Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

by Brian Benson

  As I followed Galen and Rachel down the on-ramp, as I merged with the motorists, I told myself I’d keep my head up, mind clear, eyes on distant purple. But soon enough I’d surrendered my precious attention to broken glass and rumble strips, to swirling winds and foot-to-forehead aches, to signs whose names and numbers were changing too fast for my mind to process but too slow for my body to bear. The farther we rode, the more I felt like I’d made a bad choice, like Rachel and I should head back to Hood River and get that room and end this thing right. But somewhere in there I looked down at my legs, watched them pumping like pistons, and then off toward the water, where I could barely make out what looked like a crumbling old dock. And I started thinking that maybe this river-gorge-highway hellride, this mile-by-mile slog through something I couldn’t quite see, was in fact the perfect ending, if it was an ending at all.

  Epilogue

  I rise from the saddle, lock my knees, and coast. My quads scream, but I stay standing, because my ass has never, ever hurt this much. The pulsing, tip-to-tail throb I can deal with, but as of the past few days, I’ve also been suffering these eye-popping, localized jolts. Whenever I so much as shift a centimeter, it’s as if I just sat on a pack of lit cigarettes.

  The term, I believe, is “saddle sore.”

  I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s been two weeks since I last took a break. A couple of days ago, I rode 102 miles. Yesterday, it was 128. And today, if my legs don’t melt, I’ll be hitting 140.

  I pull off at a gas station, inhale five bucks’ worth of corn syrup, return to the road. It’s going to be dark soon. The sun dipped behind the pines a half hour ago, and the light is grainy. Passing cars are switching on headlights, and drivers are slowing and staring, furrowing brows, waiting for me to raise a hand or a white flag. I’ll do nothing of the sort. I’m finishing this ride.

  It’s September 14, five years to the day from that final push to Portland. I’m back on the road, heading east, on a breakneck solo ride that’s taken me through Oregon and Idaho, Montana and Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. I’ve been riding fast, faster than I thought I could, faster than I ever will again, not because I like midnight calf cramps or heatstroke dry heaves, not because I’m trying to prove something, but rather because I’m equal parts impulsive and ragingly sentimental, and so, even though I didn’t decide to do this until mid-August, even though it’s meant riding twenty-two hundred miles in a month, even though I know it matters to no one but me, I’ve been racing time to make it home on this day, in this way.

  I no longer own a speedometer, but if I had to guess, I’d say I’m now going somewhere between nine miles per hour and backwards. My joints are full of concrete, back spasming, quads liquefying and pooling in my socks. I know I’m close—twenty-some miles close—but I can’t fathom actually riding this final stretch. And yet, I’m going to.

  I drop my head and bite my cheeks and make myself think about something. About anything. About Rachel. About how I probably wouldn’t be out here if she hadn’t—on a crisp November night, just as I was emerging from that first Portlandian year, a year full of anxiety attacks and depressive funks and incessant moaning about how we should get back on our bikes and leave her city and ride somewhere, anywhere, forever—stopped and turned and met my eyes and said the worst words in the English language: “I need to talk to you about something.”

  And I get it now. Though I wasn’t ready to see it then—not that night, that week, that year—I get it now. I get that, just as I’d never have found Portland without Rachel, I’d never have left it with her. I owe her my second trip as much as our first.

  The air is getting downright autumnal, too cool for short sleeves, so I pull over and dig around in a pannier for my flannel. I’ve still got the same panniers. They’re a lot dirtier now, and I’ve had to repair hooks and clasps, but I’ve still got them, just as I’ve still got my sleeping bag and pad, my dented tin cookware, my trusty beer-can stove. I pull the flannel from the top of the rear right bag, and underneath it is a mess of unwashed clothes, including the soccer shorts I haven’t worn for days. For much of the past week—for much of the trip, really—I’ve been hiding the Lycra under a pair of frayed jean shorts. I’ve similarly ditched the sweat-wicking shirt and dorky fleece, the cleated shoes and expensive sunglasses, have ridden most of these miles in a baby blue Donald Duck T-shirt, a red and white flannel, a pair of Sambas, and some chipped yellow shades I found on the ground at a music festival.

  On second thought, maybe I am trying to prove something.

  I tug on the flannel, get back in the saddle, and force my legs to push the pedals. My legs are not happy. My legs are saying things like “never forgive you” and “permanent damage.” But I’m so close, and I don’t think my legs, or any other part of me, really want to ditch-camp beside a county highway on a sub-forty night, and so I pedal on, and as the pain dulls from “I might cry” to “I still might cry but who cares?” I try to recall if riding a bike has ever hurt this much. And, yes, as a matter of fact it has; as a matter of fact that’s why I’m not riding the Fuji.

  Exactly one year after Rachel left me, I was riding downtown on a Portland-population-control kind of night—rain pissing sideways, wind torpedoing down from the West Hills and shoving me toward a queue of honking, lurching cars—when out of nowhere a big black box flashed in front of me. I strangled the brakes but still I hit hard, my shoulder into metal, my head through glass, and then I was on my back, feeling rain and something thicker on my forehead. Much later that night, after the police report and ambulance ride, after the drugs and stitches, I lay in bed, unable to sleep, because my shoulder was melting, forehead throbbing, mind racing, trying to make sense of why I wasn’t more busted up about the grisly death of the bike that had carried me all the way from Wisconsin. But I didn’t care. At the time, I couldn’t quite say why. I just didn’t.

  And now, I especially don’t, because I’m riding this bike. Riding Rudolph. I chose the name in honor of my gramps, who, upon joining the army to fight in World War II, noticed that all the other infantrymen had middle names, and, in a bout of self-conscious genius, chose Rudolph on the spot. My Rudolph is lighter than the Fuji—and with his matte blue powder coat and copper-bedazzled leather saddle, much prettier—and his wheels, which I myself built, have blown exactly zero spokes.

  I lean forward, and though this shift in balance shoots off fireworks in my groin, and causes me to swerve left, then right, then left again, I persist, until I manage to plant a kiss on Rudolph’s headset. I don’t miss the Fuji at all. I adore Rudolph. I chose him. I built him. Well, okay, I mostly built him. Admittedly, I had a lot of help from some seriously patient coworkers at the nonprofit bike shop where, for the better part of four years, I’d worked as a volunteer manager–cum–event organizer–cum–everything else. The day after arriving with Rachel, I’d googled “portland+community+bicycle” and found the shop, a scrappy nonprofit that got bikes to people who couldn’t afford them. I fell in love with the place, and its volunteer program in particular. They had these drop-in nights when dozens of people came together to fix old bikes, and they tolerated, even welcomed, doofy unskilled hacks like me. The guy in charge of the program was effusive and charming and clearly loved what he was doing, and I soon decided that his was the best job ever. So I haunted the place, and applied for every position they posted, and when, a year after I’d arrived in Portland, the best job ever opened up, I actually got it, and I was euphoric, until two months later, when Rachel said the worst words.

  I lean back from the bars, look up past the pines, catch a few timid stars peeking through deep purple. Suddenly I’m getting nostalgia needles; I’m remembering those Dakotan nights when Rachel and I had pedaled side by side, alone, our solitude like a secret. It’s the same sweet secret now, has been for an entire month, really. Because the whole time, it’s just been me out here, moving forward, not needing or wanting anyone else to know how or
where or why.

  That’s not to say I haven’t been lonely. I’ve missed my sister. I’ve missed my friends. And I’ve missed my job, which I’ve loved almost as blindly and fully as I loved Rachel. For a long, long time, I thought it was perfect—absurdly fitting. A bike brought me to Portland, gave me joy and purpose, and somehow I found a way to get paid to basically cheerlead the world’s kindest people as they—joyfully, purposefully—built bikes for the bikeless. I loved knowing I was making their work possible, loved knowing I was doing right by Dale from The Dalles, was “paying it forward,” was giving what I had to people I hardly knew.

  Um, wow. I’m really sucking air now. Seeing stars both natural and man made. My pinkies are numb, and the pain in my legs is whatever pain-scale number means “unable to think clearly.” I recalled County K as a carless, quiet, pine-lined beauty, and though it is indeed all of those things, it is also mercilessly hilly. Well, bring it on, I say. I’ve got thousands of miles behind me, and no more than ten to go, and I want this final push to hurt. I want to feel every inch. I want to end this trip by remembering why I chose it. That I chose it.

  It was a sunny Saturday morning, and I was sitting at my favorite café, trying to squeeze in a few fleeting hours of writing. After three-plus years, my job was no longer energizing, just exhausting, and I’d been having bimonthly panic attacks about where it was taking me, about where I was going, and why, and why I could no longer answer such a simple fucking question. I was too scattered to really write, on that and every morning, and so I was just clicking through the street view of Washburn, Wisconsin, calling it research, when, without quite knowing why, I slid the cursor over the minus sign and tapped the party end of the zoom bar. In the span of about twenty seconds, I floated from Washburn to Bayfield County, from Chequamegon Bay to Lake Superior, from trees and towns to green space and white space, from a two-year gut twist to the sudden realization that I knew exactly where and why and how I needed to go.

  And so here I am, turning right onto West Buckatabon Road, under familiar pine boughs, over familiar pavement. Until today, I made a point of making my own route, steered well south of the roads I rode with Rachel. But now I want the beacons, the reminders of where I started and where I’ve ended up. I’ve already passed the site of the spoke explosion, a sign for the loon capital of the world, a shimmery lake that, though it’s still cattail peppered and evergreen rimmed, has surrendered one small, sun-bleached dock. And now, as I ride past roadside pine I once thought I was seeing for the last time, I’m thinking what I’ve thought every day for the past month: that maybe this is how I move—in search, in circles, incessant.

  It’s pitch-black now. My light is low on batteries, flickering and fading, and so I turn it off. I can’t see more than ten feet in front of me. I don’t need to. I just listen to my tires on the pavement, my chain on the cogs. I take a deep breath, and the air smells like pine tar, like dried sweat, like aged summer. My calves are seizing, my eyelids sandbagged. My neck is packed with glass shards, and I don’t even have words for my crotch. But I keep riding, at a jogger’s pace, past the tiny lake whose breath I can feel through the trees, past the marsh where Rachel and I watched the eagle, past the boat landing and over rolling hills and up to the foot of the driveway. It’s dotted with tiny pillars of dancing light. I pull up beside one, see that it’s a candle. My dear, ragingly sentimental parents have lined their driveway with candles. For a moment, I hesitate, because I kind of wanted to end this night alone, wanted to have myself a moment. But I’ve already done that. I’m doing it. And, anyway, my folks are up there, waiting, as are the things I left behind, the things I hope to carry back to the city I hope is home. And so I get back in the saddle, and I follow the lights, one by one, toward something like an ending.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of narrative nonfiction. It is true. It is also a story. In telling it, I make use of certain tools (section breaks, snappy transitions, narrative distance) that were unavailable while I was living it. I have done my very best to use said tools artfully—to tell a good story—without in any way misrepresenting my experiences or mind-set at the time of the trip.

  In an effort to best recall those experiences and that mind-set, I pretty much memorized my bike trip journal, and spent untold hours re-creating our route on Google street view, and re-rode or drove many of the miles we covered, and called everyone we met along the way to say hello and compare recollections and make sure I wasn’t totally full of shit.

  Still, most of this story comes from memory. I’m sure I got something wrong. If you live in Richey, Montana, and can’t believe I’d call those buttes “blue-brown,” or if you are dismayed that I’ve labeled you a serial killer when you were just trying to help, or if you, the something that was lurking outside our tent in Minnesota, would never ever describe yourself as a snorter, well, I’m sorry. I did my best.

  Some of the dialogue is exact quotation, but much of it has been re-created based on my memories and my consultations with the characters involved—especially Rachel, who sat down for many a rambling conversation and shared journal entries and even responded to an absurd, written-by-her-ex-boyfriend survey that included the question, “I guess what I’m asking is: why’d you fall for me?”

  I compressed time a bit in the first two chapters, so as to get us on the road sooner, but I wrote no composite scenes. Neither did I form composite characters. Matter of fact, every name in the book is the character’s name in real life: these people are all that generous and good. Hearing their voices made me want to drop everything and do it all again. And again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The prospect of honoring everyone who helped me write this book is utterly overwhelming, and I’m not sure where to start or end, or how to best balance humor with sincerity, or whether I’m better served by short, simple declarations or effusive looping run-ons, or . . . Actually, I guess writing acknowledgments is not so different from writing a book, and on that note maybe it’s best I begin with Karen Karbo and Cheryl Strayed, both of whom are even now perched on my shoulder, whispering advice like a pair of literary Obi-Wans.

  Karen, from the first you asked infuriatingly good questions and helped me learn the language with which to answer them. You went to bat for this book and its author well before the book felt like a book and its author like an author. “Gratitude” is such a puny word.

  Cheryl, thank you for a mantra called “dig,” for invisible last words, for being nice to my mom, for having the grace and presence of mind to, in the middle of your whirlwind rock-star book tour, pick me out of a standing-room-only crowd and say five words I very much needed to hear. You deserve statues and parades.

  A big thank-you to David Biespiel for helming the Attic Institute, where this book was born, and to Liz Prato, who pulled me aside at the end of her fantastic workshop to tell me about a train I ought to hop on. A salute to David Forrer, my agent, for his unwavering belief in this book, his patient fielding of my naive questions, and his refreshingly liberal use of exclamation points. And a deep bow to Denise Roy, my editor, for expertly, gracefully, downright Socratically leading me back to the story I set out to write.

  I am forever indebted to Laura Koch, Brian Rae, Jessica Harrison, Neil Schimmel, Nate Schlingmann, Emily Gowen, Noah Beck, Michelle Helman, Joe Greulich, and Janelle Bickford, all of whom welcomed me into their guest bedrooms and family cabins and furnished basements when I was too focused on writing to be bothered with securing my own housing.

  I’m buying the next round for Emilee Booher, Kristin Bott, Breesa Culver, Celeste Hamilton Dennis, Carl Gustafson, Julia Himmelstein, Ted Lee, Ashley Mitchell, Vijay Pendakur, Sarah Royal, Gram Shipley, Melia Tichenor, Nick Williams, and everyone else (you know who you are) who, during the writing of this book, offered a well-worded critique or well-timed note of encouragement, or who maybe just leaned across a table full of empty pint glasses and grabbed my hand and told me
to shut up already.

  To everyone who offered a bed or a meal or a ride or a power wave from a passing car, thank you for reminding me how good people can be. I talk of you all often and think of you even more.

  Rachel, you have been unbelievably graceful and supportive throughout this process. In more ways than you’ll ever know, you made it possible for me to write this story.

  Beau and Joe and Joe and Josh and Anna and Bethye and Danny, you are and always will be home, and you know it, just like you know the name that’s absent from this sentence but present everywhere else.

  Galen, your conviction is a contagion. You’ve made so many of us better.

  Leah. You’re my favorite.

  Mom and Dad. Everything, always, unequivocally.