by Brian Benson
By our second morning at Lake McDonald, my throat was ragged, my lungs were heavy, and I was cranky in that I’m-an-American-male-with-a-head-cold-and-therefore-the-sickest-person-in-the-history-of-the-world kind of way. But we had to get moving. We’d made plans to spend that night with an old Wisconsin friend who now lived in Whitefish. Charlie and his wife, Micaela, had offered to host us, even though they had a newborn child, and even though I’d given them like two days’ notice. I didn’t want to flake out and abuse their grace.
So we rode. Slowly. We stopped three times in the first eight miles. First to gaze across the lake from a slightly different vantage point, then to steal toilet paper from a park bathroom, and finally at the same “Welcome to Glacier National Park” sign we’d seen at the east entrance a week earlier. I wished I felt like I had before Logan Pass: renewed and triumphant. Wished I could say, “Thank you, Glacier National Park, for changing everything.” But this didn’t feel like a new beginning. It felt like starting over.
• • •
Whitefish was a railroad-turned-logging-turned-tourist town, and while it retained some old-time flavor—a wide central boulevard, a few saloons, some sagging sidewalk overhangs and handsome brick buildings—it also had a ton of kitschy shops and faux-frontier eateries and was sprawling ever outward, the rustic inns and not-so-rustic box stores and timber-framed mansions encroaching upon the forest and, especially, Whitefish Lake, the five-mile, mountain-crowned beauty whose shoreline was the city’s “desirable neighborhood.” Ground zero in a rapid rural gentrification.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that Charlie—who back in high school was the life of the party, the guy who knew every bartender and back road—had all the dirt on the lakeside goings-on. After years of pounding nails for his uncle, a contractor who built megahomes for the über-rich, Charlie had swindled his way into some cush caretaking gigs. Our second day in town, he drove us by the most ostentatious mansions, told us the juicy backstories about this celebrity or that billionaire, showed us around one of the homes he looked after. The place had an elevator. And like ten bedrooms. And zero inhabitants for much of the year. We pulled drinks from the stainless steel fridge and repaired to the basement, where we sat in a plush theater and watched the opening scenes of Die Hard.
As he locked up, Charlie laughed and asked, “Isn’t this absurd?”
The question didn’t quite sound rhetorical.
Later, as we lay in bed, Rachel said she couldn’t tell if he’d been proud or ashamed of the homes. I said, “I don’t know,” which was a lie. Having grown up revering lake country while benefitting from its gentrification, I knew perfectly well that the answer was “both.”
Besides that insider’s tour of the lake, I didn’t get to see a whole lot of Whitefish. Mainly what I saw was the ceiling of Charlie and Micaela’s guest bedroom. My cold had taken a turn for the worse and, as I put it in my journal, reduced me to a “low-energy, sneezy, snotty, feverish, diarrhea-afflicted, bed-ridden” blob. I felt like an awful guest, but Charlie told me over and over again that I should rest, that he and Micaela were happy to host, that we could stay as long as we liked.
And so while I festered in bed, Rachel hung out with Charlie and Micaela and Baby, whose name and appearance and (let’s just be honest here) gender I cannot recall. Rachel instantly clicked with them, and I woke from many a fever dream to hear her belly laugh in the living room. She had always been great with kids, and loved Baby, and whenever Baby was awake, she was right there, cooing and holding and giggling.
Our second day in town, I came into the kitchen to find her helping Micaela change a diaper, and my life flashed forward in a mental montage. I saw a home and a wedding, Rachel in a hospital gown, and me behind a stroller. I shuddered. Too much future too fast. But then I hit rewind and brought the tape back to the part where it was me and Rachel, in our own place, sipping coffee and reading the paper. I played that scene over and over, and thought about the dream we’d deferred. The dream of staying.
• • •
By our fourth night, I was at last feeling better, and so Charlie and I—Rachel and Micaela and Baby declined to join us—headed to a bar with the stated goal of shooting pool and getting drunk. After a few games, we racked the cues and holed up at a table, where we stayed for hours, talking about Wisconsin and the West and Sammy and how much we missed him. I told Charlie about encountering Sam at Meyers Beach and Gunsight Lake, and he seemed to get it when I said it had felt like finding key clues in some kind of existential scavenger hunt.
“Man,” he said. “I bet your trip has been full of stuff like that.”
“Yeah.” I stared dreamily into my pint glass. “It really has.”
“What’s been your favorite part?” he asked.
I took a gulp of beer. Time for my big speech.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I just love how it feels out there, you know? Even on the ugliest of days, there are these moments where I sort of pull back and see us from above. We’re riding an empty road, and there’s a brutal headwind, and the sky is smoky, and there’s a totally fucking mangled raccoon on the shoulder, and I remind myself that even if this looks—and actually, okay, is—pretty miserable, Rachel and I are the only people in the world who know where we are and what we’re doing. And knowing that, for whatever reason, just makes me really happy.”
I paused, then said, “I’m probably not making any sense at all.”
This was where Charlie was supposed to politely say, “No, I think I might get it.” For extra credit, he could even follow up with, “It sounds like the experience of a lifetime.”
But instead he was nodding furiously and saying, “No, I totally understand. Micaela and I feel the same way. We’ve got our house and our family. We change shitty diapers and go to bed really early, and when I try to talk about it to my friends, it’s weird, because pretty much none of them are in the same place. I bet they all think I’ve gotten old and boring. But I’m happy. I love where I am. I’m just leading a very different life from everyone I know.”
“Huh.” I massaged my increasingly massageable beard.
“What?” Charlie asked.
“Oh. Uh. I guess that’s a good point. I can’t think of any friends who have kids.”
This, of course, wasn’t what I was really thinking. What I was thinking was: Hey, that’s my line. I am the one who’s different.
We had a beer and headed home, and after brushing my teeth, I lingered in the bathroom. I stared at my reflection, at the windburned face and unruly beard and shaggy mop of hair, then executed a slo-mo pirouette, took in the big fluffy towels and the artfully decorated walls and the half-dozen magazines stacked on the back of the toilet. And just as I was on the cusp of thinking a deep thought, I hiccuped and decided it was maybe time to go to bed.
• • •
Like any self-respecting son of rural Wisconsin, Charlie had traveled every back road within a forty-mile radius of his home. So when Rachel and I, after four days in Whitefish, loaded up and said we were just planning to take Highway 93 south to Kalispell, he shook his head and said, “Nope, no way, not on my watch.” He gave us handwritten directions that involved a half-dozen turns and roads with names like Lodgepole and Farm to Market, and though his route ended up being five miles longer, I’m sure it was at least fifty times better.
Aside from the purple-mountain backdrop, the ride reminded me of home: towering evergreen giving way to sprawling pastureland, air smelling of Pine Sol and manure, decorative mailboxes and gravel driveways, sparse traffic and hands waving from car windows. The wind was weak, the terrain flat, and even the resurgent smoke felt forgiving. It was a hushed and gentle world, and I was happy to be riding through it once again. Then we hit Kalispell. We’d decided to take a route that bypassed downtown, and so the Kalispell we encountered was just a mess of stoplights and car lots, gas stations and golden arches. It looked like ever
ywhere and nowhere. Halfway through town, we turned west on Highway 2, and just like that a brutal wind was lashing my chest. I pushed into the current, now on the shoulder of a four-lane highway clogged with RVs and 18-wheelers, and Rachel hugged my tire, her head bobbing with every pedal stroke, her eyes saying exactly what I was thinking: I did not miss this one bit.
For five, ten, fifteen miles, everything that was bad got worse. The smoke smokier, the wind windier, the trucks truckier. Soon Highway 2 was crawling with logging rigs, its shoulder littered with bark strips. Also, I was exhausted. After the long break, my legs had gone all saucy. My taint had lost its toughness. I was feeling miserable, and in the rearview I could see that Rachel was equally miserable, not to mention falling a bit behind. I slowed my pace. Before long I was fuming about how unfair it was that she was making me endure extra minutes of otherwise avoidable misery, but then we stopped at a gas station and I ate chocolate and realized I was, for the thousandth time, being a hangry martyr.
We got back on the road, refreshed. But within the hour, I was again tanking and pouting, and so when Rachel suggested we stop and camp on the shores of McGregor Lake, even though we’d only ridden fifty miles, and even though the campsite cost a whopping ten bucks, I agreed. We swam in the lake and sat on the dock and cooked macaroni and cheese and had a beer, and by the time we lay down in the tent, I was back to happy and I think Rachel was too.
• • •
On day forty-nine, we woke at dawn to clear skies and sun-kissed water. For the first few miles, we traced the shoreline of McGregor Lake. Traffic was sparse, and the lush Salish Mountains humped up around us like giant Chia Pets, and at the lake’s west end was a store where we stocked up on fruit and pretzels and sugar water and trail mix with yogurt-covered raisins.
As we packed the panniers, Rachel said, “If every day started like this . . .”
She didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. Whatever she’d been thinking, I agreed.
Ten miles in, we crossed from Flathead County to Lincoln. The latter must have had a healthy tax base, because right at the border the pavement turned from bumpy and potholed to perfect. In a car you might not notice the difference, but on a bike there are few things more satisfying than leaving cheese-grater chip seal for baby’s bottom blacktop. We stopped at the border, and I tried to take a picture of the change in the asphalt’s surface. But it didn’t show up right; just looked like asphalt and then some more asphalt. I put the camera away. This was yet another thing that couldn’t be explained with a picture, if it could be explained at all.
And that day the smooth pavement didn’t end up making much of a difference. For forty miles, all the way to Libby, Highway 2 was relentlessly hilly. I loved every minute. This was the landscape I’d long dreamed of, the one I envisioned every time I stared at our Montana map. On paper and in person, it was green space: Furry mountains overhead, freshwater all around. Breath-stealing climbs and plunges. Big sky and big horizon, little me and little Rachel. As I took in the cedar and spruce, the rivulets of water drip-dropping from roadside clumps of loamy mocha soil, I thought, this is the West. And my heart quickened. Because we were close. Close to being done and needing to know what “done” looked like. I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed the thought away. For now, I just wanted to be where I was.
West of Libby, the highway cozied up to the Kootenai River. It was a mesmerizing thing to behold—silty water tumbling over rock, surging through canyons, pushing twenty-foot logs over waterfalls—so we stopped at a trailhead and walked to the river’s edge. While Rachel wrote in her journal, I looked back and forth between the Kootenai and the train tracks alongside it. When I’d visited Portland, almost a year earlier, I’d ridden the Empire Builder along this very route. The train had passed through this stretch in the night, and I’d sat in my seat, resting my head on the glass, unable to sleep, peering into the black and wondering what was out there. Now I knew.
• • •
A few miles up the road, we hit the intersection of Highway 2 and Route 56. For weeks, I’d been hoping we might take the northern fork here, ride 2 all the way to Bonners Ferry and cross into Canada. But we no longer had time. We were on a schedule. Back in Whitefish, we’d called Galen and finally made plans to meet. In four days, we were to be in Moscow, Idaho, some 252 miles to the southwest. Even without a northerly dogleg, we’d need to push it to arrive on time.
Near the intersection was a rest area with bathrooms and a pavilion split into four partitions, each with its own picnic table. Rachel wanted to camp there, because the light was dusky, and it had been such a nice day, and why take chances? I wanted to press on, because the light was dusky, and it had been such a nice day, so let’s take chances. Somehow my logic won.
We made it about a mile, just far enough to see that the ride down 56 was going to be breathtaking, when I got a flat tire. After almost nineteen hundred miles, this was the trip’s first flat. Pretty remarkable, really. As I removed my bags and fished for the patch kit, Rachel and I talked about how lucky we’d been. No flats, no crashes, and except for a few stray drops, no rain. Sure, I’d blown a bunch of spokes in Wisconsin, and North Dakota had been windy, and in Montana we’d maybe almost gotten murdered, but really, overall, the world had been kind to us.
I fixed the flat quickly, but by the time I’d reloaded my bags the light had all but faded from the sky. Rachel suggested we maybe do the sensible thing and just head back to the freaking rest area already, and I agreed. We chose a table, cooked some pasta, lit up a candle, and pulled out our journals. Perhaps because I was thinking more about the end of the road, or because I’d just fixed that flat and was feeling a little flush, I wrote:
I’ve been thinking lately (i.e. today) that I might want to get a job at a bike shop in Portland. Yeah, it would probably be low-paying and a poor use of my university degree, but it’s something I really enjoy doing.
Which, to this day, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever written in a journal.
When the candle burned out, we threw our pads and bags on the concrete and lay down. This wasn’t legal, nor was it comfortable, and throughout the night I was startled from sleep by alarmingly close sprinklers and the patter of foot traffic. But we didn’t get arrested or accosted or soaked, and when the sun came up, we rose with it and headed into the valley.
• • •
Route 56 was a stunner. Its perfect pavement wound slow and easy, nuzzling up alongside a smattering of still-as-glass lakes and the Bull River Valley’s eponymous river, a burbling beauty that meandered through grasses of every imaginable green. In the river were men wearing oily brown waders and waving fly rods, and over the river were weather-worn bridges bound for weather-worn barns, and to either side were mountains—the Cabinets and Coeur d’Alenes—whose faces, when I took them in slowly, bottom to top, blurred from a peppering of pine to a sweet green fuzz to a purple-tinted smear that made me feel warm and hopeful in a way I still can’t explain.
Fifteen miles in, we stopped for a snack on the shores of Bull Lake, and I decided to call my friend Vijay. Big mistake. Because after I shared some choice anecdotes, and tried with little success to describe where Rachel and I were, and tried with even less success to convey what it really felt like on the road, I asked how he was doing. And then I listened as Vij, with maddening precision, told me about his challenging, rewarding job and his weekly guitar lessons at a neighborhood school and his recent shit-show night of drinking with our mutual friend Carl and all the new hip-hop he was listening to and how he was overall feeling really happy in Chicago.
I hung up, stared at distant purple, and daydreamed. About a planner. An iPod. A café where the baristas knew my name, and some new pants, and a rewarding job, or really any old . . .
I snorted. Here I was, sitting in the Garden of Eden, and somehow I was feeling not content but jealous—torn between where I was and where I hoped to be.
I stood and
forced myself to focus on the lake and the mountains, the bike and the Rachel. She was standing on a rock and munching on a carrot and staring at me with this cocked, curious expression that seemed to say, Whatever you’re thinking about, it isn’t worth ignoring this. Or maybe she was just looking at me and I was doing the rest, because when she did open her mouth, she just said, “Ready?”
South of Bull Lake, the mountains crept closer and rose higher, and the greens got greener, and there was no wind, no traffic, no reason to do anything but ride side by side and spew rapturous goo like “This is so beautiful,” and “It’s like we’re in a painting,” and, well, I guess I don’t really remember. What I do remember is breathing deep and looking left to right to left, trying to consume it all at once. I remember feeling the particular sadness that anticipates joy’s disappearance, remember seeing Rachel in sharp focus against the blurred blues and greens, and thinking: This is it. This is what I wanted. This is where I hoped to be.
• • •
By the time 56 dead-ended at Highway 200—yes, that Highway 200—we’d ridden thirty-six miles on two bowls of oatmeal and a dozen baby carrots. A gnawing hunger was beginning to threaten my precarious euphoria. I’d figured we wouldn’t find food until Clark Fork, Idaho, some twenty miles to the west, but now we were pulling up to 200, and right at the intersection was an Amish bakery. I turned to Rachel and said, with some conviction, “This is the best day of my life.”
We bought soup and sandwiches and cookies and lemonade and took our meals to the shaded porch. For purely sentimental reasons, I pulled out the Montana map and looked over our route. I’d been tracing it, day by day, and the inked line now looked not unlike a Rocky Mountain skyline. Rachel pressed her thumb to the westernmost stretch of 200, which we’d be riding to the Idaho border.
“Just one more finger,” she said. “Good-bye, Montana.”
Behind us, someone asked, “Did you do all that on bikes?” I turned to find a guy eyeing our map. He had striking features—barrel chest, strong jaw, icy blue eyes—that all but ensured he was a news anchor, lawyer, or doctor.
