Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (10 page)

It was a quick ride to the mine, which, according to a sign in the rim-top museum, was known as the “Grand Canyon of the North.” I could see why. The pit was mind-boggling. Three miles long, two miles wide, 535 feet deep. I peered down below, pressing my forehead against the chain-link fence, and marveled at the microscopic bodies, the corduroy striations on the pit’s sheer walls, the convoy of mustard-yellow Tonka trucks buzzing back and forth. One of the trucks was on display up in the lot, to give visitors a sense of scale. Its tires were twice my height, its dump bucket bigger than any room I’d ever rented. I kind of wanted to move in—to Hibbing, if not the dump bucket itself. Though I knew so little about the place, or maybe because I knew so little, it seemed perfect.

 • • • 

W
e reached Grand Rapids, and the end of the Mesabi Trail, by early evening. As I coasted down the trail’s final hill, my head was pounding, not from the helmet, which I’d removed when we left the highway, but from the tug-of-war match raging inside my skull. Past, present, and future were yanking at my brain, stretching it like taffy, and though I was doing my very best to both soak up these final moments and indulge some fuzzy nostalgia, it wasn’t going so well, because up ahead, through the trees, I could hear music, and not just any music, but earsplitting, shit-kicking country music, and, look, I dare you to try and be mindful while listening to that.

I rounded a bend and found myself in a sprawling county park. Tim McGraw’s voice blasted through the loudspeakers overhanging a mess of tents and RVs and oversize pickups and people, so many people, all of them here, according to an enormous vinyl banner, for the Itasca Vintage Car Club’s 36th Annual Northern Minnesota Car Show and Swap Meet. I stared, slack-jawed, at the scene, unsure if I was more bewildered by the bursting of our bike bubble or the fact that northern Minnesotans had, for thirty-six years, put up with saying and reading and writing “Itasca Vintage Car Club’s Annual Northern Minnesota Car Show and Swap Meet” (and, I hoped, even if it only happened once, using the initialism IVCCANMCSSM).

Rachel, who I’d outpaced on the long hill that dropped into the park, now pulled up beside me, and together we took in the IVCCANMCSSM. There must have been a hundred RVs, with names like
Cougar
and
Conquest
and
Avenger
and, my personal favorite,
Bounty Hunter
. The air was thick enough to eat with a fork, a summery soup of fry oil and charcoal, singed meat and sunscreen. McGraw’s voice reigned supreme, but I could make out a dozen others—Toby Keith, Deana Carter, Sammy Hagar—floating from boom boxes and car stereos.

We tracked down a couple of bratwurst and a bag of kettle corn, and wandered through the meet. I usually loved small-town festivals, and wanted to want to stay, but I was already missing the solitude, the we-own-this-place feel of the trail, and so when Rachel suggested that maybe we head back to the woods for the night, I agreed. Soon enough, we’d be sharing the road with these RVs and anonymous throngs. But we didn’t have to share a campsite.

 • • • 

A
s we were finishing breakfast at our trailside campsite, the phone rang. Rachel picked it up, held her hand over the receiver. “It’s Galen!” She started pacing, the phone pressed to her ear. For a few minutes, I scrubbed plates and packed panniers, but soon I was pattering behind her, eavesdropping.

“Are you kidding?” Rachel stopped walking and spun toward me, wearing an expression that fell somewhere between ecstatic and desperate. Not unlike the face she made while having an orgasm. She gasped. “Gaaaaaaalen!”

“What?” I mouthed, leaning toward her, needing to know.

Rachel spun on her heel and went back to pacing. She was wearing only her hide-the-Lycra shorts and a sports bra, and I let my eyes wander over her toned, tanned legs, the dimple in the small of her back, the curve of her ass against the fab—

Galen. I caught up, circled in front of her, jumped and waved my arms like a rodeo clown. She turned and kept walking. I flicked her ears. Poked her kidneys. Goosed her. At this she shrieked, pulled the phone from her ear and mouthed two words: “Kill you.”

“Galen, I get the impression Brian wants to talk to you,” she said, then paused, her smile widening. “Yep. Let’s talk again soon.”

She handed Galen over. Turned out he was in Chicago, and Rachel had been squealing about the trip that had taken him there. The previous morning he’d woken in eastern Indiana and decided he wanted to be in Chicago. So he rode all day, past sunset, into darkness. By the time he reached the outermost circle of suburban hell, it was past midnight. Traffic was light, so he rode the Chicago Skyway—a twelve-lane, megamonster freeway—into the city, finally arriving at a friend’s place around three in the morning. By the end of his odyssey, he had ridden 132 miles. In the past two days combined, Rachel and I had barely broken 100.

“Whoa,” I said, unable to come up with anything else. I wanted to be happy for Galen. But I wasn’t. I was jealous. Angry. First at Galen, for having pulled off such a spectacular ride. Then at Rachel, for riding too slow and holding me back from doing the same thing. And finally at myself, for being such a petulant, self-absorbed dickbag.

I spoke to Galen for a few more minutes, then hung up. It was time to get moving, to prove to myself, and Galen, that while I had enjoyed the trail, I sure as shit didn’t need it.

 • • • 

R
achel seemed to be on the same page. After breakfast at a café in Grand Rapids, we rode fifty miles in four hours, stopping only twice, first in the charming town of Remer, to grab sandwiches and Gatorade and Grandma’s cookies, then at Mabel Lake, for a quick swim in tepid water, and now, in front of me—
in front
of me—Rachel was charging uphill, legs pumping, torso bobbing metronomically. A frisky tailwind was shoving us forward, and we were riding hard, twenty-miles-an-hour hard, damn near flying through the Chippewa National Forest.

This highway, Highway 200, was a gift—smooth blacktop, scarce traffic, and lake after lake after lake. We’d stumbled upon this road, just like we’d stumbled upon the trail, and I was now feeling like the luckiest ignoramus in the world. And wondering if that made Rachel and me ignorami. And, come to think of it, whether that band name was still available.

I mashed the pedals, took in greedy gulps of breeze blowing off the city-size lake to my right. This world was so gorgeous and inviting, so superlatively superlative, and I was feeling exceptional, a peak-life-experience kind of joy, and so I pushed harder, still on an incline but accelerating, catching up to share this moment with Rachel, who now turned her head and opened her mouth and just completely out of nowhere said, “I want us to live in Portland.” And because I was feeling peak-life joyful, because I was accelerating uphill, because I loved Rachel more than ever and was at the moment ready to say yes to anything and everything, I said yes to this—said, “I think I actually want that too”—and then as quickly as I’d said the words I forgot them and dropped my head and rode, because for the foreseeable future, wherever we were was where we were going, and we were here, riding blind through uncharted Northwoods, together, and it was even better than—

Ping! Ping!

I kept riding. It couldn’t be. I was still going so fast, and the road was still empty, the breeze candy sweet.

Now I took a deep breath, looked down. With every revolution, my rear wheel was wobbling left and right, as if navigating a slalom course. I pulled onto a side road, waved Rachel over, and together we investigated. I had three blown spokes. For a few minutes, I shuffled around and kicked pebbles and spat out every profanity I knew, finally landing on a gem I’d picked up from Steve, a rough-and-tumble farmer who was foreman on my old landscaping crew.

“Fuck me with a football.”

“Do you think that’ll help?” Rachel asked.

I stuck my tongue out, then dug for the cassette-removal tool I’d picked up in Ashland. I began to reacquaint myself with the instructions, but it was hard to focus. My brain was soaked in expired adrenaline, and I was aware of something like regret nosing up from the murk. Also I was being eaten alive. So many mosquitoes, biting and pinching and sucking my flesh.

Minnesota, like Wisconsin and Michigan and probably every other state besides maybe Utah, was full of T-shirts and postcards sporting pictures of hairy, scuzzy insects and this groaner of a slogan: “Minnesota State Bird: the Mosquito.” Well, here on the shores of Leech Lake, there was a state bird convention. A reunion. It wasn’t yet dusk, but a huge crowd had assembled for cocktails, loosening up before the main event. Rachel danced around, slapping herself and swearing, and I tried to maintain a mind-over-matter Zen state, to will the bugs away from me. After about fourteen seconds, I jumped up from my bike, screaming and kicking.

A station wagon turned onto the road and stopped beside us. A pretty woman with wavy black hair dropped her window, poked her head out, and swatted at a cloud of mosquitoes. “Can I help you?” She nodded at the gravel road ahead of her. “This is a private drive.”

“Oh, um, sorry?” Our first run-in with the this-land-is-my-land property police. Great.

Her eyes softened. “This road doesn’t really head anywhere. Do you know where you’re going?”

“Nowhere, for a bit,” Rachel said.

We told her about our trip, becoming more harmless with every detail about how far we’d come (480 miles), how far we had to go (no idea), how immobile we were at the moment (very). The woman introduced herself as Sherry and said her family lived a half mile down the drive. She looked around our gravel-strewn, sun-beaten, mosquito-besieged base of operations. “Why don’t you come and work in our yard? It’s shady, and we’ll feed you when you’re done.”

It was a quick walk to their home, a honey-colored log cabin tucked into the trees. Somehow there were no mosquitoes in the front yard, so Rachel and I set to working on the wheel. I played surgeon, Rachel the surgical assistant. As I tinkered, she read instructions, passed me tire levers and spoke wrench, monitored the vital signs of bike and biker. All the while, we remarked on the record that Sherry had put on. It was a solo fingerstyle performance, the melodies shimmering and sliding, one of those major-key songs that still sounded bittersweet.

The music stopped abruptly. I heard a man talking to Sherry, and under his voice the sound of plucked strings. He was speaking in halting bursts—the same way I did whenever I tried to talk while playing guitar—and then he wasn’t speaking at all; he was walking through the house and out the door, shaking our hands, and introducing himself as Paul, Sherry’s husband. He said he had been playing a Dobro, that he also played mandolin, banjo, and a dozen other instruments, played them well enough to make a living doing session work in Nashville with big-name bluegrass players. He and Sherry and their two daughters lived in the Cities, but they tried to make it to the cabin often, hoped to eventually live here full time.

They invited us in for a spaghetti dinner, then served up heaping bowls of ice cream, then invited us to camp in the yard and do laundry and take showers and hang out inside as long as we wanted. We thanked them repeatedly and clumsily, then took them up on every offer. And just as we were about to bid them good-night, Paul hauled out an old nylon-string and played a medley of Celtic ballads, which I still recall as one of the most stunning performances I’ve ever heard.

Eventually, reluctantly, we headed to the tent.

“I wonder if the whole trip will be like this.” Rachel was propped up on her elbows, considering the Minnesota map.

“Like what?”

“Every person we’ve met has offered something,” Rachel said. “It’s been, what, two weeks? We’ve barely even had to look for campsites. And every time something remotely bad happens, a guardian angel swoops in.”

“I know. I kind of expected it to be harder. Or lonelier. Or something.”

I looked at the map. The part of Minnesota we’d just ridden—up the North Shore, across the Mesabi Range, into the Chippewa National Forest—even looked pretty on paper. Expansive chunks of forest and thousands of sky blue blobs and tendrils. We had maybe one more day of
that
Minnesota. I traced our route to Detroit Lakes, a sizable city that lay about seventy miles away. It too was surrounded by tiny blue splotches. But to the west the splotches ended. And North Dakota began. I didn’t know if Dakota was going to be lonelier, or harder, or something else. I just knew that once we crossed that border, it was going to be different.

I looked up from the map to find Rachel looking at the house.

“It was so fun hearing Paul play tonight,” she said. “I miss making music. We should find people to play with when we get to Portland.”

Now that the mania had subsided, I was back to feeling like Portland maybe wasn’t such a swell idea. For now, I decided to leave it alone.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

 • • • 

B
y midmorning, after breakfast and photo snapping and good-bye hugging, Rachel and I were on our way, heading west on the Heartland State Trail. We’d been thrilled to learn that yet another trail, this one twenty-eight miles long, lay directly in our path. Later we’d learn that these “lucky” encounters were anything but. Minnesota has been recognized as the “Best Trails State” in America, boasting over twenty-five thousand miles of paved rail-to-trail bikeways, and one would be hard pressed to ride east–west without running into one. But at the time, we didn’t know this. It felt like every trail we encountered had been built just for us.

The Heartland was empty and well paved, and though it steered us through more charming small towns, it was hard riding. With every mile, the forest thinned, opening up more space for the westerly winds we’d heard so much about. I kept looking down, checking for blown spokes or flat tires. Nothing. Just the low, almost imperceptible breeze, its fingers on my forehead. By the time we arrived in Park Rapids, Rachel and I were both exhausted, and we headed to the town park and passed out on picnic tables.