by Brian Benson
• • •
I was hugging a tree: rubbing my nose into ridges in the bark, horseshoeing my arms around the trunk. And why not? Nobody was around. I was on a dead-end road, searching for a ghost town deep in the pine-drenched Judith Mountains, drunk on a cocktail of vitamin D and adrenaline and nostalgia and a mischievous awareness that nobody in the entire world had any idea where I was or what I was doing. So I was hugging a tree, because I fucking wanted to.
Rachel and I had woken that morning with different ideas about the day. She wanted to check out a museum, make calls, laze around at a coffee shop, and I wanted to do the same things, wanted to do everything that could be done by anyone anywhere, but from the moment I’d looked out the window and seen the mountains towering over town, I’d known I needed to dive in and submerge myself in pine. So I’d suggested we split up for the day, had said it like it was no big deal, though it had been a month since we’d spent over an hour apart.
The ride up was perfect. No panniers, no rearview mirror. Just me and the Fuji, the blacktop and blue sky and foothills so eye pleasing they appeared computer generated. The grade was steep, but I charged up it, feeling sleek and powerful, even after the previous day’s hundred-mile ride. Ten miles north of town, I turned onto a dirt road, bound for the ruins of Maiden, an abandoned mining town I’d read about in a brochure. Halfway there, I decided I didn’t care about seeing Maiden. I just wanted to be in the woods. I stopped, dropped the bike, and made my way toward a stand of pine.
So here I was, wrapped around a tree, laughing aloud. I hadn’t, I realized, felt such pure joy for quite some time, maybe not since that tailwind ride to Turtle Lake, when I’d let myself forget life outside the mile, when I’d been free to enjoy the moments as I wanted, without the perverse conviction that Rachel and I had to enjoy the same things, the same way, always. And so now I found myself thinking of Galen. His trip, I imagined, was just one big orgy of freedom. Every day he and he alone got to decide how far to ride, where to take breaks, when to hug a tree. He got to wake up every morning and think, “This is mine.” I mean, I had no idea if he really did or thought any of this. I’d only talked to him within earshot of Rachel, so I couldn’t exactly ask, “Hey, could you tell me how awesome it is to not have to compromise with your girlfriend?” And even if I’d had the chance, I’d never have asked. I didn’t really want to know.
But here I was in the woods, alone and happy, thinking this is mine and wondering if I couldn’t learn something from Galen or, better said, from my idea of Galen. Maybe I could make more space for this kind of freedom, even amid all the compromise. Yes. Of course I could.
• • •
I met Rachel back at the Calvert. She’d had a good day too. Those were the words she used, at least. But then she explained what she’d done—phone calls to Portland friends, a nap, a book, a latte—and I thought her day sounded kind of ridiculous. Here we were, in the trees, on the cusp of the Rockies, and she was thinking about Portland? So I just nodded and said, “Cool,” which is exactly what she said when I tried to impart what I’d found up there in the hills. I didn’t have words for it, I realized, and it just sounded kind of silly, all the tree hugging and beauty of being alone. Soon we stopped talking about why we’d been happy, alone, all day and focused on how happy we would be, together, for the rest of the night.
We’d planned a romantic evening: dinner and drinks and a bottle of wine back at the hotel, where we’d be staying a second night. Thirty bucks was a lot of money, so the evening would have to be perfect, and with this in mind, at dinner I subbed wine for beer and forced myself not to overeat, because getting farty and falling asleep at ten was not romantic. Rachel rubbed my knee under the table, asked about my ride, blinked and leaned in as she did when trying, super hard, to listen. And I, dipping into dwindling reserves of raging sentimentality, told her how happy I was to be here with her, how amazing and exciting and wonderful it was that we’d been riding for a month, across four states, together. But the words didn’t sound right. It felt like we were playacting. My head was up in the hills, Rachel’s in Portland, and yet we were pretending this day, this trip, had brought us closer.
As we walked back to the hotel, Rachel took my hand and asked, “Is everything all right?”
I nodded a little too vigorously. “Of course. It was just a big ride today.”
“You’re sure that’s all?”
“Yeah. What do you mean?”
She hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. You just seem kind of distant.”
I put my arm around her, and squeezed, and kept walking.
Back in the room, we poured glasses of wine and lay on the comforter. I’d been hoping that once we got back here, to this bed, this unambiguous place, a raw animal desire would ambush my apprehension, would rip it to shreds and spit it out the window. But now Rachel was putting her glass down and pushing her hand under my shirt, and I was shrinking away, was for maybe the first time ever thinking, I don’t want this.
“Wait,” I said. I grabbed her hand, through the fabric. I told her I was sorry. I’d overeaten. I was feeling farty and sleepy and not romantic.
She just sat there for a moment, blinking.
“I’m really sorry, Rach. I think I just need to pass out.”
Now her lips said, “It’s okay.” But her eyes said no, it is not.
We were asleep by ten.
• • •
After some crappy continental breakfast, we packed and headed outside. On the front steps, I paused. Sniffed. The air was heavy with wood smoke, the skies a gauzy gray. We rode up out of the valley, away from the pine, into another expanse of high desert, and now the gray was everything, everywhere. So much smoke. At the moment I had no idea where it was coming from, had somehow managed to miss every news headline and gas station conversation about the raging wildfires consuming most of western Montana. All I knew was that my eyes were stinging, and I was very thirsty, and a vast gray curtain hung over the horizon.
As we rode west, under a sky like a pile of dirty socks, my mood soured. We were finally at the foot of the Rockies, but if this smoke held, we’d never see them. There would be no sweeping views or sweet alpine air, just cold nights and tourist traffic and smoke-choked climbs. No distractions or destinations, just miles and miles of in-between.
I kept this up for quite a while, sucking on smoke and pouting, until something—I can’t recall what exactly—brought the previous day’s sojourn back into my head. I made myself remember how free I’d felt up in the trees, how content I’d been simply because I’d picked a destination and moved toward it and allowed myself to forget it when I found something real along the way. So now I sat back, took in the steel wool sky and weather-worn silos. I looked down, admired the taut knobs of muscle above each of my kneecaps, dropped a hand and gripped the Fuji’s top tube, like a cowboy stroking his stallion’s neck.
Fuck the stupid Rockies. I didn’t need them. I liked spending all day in the saddle and sleeping in a tent and wearing the same two shirts and having a hideous farmer’s tan and hearing people say “wow” when I told them what I was doing. I liked the stories I was accumulating, liked practicing how I’d tell my friends about escaping the Meth Muppet and braving killer headwinds and turning Cenex stations into breakfast nooks. I liked knowing how I was moving forward. And I liked knowing why: because I wanted to. It was a fleeting thing, having such a pure want, a want powerful enough to release me from my anxiety about where I wasn’t going, and so even if it was stealing my horizon, I was going to enjoy this smoke, because it was mine, because it was real, because—
“I think we should stop soon.” Rachel had crept up beside me. “This smoke is awful.”
I didn’t respond because, well, have you ever tried to speak while climaxing?
“Really,” she said. “What do you think? Stop in Stanford?”
I kept my eyes on the road. “I
guess. I don’t know. That’s not even fifty miles, and I kinda want to cover some ground—just get this over with and make it to the Rockies.”
“We can’t even see the fucking Rockies.”
Uh-oh. F-bomb. In Rachel’s conversational arithmetic, sincerity plus profanity equaled impending violence. Still, I kept at it. “I know. But I bet we’ll be able to once we’re in them.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, can we just ride there and then see how—”
“Brian. I need to stop.”
I looked at her. No trace of violence. She was just being honest. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes saying, I am waving a white flag. I am being vulnerable. I am asking for mercy.
“Fine,” I said.
And so we rode, through smoke and silence, to Stanford. We dropped our bikes in the park, and I pulled off my helmet and put on my fleece and told Rachel I wanted to take a walk.
“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just needed to stop.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s obviously not. What’s going on?”
I took a step back, toward town and away from the swing set where Rachel was now sitting. “I don’t know. I just . . . I want to take a walk.”
Before she could respond, I turned away and headed toward Central Avenue. I paced the downtown strip, all four blocks of it, and tried to focus. But my head was a mess. In the span of two hours, I’d pinballed from smoke-induced despair to oh-wait-the-smoke-is-mine mania to a deepened despair, a despair borne of Rachel’s timely reminder that said smoke, and the decision about how to deal with it, was not mine but ours. And I was getting awfully tired of ours. I didn’t even know what “ours” meant anymore. These miles had changed both of us, had changed everything, had demanded such attention that I’d basically stopped considering our long-imagined horizon, and now, quite literally, couldn’t see it at all.
My pulse surging, I doubled back and power walked side streets to the town library. I slid in front of a computer, began googling jobs and creative writing programs in Portland and Chicago and Madison and Durango, Colorado, a town about which I knew almost nothing, except that an old friend had moved there years back. I even logged in to my e-mail and began writing a note to that friend, but halfway through I stopped and deleted the draft and stood and walked back to the park, where Rachel was still sitting on the swing.
I sat beside her, and she slid her hands up the chains and turned to me and said, “Please tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, can you at least try?”
“Yeah. I’ll try.”
I paused. Collected my thoughts. And then I opened my mouth and began speaking fluent cliché. I-don’t-feel-like-myself and sometimes-I-need-space and it’s-not-about-you and—
“Brian. Please.”
“Sorry.” I looked down at the dirt and took a few pulls of wood smoke. And before I could think better of it, before I could think at all, I admitted that, okay, maybe this was about her, because more and more she seemed to hate what I loved, which was to say the challenge, the uncertainty, the spirit of this thing we’d set out to do together, and honestly that was making it hard for me to connect with her.
I looked up from my feet and found Rachel staring down at hers. I had the sense I was going too far, had gone too far, but now I knew what I wanted to say, and she’d asked for honesty, and so I kept going, told her about joy and freedom, about lingering frustration and empty reserves of sentimentality, and once I’d finished, I looked at Rachel and she looked at me, and she asked if I was saying I wasn’t sure I loved her anymore, and I just gave her the honest answer, the one I’d have given no matter what question she asked.
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 15
Into the Valley
Rachel was leaning forward, elbows on knees. I leaned with her, craned my neck and cocked my head and tried to catch her eyes. But she wouldn’t look at me. She was just staring at the dirt, and her fingers were working at something small and brown, and I swear a single tear was trickling down her cheek.
“Rach,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m . . . I’m not sure I even meant that. Jesus. I’m just feeling confused, and I wanted to be honest.”
She nodded.
“And . . . yeah, I guess I was just trying to say it’s, well, it’s hard. Sometimes. And I’m tired of pretending it’s not.”
Another nod.
I took this as an affirmation. “I feel better having said that. I’m glad I was honest.”
“Well, I’m not.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “How the hell could you say something like that if you weren’t sure you meant it?” She turned toward me. Her eyes were still glazed with tears, but the gaze underneath was smoldering. I’d never before seen this from Rachel, this mix of tenacity and vulnerability. To my total fucking horror, it was turning me on.
I shook my head, tried to focus. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “You don’t know.”
We sat like that, side by side on the swing set, for some time. I sputtered some more apologies and clumsy explanations, and she was pretty graceful about it, all things considered. Just kind of kept to herself. Eventually she got up and took a walk, and I stayed at the swing set, staring at my dirt-smudged hands, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. I felt sick over what I’d said. That single tear had opened up this forgotten cache of tenderness, had yanked me out of my self-absorbed sob story, and now I was having one of those gut-sliming, mouth-desiccating, forehead-slapping epiphanies, was realizing that Rachel wasn’t the problem. I was. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t enjoy being filthy and exhausted, wasn’t her fault she simply couldn’t ride as fast and far as I wanted, wasn’t her fault that I, after a particularly acute attack of Galen envy, had examined my willful failure to compromise and dubbed it “freedom.” And it definitely wasn’t her fault that for well over a year I’d pinned my destiny to her back, or that I’d just had a “well, gosh, that’s a really terrible idea” anxiety attack.
Even so, I’d taken that whole big shit pile and dumped it on her. And now, about eleven minutes too late, I was recognizing that I’d meant my “I don’t know” in reference to everything—that I’d confused remembering myself with forgetting Rachel. And while I was glad I’d finally found these words, I really, really wished I hadn’t said them out loud.
• • •
The next morning, the sky was a vast gray smudge. A weak wind blew from the west, its breath reeking of smoke. Rachel was silent, avoiding eye contact as she packed her things. She didn’t appear angry exactly, just deflated. She’d already been struggling, and I’d made it worse, and now more than ever I wanted to take my words back. But I couldn’t do that. So I cooked some cheap oatmeal, and we ate it, and then we rode out of town.
That day, our thirty-third on the road, we were headed for Great Falls, home to Sherri Bock, a friend of Kelly from Sidney, who had offered to put us up. It wasn’t going to be a long ride—barely sixty miles—but a grocery clerk in Stanford had told us the traffic would be awful. And from the first, it was. West of Stanford, 200 merged with 3 and 87, and traffic multiplied exactly threefold. Long queues clogged both lanes, and riding along the crumbling shoulder felt like a tightrope act. I checked the rearview every minute, making sure I was holding a fair pace. And every time I looked up, Rachel was there, riding hard. I now thought her frown looked not glum but tough. She was so fucking tough. How had I forgotten that?
We stopped for a break in Geyser, a town about which I remember exactly nothing, and got back on the road. This was maybe the nastiest stretch we’d seen yet. The smoke was as thick as the traffic, the elevation profile something like a healthy heart rate, and I relished every bit of it: the acid in my legs and smoke in my lungs, the truck-induced speed bursts and what
ever else allowed me to forget about being an insensitive ass. I began to relax, so much that even when I wasn’t able to forget my words, I was able to feel almost triumphant about them. Because I’d been honest, right? And honesty was good, even if it was clumsy, and even if it had hurt Rachel, and even if it wasn’t exactly honesty but something more like second-degree attempted honesty.
Whatever it was, I’d tried, and I’d learned something: I might be able to have it both ways. My own sense of possibility and our big romantic story. Admittedly, it was not so romantic right now. But it would be again, somehow.
• • •
Sherri Bock’s home was a monument to motherhood, to the people she’d cared for: photos of the kids next to photos of the kids who were now adults, a Montana Teacher of the Year certificate on the fridge, books with titles like How to Survive and Thrive in an Empty Nest stacked on the back of the toilet and the table by the couch. “You guys can stay as long as you like,” she said, within a minute of meeting us. I figured part of this was loneliness and part was how defeated Rachel and I must have looked upon arriving at her doorstep. But it seemed more basic than any of that. You got the feeling this was just how she operated.
That night, after Sherri did our laundry and showed us our room and gave us big, fluffy towels for long, hot showers and insisted on treating us to a meal, we all curled up to watch the news. Sherri was worried. There were fires out there, raging across western Montana, and we, her newly adopted babies, were going to ride straight toward them. Okay, maybe not straight toward them but nearby, and there was so much smoke, and maybe we’d like a ride instead? We declined but gratefully accepted her offer to host us for a second night.
