Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America Read Free

scrambled around, found what looked like a spatula, and poked at the veggies. A few seconds later, the hotel’s housekeeper walked into the kitchen, gasped, and said, “Es matamoscas.”
    I hadn’t heard the word before, but it sounded familiar, because, yes, I knew
mosca
,
and it meant . . . Fuck. I was cooking with a flyswatter.
    “Hey, it looked like a spatula,” I muttered.
    Rachel, who could accelerate from zero to gasping and teary- eyed in a matter of seconds, paused in the path and started laughing so hard that she was barely producing sound. I turned to find her doubled over, heaving, tears coating her cheeks. I had been mortified about the flyswatter, but I no longer felt embarrassed. Just happy. Happy that I was here with Rachel, this woman who was so full of life, so dynamic, and so completely with me, even if I had stirred dead flies into our marinara sauce.
    After a solid minute of laughing, nearly composing herself, then losing her shit all over again, Rachel caught her breath. I kissed her, and when I pulled back, I had the overwhelming urge to tell her I loved her. But I wasn’t sure those were the right words or, for that matter, what they even meant. What I did know was that I was leaving town in two weeks, and two weeks didn’t feel like enough. Not at all.
    My mind drifted to a conversation we’d had earlier that day about backpacking and its pitfalls. Rachel had mentioned that while she couldn’t see herself traveling that way ever again, she had for years dreamed of biking across the States. When I asked why, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It just kind of sounds fun.” I waited for one, two, five seconds, and then she added, in concise, bullet-pointed afterthoughts, that she (a) biked everywhere in Portland but had never ridden farther than forty miles, (b) hadn’t really seen the Midwest or the Plains, and (c) figured that riding the Rockies would give her “really tight buns.”
    I got the impression she’d produced those bullets on the spot. And I knew she’d now repeat them verbatim. This was how Rachel made decisions. Clearly. Finally.
    I turned and started down the path, and Rachel fell in behind me. After trying to come up with a clever segue, and failing, I looked over my shoulder, and not breaking stride, said, “So, this bike trip. Is it really something you’re thinking about?”
    “Yeah, I guess.” She wiped the final tears from her eyes. “I’ll finish school next May, and I was hoping to maybe go then.”
    “Sounds amazing. I’ve been thinking about taking that kind of trip forever.” Depending on one’s conception of space and time, this was true. I had indeed been thinking about it incessantly since Rachel first mentioned it, twenty-five minutes ear- lier.
    “What if we did it together?” I asked, still walking.
    “Well, it
would
be nice to have someone carry my gear. And, yeah, of course I’d love to ride with you.”
    For the rest of the walk and the bus ride back to Xela, and during my final weeks in town, we batted the idea around. We figured we’d start in my rural Wisconsin hometown and head to—or at least toward—Portland, Oregon, where Rachel had grown up. We weren’t sure which states we’d ride through or when we’d leave or what gear we’d need. The details could be worked out later. The important thing was to have an idea, a commitment, and
this
was it.
    Time came, we said good-bye. As I sat on my Wisconsin-bound flight, I was already missing her but thrilled I had something to hold on to. I would follow Rachel into this bike trip, and she would pull me westward, over lakes and plains and mountains, over a twenty-five-hundred-mile bridge, toward something new, something shared. And when we reached the horizon, breathless and ecstatic, we would have solved its mysteries and begun searching for new ones, on new horizons.

CHAPTER 2
The Water Beyond
    A s usual, the intersection of East Buckatabon and West Buckatabon was sprinkled