Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson

  We were in the West, all right. Weathered rocks were everywhere: here, sprawled out under a frayed blanket of high grass; there, stacked four high, a giant’s cairn. And the grass, which through some trick of lighting or sentiment appeared gold and green and blue all at once, was speckled with what must have been a hundred tar-black steer. A hundred rigidly attentive steer. Every last one of them, I realized, was staring at us with dopey intensity.

  “Do you see this?” I asked, pointing toward the cattle. Some were standing, some lying down. One was spraying piss with the pressure of a fire hose, and another had frozen midmeal, a mouthful of grass hanging from its face. All of them were possessed by our presence.

  “Makes me feel self-conscious,” I said. “Do I have a cold sore or something?”

  Rachel didn’t respond. She was breathing hard, and her cheeks were flushed, and she seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact. And, well, what the hell? She’d been downright effusive back at the Cenex, not twenty minutes earlier. What had I done?

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  She kept riding for a moment, then turned and said, “I’m just getting tired of this.”

  I nodded, relieved. “Yeah. This is quite a hill, right? But I think we’re almost to the top.”

  She gave me a well-you-just-missed-the-entire-fucking-point stare.

  I looked down at the pavement, trying to find the I-do-too-get-the-point words. But I did not get the point, did not quite grasp what she was tired of, and so finally I just pulled back in front of her and shrugged at my bovine spectators and rode.

  Soon the grade flattened out, and we began picking up speed, riding what I swore was a faint tailwind. At the Cenex, a pleasant fifty-something woman had told us to expect “a really tough day” of hills and headwinds, and the local paper had similarly predicted westerlies gusting up to thirty-some miles per hour, but now I set to rewriting the forecast. The winds would shift, and the hills would lay prostrate before us, and we’d have ourselves another glorious tailwind romp.

  About that. For ten miles, or perhaps six—okay, maybe it was only four, but definitely no less than four—the air stayed gentle, and I stayed silent, and Rachel stayed right on my tail. But then we came around a little bend in the road and—surprise!—here was that west wind. At first it was playful, tickling my ribs and whispering in my ear, but soon the whispers became curses, and the rib tickles gave way to cheek slaps and eyeball pokes, and finally the wind just planted its feet and gave me a yes-I’m-picking-a-fight-with-you shoulder shove.

  I swore under my breath and hunched over the bars and pushed, my attention split between the grasses, which telegraphed nothing I couldn’t feel, and the rearview, where I could see Rachel’s head bobbing, her eyes like ticking time bombs. I decided to ignore both, just dropped my eyes to the speedometer and fought for double digits. It was a slog, but I held strong at nine or ten miles an hour, for nearly an hour, and just when I felt like we were getting used to the wind, like we’d established something approaching momentum, we came up over a little hump in the road and the wind just fucking ambushed us.

  The air attacked so suddenly, and with such force, that I honestly wondered if it might be a prank, the most elaborate Candid Camera gag of all time. Maybe the horizon was actually a mile-long canvas, and said canvas would now roll up to reveal a wall of industrial-strength fans, an array of cameras, a gaggle of friends laughing and backslapping. But this was no gag. It was a humorless, soulless wind. It knocked my rearview out of position, burned my eyeballs, burrowed into my nostrils. And that howl. Never had a landscape sounded so angry.

  I was now going four miles an hour. Barely. I was amazed at how difficult it was to keep myself moving—not moving quickly, merely moving—but I was not about to be defeated by a bunch of bullshit molecules, and so I sunk as low as I could and squeezed the bars and just plain Godzilla-stomped the pedals, and, well, now we were getting somewhere. I even hit seven miles per hour for a couple of seconds. I pushed harder and harder, until I could almost feel the veins worming out from my forehead, could almost taste the sweat soaking my shirt, and soon I was feeling pretty triumphant, because here I was, in the unforgiving West, and the world was assaulting me with the worst it had, and (cue strings) I wasn’t backing down.

  At a certain point I remembered I had a girlfriend. Who was riding her bike cross-country. With me. Since my mirror was now aimed at a power line, I couldn’t see her, and I had to actually spin around and look over my shoulder, and, of course, just as I did, the jerk-off wind surged and sent me swerving into the lane. I righted myself, and looked again, and saw that I’d left Rachel a good fifty yards back, so I slowed up and tried hard to hold a draftable speed. But the wind kept launching sucker punches every time I glanced back, and it was hard enough just to keep moving, so I looked less and less, outpaced her more and more.

  Nine miles of this nonsense. Nine miles that took almost two hours. By the time we arrived in the not-quite-a-town of Halliday, my eyeballs were acid soaked, my entire body was aching, and I wanted nothing more than to drink a liter of corn syrup and pass out on a picnic table. I said so to Rachel. She nodded and said—her voice just above a whisper, her eyes all but empty—that she was just going to head to the park. A few minutes later, I found her there, slumped against an oak, speaking with quiet intensity into her phone. I started to lean my bike beside hers, but she put a hand over the receiver and looked up and said, “I’m on the phone.” She kept looking until I got the hint and wheeled my bike to the other side of the park.

  An hour passed. Then two. I kept expecting Rachel to come over and talk, but every time I looked up, she was still in her corner, leaned against the tree, one hand holding the phone, the other ripping up patches of grass. I wanted to join her over there, but I didn’t know what I’d say. And so I kept myself busy—wrote in my journal, scribbled out a couple of postcards, even pulled out the ukulele. I’d barely played it thus far, but now I studied the chord chart, got comfortable with a few progressions, and set to figuring out a uke version of a song I’d written in Xela. As I played, I found myself thinking about the months we’d spent there. I thought about el lago, and the beachside path where this whole thing had begun, and it all seemed very far away.

  • • •

  The sun was kissing the horizon when Rachel at last came out of her corner.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For being such a brat.”

  “You’re not being a brat.”

  “Yes. I am. And I wanted to tell you that it’s not about you.”

  “Everything is about me.”

  She gave my shoulder a shove. “I’m serious, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked down at the grass and said, “It’s just hard. I guess I knew I’d be tired and dirty. But I thought I’d like it. And sometimes, most of the time, I do. But there are days, like today, when I just feel totally bored and discouraged. And then I ask myself why I’m even out here. You know?”

  I did not know. But I nodded.

  “And it’s not even about my butt being sore or my fingers being numb or whatever. Really, it’s just that sometimes—and, again, today especially—I just get caught on the thought that I really don’t want to do this. That I could be doing anything else right now.”

  What I said was, “I know what you mean.”

  What I did not say was that what she meant was the opposite of what I felt: that I loved this trip precisely because it closed off anything—everything—else, and I thought this thing we were doing was pure and true and glorious, and I felt like I could—

  “Hey.”

  I looked up. “Sorry. I was just thinking about what you said.”

  “Well, I was saying I’m done talking now. I just wanted you to know that I do want to finish this trip, and I know
this is all in my head, and I’m going to try to be more positive.”

  “And I’m going to try to be more supportive,” I said. “But can you help me out a little? I’m having trouble finding that sweet spot between ignoring you and annoying you.”

  She said she’d try to do that, and I grabbed her hands and said, “Help me help you,” and then she kicked me in the shins, and I came right back with a Lycra wedgie, and we agreed that it was maybe time to get back on the road.

  • • •

  That night we rode twenty-five miles. The wind sank with the sun, a deep quiet settled with the night sky, and by the time we saw the distant twinkle of civilization, from the town of Killdeer, it was past ten and the temperature had dipped into the forties. Even I, the winter-loving northerner, was shivering as we rolled into the town park, which meant that Rachel, who wore multiple layers in seventy-degree apartments, was freezing. When we learned the park had heated bathrooms, with showers, Rachel was jumping-up-and-down ecstatic. I offered to set up the tent on my own, and my offer seemed to land right in that sweet spot we’d been talking about. She headed to the showers, and after some tent erecting and self-congratulating, I did the same. For some time, I lingered under steaming water, my skin tingling, my mind sweeping over all the miles that had made this cramped, funky shower stall feel downright posh.

  The next day we laid over in Killdeer. All morning we loitered at a nearby Cenex, and come afternoon we headed back to the park to write postcards and read books and call friends. One of those friends was Galen. He was now in eastern South Dakota, apparently battling some equally fierce headwinds. His last three days, he said, had been “pretty hellish.”

  When I hung up, I told Rachel what Galen had said, how discouraged he’d sounded.

  She smiled and said, “I’m embarrassed to admit how happy I am to hear that.”

  The rest of the day passed slow and lazy. We had a little uke sing-along, played a dozen games of rummy, strolled every street in town. Every hour or so, one of us would say something about how good it felt to take a break, to step out of the day-to-day. To just, you know, enjoy each other’s company.

  When thunderheads rolled in, around five, we took refuge in the town bar. It ended up being a four-pints-of-pilsner storm, and when the skies finally cleared, we walked back to the tent and had some four-pints-of-pilsner sex. Eager and clumsy and over before we knew it.

  • • •

  By morning the rains had resumed, so we shuffled back to the Cenex to eat breakfast and drown our four-pints-of-pilsner hangovers in cheap coffee. Rachel pored over newspaper horoscopes. I began, and quickly gave up on, a crossword. And then we headed back to the park for shamefully long showers. Sure, in a couple of days we’d be staying in a proper home—Kim from Sykeston had set us up with friends in a town just past the Montana border—but we’d learned that in our time-space continuum, two days could feel like two months.

  North of Killdeer, Highway 200 was mercifully flat, and it wound gently around weathered old barns and postage-stamp horse pastures. Though the forecast had called for more life-ruining winds, I could barely detect a current. The air was calm, the sun obscured by a slate cloud pillow, the highway, as ever, nearly free of cars. For twenty-some miles, Rachel and I rode side by side, stopping frequently for pictures and pee breaks, wondering aloud why every day couldn’t be like this, and discussing which route to take through Montana. It was hard to believe we might be there, might at last escape North Dakota, by the following evening.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the flats gave way to gentle rollers, and then not-so-gentle rollers, until we found ourselves perched on the edge of a river valley, its western banks rising toward what appeared to be mountains. Oddly familiar mountains.

  “I thought these were in South Dakota,” Rachel said.

  “Me too.”

  Back in Fargo, I’d pored over pictures of this exact landscape, had briefly gotten obsessed with the idea of veering down to South Dakota. To the Badlands. We’d decided against doing so, had even steered clear of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which I understood to be the poor man’s Badlands. And when we’d made these decisions, a little part of me, the part that believed the secret to happiness might be perched atop one of those buttes, had died. But here we were, amid the white space, the place between places, a place that, according to our map, was merely an amorphous blob defined by all it was not: Not lake nor stream, not park nor forest, not reservation land nor county seat. Not the Badlands. And yet. It was.

  The land before us rose in a mess of massive humps, some knobby and wrinkled like an old man’s knuckles, others jagged as shark’s teeth. This, of course, was not how I described it at the time. No, I took in the Badlands and, echoing every other human who has ever gazed upon a stark and unfamiliar landscape, I said, “It looks like the moon.”

  I turned to Rachel. “I want to get a picture of you on the moon.” As I dug out the camera, she waddled forward with her bike. I pulled back to a wide angle, fitting in the rippled horizon, the sloping pavement, some foreground buttes and, off to the side, Rachel, who was still waddling. I called her name, and when she turned to look over her shoulder, I snapped the shot.

  I’ve looked at that photo many times over the years, enough that I don’t need to see it to tell you that Rachel, with her sucked-in cheeks and her narrowed eyes and her mouth twisted into a tight half smile, was trying to look tough. Rachel always exuded toughness, but there, in deep Dakota, she was straining to project what had once come naturally.

  And I definitely don’t need to see the photo to tell you about the photographer. He was positioning the camera, fussing over the framing, trying to capture the big picture—so consumed by the composition that he’d lost sight of its subject.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Single Whisper

  I tilted my head skyward and raised up the bottle and squeezed it with both hands. A shy tablespoon of lukewarm water wet my tongue. I squeezed harder, and the plastic made that pathetic wheezing-donkey sound, and here came a drop, and another, and another, and . . .

  My eyes still on the bottle, I asked, “So, hey, how much water do—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Rachel said.

  “Right. Well, then I guess I’ll just have to drink these here Cheetos.”

  “You do that.” She looked off to the west, over the barbwire and apple-bobbing oil derricks and dirt—so much dirt—and said, “How far did you say it was? To Wilford Brimley?”

  “Watford City,” I said. “About thirty miles.”

  She picked up a rock, tossed it from hand to hand. “We’re not very good at this, are we?”

  “No,” I said. “No, we are not.”

  Despite having spent the morning shuttling between Killdeer’s well-equipped town park and its downright deluxe Cenex, we’d forgotten to fill our Camelbaks. Again. And now, barely halfway into this ride through high plains heat, we’d emptied our bottles.

  Rachel stood and stretched her arms high overhead, shielding her eyes from afternoon sun. “Well?” she said. “Wilford ho?”

  I nodded. “Wilford ho.”

  We saddled up and pushed back into the blast-furnace heat, and after a mile I already felt like I was sucking a salt lollipop. I tried to distract myself, to think of anything else, but there was only this. Only thirst. When I closed my eyes, I saw a montage of plump, juicy oranges and rain-forest waterfalls. When I opened them, I saw dirt. And dirt. And dirt.

  The Badlands weren’t so romantic when viewed up close. Those velvety wrinkles, the ones that from afar had made the mountains look as cuddly as sleeping shar-peis, were just a bunch of eroding canyons. And the peaks themselves? Those blue-brown, pastel-chalked domes? Piles of dirt. This was just a bone-dry, brown-scale dust bowl peppered with sagebrush and dead grass and the most decrepit little shrubs I’d ever seen. They looked as thirsty as I felt.
r />   So, for that matter, did Rachel. Her skin was slick with sweat, her face a hangdog droop. I wanted to say something, anything, to help her forget the heat and thirst and dirt, but my mind was blank. I couldn’t put together words, much less sentences. All I could do was ride. And count—pedal strokes and eye blinks, miles and minutes, fence posts and passing cars. I’d had a mild sleep disorder as a kid, and now I was thinking of those long hours when I’d lain in the dark, counting sheep or, more often, puppies. I’d keep my eyes shut as long as possible, would finally check the clock to find that nine minutes had passed since I last looked. It was the same shit out here. Only now my clock had this speedometer, this oscillating reminder that time was moving so slow only because I was too weak to speed it up.

  For somewhere between an hour and a decade, Rachel and I rode, silent and separate, suffering from cotton mouth and twinklevision, until at last we came upon a splotchy white ranch house sitting just north of the road. We dropped the bikes in the gravel driveway, climbed the steps, and knocked on the door. No answer. I walked to the side of the house, hopped the chain-link fence and cased the backyard. Sure enough, over there by the deck was a spigot. I popped around the house and told Rachel to toss over the bottles, and she did, and I filled them, and I came back over the fence, beaming with pride, like some kind of returning war hero, and we both closed our eyes and put the bottles to our lips and took in that sweet . . .

  Poison. Fucking poison.