Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America Read Free Page A

with loose sand and gravel, and, as usual, I was coming in way too fast—because how could you
not
bomb that corkscrew downhill?—so I veered into the opposing lane and slalomed through a gap in the debris, dropped a hand from the bars, and pointed tireward in hopes that Rachel would follow my lead. And, what with all the slaloming and stones and signals, I didn’t even notice the bald eagle until it was right there, maybe thirty feet overhead, its shadow slicing across the pavement like a giant black boomerang.
    I coasted to a stop on the shoulder. Rachel parked beside me, and together we watched the bird soar south over the marsh, its snow-white tail feathers popping out against the latticed evergreen and sun-silvered water.
    “I still can’t believe you grew up here,” Rachel said.
    I shrugged. “Believe it, lady.”
    She pulled a water bottle from the silver cage on her down tube and, her eyes still on the eagle, took a long pull. She swallowed and asked, “Do we really need to leave?”
    “Nope,” I said. “We can totally move in with my parents. It’ll be romantic.”
    “Deal.” She smiled and nodded eastward. “Let’s go tell them.”
    She pushed off and, after a few unsuccessful clacks of metal on metal, snapped her cleated shoe into its pedal and started spinning. I slid onto my saddle and followed behind.
    We had been in northern Wisconsin for nearly a month, staying with my folks, playing some gigs—on the patio of a local country store, at the wedding of family friends—and, of late, trying out all the gear we’d acquired during a bewildering three-day shopping spree in Madison. We now owned panniers and racks, headlights and headlamps, Lycra shorts and moisture-wicking shirts. Also bikes. Matching
bikes.
    We’d had them for weeks, but even now, as I watched Rachel power hers up a steep, pine-shaded slope, I had to shake my head. Hers was a silver and black 52 cm, mine a brown and gold 58 cm, but in all other ways they were identical. Both had “Fuji Touring” emblazoned in a sloping font on the top and down tubes. Both had wide bars with a second set of brake levers near the stem, so we could change hand position as we rode. Both had black seats, black bar tape, black spokes and rims, black tires, and black racks that held our black-and-gray panniers. And both had small square stickers down by the gears, stickers that screamed in big black capital letters that the bikes had indeed been purchased from the same shop.
    We hadn’t planned it this way. Hadn’t planned it, period. No, we’d just shown up in Madison with a monster shopping list and a fantastically unrealistic timeline and pretty much zero idea what we were doing, and we’d quickly discovered that Madisonian shops had a limited selection of the affordable, steel-frame bikes that, according to our sources (my daddy and Rachel’s Internet), were the only option for long tours. It turned out Fuji’s touring bike was the only “only option” in Madison, and so after visiting every shop in the city, after manically scouring Craigslist posts and estate sales, we’d sucked it up and bought the same bike.
    Brown and silver. His and hers.
    By now Rachel was well ahead of me, nearly at the top of the hill. I downshifted and gripped the bars tight and drove the pedals, and the Fuji rocketed forward. I gripped tighter, pushed harder, and the bike responded so instantly and enthusiastically that I had the urge to dismount, carry it into the woods, and cuddle it for a little while.
    Until a week ago, I’d only ever owned a one-speed blue Huffy and, come puberty, a Trek that I’d theretofore believed to be the best bike in the universe. But now I’d found the Fuji. After test-riding it for like six minutes, I’d come to the conclusion that the Fuji and Huffy were both bikes in the way a greyhound and papillon were both dogs. Even with twenty pounds of cargo—we’d half-packed our panniers for this, our first loaded training ride—it