Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (14 page)

The next day we laid over in Killdeer. All morning we loitered at a nearby Cenex, and come afternoon we headed back to the park to write postcards and read books and call friends. One of those friends was Galen. He was now in eastern South Dakota, apparently battling some equally fierce headwinds. His last three days, he said, had been “pretty hellish.”

When I hung up, I told Rachel what Galen had said, how discouraged he’d sounded.

She smiled and said, “I’m embarrassed to admit how happy I am to hear that.”

The rest of the day passed slow and lazy. We had a little uke sing-along, played a dozen games of rummy, strolled every street in town. Every hour or so, one of us would say something about how good it felt to take a break, to step out of the day-to-day. To just, you know, enjoy each other’s company.

When thunderheads rolled in, around five, we took refuge in the town bar. It ended up being a four-pints-of-pilsner storm, and when the skies finally cleared, we walked back to the tent and had some four-pints-of-pilsner sex. Eager and clumsy and over before we knew it.

 • • • 

B
y morning the rains had resumed, so we shuffled back to the Cenex to eat breakfast and drown our four-pints-of-pilsner hangovers in cheap coffee. Rachel pored over newspaper horoscopes. I began, and quickly gave up on, a crossword. And then we headed back to the park for shamefully long showers. Sure, in a couple of days we’d be staying in a proper home—Kim from Sykeston had set us up with friends in a town just past the Montana border—but we’d learned that in our time-space continuum, two days could feel like two months.

North of Killdeer, Highway 200 was mercifully flat, and it wound gently around weathered old barns and postage-stamp horse pastures. Though the forecast had called for more life-ruining winds, I could barely detect a current. The air was calm, the sun obscured by a slate cloud pillow, the highway, as ever, nearly free of cars. For twenty-some miles, Rachel and I rode side by side, stopping frequently for pictures and pee breaks, wondering aloud why every day couldn’t be like this, and discussing which route to take through Montana. It was hard to believe we might be there, might at last escape North Dakota, by the following evening.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the flats gave way to gentle rollers, and then not-so-gentle rollers, until we found ourselves perched on the edge of a river valley, its western banks rising toward what appeared to be mountains. Oddly familiar mountains.

“I thought these were in South Dakota,” Rachel said.

“Me too.”

Back in Fargo, I’d pored over pictures of this exact landscape, had briefly gotten obsessed with the idea of veering down to South Dakota. To the Badlands. We’d decided against doing so, had even steered clear of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which I understood to be the poor man’s Badlands. And when we’d made these decisions, a little part of me, the part that believed the secret to happiness might be perched atop one of those buttes, had died. But here we were, amid the white space, the place between places, a place that, according to our map, was merely an amorphous blob defined by all it was not: Not lake nor stream, not park nor forest, not reservation land nor county seat. Not the Badlands. And yet. It was.

The land before us rose in a mess of massive humps, some knobby and wrinkled like an old man’s knuckles, others jagged as shark’s teeth. This, of course, was not how I described it at the time. No, I took in the Badlands and, echoing every other human who has ever gazed upon a stark and unfamiliar landscape, I said, “It looks like the moon.”

I turned to Rachel. “I want to get a picture of you on the moon.” As I dug out the camera, she waddled forward with her bike. I pulled back to a wide angle, fitting in the rippled horizon, the sloping pavement, some foreground buttes and, off to the side, Rachel, who was still waddling. I called her name, and when she turned to look over her shoulder, I snapped the shot.

I’ve looked at that photo many times over the years, enough that I don’t need to see it to tell you that Rachel, with her sucked-in cheeks and her narrowed eyes and her mouth twisted into a tight half smile, was trying to look tough. Rachel always exuded toughness, but there, in deep Dakota, she was straining to project what had once come naturally.

And I definitely don’t need to see the photo to tell you about the photographer. He was positioning the camera, fussing over the framing, trying to capture the big picture—so consumed by the composition that he’d lost sight of its subject.

I
tilted my head skyward and raised up the bottle and squeezed it with both hands. A shy tablespoon of lukewarm water wet my tongue. I squeezed harder, and the plastic made that pathetic wheezing-donkey sound, and here came a drop, and another, and another, and . . .

My eyes still on the bottle, I asked, “So, hey, how much water do—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rachel said.

“Right. Well, then I guess I’ll just have to drink these here Cheetos.”

“You do that.” She looked off to the west, over the barbwire and apple-bobbing oil derricks and dirt—so much dirt—and said, “How far did you say it was? To Wilford Brimley?”

“Watford City,” I said. “About thirty miles.”

She picked up a rock, tossed it from hand to hand. “We’re not very good at this, are we?”

“No,” I said. “No, we are not.”

Despite having spent the morning shuttling between Killdeer’s well-equipped town park and its downright deluxe Cenex, we’d forgotten to fill our Camelbaks. Again. And now, barely halfway into this ride through high plains heat, we’d emptied our bottles.

Rachel stood and stretched her arms high overhead, shielding her eyes from afternoon sun. “Well?” she said. “Wilford ho?”

I nodded. “Wilford ho.”

We saddled up and pushed back into the blast-furnace heat, and after a mile I already felt like I was sucking a salt lollipop. I tried to distract myself, to think of anything else, but there was only this. Only thirst. When I closed my eyes, I saw a montage of plump, juicy oranges and rain-forest waterfalls. When I opened them, I saw dirt. And dirt. And dirt.

The Badlands weren’t so romantic when viewed up close. Those velvety wrinkles, the ones that from afar had made the mountains look as cuddly as sleeping shar-peis, were just a bunch of eroding canyons. And the peaks themselves? Those blue-brown, pastel-chalked domes? Piles of dirt. This was just a bone-dry, brown-scale dust bowl peppered with sagebrush and dead grass and the most decrepit little shrubs I’d ever seen. They looked as thirsty as I felt.

So, for that matter, did Rachel. Her skin was slick with sweat, her face a hangdog droop. I wanted to say something, anything, to help her forget the heat and thirst and dirt, but my mind was blank. I couldn’t put together words, much less sentences. All I could do was ride. And count—pedal strokes and eye blinks, miles and minutes, fence posts and passing cars. I’d had a mild sleep disorder as a kid, and now I was thinking of those long hours when I’d lain in the dark, counting sheep or, more often, puppies. I’d keep my eyes shut as long as possible, would finally check the clock to find that nine minutes had passed since I last looked. It was the same shit out here. Only now my clock had this speedometer, this oscillating reminder that time was moving so slow only because I was too weak to speed it up.

For somewhere between an hour and a decade, Rachel and I rode, silent and separate, suffering from cotton mouth and twinklevision, until at last we came upon a splotchy white ranch house sitting just north of the road. We dropped the bikes in the gravel driveway, climbed the steps, and knocked on the door. No answer. I walked to the side of the house, hopped the chain-link fence and cased the backyard. Sure enough, over there by the deck was a spigot. I popped around the house and told Rachel to toss over the bottles, and she did, and I filled them, and I came back over the fence, beaming with pride, like some kind of returning war hero, and we both closed our eyes and put the bottles to our lips and took in that sweet . . .

Poison. Fucking
poison.

I spat onto my shoes, Rachel onto the dirt between us.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She spat again.

The water, if you could call it that, was hot enough to bathe in. And rotten. I’d had some nasty, sulfur-saturated sludge in my day, but nothing like this. It tasted like a sewer smelled.

Rachel dug out the toothpaste, and we both started finger-brushing our teeth and tongues and gums, and soon we were laughing, because boiling-hot sulfur-lava, because heatstroke delirium, because here was this truck speeding on by, the driver watching two sweaty idiots standing over two crash-parked bike-tanks, before a house they obviously did not own, with fingers in their mouths. And now I was laughing even harder, because I’d somehow forgotten that there were people in the passing cars, that they could help us if things really got dire, and that, anyway, I’d chosen this, had even secretly hoped I’d find myself in absurd situations just like this one, and so why not stop pouting and just appreciate it for a second? I mounted my bike-tank, and Rachel mounted hers, and with some poison in our bottles, some toothpaste close at hand, we rode on.

 • • • 

T
here was a park on the outskirts of Watford City, and we pulled in and drank cramp-inducing quantities of water and sat for a while on the swing set. Once my body temperature dropped below the boiling point, I stood up and started pulling the tent from the rack. But Rachel stopped me, suggested we maybe take a spin through town first, see what was going on.

And so now we were riding past the Dakota West Credit Union, the Do-It Best hardware store, Mike’s SuperValu grocery. Stars and stripes billowed from every lamppost, and the only cars in sight were clustered near the bar, the steakhouse, the American Legion. This all felt very familiar, a slight variation on what we’d seen in so many other Dakotan towns, and really the only exception was that . . . actually, what
was
that? Over on the south side of the street, across from the puny pharmacy and even punier insurance office, was a grotesquely large, brand-new building, with a rainbow of earth tones on its sandblasted walls, a block-long parade of spotless windows, a gaudy sign for businesses like Six Shooters Showhall and Outlaws’ Bar and Grill.

We pulled up to the curb. “Well,” Rachel said, “can’t say I was expecting this.”

“Um, no. Definitely not.”

“It’s like an art exhibit.” She gestured grandly at the building. “Presenting . . . North Dakota! As imagined by suburban Chicago.”

“Maybe I should call my aunt in Buffalo Grove,” I said. “See if someone’s reported a stolen mini-mall.”

“Wait.” Rachel was now peering through the doors. “Is that a movie theater?”

It was. Six Shooters Showhall was a cinema, a huge, spotless cinema with giant tubs of popcorn and cushy seats and surround sound. And in forty-one minutes, it would be showing a big-budget action film that both of us actually wanted to see. We asked no further questions about what this was doing in Watford City, just sprinted back to the park, threw up the tent, lit up the beer can and shoveled in some undercooked pasta and tepid marinara, not caring how crappy dinner was, because
movie
. We rushed back through the theater doors, loaded up on soda and candy and popcorn, and slid into our seats just in time to catch the final preview.

The next two hours were embarrassingly good ones. After a week of wheat and wind and the subtlest subtleties, I wanted to be beaten over the head. And this film delivered. Car chases! Roundhouse kicks! Snappy dialogue and booms and crashes and bright, flashing colors! My whole being was awash in caffeine and adrenaline, my heart rate less human than hummingbird, my mouth frozen into a kid-at-a-candy-store smile, and when I looked over at Rachel, I saw she was wearing the same bewildered grin. Both of us were laughing at all the wrong times, which is to say at all times, because this film was not in any way comedic, but it was taking us for a ride, and we were both so happy to be taken for a ride by something, anything, other than ourselves.

 • • • 

I
t was barely noon, and we’d ridden not thirty miles, and already I was broken. My lips were cracked, my skin flaking off. Legs soupy, butt ravaged. All morning, I’d been doing what I could to democratize the pain—sliding left and right and forward and backward, standing from the saddle until the quad burn was worse than the taint ache—but it wasn’t working. Nothing was. Not on my body, not in my brain. I mean, I was trying to think happy thoughts, trying to remind myself that if the previous day’s ride had transmuted Hollywood brain candy into sacred treasure, then tonight’s arrival in Montana—a place that embodied the West, a place that was very close to wherever the hell we were going—should feel like some kind of existential orgasm. But those were some complicated happy thoughts,
and, at the moment, I couldn’t do complicated. In fact, the only thing I could do was:
Hooooooome, home on the range, where the deer and the—

“I want it to be over.”

Rachel had pulled up alongside me. She looked like hell. Bleary eyes and blotchy skin, loose strands of hair stuck to her forehead.

I nodded tentatively. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by “it.”

“Everything is starting to look the same out here,” she said. “I want Montana.”

Now I smiled, and said, “Me too. I mean, I know it’s just an imaginary line, but it’s got to be at least a little bit different over there.”

“I hope so. I need a break from this.” She nodded vaguely at everything.

I nodded back but could think of nothing more to say. Rachel again dropped behind me, and we rode for five, ten, fifteen miles, deeper and deeper into the harsh high afternoon, until the temperature was pushing one hundred, the wind pummeling our chests. Still I was empty of words, as was Rachel, and soon enough I began doing what one inevitably does with an overabundance of silence and self-pity. I blamed.

In a whiny, nasal, and—thankfully—internal voice, I reflected on how incredibly unfair it was that at a moment like this, when I just wanted to push myself and get this over with and make Montana, I had to putter around and wait for Rachel, who was holding steady at eleven miles an hour, while I wanted to go more like fourteen and, okay, so maybe she
had
told me many times to just fucking go fourteen already, but come on now, I could not do that, I would
not do that, because I was a noble man, and I would do the noble thing, would silently and resentfully sacrifice for Rachel, even if she didn’t want me to, because—

“I’m bored.” Rachel had snuck up beside me again. “Wanna play twenty questions?”

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

It took me a moment to get into it, and out of my head, but soon enough I was thinking not of eleven or fourteen but of “is it edible?” I pretty quickly guessed Rachel’s subject—Nutty Bars—and she in turn got my Lake Superior with a few questions to spare, and after a few more rounds, we switched to this game where one of us would name a city and the other would come back with another city whose name started with the last letter of the one just named. This kept us busy for the better part of an hour, and when we found ourselves running out of new cities, we moved on to countries, and then bodies of water, and then nineties bands, and then I was picking my head up and squinting at a distant sign and realizing it said “Montana.”

 • • • 

W
e’d arranged to spend a night in Sidney with Kelly and Forest Markle, friends of Kim from Sykeston. For the first time in almost a week, we’d have a home, a bed, a break from the road. And we needed it. I needed it. On top of the now-familiar biking-related aches, I was feeling the effects of sleeping, day after day, on an inch-thick mat, with a dirty-clothes pillow. My body felt not just sore but sharp. Angular. And Rachel looked just as jagged. After we crossed the Montana border, she’d taken the lead for a bit, and I’d noticed for the first time how muscular her calves had gotten. It was kind of gross. I was hoping a couple of days of comfort food and armchairs and blankies might soften up the both of us.

Forest and Kelly were already outside when we pulled into their driveway. From the moment I saw the pair, I felt I knew what to expect. Kelly, with her warm eyes and wild hair, would be spunky and inquisitive. And Forest, a closed-mouth smile crinkling his cheeks, his hand wrapped around a pint glass of clear liquid I correctly assumed was not water, would be self-contained but sweet, possessed of a downright midwestern sort of stoic generosity.

Over a spaghetti and salad feast made with garden-grown produce, each of them played to type. Kelly peppered us with the frequently asked questions—the where and when and for Pete’s sake why?—then steered talk toward other topics: her knitting, Forest’s love of cooking, their thoughts on small-town living. Forest, throughout, smiled and sipped, from time to time sharing a spare but fully formed thought. At some point I mentioned our beer-can stove, which led to a bit of show-and-tell, which led Kelly to demand we stay a second day and help her build one. We agreed to both proposals—the stove building and, especially, the second day.

After the meal, Forest actually let us help with dishes, and once we finished, Kelly showed us to our room, a little cave with an enormous bed. Though it wasn’t yet eight, she and Forest were bidding us good-night. This was apparently their custom, heading to bed before sunset and waking up at what-the-fuck o’clock to sip coffee, skim headlines, and start the day. I couldn’t imagine keeping that schedule. But at the moment, it felt perfect. Rachel and I were beat, so we too stuffed a blanket in front of our room’s tiny window and slid into bed.

 • • • 

T
he next day was gloriously lazy. Our hosts spoiled us rotten. Football-size omelets at sunrise, an afternoon snack of peaches and cream, another food-coma-inducing dinner. It was clear that Forest and Kelly didn’t have a lot of money, and yet they were sharing so much, so freely and joyfully, with two strangers. Beyond the food, they were simply great hosts. Hosts who understood balance. For every minute they spent with us, they took two more to do their own thing, leaving us to do ours. Even better, they actually requested our help. I’d always felt weird staying with people who insisted on doing everything—“Oh, I’ll flush that, you just
relax
”—so I was glad to be not just allowed but asked to wash dishes, was thrilled to help Kelly build her stove, to know I’d leave behind something more permanent than tire tracks and dirty sheets.