Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson

  • • •

  I woke to voices and crawled out of the tent to find people scrubbing dishes at the water pump and walking by with loaded packs. Up above, beyond the evergreen canopy, it was big sky. Blue and smokeless and beckoning.

  I shook Rachel awake.

  “What time is it?” she asked, yawning.

  “Late,” I said.

  I had no idea what time it was. Didn’t matter. Whether it was half past dawn or pushing noon, we needed to get outside. Because we were in Glacier. Because the smoke had cleared. And because Wisconsin’s eight-month winters had conditioned me to regard sunshine with a sort of manic reverence. I’d have rather been caught masturbating than sitting inside on such a bluebird day.

  Within the hour, we were on a bus, heading up Going-to-the-Sun Road, the fifty-mile miracle of engineering that snakes through the heart of the park. The views were stupefying. All around us were giant, ragged anvils streaked with the blackest of shadow and the whitest of ice, every one bowing toward the massive Saint Mary Lake, her heart a heretical blue, her shallows an upside-down still-life of shoreline evergreen and snow-dusted daggers. You could see why this place was called the Crown of the Continent.

  The road itself was equally stunning. Also terrifying. More often than not, its narrow lanes were trapped between, to the north, a wall of dynamite-blasted rock, and to the south, just inches past the shoulder, a stomach-twisting drop-off. There were too few guardrails and too many blind corners, and the grade was steep enough that, when I faced forward, I felt gravity’s pull less in the soles of my feet than in the small of my back.

  I couldn’t wait to ride it.

  The bus had these floor-to-ceiling windows, and our fellow passengers were plastered to the glass, gawking at the views, which, okay, were definitely gawkworthy. Still, I couldn’t help but pity these tourists. They couldn’t see Glacier. Not like Rachel and I could. We had put in the work, had spent weeks searching for beauty in the beigest of beige-scale borescapes, and we could now see colors and textures that defied the imagination of your average American car camper.

  I leaned into Rachel and whispered, “I can’t imagine just driving here.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got a pretty pathetic imagination.”

  We got off at the park’s best-named trailhead, Gunsight Pass, and followed the path into the woods. Hiking felt weird. For the past month, we’d walked very little. We’d taken some strolls in the towns we visited, done some pacing around grocery stores, but mainly we’d been in the saddle. My legs now felt heavy in this peculiar way, as if I’d just returned to flat ground after an hour on a trampoline.

  The trail descended into a river basin, then climbed to a broad plateau surrounded by mountains, all of them ice freckled and skirted in evergreen shag. Now I was the one gawking—slack-jawed and dizzy and mumbling in the general direction of Rachel. I’d gotten it wrong on the bus. My search for subtlety hadn’t prepared me for anything. It had simply reduced my tolerance for grandeur. I felt like I’d spent three weeks nursing a snifter of scotch, only to wake in Glacier and slam an entire bottle.

  I dropped my eyes from the mountains and saw that Rachel had stepped into a postcard. She was walking through high grass the color of a legal pad, about to enter a tunnel formed by the tangled fingers of a few scrubby pines, and in the distance snow-dusted mountains towered over an alpine lake. I pulled out my camera and framed a shot. Against the pine and powder blue and distant saw teeth, Rachel looked tiny. Engulfed.

  Still holding up the camera, I began to think of a different photo, a photo I’d seen a million times, a photo very similar to the one I was framing. And . . . well . . . click.

  • • •

  Four years before his death, Sam Larsen went backpacking in Glacier with our mutual friend Josh. The two of them had the best time anyone has ever had doing anything anywhere. For weeks, they spoke of nothing else. They regaled our group of friends with stories of goat stampedes and sixty-foot cliff dives, force-fed us stacks of photos, used words like “epic” and “spiritual,” finished each other’s sentences and shared the kind of swoony gazes usually reserved for a couple newly pregnant with its first child.

  I hated their stupid stories about their stupid trip, by which I mean I loved the stories and hated Sam and Josh for having lived them. Without me. Months earlier Sam had locked me out of his life. My offenses, as I understood them, included (a) serial one-upmanship, (b) flagrant sniffling about my first big breakup (because at least I’d had a girlfriend), (c) making out with a girl on whom Sam had a crush, and (d) being, on the whole, a self-absorbed jackass. I was eighteen years old. Years later, I would discover my own reasons for keeping him at a distance, would parse the ways in which he’d been right and wrong about my self-absorption. But that summer, I just felt like I’d been dumped. And I saw his trip with Josh as a targeted snub (see “self-absorbed”).

  The photo I hated most was a wide-angle shot of Sam crouched beside a goldenrod-yellow tent, his head raised toward a set of glacier-stamped saw teeth that rimmed the glassy lake on whose shores he and Josh had set up camp. The shot seemed to capture not only the visual majesty of Glacier but also the euphoria—profound and private—of my estranged friend. The first time I saw the photo, in Sam’s company, I blinked away tears. The second and third and forty-first times, when it was framed and proudly displayed in Josh’s apartment, I told myself I’d call Sam later that night. The forty-second time, Sam Larsen was gone.

  Ever since, when I’d pictured Sam it was in Glacier, in that photo, his image reflected in glacial runoff, his mind full of big thoughts. Thoughts that transcended the grotesquely small bullshit that had pushed us apart. Thoughts that sprung from the firm and fertile ground where I’d hoped we might reconnect.

  I was now standing on that ground.

  I lowered the camera. Jogged to catch up with Rachel. “What day is it?” I asked.

  “Tuesday,” she said.

  “No, what’s the date?”

  “Um. I don’t know.”

  “Can you check the phone?”

  “Let’s see . . . It is the twentieth day of the eighth month of this, the year of the zebra.” She held out an upturned hand. “That’ll be three dollars, please.”

  I stared through her. “Wow.”

  “Okay. Two dollars.”

  I shook my head. “Sam died three years ago. Well, three years and a day, I guess.”

  “Oh.”

  “And he was here. I mean, right here.”

  “Didn’t he . . . Didn’t it happen in Lake Superior?”

  “Well, yeah. But he was here a few years before, and Josh took this picture, and . . .” I looked off to the right, as I always do before saying something incoherent.

  “And?”

  What I wanted to say was this: And now I’m here, on this of all days, in this place Sam loved in a way I couldn’t understand, and now I might kind of understand, and I wish I could talk to him, and maybe by being here I am talking to him, and—well shit, Rachel—I wouldn’t even be here if not for you, you brought me here, and I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I feel like I’m watching a movie of myself and this is something like an ending.

  But those words weren’t available. Not in that order. In any order. So I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I’m just happy we found this place.”

  I pocketed the camera and kept walking toward the lake.

  • • •

  We spent a full week in Glacier. For the first four days, we didn’t even touch the bikes. Rachel may have even succeeded in not looking at them.

  Mainly what we did was walk. And talk. See, Glacier was teeming with signs and pamphlets and ruddy-cheeked rangers warning us to BE ALERT and MAKE NOISE because DON’T SURPRISE BEARS, and though we felt bad about verbally polluting a landscape that all but demanded silent reverence, we
felt even worse about the prospect of getting mauled by a surprised bear. So we made noise. We conversed, unlike most of our fellow hikers, who seemed to believe the only way to MAKE NOISE was, at ten-second intervals, to holler, “Hello, bears!” or “Yoo-hoo, bears! Here we are!” Which, I mean, yuck. Like everyone else, Rachel and I had a keen interest in avoiding violent death, but as seasoned veterans of the unstructured outdoors, we knew better than to be so fucking gaudy about it.

  We decided, during that first hike to Gunsight Pass, that we’d MAKE NOISE by asking each other “big questions.” This seemed easy enough, but then I tried to think of a single such question and blanked. I kind of felt like I knew all there was to know about Rachel.

  And yet. BEARS.

  I started simple, asked what she missed most about living in Xela. She answered (speaking Spanish, buying thirty-cent avocados, getting her ass kicked at soccer by Raúl, a seven-year-old boy who lived at the shelter where she volunteered) and then turned the question back on me (also the Spanish, piping-hot street-corner arroz con leche, and watching Soltura’s sax player, Fernando, cheese it up while playing the melody to “My Way”). From there, the conversation started flowing. We talked about a two-week silent meditation retreat Rachel had been on years back. This had been mentioned but never described. Same for my clumsy college activism, and both of our vague daydreams about life in Portland, and even some of the whens and whys of our on-the-road frustrations.

  These conversations followed us from the woods to the bus to the campsite, then back to the woods the next day, and the next, and I’d like to think we walked right past several grizzlies, all of whom were like, “Damn, that is one attractive and emotionally healthy couple, and even if they did startle me, they didn’t insult my intelligence, and by golly I wish them well.”

  • • •

  When we weren’t hiking, we were drinking microbrew on the shore of Saint Mary Lake, or taking irresponsibly long showers, or having responsibly quiet afternoon sex, or eating breakfast pie at a little café just outside the park, all the while getting pampered by complete strangers. One morning a camp neighbor, with whom we’d spoken for like two minutes, handed us a twenty-dollar bill he’d found by his tent and told us to treat ourselves to a meal because “I think what you’re doing is really cool.” Another guy we met, who had the double virtue of being a fellow Wisconsinite and a fellow Brian, offered to drive us to the bus-inaccessible Ptarmigan Trail, and the hike ended up being our favorite of the week.

  Everything felt easy. I wasn’t thinking about where I was or wasn’t headed, what I did or didn’t deserve. I was just enjoying myself, my memories of Sam, the beauty of the park, the generosity of strangers, and, especially, I was enjoying Rachel. My frustrations seemed so distant. I’d just needed to step back and see her outside the rearview. I was seriously considering tossing that thing in the trash. It never showed me the Rachel I wanted to see: the woman who could land somewhere and instantly know how she wanted to spend her day, who had the most infectious laugh I’d ever heard, who knew who she was and wanted to be, who had such a voice that sometimes I got hard just listening to her speak.

  In Glacier I’d been seeing a lot of that Rachel. I was now confident our on-the-road tensions hadn’t been a harbinger of relationship doom. Quite the opposite. The miles had been a test, and we’d passed. We had figured out how to make tons of tiny decisions together and how to be painfully honest with each other, and now being in one place together was easy. It seemed like from here on out, everything would feel easy. Life in Portland, for example. Easy.

  I must have on some level known the week in Glacier was not “being in one place together.” It was a fucking vacation. But at the moment, I wasn’t interested in that distinction. I was perfectly happy to take our vacation and call it an arrival.

  • • •

  I rested my elbows on the handlebars and considered the western horizon. I was ready for it. We’d taken a full day in camp to relax, so I had fresh legs and laundered clothes and was stir-crazy enough to do this—to climb up and over the Rockies.

  “Ready to go?” I asked Rachel.

  “Nope.” She turned from Logan Pass and nodded toward town. “Why don’t we go that way? There’s pie that way.”

  “I do like pie.”

  “I’ll buy you two pieces every day for the rest of your life if we just stay here.”

  All morning, as we’d pulled the bikes from their hiding places and repacked the bags and discussed our post-Glacier plans, Rachel had been saying stuff like this. I assumed she was kidding. How could she not be looking forward to riding through the park? It was gonna be amazing.

  We set off. The initial miles were fairly flat, a warm-up for the climb, and I moved along easily, closing my eyes, drawing in mountain air, anticipating the scenery ahead and thinking, I am so lucky, so lucky, so lucky. I was about to tell Rachel that my legs felt surprisingly strong when—

  “I already want this to be over.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the climb or the entire trip. I didn’t ask.

  “I’m gonna go slow today,” she continued. “And stop a lot.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “It’d be a shame to rush this. Kind of nice that we have to go slow, actually. We’ll enjoy the views more.”

  “You sound like Calvin’s dad.”

  “This will build character, Calvin.”

  “Keep it up, and me and Hobbes will let the air out of your tires.”

  This was about as jovial as it would get all day.

  At about the ten-mile mark, the road started climbing, and we pulled above the trees and got our first big views, and though we’d seen the sights from many a bus seat, and many a backcountry trail, on the bikes everything felt more immediate, more accessible, more . . . Well, just more. It pains me to admit this, but I had that old Skittles slogan in my head. I was looking up at the mountains, feasting upon greens and blues and purples and feeling like I’d finally learned what it meant to “Taste the Rainbow.”

  “This,” I said, “is amazing.”

  Rachel didn’t reply. I thought I saw her roll her eyes. I wasn’t sure if she was disagreeing with the overall sentiment or simply my choice of words. Again, I didn’t ask.

  The actual climb was only six miles. But we were averaging 3.7 mph, and so it took us the better part of two hours. By the time we hit the 6,646-foot summit and pulled into the Logan Pass Visitor Center, I was giddy. We’d climbed the Rockies, and it had felt almost easy, and I was all oh-wow-look-at-those- mountains, and whoa-it’s-a-bighorn-sheep, and hoo-boy-I-am- going-to-get-closer-and-then-I-am-going-to-frolic-in-that- meadow-do-you-want-to-frolic-with-me? Rachel did not want to frolic. Rachel wanted to knit. Here we were, seconds removed from riding one of the prettiest roads anywhere, perched atop a pass in the Crown of the Continent, and it was a cloudless day, and there was a sheep within shouting distance, and she was knitting.

  “You’re really going to knit right now?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, as if I were thinking, well, sure, that’s a reasonable thing to do, when I was in fact thinking, there is something deeply wrong with you. And then I went to the meadow, which, honestly? Not that exciting. A lot of sandal-wearing, photo-snapping tourists who had driven or taken the bus. They couldn’t understand what it meant to be here.

  I found a somewhat solitary spot, sat down, and tried hard to make this a moment. I’d hopped on my bicycle, come all the way from Wisconsin, and now I was here, atop the Rockies, my head spinning from these stunning panoramic . . .

  It wasn’t working. This wasn’t a moment for me alone.

  I walked back over to Rachel. She’d probably just needed a bit of space. By now she had to be ready to momentify with me. But her head was still tucked to her chest, her fingers working at the yarn. She was muttering something.

  “Hey
,” I said. “Want to take a walk?”

  Rachel didn’t look up. “This fucking yarn is all tangled.”

  “Oh. So, do you want to take a break? The views over there are pretty incredible.”

  She glanced up, then looked back at the yarn. “I’m getting this untangled.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, hey, when you finish, I’ll be over there. In Glacier National Park.”

  A half hour later, I’d come back, and we’d talk. Rachel would say she’d been dismayed by how hard it had been to get back on the bike, that she hadn’t wanted to ruin my good time—though she resented me for it—and that she’d buried herself in the yarn in a failed attempt to center herself. And I’d say that, yes, I’d noticed all that but was too wrapped up in myself to be sensitive and empathetic. We’d both offer apologies, and they would be good, honest apologies, and soon we’d be back on the bikes, smiling and laughing together, and though I’d like to chalk this up to the apologies, it probably had more to do with the fact we were now going downhill.

  CHAPTER 17

  Where I Was and Where I Hoped to Be

  The descent from Logan Pass was a blur of tight corners and dive-bombed straightaways, arthritic brake pumping and metaphor-defying scenery, and it left me so giddy and breathless that it wasn’t until evening, after Rachel and I had settled into our campsite on the shores of Lake McDonald, that I felt the tickle in my throat. The soupy weight in my chest. By dark, my tongue was coated in a tacky film that tasted of ammonia.

  This was not part of the plan. The plan had been that Rachel and I would spend two days on Glacier’s west side, hiking and swimming and being in love, before waking on a bright blue morning and riding from the park side by side whilst saying, “That was perfect” and “Now I’m ready for anything.” Instead, I lay in the tent, pouting. Life was so unfair.