Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson

  Ten minutes later, I got a flat of my own. I patched it, and we made it a mile before I got a second flat, this due to my shoddy repair of the first. As I waited for the glue to set, I watched Galen and Rachel leaning over his teeny travel Boggle set, laughing and scribbling on grocery receipts. I decided that maybe flats weren’t so annoying, after all. Just part of the experience. Still watching them, I began tracing my fingers around the tire. I felt something odd and looked down to find that the treads were sporting some red streaks and fibrous whiskers. This was new. The word “threadbare” popped into my head. Also, the word “replace.” But I just had to make it a few more days, right?

  • • •

  We rode forty miles of farmland flats and corduroy rollers, then turned onto Route 127, heading south toward the Snake River Valley. Galen pulled on headphones and rode ahead, and Rachel and I pedaled side by side in carless quiet. Auburn earth mounded up around us like a bunch of desiccated Creamsicles, and ahead I could see deep into the valley. Could maybe even see Oregon. “I can’t believe how close we are,” I said, or Rachel did, a dozen times.

  The bomb into the valley was a lifetime top ten. I caught up to Galen, and we tucked tight and leaned into the curves and sent echoing shrieks down the canyon. It was a six-mile downhill, and it took at least ten minutes, just enough time to move through all four stages of descent: relief, mania, self-awareness, and regret. And when we reached the river and laid the bikes down and looked at what we’d just done versus what lay before us, I found myself unable to say anything but “Oh shit,” on repeat, my inflection somewhere between celebratory and anxious.

  The five-mile climb up from the Snake was unfairly steep, into headwinds, under a suddenly blistering sun. One of those hills where you can see, way off in the distance, a wavering black ribbon that, you tell yourself, is not—cannot possibly be—the road.

  It was the road.

  We fell into what was quickly becoming our go-to formation: Galen charging ahead, Rachel on the flank, and me in the middle or, more precisely, in the first third, hanging closer to Rachel because (a) it seemed like the sensitive thing to do, and (b) I couldn’t go any faster. The climb took over an hour, and by the time we hit the peak, it was pushing five and we’d ridden sixty-three miles and we were woozy and suffering from varying degrees of pudding leg.

  It was thirty-five more miles to the park. This would have been a slog even without the vicious headwind that slammed us once we turned west on Route 12, and had it been just Rachel and me—any twosome, really—these miles could have been disastrous. But now we had a gang of three, and if two of us were crashing, the third was hitting a second wind, cracking jokes, telling stories. We rode hard under fading light, and by the time we pulled up to a picnic table covered in kebabs and beer and s’mores fixings, I could barely remember why I’d been nervous about sharing these final miles.

  • • •

  The next morning it was mile after mile of perfect Palouse. Blue sky over golden brown rollers, distant combines kicking up clouds of wheat dust. After so many weeks in the mountains, I was happy to be back in such open, sprawling country. Horizon country.

  By noon we’d reached Walla Walla, where, in the span of a couple of hours, we checked out downtown, visited the library, sent some final postcards, and ate in the park. I loved how ingrained these routines had become and, just as much, loved seeing how they matched up against Galen’s. He didn’t seem to buy postcards or coffee, or treat gas stations like home, but did loiter in libraries and nap in parks. He preferred canned beans, gas station hot dogs, and generic strawberry Newtons to our deli meat, trail mix, and Nutty Bars. He was clearly spending way less than we were, but now that I was back on the road, I didn’t care. Relativity felt irrelevant. I knew what I wanted, knew that canned beans were boring and Nutty Bars were awesome.

  Just past Walla Walla, I got another flat. This time it was a goathead thorn, a sort of 3-D ninja star that’s ubiquitous in the area and the bane of local bikers’ existence. I fixed the flat quickly enough, and we rode for a half hour, and then I got another. There was no obvious cause this time, except for the tire’s ever-larger patches of red, its mess of exposed threads. I was kicking myself for not replacing it in Walla Walla, where I’d seen at least two bike shops.

  At dusk, a few miles east of Wallula, Galen got a call from the CouchSurfer host he’d lined up that morning. She said she’d been cool hosting one person, but now that she thought about it, three was an awful lot. So we pressed on, toward the setting sun, and soon we were kissing up to the east bank of the Columbia River, and I was time-traveling back to the previous year’s train ride. It was upon first seeing this storied river that I’d felt truly close to Portland. Now I felt the same way, especially because we were turning left, tracing the river south toward the Oregon border. Just six miles away.

  We rode south on the empty highway, chatting and laughing, high on that particular energy borne of impulsive choice. Galen and Rachel started talking about whether three people were enough to establish a bicycle gang, and what exactly a bicycle gang might do, and after offering a few suggestions, I drifted back and closed my eyes and tasted the night and thought about exactly what I wanted to think about, which was nothing.

  By the time our lights fell upon the sign, the sky had gone starry. The air was thick with sweet vapors, the southern horizon surrendering faint, hulking suggestions of a coming dawn.

  The sign said, “Welcome to Oregon.”

  • • •

  Day sixty was what you call a real scorcher. We were back in high desert, and there was nothing approaching shade. Not so bad when we were moving, but soon enough we weren’t, because after eight miles I got yet another flat. My tire now looked like it might not survive a particularly strong gust of wind. There was no way it would make it to Portland.

  “Can you do the Google text-magic thing?” I asked Galen.

  The day before, he’d told Rachel and me about this newfangled service where you could text Google a question—something like “Where is the closest bike shop to Umatilla, Oregon?”—and expect an answer within minutes. This was a year before smartphones would make their debut. It seemed like the cutting edge of technology.

  Galen found a shop in Hermiston, seven miles from Umatilla. I pulled off the panniers, left him and Rachel at a café, and sprinted south. It felt good, riding solo without the bag weight, and I pushed hard. When I arrived at the shop, I was sweaty and dizzy. And embarrassed. The mechanic was just plain tickled by my tire. He called over coworkers and invited them to “get a load of this.” It seemed my tire was, in technical terms, totally hosed, and Mr. Mechanic told me I should have replaced it hundreds of miles back. He couldn’t believe it hadn’t blown out on me. I replied, in a shoe-gazing mutter, that, okay, I got it, but I was kind of in a hurry, so . . .

  As I watched him work, I recalled the journal entry I’d written a week earlier and grunted a laugh. Forget working in a bike shop, I thought. I don’t even want to enter one.

  • • •

  West of Umatilla, I-84 was the only Oregonian option. Riding the interstate sounded nightmarish, so we opted to cross back into Washington and take Route 14. On this stretch, shade trees were few and far between, and there were no towns aside from Paterson, a three-shack cluster where we stopped to refill water bottles and inhale diner pie, and it was outside said diner that we met Emily, the first fellow cyclist we’d seen in a month. She was heading east, from Portland, and when Rachel mentioned we were headed that way, Emily dug around in her handlebar bag and produced a glossy pamphlet.

  “Have you guys heard of Adventure Cycling?” she asked. “A friend gifted me the maps for the Lewis and Clark route, and I don’t need the gorge section anymore. Want it?”

  I was about to launch into a poignant monologue about finding my own way when Galen said, “Totally! We’ve just got this crappy Washington map.”

 
Galen and Rachel huddled up as Emily pointed out the spots where she’d camped, the roads she’d ridden. I folded my arms and looked away. After twenty-four hundred miles of principled resistance to prepackaged experience, I wasn’t about to give in now, wasn’t going to pollute these final—

  “There’s a nice free campground in Roosevelt,” I heard Emily say. “It’s pretty much the only good spot in the next fifty miles, so you should definitely stop there. Also, there’s a sweet little fruit stand right by this bridge. Great peaches.”

  I inched a bit closer and peeked at the map. I liked peaches. And free campgrounds. I kept listening, and as I watched Emily point out more of her favorite spots, I had this epiphany. The map in her hands, it was not a threat, not a constraint. It was a fucking map.

  We thanked Emily, wished her well, and got back on 14. West of Paterson, it was more heat and headwind. I’d somehow expected the final miles to be easy, but I was as exhausted and bored as I’d been on any Dakotan day. My eyes were sweat stung, my legs aching. By the time we reached the aspiring ghost town of Roosevelt, I was thrilled that we’d met Emily, that we knew we had a safe place to sleep.

  We made our way to the park and found the camping area. It was ugly and rocky, and the park was empty, and none of us could see why we shouldn’t set up in the lush grass that hugged the river, so we did, and we slept good, heavy sleep, until about two o’clock, when I woke to what sounded like a metallic heartbeat. I unzipped the tent door just in time to catch a faceful of water. A whole lot of shrieking and stake pulling and tent dragging followed. Rachel and I ended up on the beach, safe from the attacking sprinklers, and Galen tucked up in the corner of a little gazebo, his hammock just out of the blast zone. I dried off, spooned Rachel, and smiled up at the stars, thinking of how and to whom I’d tell this little anecdote. And then I fell asleep.

  • • •

  The next morning, it was more dry heat and grinding climbs, gorge-force winds and infinite dirt. We fell into formation and pushed, stopping only for snack breaks, riding past the wineries, the scenic viewpoints, the cliff-top Stonehenge replica. We were so close, just a hundred-some miles from Portland, and could no longer be bothered with frivolous detours.

  By midafternoon we’d crossed back into Oregon for good. It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome. The bridge from Maryhill to Biggs Junction had no shoulder and a glut of traffic, and by the time we’d reached Oregon, a half-dozen growling cars were queued up behind us. Since Biggs was just a concrete island amid a sea of dirt, we ate our gas station sandwiches, loaded up on Newtons and Nutty Bars, and left as quickly as possible.

  Emily had prepped us for the next stretch: ten miles on a frontage road, which she described as “meh,” then thirteen more on I-84. The interstate. She’d insisted there was no other option, unless we wanted to climb a thousand feet on gravel roads, and that the highway wasn’t so bad. “The shoulder is super wide,” she’d said, “and I had this great tailwind . . . Oh. Dang. Yeah, tomorrow’s gonna suck for you guys.”

  The frontage road did indeed suck. It was one of those ferociously gusty stretches where I wondered why the hell we’d chosen to ride cross-country against prevailing winds. For well over an hour, we pushed into the wind, leapfrogging at mile markers, taking turns facing the current.

  But I-84? A revelation.

  The shoulder was six feet wide, and we rode right along the Columbia, and the thick traffic ended up generating this localized tailwind that pretty much canceled out the westerly we’d been battling. Locked as I was between cars and water, between Rachel and Galen, I felt this unnatural momentum, like I was being sucked westward, like everything was definite and life was acceleration and all that lay before me was perfectly inevitable. For the hundredth time, I dropped my eyes to the Fuji, my hand to the top tube, and I said, if only to myself, thank you.

  A few miles up the road, just east of The Dalles, Galen got another flat. While he patched his tube, and Rachel called her folks, I climbed atop some roadside rocks and looked across the river at the train tracks that had first carried me to Portland. I remembered this stretch. I’d been staring out the window, peering into mist and fog, squirming in my seat and wondering what lay ahead. A year later, here I was again. Approaching. Wondering. I didn’t know what, if anything, it meant to have traveled so far only to arrive at such a familiar place, and with such familiar questions. I just knew I’d traveled.

  • • •

  The plan had been to make Hood River by sunset, or midnight, or sunrise. Just as long as we got there before tomorrow, so as to begin day sixty-two, our final day, within sixty miles of Portland. But Galen’s fix took a long time, and as soon as we got back on the road, Rachel got her first flat and, shortly thereafter, her second. By the time we’d ridden through The Dalles, the sky had gone black, and only when we escaped the glow of the town’s last streetlamp did I realize how dark it was. Also, windy. And cold. I shared my observations with Rachel, and we had a quick conference, then told Galen that this was nuts, that we were going to stay in The Dalles. And though I’m sure he would have continued on had he been alone, he just nodded and said okay.

  There was nowhere obvious to camp, so Galen set off in search of abandoned buildings while Rachel and I sat in a grocery deli, eating mealy fried chicken and lukewarm mac ’n’ cheese and justifying why it was acceptable, even appropriate, for us to drop the cash and get a room on this, our final night. Galen could do his vagabond-hobo thing, and we could buy a bottle of wine and do what you do with a wine drunk and a cheap hotel room, and then the three of us could meet up in the morning and head for home. I was about to call Galen and break the news when a short, bespectacled guy asked if those bikes outside were ours. Five minutes later, we had an offer for a backyard campsite and a home-cooked breakfast.

  Our benefactor, Dale, was a former Marines sharpshooter who now spent his days throwing pottery and smoking salmon and making thinly veiled references to having killed people. He insisted that he never slept, and indeed, when I got up at two thirty and stumbled inside to pee, I found him sitting in the dimly lit kitchen. He looked up from a National Geographic and asked if I’d ever seen a puma in the wild. Four hours later, he woke us with salmon-and-goat-cheese omelets and sludgy coffee and wild-eyed, pure-hearted reminders to “Pay it forward, okay, guys?” And an hour after that, he stood on the front porch and waved until we disappeared from sight.

  • • •

  It was September 14. Exactly two months, and 2,428 miles, from the day Rachel and I left Conover. The skies were clear, the air cool. We’d all had a good sleep and a big breakfast, and we were ready. Ready to ride ninety miles to Portland. Ready to arrive. Maybe.

  Galen, at least, was dead set on making it by nightfall. He’d even made plans to cook dinner with his cousin, a Portlander. Rachel, too, had let her folks know to expect us, and the previous night, during our romantic deli dinner, she’d talked about how excited she was to get off the bike and into her bed, her favorite sweatshirt, her routines. I’d nodded and mumbled my agreement, though I wasn’t sure I meant it. Even if part of me was ready to find out if these miles had mattered, if they’d vested me with whatever powers one needed to stay somewhere, a far more familiar part of me wanted to be here, on the brink, in anticipation, forever.

  We were on the road by seven thirty. Per Emily’s suggestion, we took Route 30, and about a mile past The Dalles, pretty much exactly where we’d turned around the night before, the road disappeared into a nest of evergreen. The change was instant. Arid to lush. Autumnal to vernal. More than the border crossing, more even than the sight of tracks tracing the Columbia, this felt like the end. Or the beginning. Either way. I was glad we’d waited for daybreak. I wanted to see where I was going.

  For five miles, Route 30 wound through rock and pine, deep into the gorge—eroded bluffs to the north, the sprawling Columbia to the south, and between, picket fences and thirsty pastures, chirping birds a
nd whining engines. I-84 was just a few hundred feet away, and though it was noisy, it was also a magnet for all but the most local of traffic, and so the three of us rode side by side by side, talking about Dale and Portland and the etymology of the word “gorgeous,” until the road started to climb and we all went quiet. I felt lactic acid saturating my legs, a throbbing knot between my shoulders. I took a long, slow drag of pine and time-traveled back to the Mesabi Trail, the hills above Lewistown, the crossing into Idaho. This felt right. As much as I’d enjoyed the propulsive tumult of the interstate, I wanted to spend the final miles here, in the quiet carless nowhere, in the in-between.

  It was one o’clock when we pulled into Hood River—plenty of time to make it to Portland, provided we skipped the scenic highway and banged out the final miles on I-84. Galen was all about this plan. I was not. Sixty miles of interstate headwind seemed like the wrong kind of ending. I wanted more grinding climbs, more carless quiet, more time to reflect, to ponder, to figure out what all these miles had meant and where they should take me and what I really wanted and who I could and should and would be. So when we stopped for bagels and coffee, I proposed staying the night in Hood River, then taking the final day slow.

  “What do you guys think?” I asked.

  Rachel nodded. “I’d be into that.”

  Galen took a slow sip of coffee, looked back and forth between us. “Nope,” he said. “I’m getting there tonight.”

  He stood and excused himself to call his cousin, and Rachel and I leaned over the table and whispered, even though he’d gone outside, about what to do. She said maybe we should let him go it alone, and I said yes, we should, we should stay here and rent that room and buy that wine, should end how we’d begun, alone and apart, but then Galen came back to the table, and we hadn’t settled on an answer, and it seemed weird to keep discussing it in front of him, so we made a sort of nondecision to just keep going.