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

felt impossibly fast and light and powerful. This was a bike that could take me anywhere.
    I rode up beside Rachel and said, “I’m surprised how easy this is. I mean, the bags are kind of heavy, but my legs feel good. Like they’re inflated or something.”
    Rachel nodded, kept riding.
    “How about you?” I asked.
    “My legs are tired.”
    “Oh. Well, yeah, mine are kind of tired too. But in a good way. It feels good, right?”
    “Yes, Brian. I’m tired in a good way.” She flashed a toothy smile of questionable sincerity, then said, “Honestly, this does feel a little hard, but I like it. I’m going to be so buff and hot by the time we get to Portland.”
    I was about to tell her she was already pretty buff and hot, but I got tripped up on that last word: Portland
.
“Well,” I said. “I’m glad you’ve made that decision for us.”
    She smiled, brought her eyes to mine. “Excuse me. By the time we get to the end—wherever in this big, bright world that may be. Is that better?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Much better.”
    This was by now a familiar exchange. Rachel obviously saw us ending up in Portland. I did not. I didn’t know where I wanted us to end up, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Portland.
    It wasn’t that I disliked the city. Quite the contrary. Months earlier, at about the halfway point between my departure from Xela and our rendezvous in Wisconsin, I’d taken the train out to visit Rachel and had fallen in love with her city, with its cozy neighborhoods and laid-back feel, its cool color palette and damp, mossy intimacy. But Rachel
owned
the place. She had all kinds of odd jobs and volunteer gigs, and tons of friends, and this immutable morning routine of sipping coffee and eating granola and listening to OPB and chiming in with her own opinions. She had a hundred favorite cafés and parks and bars, and knew multiple equally awesome bike routes to all of them, and understood which stop signs to blow and which to respect, and was always wearing this one outfit, a form-fitting black jacket over faded gray corduroys, that made her look put together and sexy even while riding through pissing rain. As she led me through her Portland life, a life that seemed to reflect exactly who she was and wanted to be, I felt swoony and off-balance and aroused and terrified.
    I knew she’d spent years building that life.
    I wasn’t sure I’d fit into it.
    I didn’t want to find out.
    What I wanted was to find a new place, a place unlike Xela or Portland, a place where she’d be as wide-eyed and clueless as I was. And at the moment, I was enjoying having her here in Wisconsin. In
my
place.
    From behind, I heard the growl of an engine. I stood on the cranks and pedaled hard, pulled past Rachel, and waved on the boat-towing truck that had crept up behind us. It rumbled past, the passenger power-waving through an open window. I coasted, waiting for Rachel to pull beside me, and as she did I caught a glimpse of the little lake glimmering through the pine.
    A couple of years earlier, after graduating from school but before leaving on my ill-fated backpacking trip, I’d spent the autumn up here, staining cabins and coaching soccer while living with my folks in their beautiful lakeside home. Halfway through my stay, they’d left town on a trip, and I found myself alone, in the woods, for three weeks. I’d never spent much time on my own and feared I might be lonely, bored, sad. But I loved it: loved the quiet, the lack of dizzying choice, the unusual joy I felt whenever I walked deep into the woods to read a book on a bed of pine duff, or whenever I dove into still black water under a star-studded sky, or whenever I did something—anything—just because I wanted to, even (especially) if nobody else knew I was doing it. It always felt like I was telling myself a secret.
    The little pine-rimmed lake was my favorite secret of all. Most nights, just as dusk was settling in I’d grab a beer, step into the canoe,