Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson

  “Sure did,” Rachel said.

  “Where’d you start?”

  “Northern Wisconsin.”

  “Wow.”

  He turned to the woman beside him, and she gave us this intensely warm smile that seemed to exercise her entire body. A real-life Care Bear stare. The two of them just sat there, grinning and nodding. Then they asked more questions, and Rachel offered up our boilerplate monologue. The pair listened attentively, looking somehow proud, as if we were their children.

  “Sounds like some trip,” the man said. He extended a hand. “Robert Yost. This is my wife, Cindy. We’re camping down on the Clark Fork with the family, but we live across the border, in Coeur d’Alene. Have you been?”

  We had not.

  “Well,” Cindy said. “You’ll pass through Coeur d’Alene on your way to Moscow.” She glanced at Robert for a microsecond, then said, “We’d love it if you stayed in our home.”

  “We might not be back by the time you get there,” Robert said, not missing a beat. “But there’s a spare key around back. Do you have any paper? I can write down the info for you.”

  He scribbled an address and a phone number and a map to the spare key, and he and Cindy stood and said it sure was nice to meet us and to make ourselves at home even if they weren’t home. The whole interaction lasted maybe four minutes. And then they said good-bye and left Rachel and me on the porch.

  “I feel like we should be creeped out,” Rachel said.

  “But we’re not,” I said. “Right?”

  She looked over at the Yosts, who were now herding some children into a mint green minivan. “No, I guess not. I think they’re just that nice.”

  Robert waved at us, and I waved back, watched him drive away. “I keep wondering,” I said, “what exactly we’re doing to deserve this.”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it is, I say we keep doing it.” She piled up our soiled napkins and plates. “Well. Shall we?”

  I was still watching the van as it headed east, toward the Cabinet skyline. “Can we stay a bit longer?” I asked. “I need to space out for a few minutes.”

  By which I meant: I need to remember Montana. We’d been in the state so long, and I felt I owed it a final wistful gaze. Unsure of what else to do, I opened my journal and compiled stats. Over twenty-three days—ten at rest, thirteen on the road—we’d ridden 763 miles; spent sixty-two hours in the saddle, moving at an average speed of 12.3 mph; slept at five campsites, four homes, one hotel; survived one near breakup, one googly sketchball, and an unknown number of speeding semis and unseen grizzlies. And all of this meant . . . maybe nothing. I shut the journal.

  As we rode west, I replayed memories, still casting about for a Montanan moral, a neatly packaged story I could tell for years to come. But I only saw a messy collage of moments. And all I could think was that this was something like saying good-bye to an old friend. The kind you’ve known through sunshine and shit. The kind you know you’ll see again.

  CHAPTER 18

  The View

  Border crossings hadn’t exactly been a trip highlight. We’d entered Minnesota on a traffic-clogged bridge that ferried us from the industrial squalor of Superior to the industrial squalor of West Duluth. North Dakota had welcomed us from one dreary city (Moorhead) to its twin (Fargo) via a rotted wooden sign peeking from behind underpruned oak. And at least those two borders had the decency to grant us the symbolic act of crossing a river. Where North Dakota met Montana, there had been nothing more than an invisible line in the quite literal sand and, to either side, sagebrush and oppressive heat and rolling hills and the sense that whichever direction you went, you’d end up in the same place.

  But Montana to Idaho? I swoon just thinking about it.

  As soon as we left the bakery, we began climbing, up from the Clark Fork River and into a tangle of evergreen. Then we climbed more. And more. The highway kept switching skyward, feigning summits but surrendering nothing of the sort, and just as my sugar buzz was mutating into cookie coma, just as I was questioning whether we’d ever reach the top—whether we’d ever escape Montana—I rounded a bend to find the highway disappearing into shadowed bramble. In a falsetto whoop, that singular language of descent, I called out to Rachel, and then I pedaled hard, tucked low, and plunged downward, whipping around blind corners and past signs with graphics of runaway box trucks, going thirty, now thirty-five, now forty miles per hour. The air was reddening my cheeks, drawing tears from my eyes, tickling my tongue’s sweet spot, and as I hit what felt like peak euphoria, I came around a long sweeping turn and saw, beneath a stand of pine, the sign. White serifs on a blue rectangle: “Welcome to Idaho.”

  We coasted back down to the river and stopped at a boat landing, where a guy with tree-trunk legs and Burt Reynolds chest hair was leading a gaggle of raft-and-paddle-toting college kids down to the shore. We parked the bikes near their piled gear, and as we dug for our towels, two guys came back for a stack of life jackets. Though they were clad only in board shorts, and were walking in silence, something about their gait just screamed frat boy.

  The shorter, scruffier one looked at Rachel and asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Portland,” she said.

  I glared at her. We hadn’t specifically talked about Portland that day, which, according to my logic, meant it no longer existed. I took a breath, blinked, reminded myself that we’d chosen Portland like a month ago, and that a couple of days earlier, in Whitefish, I’d had vivid daydreams about life there. I produced a smile and nodded.

  “Whoa!” said the taller, Waspier guy. “Did you just start?”

  “No,” Rachel replied, still digging in her pannier. “We’re coming from Wisconsin.”

  “No way.” They exchanged this adorably doofy look and turned back to Rachel. “That’s like a thousand miles, right?”

  “I think,” Rachel said, “it’s more like two thousand.” She smiled at the pair, and as I watched them watching her, I saw Rachel through their eyes: ultraconfident, beautiful, self-possessed, and strong enough to have biked two thousand miles with a guy who was taller and more muscular and quite possibly mute.

  I snapped out of it and said, “It’ll be about twenty-five hundred by the time we’re done.”

  “Whoa!” they said in unison. And then Burt Reynolds called them down to the shore, and they wished us good luck and trotted back to their group.

  We dropped our camp towels on some riverside rocks and waded in. The current was surprisingly fierce, the water painfully cold, so we both forced baptismal dunks and returned to the rocks to warm ourselves in the afternoon sun. Now Rachel started flexing her legs, directing my attention to the knots above her knees, the swell of her calves. She rolled on her side and said, “And take a gander at these taut buttocks.” I grabbed said buttocks, and though I intended it to be playful, her wet skin felt good. One of those intent-versus-effect things. I traced a finger over her hip, across her stomach, but she grabbed my hand and set it beside her, pulled away my newly tent-poled shorts, and gave me this look that said, “I’m in charge here, pal.”

  And so then that happened.

  I opened my eyes just as a two-passenger rowboat came floating around an upstream bend. Rachel noticed it at the same time and started laughing. I kind of crossed my arms over my stomach, and she pretended to search for something she’d dropped. The boat floated by, and its passengers kept their eyes on their reels and their beers, looking up only briefly to give us the tight-lipped nods that men employ to say nothing and everything. I nodded back and turned to Rachel, who had picked up her journal. I followed suit, and we sat there, side by side on the riverbank, writing about glorious Idaho, and this all felt absurdly normal.

  • • •

  Viewed via prop plane or Google Maps, Lake Pend Oreille—from pendant d’oreille, French for “ear pendant,” a supposed reference to shell earrings worn by the
Kalispel Indians, who, despite having fished Pend Oreille for millennia, get only passing, white-guilty treatment in this and every other mention of the lake—does, to the extent a lake can, resemble an ear. It was formed after the last ice age, when glacial Lake Missoula blew out an ice dam and charged clear to the coast, the violent churn forming and filling a mountain-rimmed, snaking, fjordlike abyss that is now the country’s fifth-deepest lake. Pend Oreille has been a naval sub test site, has inspired lore of a lurking monster, known not so monstrously as the Pend Oreille Paddler. It is intensely, bewilderingly deep, the kind of place that—much like Lake Superior and the Oregon coast—inspires you not so much to swim as to sit and stare and wonder at what it might contain.

  Pend Oreille sits at the mouth of the Clark Fork River, and the minute Rachel and I saw its sun-dazzled surface, we knew we needed to camp on its shore. But the shoreline was cluttered with fenced yards, and so we rode the water’s edge for several miles before finding a spot that, in the forgiving sepia of dusk, looked discreet: a cradle of grass hidden from home and highway by the sprawl of a skyscraping ash. We parked our bikes behind the tree, sat in the sand, cooking quinoa and watching the sun push shadows across the lake, and only when the sky went black did we put up the tent. Even the sex was stealthy.

  Dawn came and passed. And when we woke, hours after a sunrise muted by overhead foliage, we found ourselves camped on a recently mowed lawn, quite visible from the road and more so from the water and more so again from the lawn itself, where, a few hundred feet away, a man was pouring gas into what looked like a Weedwacker. We started packing.

  Back on 200, the lanes were narrow, the shoulder rotten, the traffic sparse but belligerent, a staccato parade of growling trucks rarely leaving us more than a foot of breathing room. I could hardly have cared less. Was far too bloated, on bandit-camp bluster and deep depths and a hunger for all things Idaho, to be punctured by something as banal as mortality. Between passing pickups, I watched sunlight strobe on wind-rippled water, smelled dead weeds and gasoline and teenage Wisconsin. It was a beautiful day.

  We passed through the tiny town of Kootenai, followed by the less tiny but adorably phonetic Ponderay, and by nine o’clock we were in Sandpoint, which, according to Robert and Cindy Yost, we were “just going to love.” And I did. I loved it. Immediately. Just like so many Wisconsin towns, Sandpoint sits on the shores of an über-lake and is nestled into dense forest. But unlike my hometown and, I thought, quite like Portland, it had bike lanes and a theater that showed foreign and indie films, and young people on the sidewalks and a cozy, curving central boulevard and a farmers’ market and what looked like a community pharma—

  “Hey.” Rachel pointed at the pharmacy. “Can we stop here? I want to see if they’ve got arnica. My back is killing me.”

  I’d been zooming thirty thousand feet above our future, and it took me a moment to touch down and orient myself and tell Rachel I’d just wait outside. We were short on time, and there was much to see, and I think my logic was that if I stayed put, outside and above the particulars, I could see everything at once, could live a Sandpoint lifetime in a passing afternoon.

  When Rachel emerged from the pharmacy, I followed her up the street and into the café she blindly sniffed out. I dispatched my bagel sandwich in five bites, and while Rachel read Allende and savored her oatmeal, I pinballed around the room. There were young people at every table, and handwritten invites to jazz jams, and twin towers of a weekly rag called the Sandpoint Reader, and posters advertising a microbrew festival—happening that day—in some place called Schweitzer Village, which I assumed to be Sandpoint’s Swiss neighborhood, even though Sandpoint only had eight thousand residents, and thus no ethnic enclaves, and even though Schweitzer is actually a German name.

  I slid into a chair across from Rachel and started babbling. I told her I wanted to stay for a couple of nights, and that Galen could wait, because we needed to go to the brew fest and catch a Nepali film, and also I wanted to look into volunteering on this organic farm I’d read about on a thumbtacked index card, because, really, farming would be a great complement to writing for that weekly rag, and as for Rachel, well, I was sure she’d find a million things to do, because she was Rachel, and she always found what she wanted, and, seriously, what did she think? Should we stay?

  She sipped her coffee. “I thought we were going to Portland.”

  Portland. Suddenly it sounded like a dirty word.

  “Well, yeah,” I said, “but there’s no reason we have to, right? Wouldn’t it be amazing to, I don’t know, not go? What if we stayed here? It’s new to both of us, and it seems awesome.”

  Another sip. “I’m kind of excited about Portland. And I thought you loved it.”

  “I do love Portland,” I said. “It’s just . . . ”

  Rachel was staring into her cup, tracing her fingers along the ceramic handle.

  I leaned back in my chair and shrugged and said, “You’re right. This is probably the coffee talking.” And then I got up and grabbed a Reader and focused on figuring out where Schweitzer was anyway.

  • • •

  Schweitzer was the mountain—or rather was the ski resort nestled in the Selkirk Mountains—that towered over town, and its chalet, where the brew fest was being held, sat at forty-seven hundred feet, a half mile above Sandpoint. This I knew because a guy in the café, a Wisconsinite by the name of Quinn, had overheard our conversation and asked if we were really trying to bike to Schweitzer. When I’d nodded, he’d smiled up from under beard and baseball cap, then pointed skyward. This seemed odd, until he explained about the ski hill. Then it just seemed sad.

  Quinn began asking the standard questions, and I told him where we were coming from, what states we’d crossed through. He nodded slowly. He was speaking slowly, breathing slowly. Being slowly. I got the feeling Quinn meditated a lot.

  “So,” he said, “northern Wisconsin. I went to school in Ashland. And I spent a lot of time on the Bayfield Peninsula.”

  “Really?” I asked. “I love it up there!”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Long shot, but do you know Andrew and Jennifer Sauter Sargent?”

  Turned out that Quinn had lived in Corny for a few years and spent a good bit of time with Jennifer and Andrew. He even knew Ann Christensen, who taught at Northland College, his alma mater. Quinn and his wife, Moh (I initially heard Moe, and since he said “partner” pictured not a petite, curlicued brunette but a raspy, balding bartender), had moved to Sandpoint a few years back, planning to ski a few seasons and move on. But they’d fallen in love with the place and were now looking to put down roots, raise their newborn girl, and do something involving herbs that I didn’t even remotely understand. Quinn had barely sized us up before sharing that he and Moh and the baby lived in a rented condo in Schweitzer Village, that they were presently mansionsitting south of Sandpoint, and that if Rachel and I thought we could make the climb, we’d be welcome to stay in their condo for a night. In fact, he was about to head up there and would be happy to carry our bags.

  Ten minutes and twenty thank-yous later, we’d stripped the bikes and set off. We gained twenty-five hundred feet in nine miles. This was the biggest climb of the trip, including our Glacier summit, and while I’m sure it was grueling, I only remember smiling and laughing and standing from the saddle, pumping the pedals, seeing how long I could hold ten miles an hour on a 4 percent grade. Without the panniers, I felt weightless, superheroic, and Rachel was right with me. Every time we stopped, she’d say, “I feel so strong” or “I figured this would be harder,” and I’d nod and wonder why it couldn’t have been like this all along, before reminding myself that “all along” was the reason it could be like this now.

  It was six miles of dense evergreen before we burst free to head-spinning views of Sandpoint and Pend Oreille, the Cabinets and Coeur d’Alenes—all the miles we’d covered during the past few days. We stopped and gaped
for a minute, then kept pushing, higher and higher, up ever-steeper grades, until we were there, at the door of the condo. We thanked and hugged, showered and changed, and made for the beer.

  The festival was packed. Hundreds of people were lined up at the beer tent, dancing to reggae, sprawling on the grass. Rachel and I were in the latter camp. We were feeling the climb.Also, the beer. After one pint, we were giggly, cuddling in public, and when we went for a second round, we got to talking with a volunteer, who, when she learned of our trip, filled our cups for free. Same deal for our third round. Our fourth and fifth and I-don’t-remember-how-many cups we filled ourselves, in the tent, into which we’d been invited by the event manager, and we kept on drinking even as the tents and tables disappeared into box trucks. Eventually it was just me and Rachel and a half barrel and five volunteers, one of whom Rachel was grilling about local jobs for Spanish-speaking social workers. She even got his business card. Around midnight we stumbled home, had sex about which I would remember little besides bashing my head into the frame of the bed’s upper bunk, and passed out in a heap of arms and legs and blankets.

  The next morning started very, very slowly. We managed to get out of bed by eight, only to collapse back onto the window seat, where we ate granola and waited for the ibuprofen to kick in. When I could keep my eyes open, I stared out the window. It was a typically stunning view—jagged mountains under deep-pile pine, popcorn clouds over pale blue water—but, mostly, I was looking at myself, at all the miles that had brought me here. Being up so high up made it easier to understand how far I’d come. And while I’d more or less accepted that we couldn’t stay here—not on this mountain, not in the town below—I hoped I could at least hold on to the view.

  • • •

  South of Sandpoint, the only real option was Highway 95, a potholed, car-choked yawn inducer connecting scrubby pine to dusty lot to four-pump gas station. This was one of those drop-your-head-and-deal-with-it stretches, and so we dropped and dealt, and at one point I checked the rearview and noticed I’d been dealing quite a bit faster than Rachel, so I pulled over and waited, and when she caught up, we sat on the shoulder sharing elk jerky and comparing hangovers, and then we got back on the bikes and resumed riding at our own speeds, and I wondered why the fuck we’d ever fought about any of this.