechanic Jeff had told us to do so every hundred miles, and until Fargo we had, mainly because my blown spokes had forced me to think about maintenance every freaking day. But since Fargo, we’d traveled over four hundred miles and hadn’t yet pulled out the lube. Not once. Day after day, I’d listened to the squeaks and gnashes, the telltale cries of a thirsty chain. Had worried, but had done nothing. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how. Lubing a chain was easy, even for a novice. I’d avoided the task because I was afraid that if I looked close I’d find something worse than a dry chain. Something I couldn’t fix. And Rachel, maybe with the same self-sabotaging rationale, had been just as negligent.

  So now we were side by side, kneeling in the gravel, shaking our heads. Both chains were dirt choked and grimy. Same for the cogs and derailleurs. Also the rims and brake pads and cables and hubs and, well, every other part that was responsible for propelling us forward or keeping us from crashing. And the myriad bolts, the ones that held on the racks and fenders and water bottle cages, the ones we’d been advised to tighten regularly, were all loose. All of them.

  Rachel sat back and rested her arms on her knees. “Whoops,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe these things are still running. We’re morons.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we are.”

  It took us quite a while to wipe off the gunk, snug the bolts, oil and polish and pump. Somehow nothing seemed broken or overly worn. We realized we were lucky, and we both made promises, to the Fujis and each other, that from here on out we’d be more attentive. We’d be better. We said these things while sitting in a private driveway, in front of a cozy home, our bellies full and our bodies rested. And we believed them.

  After washing up, Rachel and I headed to the bedroom, telling Forest and Kelly that we needed naps, but just intending to lie down together. To cuddle. Out on the road, we didn’t get to do a whole lot of cuddling. We were always filthy or hot or caged in Lycra, and since neither of us was inclined to lie in the grass in a town park, limbs intertwined, fingers in each other’s hair, while a family of four played on a nearby swing set, the tent was our sole source of privacy. But the tent was stinky and cramped, and when we tried to lie together, one of us would inevitably slide between the two Therm-a-Rests and onto the cold, hard ground. Not exactly cuddle-time central. Sure, we had our fair share of sex in there, but sex didn’t require comfort. Cuddling did.

  Now we sunk into the bed. Limbs intertwined. Fingers in each other’s hair. We murmured things like “this is nice” and “I wish we could stay here all day.” Rachel took my hand, rolled toward the wall, tucked my palm to her chest, and for an hour we lay like that, drifting in and out of sleep, my face in her hair, her warm skin on mine. Eventually she moved to get up. I grabbed her arm, and we did exactly what you hope to do when you pull someone back to bed. We could hear our hosts in the kitchen, talking about vegetables and where-are-the-measuring-cups, so we burrowed under the blankets, made hardly a sound, moved slowly, finished quickly. Maybe that doesn’t sound sexy. But understand, we’d been together, incessantly, for four weeks. We’d just finished a nine-day Dakotan odyssey, an experience by turns deafening and disorienting, tedious and endless. At the moment, sexy was not a Hollywood blockbuster. Sexy was a single whisper.

  When we left that room to join Forest in the kitchen, we were smiling secret smiles. And as I stood beside Rachel, chopping onions and garlic for another sure-to-be-spectacular meal, I felt something that had been missing of late. Tenderness. Overwhelming tenderness. I shook my head, let out a little snort-laugh. Forest looked at me, so I blinked and grimaced and said something about spicy onions. Rachel looked too, and she smiled, as if she knew what I was thinking, as if she was thinking the same thing.

  • • •

  Just past Sidney, 200 broke due west, into another expanse of drab, dry grassland. A brutal crosswind tumbled over the northern horizon and assaulted us at an angle of exactly ninety degrees. I had to lean hard into the current just to stay upright. It was an odd sensation, spinning my legs forward while pressing my shoulders sideways. Kind of like the rubbing-tummy-while-patting-head game, except that in this game, messing up wouldn’t lead to a fit of giggles—it would lead to getting pancaked by a big fucking truck.

  Soon enough, I was enjoying myself in the same masochistic way I’d enjoyed our battle with that Candid Camera headwind. These miles were so perfectly difficult, so uncomplicated, so very much mine.

  I looked back to the rearview. Rachel was clenching the bars, and I could practically see the numbness settling into her fingers. The wind was shoving her, sending her into mini-swerves and not-so-mini-swerves, and her eyes were squinted against the rushing air, focused on the pavement. For the hundredth time, I reminded myself that I wasn’t alone out here. These miles weren’t mine to own. They were ours.

  For thirty miles I pushed into the wind, hard enough to keep us moving but not so hard that I’d accidentally open a gap between us, until at last we came upon some hay bales sitting just off the shoulder. Rachel suggested we pull over, and for some time we huddled behind the hay, our noses buried in books. She was in the final pages of Still Life With Woodpecker, and I’d made it halfway through DeLillo’s White Noise. I wasn’t really getting it, the big message buried in the prose, nor was I getting the irony that my poor comprehension likely had more than a little to do with the ever-distracting, not-so-white noise of roaring winds and whining engines.

  Soon I dropped my book an
d walked to the shoulder. The wind had been blowing from due north, but now I could swear it was shifting, was becoming more northeasterly. I turned to mention this to Rachel, then caught myself. Days earlier, she had forbidden me to talk about the wind. It was her opinion that while I did have great enthusiasm for the work I performed in my capacity as self-appointed crew meteorologist, I did not have access to current weather reports or knowledge of locally prevailing winds or anything beyond the most basic understanding of meteorology. She had, as delicately as possible, said it would be easier for her to endure the wind if I’d stop repeatedly, and baselessly, trying to raise her expectations.

  I wanted to honor this simple rule. No wind talk. But I also wanted to make her, and myself, and us, feel happy, and I’d studied the map enough to know that four miles up the road, just before Richey, Highway 200 would bend forty-five degrees to the southwest. Once we made that turn, the crosswind would transform into something tailwindish, whereupon life would become just swell. And when you know something like that, even if you’ve been specifically asked not to share it, aren’t you kind of obligated to share it?

  I shared it.

  Rachel looked up from her book, sunk her eyes into me, said a single word. “Brian.” Through some magic of vocal tone and body language, she had turned my name into a weapon.

  I left it alone and, unsure what else to say, suggested we get back on the bikes. We fought through four violent miles, reached that bend in the road and followed its southwestern arc, at which point, lo and fucking behold, the wind was with us. It wasn’t precisely a tailwind—was more of a right-haunch wind—but it was clearly doing more good than harm. Rachel, quite gracefully, acknowledged that I’d gotten it right for once. And I, quite shamelessly, celebrated my clairvoyance. We rode the haunch wind to Richey, stopped to buy and inhale some foodlike products, and then we eased into the day’s final miles.

  • • •

  Southwest of Richey, we descended into a valley, moving from yawn-inducing plains into a mess of blue-brown badlands, and these badlands, unlike the ones we’d encountered in North Dakota, didn’t seem to surrender their magic when viewed up close, or, rather, they did but it didn’t matter, because for every foregrounded dirt pile, there was another hump on the horizon, still distant enough to appear inviting, forgiving, uncomplicated. And then there was the asphalt itself—tucking between buttes, rolling over rises in the earth, whispering words of encouragement. “You can go here,” it told me. “Matter of fact, you have to.”