Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson

  It was late afternoon when we hit the outskirts of Coeur d’Alene. Thanks to the Yosts’ enthusiasm, and also this beautiful Josh Ritter song that mentions the city as a place one might ride to on a stolen mule, I had pictured Coeur d’Alene as a quaint lakeside village. I bet it once was. But now it just appeared to be another sprawling city. Four-lane roads and gaudy billboards. Cul-de-sacs and strip malls.

  “I think they live out here,” I said to Rachel. “We aren’t even going to see the city.”

  “We are going to see a bed.”

  “Yeah. But I almost want to keep riding. We could check out downtown and head to the lake after sunset. I bet we’d find another camp spot down there.”

  I meant these words. But fifteen minutes later—after Cindy had met us at the door of the Yosts’ tremendous home (she had “just walked in!”) and given us each an orange and showed us to our private air-conditioned basement and explained that we should plan on staying at least until dawn, when Robert would return, and at most forever—I found myself in the bathroom, oblivious to the city outside, thinking only, I’m so glad we’re here.

  That night, over Cindy’s life-changing lasagna, we learned that she, a nurse, and Robert, a doctor, had dreamed for years of taking a trip like ours, that they still hoped to once they’d raised their kids. She asked question after question about how we’d met and why we were doing what we were doing and where we thought we were headed, and by the time we’d wrapped up our now extensively rehearsed story, she was twinkly eyed and smiling, was saying maybe we ought to just ditch Portland and stay in Coeur d’Alene, where we could live with her and Robert in their plush, private basement, rent-free, forever.

  Later, as we lay in bed, it was Rachel who started talking about what life might look like if we said yes. I egged her on, and soon we were plotting, in pulse-quickening detail, about finding work and playing music and exploring Idaho and seeing where all that took us.

  We just had to say yes. And if not for the plans with Galen, we really might have.

  • • •

  Robert had been home for all of fifteen minutes, and already he was on the phone, planning our route.

  “Jon says there’s a big climb right away.” He had the phone to his ear, his hand over the mouthpiece. “Then it’s just a nice, hilly ride through the Palouse.”

  “The Palouse?” I asked.

  “Gentle rolling wheat fields,” Cindy whispered. “You’ve never seen the Palouse?”

  Two heads shook.

  “You’re going to love it.” She nodded at the box of pastries on the table. It was barely eight o’clock, but she’d already driven to the bakery to buy them for us. “Don’t be shy about those. You’ll want all the calories you can get.”

  Robert hung up the phone. He’d called Jon, an avid cyclist, to get his opinion about the best route to Moscow. Jon had said to definitely avoid Highway 95, which, though it was by far the most direct road, was a nightmare of traffic and topography. We still didn’t have an Idaho map, and refused to take one from the Yosts, so Robert scribbled some numbers on a piece of paper and placed it on the table between us.

  “Jon recommends taking 97 to 3 to 6 to 95,” Robert said. “I’ve driven this route many times. Well, part of it, at least. My folks live in St. Maries, which is about halfway to Moscow. Beautiful spot. I will say that even in a car it feels pretty hilly, but Jon rides all the time, and if he says it’s the best route, I’m sure it is.”

  We accepted these words without question. So far as I remember, we didn’t even look at a map, just thanked Robert and memorized the directions: “97 to 3 to 6 to 95.” Easy.

  Because this scenic route would add over thirty miles, making it a 125-mile ride to Moscow, Robert insisted on driving us through the city, thereby shaving off a dozen miles. He and Cindy further insisted on loading our bags with granola bars and Gatorade and string cheese, and as we drove away in Robert’s car, Cindy stood on the porch, waving and smiling. Just before nine, Robert dropped us at the north end of 97 and said good-bye in a whirl of bear hugs and repeated offers to “come back whenever you’d like.” Rachel and I sat there for a minute, looking over the lake and wondering aloud at the Yosts’ generosity. We were no longer questioning whether we deserved it, just agreeing that it was about time to start paying it back.

  • • •

  The “big climb” wasn’t so bad. It lasted a mere mile, and I was so distracted—by the lake beneath us, by the palatial homes tucked into its shoreline pine—that I was almost surprised when it ended, and then even more surprised when the road began to climb again. And again. By the fifteenth mile, and the third gnarly uphill, I was starting to wonder if this guy Jon had actually ridden a bicycle on these roads and, assuming he had, if he was an Olympian.

  For thirty miles we rode the shore, then followed 97 up into highland meadow. Yellow grass and graying barns, small homes with greenhouses and shake siding. This, I figured, was the Palouse, but it sure was hillier than I’d expected. Mountainous, even. My legs were on fire, and I guessed Rachel’s were too, and we had another sixty miles to go. Still, we were in good spirits, enjoying the scenery and the luxury of having a third party to blame for our suffering.

  “I bet Jon has one of those nine-pound carbon bikes,” I said, when we stopped for a snack at what seemed like the peak.

  “And a steroid problem,” Rachel added. “By which I mean a tiny wiener.”

  “Which maybe explains the sadism of sending us out here.”

  Rachel bit into an apple and nodded. “Glad we got that all figured out.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “it should be downhill from here.”

  “Brian.”

  “What? You can see the valley.”

  “I bet we’ll have a tailwind too.”

  “I hate you.”

  As it turned out, we did drop into a long downhill, just a half mile up the road. But during the descent, my bike started feeling skittish, and by the time we bottomed out at the Saint Joe River, I could hear rim scraping pavement. It was midafternoon, and we still had a long way to go, so I rushed the flat fix, carelessly stuffing the tube back in the tire. After a few pumps, I heard the telltale hiss. A pinch flat. Swearing under my breath, I searched for the new puncture, did the whole thing over again, and after forty-five minutes, I’d at last fixed the flat. Suffice it to say that I was no longer dreaming of being a bike mechanic.

  I put my bike-tank back together, and we returned to the road, and soon we were tracing the Saint Joe through an achingly pretty valley, which I can’t in good faith describe here, given how actively I ignored it in the moment. My flat had cost us precious time, and we needed to rush to make Moscow. We were no longer in a position to stop and enjoy small surprises. To search for beauty would have been to set ourselves up for heartbreak.

  What I do remember of those miles is Rachel—cracking jokes through the climbs, passing me a granola bar as I patched my flat, expressing keen interest in the speedometer, and texting Galen to update him on our progress and say, “We’ll be there. Might be after midnight, but we’ll be there.” By the time we reached St. Maries—where we sat in the town park, inhaling junk food and trading massages and calculating how fast we had to ride (13.5 mph) and how much break time we could afford (one hour) if we were going to arrive in Moscow by sunset—I was beat from all the climbing and wary of what lay ahead, but mostly I was happy. Giddy, even. Because Rachel and I were aiming for the same place, for the same reasons, using the same language to talk about the miles that would take us there. This was all I’d wanted from our trip. What I’d feared we’d lost in the Plains. What we’d found our way back to.

  • • •

  Straight out of St. Maries, we came upon a big yellow sign that read, “Chain-Up Area Ahead.” At which point I knew, just as Rachel must have, that we were totally fucked.

  The next six hours were maybe the mo
st punishing of the entire trip. Jon, for reasons I shall never learn, had sent us not through the Palouse—that gorgeous, glacially massaged hillscape I’d soon fall in love with and, of course, describe as “lunar”—but instead into the Saint Joe National Forest, which, like all western national forests, was characterized by surging rivers, old-growth evergreen, and topographical violence.

  The climb out of St. Maries was four miles at a 6 percent grade. It took us an hour. Still fixated on Moscow, we decided not to rest at the summit, but just bombed downward, tucking low and laughing, until we spilled out into a river valley and saw the next ridge. That climb was five miles. It took another hour. The grade in some places was so steep that we had to zigzag from shoulder to shoulder just to keep moving, and by the halfway point I felt like someone was crosscutting my quads with a butter knife. When we finally reached the summit, the sun was sinking, and we were both tanking, and as we inhaled our last bit of food—stupid almonds—we cursed ourselves for not buying more snacks in St. Maries. We’d figured we’d re-up in Potlatch, some thirty miles up the road, but we hadn’t banked on all this climbing. Now we were both ravenous, and a dozen almonds didn’t satiate the hunger, just spotlighted it.

  We plunged into another downhill, bottomed out in another valley. There, at last, the earth stayed flat, and we rode side by side under darkening skies, each of us searching for encouraging words, still believing we could make Moscow. We’d now been on the road twelve hours, had ridden ninety miles, including twenty of climbing, and maybe we could have dragged ourselves through thirty more if we hadn’t come upon that trailer park with its brightly lit vending machine.

  We stopped. “Just for a minute.” But as soon as I sat and felt sweet relief in my every atom, as soon as I looked at Rachel and saw her looking back at me, I knew we were done for.

  I called my friend Anna, who lived in Moscow and was the whole reason we’d decided to meet Galen there. More than a little embarrassed, I asked if she could pick us up in Potlatch.

  “Oh my God, yes,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re still riding!”

  Which, just after quitting, is pretty much exactly what you want to hear.

  We rode the six miles to Potlatch. Six miles, compared to ninety-two, may sound like small peas. But after ninety-two, and after your muscles have been led to believe it’s beer thirty, six miles is pure agony. By the time we pulled up to the gas station where we’d planned to meet, Rachel and I were barely functional. We hobbled inside and bought day-old burgers and candy and cocoa. Back outside, we leaned against an ice chest and laid into our feast, and there we sat, in an empty parking lot, under fluorescent light, in the company of a mangy dog, rehashing details like it was the end of just another day. Only when a familiar car pulled up before us, when I saw Anna and Galen’s smiling faces through the windshield, when I foresaw a week of laughing and relaxing and, yes, of course, riding with dear friends, only then did I realize our trip had basically ended.

  CHAPTER 19

  Horizon Country

  I woke well before the others, and as soft morning light spilled through Anna’s kitchen window and washed over sleeping bags and bodies, I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, trying—and failing—to keep my eyes off that stupid fucking duffel.

  The duffel belonged to Galen, who was now snoring into a pillow near my left foot. Ever since he’d shared his plan to one-bag it across the country, I’d indulged wicked fantasies about the bag in question: had envisioned a seam-splitting mess, full of unnecessary gear, rising up behind him like a mushroom cloud. But now here it was, lying beside Anna’s couch. Just a simple green duffel, the size of one of my panniers. No side pockets, no water-resistant coating. I’d carried bigger, nicer bags to high school soccer games. To college classes. To the Laundromat.

  And his bike, presently locked up on Anna’s stoop, was just as maddening: a silver-blue aluminum-frame Giant. I’d heard over and again that loaded touring on an aluminum frame was a bad idea. But Galen wasn’t loaded, just duffeled. And as such, he was free to ride an aluminum hot rod that, beside our bloated earth-tone pack mules, looked impossibly light and fast. I was starting to wonder whether people might mistake Rachel and me for his Sherpas. Or, come to think of it, whether they’d notice us at all. Galen—who, as we’d now heard many times, had ridden “alone?” and “from Boston?”—had a way of making us disappear.

  I rolled over and buried my face in the pillow and swamped the case with a particularly fragrant blast of morning breath. For some time I lay there, facedown in my own rot, telling myself what I’d been telling myself for months: that Galen—who had spent next to nothing on food and gear, had slept in abandoned homes and falling-down barns, had topped a hundred miles like a dozen times and stopped wherever he pleased and never even considered buying a rearview mirror—had traveled not just farther but better.

  I pulled my face from the fabric and turned to look at Rachel. She was lying on her side, her hair fanning out from the pillow and spilling over an upturned palm. I shimmied closer, freed a hand from my bag, and grasped hers. She gave a light, reflexive squeeze, but her breath stayed slow, her eyes shut. I held on, traced my thumb over her fingers. This had been the one uncomplicated sweetness in Moscow. Being with Rachel, off the bikes, in the consistent company of others, had felt so easy. For months, we’d had all the time in the world, but now we had to seek out space just to talk, to furtively make out like a couple of seventh graders. Even if everything else felt fuzzy, I was surer than ever I was going wherever she was.

  I let go of Rachel’s hand, stood, and surveyed Anna’s wrecked studio. The floor was covered in unfolded maps and gutted panniers, scattered clothes and twist-tied bags of bulk granola. Anna, I thought, had been awfully gracious about hosting us. Sure, she was one of my oldest, dearest friends, but she was also in the first semester of an MFA, buried under the books she was reading and the memoir she was revising and the adorably awful Freshman Comp essays she was grading, and though she’d said a dozen times over that “You can stay forever,” the bags under her eyes said something quite different.

  I walked to her bookshelf and pulled out a Steve Almond paperback she’d put in my hands the night before. She insisted I’d love him, and I’d only had to skim a few pages to know she was right. I flipped to a random story. Halfway through the first paragraph, I shut the book and shelved it, feeling not grateful but insecure. Why hadn’t I heard of Steve Almond? Of half the authors on Anna’s bookshelf? Oh yeah. Because while she’d been reading and writing, I’d been fucking around, avoiding commitment.

  I tiptoed back to my bag and resumed staring at the ceiling. I’d been prepared for the Galen envy, but had been blindsided by this longing for Anna’s life. For the past few months, I’d pictured her wading through the exhausting tedium of grad school, and while she certainly was doing that, she was also taking herself seriously as a writer. Her shelves teemed with great books, and books about how to write great books, and I’d read her stuff, knew how talented she was and how hard she worked, daily, to get better.

  I looked back at the duffel. Then the bookshelf. Closed my eyes. These four days in Moscow had been enough to remind me that I was incapable of ignoring the existential background noise. Maybe what I wanted, really, was to keep moving, forever, so as to avoid comparisons with Anna and Galen and everyone else who seemed to be doing better, more worthy things. I honestly didn’t know.

  Rachel stirred beside me, and I rolled over. Her eyelids were still stuttering, her hand lying where I’d left it. Again I took hold and waited for her to wake.

  • • •

  We were aiming to ride a hundred miles that day—Rachel had made plans to meet some friends at a park near Walla Walla—so we were on the move by eight, pedaling west on a separated bike path that cut straight through the Palouse. I could see why Cindy Yost had been so wide-eyed and whispery about this place. Everywhere you looked, it was a sea of perfectl
y rounded, elegantly tilled silt dunes, something like a giant child’s sandbox. The winding roads seemed traced out by pudgy fingers, hills shaped by cupped palms and textured with the teeth of a twenty-foot comb.

  The bike trail was fairly wide, and we initially tried to line up three abreast. But as with most threesomes, this got awkward, and so I dropped back and let Galen and Rachel talk. Soon I was staring off at the wheat fields, watching the stalks tumble and twist, thinking that it wasn’t so bad, being the odd man out, that in fact it was kind of . . .

  Rachel was laughing. I mean, really laughing.

  I pulled closer, tried to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t hear much over the wind and traffic. I craned my neck, tilted my head, got my ear a tiny bit closer, and now I picked up more rolling giggles, and Rachel, in passable cockney, talking about her “bits.” Instantly I thought of those early days in Xela, when I’d watched bashfully as she and Galen conversed in octogenarian Cuban Spanish and babbly Brooklyn Jew. I’d never been any good at accents, and had always been eager for those conversations to end. Now I found myself trying to recall the last time I’d heard Rachel bust out one of her voices. Nothing came to mind. Maybe it was the difficulty of the trip, or maybe I just couldn’t bring out that side of her. Whatever the case, for the first time in a while I was feeling shut out, left behind.

  After a few miles, we crossed into Washington, and right at the border Galen’s front tire went flat. He’d bought super cheapos, opting against the bombproof wallet-emptiers Rachel and I had chosen, and as a result he had been getting flats almost daily. While this allowed me to feel a certain sense of superiority—I’d had only two flats, and Rachel none—it was also kind of annoying. We had a long day ahead, and changing flats took a while, and what if we had to ride until two in the morning just because Galen had been too stingy to buy the right equipment?