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

the past few weeks, I’d again been thinking what I’d thought the night we met: I not only wanted Rachel but wanted to
be
her. She was self-confident enough to lean into the unknown and self-aware enough to be herself wherever she landed. I wanted that: I wanted to keep moving. I wanted to figure out how to be myself anywhere. And I wanted to do it all with her.
    Now Rachel came back to the kitchen, in swimsuit and towel, and I lifted swim trunks from the porch railing and followed her down to the lake. We stayed all afternoon, diving into the water and drying on the dock, diving and drying, again and again, Rachel shrieking when her toes got tangled in slimy stalks of invasive Eurasian milfoil, me yanking up handfuls and sticking them in her hair. Later, after helping with dinner, we returned to the dock, to play music and watch the sunset, then lingered as stars burned the blue-black sky. And as I lay beside Rachel, staring up at the night, my legs faintly aching from our afternoon ride, I thought not of Galen or gear, of Portland or Who Knows? but only of this quiet moment. I wondered how many such moments might await us out there. I was ready to find out.

PART II
THE WISCONSIN GLACIAL EPISODE

CHAPTER 3
Big Picture, Little Moment
    W e stood alone in my parents’ driveway, I in a freshly laundered gray polyester T-shirt, Rachel in a sleeveless beige version of the same, both of us in crotch-hugging Lycra and baggy black shorts whose sole purpose was to hide said Lycra. Our heads were helmeted, our laces tied. Tires pumped, chains lubed, panniers packed and racked. It was a prime photo op—golden light peeking through pine needles, dappling bikes and bikers—but nobody was around to take the photo, and I hadn’t figured out the timer on my clunky old digital, so I settled for an extended-arm head shot, the kind that fills the albums of many a mediocre photographer.
    I pulled up the image and we huddled over the screen. Our huge helmets blotted out the bikes, but we were smiling, leaning into each other.
    “Look, honey!” I said. “This was back before we hated each other.”
    Rachel nuzzled her helmet into my armpit. “You always know just what to say.”
    We had by this point heard every imaginable quip about how the bike trip would destroy us. We would break down after weeks of sore butts and scarce showers, brutal winds and grueling climbs. We’d explode under the pressure of having to agree on decision after decision. I’d want to go faster, and she slower, and sometimes one of us wouldn’t want to go at all, and, well, what were we going to do about that? We’d shrugged this off, all of it. Wisconsin had been good to us, and we’d never been more confident about our ability to take this trip and move forward, together.
    “This is pretty good, right?” Rachel said, still staring at the screen. “I’m sure your mom will appreciate that we took it. Speaking of, I’m surprised she hasn’t called again.”
    I nodded, shaking off a mild guilt tremor. My folks were in Chicago, and I knew it was killing them to miss out on a dramatic send-off. But it felt right, leaving like this: alone and unseen.
    “Do you have the map?” Rachel asked.
    “Of course.” I gave her an are-you-really-asking-me-that smile, but as soon as she looked away, I slid my fingers into the pannier pocket and dug for the folded sheets in question. She looked back from the lake just in time to catch my hand releasing the paper. Busted.
    The map was actually nine separate maps photocopied from a gazetteer and taped at the seams. I’d sketched out our route with a yellow highlighter, and it stretched from edge to edge, bottom right to upper left. We’d had other options—an association called Adventure Cycling offers dozens of compact, waterproof, intricate route maps for cross-country bikers—but we’d agreed that buying those babies was out of the question. Our trip was about independence, about adventure, about us, and we