Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America Read Online Free

and paddle across the lake my parents lived on, up to the northwestern corner, where a finger of water disappeared into marshland. I’d move slow and quiet, my paddle barely breaking the surface as I slipped past lily pads and high grass, bullfrogs and blue herons, painted turtles on downed trees and, on lucky nights, a beaver with a mouthful of branches. Soon enough, the creek would open into a tiny, placid lake whose name I never learned, and I would lay the paddle across my lap and open the beer and sip it as I floated. A few houses dotted the south shore, but no one ever seemed to be home. It was just me out there, alone and unseen, and upon recognizing this, I’d swell up with the unusual joy, just about the sweetest feeling I’d ever felt. But by the third week of feeling that feeling, I found myself wanting someone else there with me: someone who would know better than to speak, someone who would sit with me and sip beer and listen for loons and know when and how to smile in such a way that I understood they understood what neither of us could ever say.
    I turned from the lake and looked at Rachel. Her eyes were on the trees, maybe on the water beyond. And I’m pretty sure she was smiling.
     • • • 
    W e leaned our bikes against the house, then unracked the panniers and carried them into the garage. On the opposite wall, between the cross-country skis and bags of birdseed, was our gear. It was a knee-high pile, about four feet wide, a mess of bags and poles and bright fabric. Somehow we were going to carry it all, for thousands of miles, on two bicycles.
    I wasn’t sure how we’d ended up with all this crap. I mean, of course I remembered those days in Madison, rushing around, hemorrhaging money. But the gear still felt separate from, even at odds with
,
the
idea
of the bike trip. Since the day we’d dreamed it up, I’d envisioned an exodus from the trappings of society, an iconoclastic, anticonsumerist journey into the unknown. And yet here were the Camelbaks and Clif Bars, the shiny new helmets and factory-fresh panniers.
    For the millionth time, I asked myself if we really needed any of this—if we needed anything more than a bike and a bag. That, after all, was what Galen had.
    Galen—the guy who had moved to Guatemala at sixteen and started a jazz band; the guy who had dreamed up an epic concert that featured music from across the Americas and packed an eight-hundred-seat theater; the guy who could play piano like nobody I’d ever heard and make these fantastically weird balloon animals and speak flawless Spanish, on the phone, with octogenarian Cubans; the guy who, on better days, I looked to for inspiration and, on other days, I wanted to bury in a deep, deep hole—was, as it turned out, about to embark on his own cross-country bike trip. From Boston to Who Knows? Maybe even the same Who Knows? as Rachel and me.
    A few days earlier, I’d called him and we’d talked routes and gear. Apparently he had bought a hammock, rather than a tent, so he could sleep wherever he found two trees or an abandoned barn. He’d made himself a stove, from two beer cans and a penny, that ran on HEET, the stuff I’d once used to prevent gas-line freeze during Wisconsin winters. He’d found a sweet steel-framed eighties road bike and was bringing little more than shirt and shoes and shorts and jacket, and was now on the hunt for his final bit of gear, a duffel bag—not a trailer or set of panniers but a fucking
duffel bag—
in which he would carry his meager supplies.
    By the time I’d hung up the phone, I’d convinced myself that we were doing it all wrong. But when I mentioned my doubts to Rachel, and told her about Galen’s super-spartan setup, she’d said, “A hammock?
That sounds awful. And I’d much rather haul some weight than wake up every morning and put on the same sweaty socks and poopy shorts.”
    Now, as I stared down at our piled panniers, at the tent and rain fly, the cleated shoes and