by Brian Benson
Four o’clock came, and we loaded the bikes, scoured the house to make sure we weren’t leaving anything behind. We were. Two king-size chocolate bars, final gifts from Helen. Rachel picked them up and packed them, and we locked the door behind us and returned to the road.
• • •
Several weeks earlier, my hometown mechanic had warned us about westerly winds. When we’d mentioned our potential route, he’d nodded and looked back and forth between us. “East to west through Dakota, huh? Gonna be a battle. Be prepared to pedal as hard as you can just to keep moving. It’ll probably take you a couple of weeks.”
These words echoed in my head as we rode from Fargo. Wind was licking around buildings and over gas pumps. Treetops were shivering, American flags popping and locking. We stuck to quiet side streets as long as we could, but then we hit the city limit and turned onto a country road that paralleled the interstate. The horizon opened up. And the battle began.
After all the buildup, what surprised me wasn’t the force of the wind but its deafening roar. Had we been facing downwind, I bet it would have seemed like a placid late afternoon, but now, facing the current, I felt as if I’d stepped onto a crowded airport tarmac. I mean, it wasn’t like we hadn’t experienced wind before—“Honey, the air, it’s . . . it’s moving!”—but this was in a class of its own. The howl rendered conversation impossible, which was actually kind of nice, as it forced me to keep my mouth shut and watch the wind assail the wheat. The latter performed a languid dance, lilting southward here, easing northward there, like a field of terrestrial seaweed.
I’d thought the Osage to Fargo ride was our first day in the Plains, but that, I now realized, had been nothing. Here the land was religiously flat. There were no curves or crevasses to greet the wind, whose ghost was everywhere. Lonely trees tucked tattered branches to their trunks. Granules of sand perched atop tractors, reluctantly nomadic.
If all along I’d known we were crossing the country, now I could feel it. The land unfurled before us, allowing no confusion about just how far we had to go.
We’d ridden twenty-some miles when the sun began to drop, the wind with it. We pulled over, plopped down in a roadside ditch, and prepared dinner—two PB&J sandwiches and a pound and a half of trail mix—and as we ate, Rachel, her mouth half-full, began to sing, “My baloney has a first name: it’s O-s-c-a-r. My—”
“Please stop.”
“Baloney has a second name: it’s—”
I yanked a handful of grass and made to shove it in her mouth.
She ducked away, sang the final words into her armpit. Her performance complete, she looked up and said, “All fucking day. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for hours.”
“Yeah?” I said. “I’m stuck with ‘Home on the Range.’ But I only know the first verse.”
We both tried to remember the second but came up blank, which, really, was maybe for the better. Rachel pulled out her book, and I my journal, and there we sat for some time, just reading and writing, the ditch like a den. This is home now, I thought, and wrote.
Eventually the bugs found us, and so we got back on the bikes and rode toward the setting sun, kept on even when it slipped from sight. Soon it was black all around. I could make out the glow of distant farmhouses, could see the faint flicker of headlights and watch them twinkle like stars until, five minutes later, they finally whooshed by. I kept stealing glances at Rachel as she pedaled beside me, her headlight painting the pavement. Riding with her through this hushed landscape, utterly alone, felt like a secret. We were in a world all our own.
Eventually the horizon surrendered a dull glow, which grew and sharpened into the lights of a town called Page. We stole into the park, set up behind a pavilion. I said I wanted the chocolate. Rachel said it had only been an hour or two since our roadside dinner. I said chocolate. She rolled her eyes, began digging around in her bags.
“I know they’re here somewhere,” she said. “Can we just wait until tomorrow? I’m full.” I shrugged. I didn’t really want to wait, but I rationalized that I was already feeling pretty nourished, having faced down those headwinds, having discovered this forbidden, starlit spot. And I was sure tomorrow would be another tough day. It would be easier to endure if we knew it would end with some hard-earned sweetness.
• • •
The next morning the air was angry. I started out in front, tucking my head to my chest and fighting for every turn of the cranks, and Rachel hugged my rear tire, trying to find that sweet spot where my frame blocked the breeze. We wordlessly switched every few miles, the drafter chugging past the leader to take lashes from the current. Progress was painstaking. We may as well have been pedaling through pudding.
A few miles out of Page, we turned west on Highway 200, which we’d now be riding for, well, we weren’t sure, but it was somewhere between a long-ass time and forever. Immediately we saw two tiny ants on the horizon. They grew into pine beetles, then pinecones, until, at five hundred yards, they became people. On bikes. I was wondering when this would happen. By chance (and only, mind you, by chance), we’d stumbled onto an Adventure Cycling route, and now, for the first time, we were encountering another pair of cross-country cyclists. Maybe I should have been excited to see them, but I wasn’t. I hated them. They appeared to be traveling at 943 mph, driven forward by the same wind that was pressing against us.
There were no cars, so the four of us coasted toward the center stripe. They were two guys, probably in their twenties, long and lanky, just like me. We eyed each other’s panniers and judged outfits, stopping just short of sniffing asses.
“Looks like you guys are riding the right direction,” Rachel said, holding a hand up against the wind. I caught a slight hint of malice in her voice.
One of them snorted. “For the moment. We’ve had awful headwinds for three days.”
I perked up. So prevailing didn’t mean “permanent.” This was encouraging.
Turned out that, throughout North Dakota, they’d only encountered west-bearing winds, and many locals had commented on how odd this was. How rare. I cursed the Lump, the trail, the spokes. If Rachel and I had gotten here just three days earlier, we’d be flying. We chatted for a few more minutes, covered the wheres and whens of our respective trips, none of us interested in delving into the whys, and then we wished each other well and moved on.
The prevailing winds continued to prevail. After twenty miles, we stopped off in Cooperstown, a sleepy town whose ornate theater, wide streets, and plentiful-but-vacant storefronts spoke to a prosperity come and gone. We settled in the park, spent a few hours reading, sleeping, and baking cookies whose only redeeming quality was being prepared on a stove made from a beer can. Again I thought of asking Rachel to pull out the Fargonian chocolate. But we still had many miles to ride. I mustered up more patience.
Once the wind had dropped, we returned to the road, again riding past sunset, alone under starry skies, basking in prairie quiet. We’d been riding for two hours when the town of Glenview appeared on the horizon. We rolled into its park, set up the tent, lit up the beer can. Rachel told me, in an accent best described as drunken Queen’s English, that she was “properly famished.” I replied that she was in luck, as we’d soon be feasting upon quinoa with mixed vegetables paired with a side of string cheese and a 2007 bottle of Gatorade.
We feasted, and it was good, and as I began to clean up the dishes, Rachel stood and began rooting around in her panniers, rooting around for what seemed like an awful long time, which, I mean, I guess I didn’t really care how long it took, so long as she found—
“I can’t find it,” she said.
“What?” My mouth gaped. My eyes bugged.
“The chocolate. I can’t find it.”
“Did you look in all the bags?”
“Brian. Yes. You just watched me.”
“Okay,” I said, sounding more desperate than i
ntended. “Maybe look again?”
She looked again: unearthed her pink jersey and orange camp towel and flip-flops and loose change, pulled out a heavily creased North Dakota map, three ballpoint pens, a book of stamps, two unsent postcards, and a bottle of sunscreen. But no chocolate.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I wish I had it. But I don’t.”
I avoided eye contact and rubbed two stones together. “It’s all right.”
We both sat there for a moment, silent. Then Rachel stood and walked to the bathroom, crouched beside a water spigot and began scrubbing the chamois of her spare shorts. She did this every night, without fail.
Without fail.
The rage was sudden, disorienting. I rose from the table and set off across the park, let the venom course through my gut, into my bloodstream, up toward my brain, where it cohered into the sobering realization that this was no mistake, that Rachel, queen of routine, did not make mistakes, that, in losing this chocolate, she had revealed herself to be precise about the wrong things and careless about the right ones, and as such, had not just lost chocolate but rather had become—or perhaps had always been—the kind of person who lost chocolate, and, okay, fine, I admittedly wasn’t sure what this meant, exactly, but I knew it was important, was in fact vastly fucking important, and so I stewed on it, all night and for much of the next morning, right up until the moment when Rachel, who had for five minutes been digging through panniers in search of her wallet, suddenly yipped and did a little dance and held up two slightly mangled but still intact chocolate bars.
CHAPTER 10
An Answer to All My Questions
On a town park picnic table in Carrington, North Dakota, I sat beside Rachel, puffing my bare chest against the sun. After weeks of exposure, and despite a daily slathering of sunscreen, my skin now felt like fruit leather. Filthy fruit leather. Since leaving Fargo, we’d seen no lakes, no rivers, no showers—no water of any kind, save for the rusty sludge that flowed from gas station sinks and the snot-colored, algae-coated, agro-chemical gravy that pooled between amber waves of monoculture—and so we were covered in grease and grain dust, redolent of synthetic coconut and organic armpit, submerged face-deep in a world defined by wind-whipped wheat and heat-rippled pavement and a steamrolled horizon that never . . . fucking . . . changed.
And yet. At the moment, the sun felt warm but not hot. The breeze like fingers through my hair. I was pleasantly groggy and full, having just napped off my well-rounded breakfast of one sub sandwich, twenty ounces of soda, twelve fistfuls of trail mix, and that melted chunk of found chocolate. I was happy. I wanted nothing and nowhere else.
I propped myself on my elbows, plucked a few blades of grass, and tossed them aloft. They floated to the ground, landing just west of their point of origin.
“Check it out,” I said to Rachel. “I think the wind is gonna be behind us today.”
She smiled politely, as if I’d said I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up. She was getting used to these proclamations.
“Rach? Can you feel it? We’re going to have a tailwind.”
“Maybe.” She squirted out a dollop of Chamois Butt’r and stuck her hand in her shorts. “Or maybe you flicked your wrist a teeny bit, in a westerly direction, when you ‘dropped’ the grass.”
This was exactly what I had done. But it was for a good cause. A tiny lie told in service to our sense of momentum.
I shrugged. “We’ll see about that.”
I pulled on shirt and shoes and helmet and followed Rachel across the grass. We got on the bikes and started pedaling, and as we rode out of town, past cloud-colored grain silos and pole barns, I swore I felt a breeze tickling the back of my neck. I began nodding and pointing vaguely up at the sky, and just as I was twisting around to gloat, the wind stutter-stepped and feigned a wild starboard gust. I bit the fake—bit hard—and as I leaned into the current, the air abruptly about-faced and knocked me to the gravel. I fought back to the pavement, only to find that the wind had shifted again and was now slap boxing me back to Carrington.
This was not a headwind, not a tailwind, not even a crosswind. Just an asshole wind.
Now Rachel pulled up beside me, smirking, and said, “Some tailwind we got here.”
“Very funny.”
“I mean, this almost feels too easy.”
“Right, okay, you win. But I still think—”
A horn blew. We were taking up the entire lane, and what with the wind’s roar, we hadn’t heard the truck approaching from behind. As it blasted on by, the driver gave us the finger.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, to no one in particular.
I pulled back in front of Rachel, dropped my head, drove the pedals. The wind was now roaring, worming into my ears and eyes and nostrils, making me feel not so very happy, and so I began casting about for something to appreciate. But the roadside grasses were convulsing in tight, violent spasms, as if being electrocuted. And the sunflowers off to the south—which, hours earlier, under flattering dawn light, had rolled their big beautiful heads in lazy little circles, calling to mind a lost scene from Fantasia—now leaned uncomfortably close, their faces bulbous and leering in the high-noon sun, looking less Fantasia and more The Day the Plants Attacked.
I shifted my gaze to the northern wheat fields. Much better. There the stalks swayed elegantly, swaths of gold rolling and rising in unison, rippled by the ever-changing current. As I watched the wheat dive toward me, then felt a gust barrel into my kidney, I realized: I could see the wind. Nostalgia surged. I’d grown up sailing tiny boats on tiny lakes and had loved scanning the water, searching for telltale shivers. Out here it was the same deal. If I kept my eyes on the wheat, I could rob the wind of its element of surprise, could lean into south-bearing crosswinds before they hit, duck into gusting headwinds, sit back and savor short-lived bursts from behind.
I didn’t get it right every time, but that wasn’t the point. Soon I was absorbed, engaged with the world, having myself a moment. And when, an hour or three later, we rolled up to the hold-your-breath town of Sykeston and slid into a window booth at the Country Cafe, I felt like I’d earned my slice of cherry pie, my cup of coffee, my sense of momentum.
• • •
The instant we got back on the road, I knew something had changed. I could feel it, could smell it, and I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t really hear anything at all, save for those super-subtle sounds usually buried under the wind’s howl: tires humming on pavement, chain links whirring over steel teeth. Also, I was suddenly feeling like a superhero: barely working but damn near flying. I eyed the speedometer. We were going twenty, on flat ground, without breaking a sweat. I whipped into a U-turn and faced up to the eastern horizon. The wind was surging. Ferocious. It blasted back my eyelids, tore the skin from my forearms, bored a hole in my chest. I spun around again and rocketed forward, as if fired from a giant slingshot.
We finally, indisputably, had a tailwind.
For one, two, four miles, I rode in rapture, the cranks all but spinning themselves, my legs merely along for the ride. I tilted my head back, and I hoovered down the glorious prairie air, and it tasted so saturated, so sweet. I wanted to kiss it. Lick it. Marry it.
I mean, I must have on some level understood that I was tasting more than the moment. That the sweetness had something to do with those muscular clouds creeping over the northern horizon. Thunderheads of a purple so deep and dark they seemed capable of raining ink. But the wind was blowing from the east, and the clouds were so far north, right? Right.
We were about five miles west of Sykeston when I felt the first gust. It came in low and fast, drove straight into my rib cage. I shrugged it off as an anomaly, a sort of airborne eddy, the wind curling upon itself before continuing downstream. But more bursts followed, and then a steady push. By this point the northern horizon—not just the clouds but the horizon itself—appeared to be
closing in, and above its bushy purple eyebrow I noticed a yellow smudge. Maybe I was an adrenaline junkie, a risk taker, but I was also a midwesterner, and midwesterners know that when you see a yellow smudge on the sky, you get the fuck inside.
I yelled to Rachel and pointed to the conveniently located rest stop on our right. We pulled in and discussed. We considered holing up at the wayside, but it only had a three-walled enclosure, and that wasn’t going to cut it. There was nothing to do but head back to Sykeston.
I took the lead, and Rachel tucked in close behind. The wind was fighting dirty now—tossing dust in eyes, hitting below the belt. And that doomsday eyebrow was getting awfully close. Soon a taproot of lightning lit the sky. Seconds later, an ovation of thunder. The heavens flashed brighter and brighter, and the thunder followed ever more closely, until it was rumbling along with the lightning, rumbling right overhead.
We skidded up to the Country Cafe just as the rains began. There was no drip-trickle upswell. The heavens just shrugged and kicked over a Dakota-size bucket of water. It took us two seconds to reach the café door, but already we were soaked. We smiled sheepish smiles at the deeply dimpled proprietor, ordered cups of cocoa, and slid into a window booth.
The rain was now falling in sheets. Blankets. Shag carpets. The gravel lot was already flooded, and falling drops sprayed standing water like machine-gun fire. We played some rummy, waiting for the storm to wear itself out, as all prairie storms do. Except this one didn’t. It was feeding upon itself, and by five thirty it looked nastier than ever. The café was to close at six, and we didn’t have a plan for how we were going to achieve not going back out there. But we knew it was not going to happen. It couldn’t. “I say we just look as pitiful as possible,” Rachel whispered, nodding toward the woman behind the counter. “What’s she going to do? Boot us out and watch us die?”
