Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America (9 page)

Hours later, after our first cooked-on-the-beer-can dinner, after some making-up-for-the-fight-we-almost-had sex, after Rachel fell asleep, I crawled out of the tent. Listening to the roar of the water, pulling sweet mist through my nostrils, I thought about the day, our first without the safety nets. I had to admit it hadn’t really been that enjoyable in the moment. It was only now that I could smile about the ugly highway and the meandering trail and my own idiocy, only now that I could construct the stories I’d eventually tell others. The stories I’d tell myself.

I wondered if this was what awaited us. Thousands of miles that would only make sense in retrospect.

 • • • 

B
reakfast was cowboy coffee, bananas, and pancakes topped with the Simeones’ syrup. On the lip of the falls, Rachel and I ate while looking over a glossy threefold pamphlet she’d been handed at the visitor center in Two Harbors. The cover showed a pretty, hilly forest bisected by an arcing strip of pavement: the Superior National Forest Scenic Byway. Didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but the route looked fantastic, a westward-winding path from the North Shore to the “historic Iron Range.” I had never heard of the “historic Iron Range,” but it sounded big and chunky and vaguely communist. Sold.

I turned to the inside cover, read aloud a section we’d already laughed at a half-dozen times. “Although not an everyday occurrence,” I said in my best instructional-video voice, “black bear and moose have been sighted hanging out along the byway.”

“Just hanging out,” Rachel said, her words muffled by pancake. “Puttin’ out the vibe.”

I folded the brochure and set it atop our Minnesota State map, a freebie Rachel had found in a gas station. We had barely used it, just like we had barely used the super-map in Wisconsin. After 334 miles of riding, we had almost exclusively followed handwritten directions provided by our hosts. This, we’d decided, was the way to travel. Listening to locals, choosing routes day by day, avoiding any decisions we couldn’t bail on by nightfall.

By the time we cleaned up and packed, it was hot. Nasty Midwest-summer hot. It’s-already-eight-o’clock-and-my-knee-pits-are-sweating hot. I wanted to get back in the water, and I convinced Rachel to join me. While I dove from the highest spots I could find, she climbed down to the lagoon, grasping a rope hung from a big oak on the rim. Tiptoeing from boulder to boulder, she made her way to a rock ten feet above the water. And there she sat for quite some time, giggling and grimacing and looking up every few seconds as if to ask, “Do I
have
to?”

I sat at the top of the falls, laughing with her. It was a sort of relief, seeing this Rachel: the Rachel who wasn’t in control, who couldn’t quite keep up. From the day we met, she’d been perpetually out front, keeping me in pursuit, but now, out on the road, there were more and more moments like this one, where she was trying to keep up with me.

Now at last she plunged in, half-jumping, half-falling from her perch. She disappeared for a second, and then an arm shot out of the water, arcing upward and plunging back down. Just like that she was speeding across the surface, her form perfect, doubts dismissed.

 • • • 

W
e packed our things, pulled on the Lycra and the hide-the-Lycra, and started to walk the bikes back to the road. I’d been out of the river maybe ten minutes, but already I felt beads of sweat on my forehead, a tingling ache on my tongue. I reached for a water bottle.

“Shit.” I looked up at Rachel. “Do you have any water?”

“No, I used the last of mine for the coffee. Remember? I thought you had some left.”

“I did. But then I used it for dishes.” By which I meant I drank it while doing dishes.

“Well, then,” Rachel said over her shoulder. “This should be fun.”

It was not fun. And it wasn’t the heat—wasn’t even the humidity—that really got me, or rather, it was, but only because I was working so goddamn hard. West of Illgen Falls, it was all
hills. I imagined a chummy group of highway engineers challenging themselves to design a route that never—not even for one measly foot—flattened out. By the five-mile mark, my eyes were sweat stung, my temples pounding, my gums raw. I felt like I’d spent all morning gargling fiberglass insulation. Rachel, I could only assume, was feeling the same way; she’d quickly fallen silent and was now staring at the pavement, gamely pushing the pedals.

According to our map, the next town, Finland, was just ten miles away. A ten-mile ride, I’d thought, was nothing. I was wrong. Absent water, and present the scorching sun, a ten-miler was murder, and for that matter, so was an eight-miler, or a six-miler, or whatever paltry distance we’d ridden by the time we saw that heaven-sent, roadside bait shop. We crash-parked the bikes and burst inside, and before I knew it, we were sitting in a gravel lot, our backs against a propane-cooled ice chest, our water bottles refilled but untouched, both of us bloated from the king-size Snickers bars and liter bottles of Mountain Dew we’d just inhaled, at 9:42 in the morning.

I closed my eyes and smiled and said, “I’m not sure anything has ever tasted that good.”

“I know,” Rachel said. “I kind of want more candy.”

“So let’s get more candy.”

We got more candy.

Also, soda.

Also, a kind of weird look from the lady at the counter.

That morning we might have learned a boring lesson about foresight and preparation. We did not learn such a lesson. We did not so much learn anything, actually. But we did remember, both of us, having long ago imagined that the best thing about growing up would be getting to eat candy whenever we wanted. And now, we agreed, we’d been so, so right.

 • • • 

T
he Superior National Forest Scenic Byway was huge, a forty-foot-wide strip of smoother-than-smooth pavement, and it was utterly empty. As we rode, Rachel and I guessed at why it even existed. It was pretty and all, but no more so than a million other areas in the Northwoods. Maybe it was a pork-barrel project trumpeted by a politician who owed some highway contractors a favor? Or maybe the 1,763 residents of Aurora and Beaver Bay, the towns at either end, were important people, let’s-build-an-expressway-between-them people? Whatever the case, we felt lucky to have found the byway. It was our own private theme park, full of attractions: a centuries-old Finnish schoolhouse here, a trail there, and always a lake, stream, or bog beyond the roadside trees. The miles passed easily, and by early afternoon we were halfway to Hoyt Lakes, the town where we were thinking of camping that night.

We pulled off and took a break at Sullivan Lake, attraction no. 11 in our brochure. We were the only ones at the lake, despite the huge campground on its banks, and so we stripped naked and ran into the water. Rachel took off toward the opposite shore, practically hydroplaning across the surface, and I followed for a bit, then gave up and headed to the shallows to practice underwater handstands. It was pushing ninety, and the water felt perfect. Well, almost. It was cool enough to cut the heat, warm enough to stay in for hours. But it was also orange enough to pass for Kool-Aid. There was quite a bit of sulfur and rust in northern Wisconsin water, but nothing like this. It tasted like melted pennies.

I waded out of the lake and starfished on a picnic table, trying to recall the last time my pasty white ass had seen sunlight. After a few minutes, Rachel nudged me over, started situating herself, squealed. A leech was stuck to her calf. A big, fat, slimy one.

I smiled. Rachel pretty much never played damsel-in-distress. This was going to be fun.

“That there’s a keeper,” I said, still on my stomach. “We should get it taxidermied.”

“Get it off!” she shrieked, between hiccups of laughter.

“I just wish I’d brought a bigger knife.” I sat up and reached toward a pannier. “Oh, and do you have the lighter? We’ll need to cauterize the wound.”

“Brian!”

Generally, I was not a man who knew how to do manly things. I could not change my oil or differentiate between a planer and a router or tie a bowline knot or carve a turkey or stoically repress my emotions. But I had spent half my youth in and around lakes, and I knew how to deal with leeches. Now I leaned over Rachel’s knee, slid a conveniently untrimmed fingernail up her leg, and pressed it to the leech’s sucker. Slow and careful, I forced it free, raised my hand up, and made a big show of flicking the little booger back into the water.

Somehow this was foreplay.

And somehow, fifteen minutes later, when a forest service truck rumbled by, its driver waving through the open window, we had washed away the evidence and pulled our clothes back on, just in time, just as we had our second day out on the road. I was really starting to feel like other people were only appearing to remind us that no one, not them nor anyone else on the planet, had any idea what we were really up to.

 • • • 

I
t was dusk by the time we reached Hoyt Lakes, and we were both weary and hungry and wondering where exactly we were going to sleep. For the first time, we wouldn’t be staying under a roof, wouldn’t be camping in a yard or a recommended campsite. We were on our own.

After splurging on greasy pizza at a greasy spoon, we cruised town, checking out the parks and the lakeshore, looking for somewhere discreet. The park bordering Colby Lake, just north of town, was wide open and well lit, with abundant “No Camping” signs, so we headed west and turned off on a random back road. After a mile or so, we found what appeared to be a snowmobile trail. It was poorly lit and flat. Perfect. We set up the tent, pulled our bags into a pile near the door, and climbed inside. Then I caught a whiff of our leftover pizza, climbed right back out, and carried it a hundred yards away. This was, after all, a place where bears hung out.

Rachel and I tucked into our bags and pulled out books. She was still reading
Still Life With Woodpecker
, and I was halfway through
The God of Small Things
. I knew the story by heart, which was good, because I wasn’t actually reading it, was too wrapped up in reviewing the events of the day. It felt amazing to be moving, truly moving, away from the familiar and into the unknown. I kept returning to the thought I’d had back at Sullivan Lake: Nobody knows where we are right now. What we’re doing. Nobody.

We soon turned off our headlamps, rolled away from each other, began drifting into sleep.

Outside, something snapped.

And another something snorted.

“What was that?” Rachel’s hand was on my shoulder.

I rolled onto my stomach, propped myself up on my elbows. “I don’t know,” I whispered.

More snapping, more snorting. Whatever the something was, it was close. The tent fly was almost opaque, and through it I could see only the fluorescent glow from a lamplight at a nearby resort. “Did you notice if there were horses at that place?” I nodded toward the light. As a kid, I had spent a good deal of time at some nearby stables. I had heard horses snort.

Rachel shook her head. She looked terrified. I realized I probably did too.

The something was moving. It snapped and crunched and snorted, getting closer and closer, until it sounded like it was right outside the tent. I wanted to comfort Rachel, not to mention myself, wanted to say it might just be a deer or a porcupine, and that even if it was a bear, I would wrestle it to the ground, choke it with one hand, flick its ears with the other. But I couldn’t say any of that, couldn’t even do what I knew I was supposed to do: make a bunch of noise, brandish make-shift weapons, appear threatening. I was frozen, afraid to even whisper.

For what felt like an hour, the something moved around us. It would pad away, stay quiet for a time, then shatter the silence with a snort. It was fucking with us, I was sure of it.

Eventually the snaps became more distant, the snorts less frequent. Then, silence. Finally able to speak, I said it had probably just been a whitetail. I tried to sound confident, authoritative. Rachel didn’t reply, didn’t need to. She just tucked up against me, and there we lay, quiet and motionless, imagining the something, knowing what nobody knew.

L
oose gravel to the right. A caravan of cars to the left. And straight ahead, a strip of torn tire spanning the shoulder. Shit. I leaned left and pulled the bike just inside the white line, barely missing the mound of rubber, then checked the rearview to see if Rachel had followed. But I didn’t see Rachel. I saw a big fucking truck. And now I felt it, blasting air up my back. I gripped the brake hoods and leaned from the lane, against the wind shear, but overcompensated and slid off the shoulder into soupy dirt. I fishtailed and fought back onto the pavement, just in time to swerve around a twinkling heap of broken glass.

All morning with this shit. We were heading west from Hoyt Lakes, away from the scene of the something. Pretty scenery abounded—a mess of silver-blue lakes, spires of balsam fir and white pine, too-small-for-stoplight towns with names like Biwabik and Pineville—but I’d only glimpsed the surroundings. Highway 135, just like 61, was full of vehicles, and the shoulder was puny and peppered with debris, and so if my eyes weren’t on the pavement, hunting for hazards, they were fixed on the rearview, monitoring Rachel’s speed and adjusting my own.

I was doing my best to feign optimism but was starting to wonder if this was what the trip was going to be about. The rearview and the road ahead.

Behind me, Rachel yelled something. A passing car muffled her voice, but I thought I heard “bike.” I looked down, assuming I had a flat or another blown spoke. More yelling. I checked the rearview, saw she was pointing at a sign, a black bicycle silhouetted against a yellow diamond. We rolled up, and just beyond the sign was an eight-foot-wide tar ribbon snaking through tall grass, running parallel to 135. A bike trail. I looked back to the east, saw the trail hugging the stretch we’d just ridden. I hadn’t even noticed it.

“You think we should take it?” Rachel was already back in the saddle, her right foot clipped in, her left ready to push off. This was one of those rhetorical questions.

“Yep,” I replied. “Looks like it’s headed the right way now.”

We had seen another sign for this trail, the Mesabi Trail
,
a few towns back. Despite the snappy, traveling-through-the-trees logo—the trail had a logo—we had assumed it was your standard small-town path, the kind that takes you a mile in the wrong direction, then deposits you in a Shopko parking lot. But here it was again. Still heading west.

We pulled off the highway and onto the trail. The change was immediate, glorious. Sure, we could still see the cars, could hear their whining engines and smell their putrid exhaust, but now they were merely annoying neighbors. And annoying neighbors were better than battering rams.

After a few miles, the trail veered into the trees, wiggled between jagged towers of dynamited rock, and deposited us at the edge of a sheer cliff, where we stopped to take in the sort of panorama I’d never thought existed in the Midwest. To the north, a placid emerald river cut through a someone-must-have-stolen-this-from-Arizona canyon. It was hundreds of feet deep, its striated red-orange walls softened by evergreen carpet. We stepped to the scenic overlook, read the interpretive sign. “The Rouchleau Mine.” Well, that explained it. This was not a canyon but a crater; not a river but a man-made lake. The red cliff walls were taconite and hematite, two types of iron-bearing sedimentary rock. So this was the Iron Range.

A rumble from the west. Some purple, anvil-shaped clouds were rolling in, and there was a hint of distant mud in the air. After twelve days on the road, we hadn’t yet seen a drop of rain, but that streak was about to end. Time to move.

Past the mine, the trail plunged into a series of sidewinders, whipping us left and right and up and down, a bring-your-own-cart roller coaster. I pedaled hard and tucked low, topping thirty in seconds. Now I was giggling. Squealing. If I could have taken both hands from the bars, I’d have clapped them and barked like a seal. The trail gradually flattened, and as I coasted, waiting for Rachel to catch up, the trees split like curtains and the macadam widened into a residential street. I figured this was it, the end of the trail. But then I noticed another sign and, beside it, a thin strip of pavement tucking into the trees, continuing onward.

Rachel pulled up next to me, said what I’d been thinking. “More!”

Above, a crack of thunder. More would have to wait.

We turned onto Chestnut Street and rode into Virginia, a pretty little mining town with worn brick storefronts and triple-globe streetlamps and businesses with names like Jim’s and Stacy’s and Frank’s. At the end of Chestnut, we found a food co-op. Perfect. Now we could stock up on snackies, and those hippies would surely know how far the trail went. We locked the bikes, pulled lime-green waterproof covers over our panniers, and ducked inside just as the rain began.

 • • • 

I
’d never really shopped in co-ops. There were none where I grew up, and though Madison had a great one, I’d only been inside once, as my college cuisine had consisted mainly of Eggo waffles, pretzels, and Busch Light. But Rachel? She was a Portlandia native, a greens-and-grains-please healthy eater, an amateur herbalist who could make (and spell) tinctures. She was at home in this co-op, and she navigated the aisles with ease, grabbing miso soup mix, premade palak paneer, bulk almonds, and a handful of Emergen-C packets. As she stole her fourth yogurt-covered pretzel from a bulk bin, a forty-something man, decked out in three shades of beige, walked up and introduced himself as Jim. He’d noticed the bikes, pegged us as the riders. When we told him we were headed west, he lit up. His work, apparently, took him all over Minnesota and North Dakota.

“What do you know about the Mesabi Trail?” Rachel asked, her enunciation slightly muddled by the stolen pretzel.

He turned to a rack and lifted a brochure, opened it wide and placed it in Rachel’s hands. There it was again, the somebody-got-
paid
-to-design-this logo. Beneath it, a detailed map with close-ups of the twenty-three “downtowns” the trail passed through over its—two jaws dropped in unison—eighty-two miles. This wasn’t just a bike trail. It was a goddamn institution. Though we’d somehow missed the trailhead back in Aurora, we still had 64.3 miles ahead of us.

“They’ve been building this for a decade,” Jim said. “Some of it follows old rail lines, but mostly it was designed to take you through the prettiest parts of the Mesabi Range.” He pointed at the close-up of Virginia. “Through downtowns too. Supposed to inspire tourism, but it always seems empty. Actually, it being Thursday, you’ll probably have it all to yourselves.”

We thanked Jim for the info, then headed to a table to pore over the map. We’d be riding by dozens of lakes, through towns with names like Mountain Iron and Marble, past a slew of mining-related attractions. It looked like there were campgrounds, but if Jim was right, we could probably just throw up the tent wherever we wanted. I bounced in my chair. This was why we had done almost no route research, why we had shunned those Adventure Cycling
maps. Okay, also because they were fucking expensive. But, mainly, this.

 • • • 

I
’d seen my share of bike trails over the years, and most were rail-to-trail conversions. Graded for the steam engine, these paths were straight and flat, peaceful but monotonous, and all too often routed through the most drearily industrial sections of the cities in their right-of-way. Rail-to-trail paths always clung to the smoke-smeared factories, teeming junkyards, white-walled corporate compounds, and (one of these things is not like the others) boxy Section 8 housing complexes. The “blemishes” cities invariably zoned into oblivion.

The Mesabi Trail was different. It had been designed not to facilitate the unfettered transport of freight but to maximize interaction between people and place, and the fourteen-mile stretch west of Virginia felt like an interpretive tour of the Northwoods. The pavement—pitch-black, unblemished, something-to-call-home-about pavement—rolled over sudden hills, bent from ragged rock to cobalt mine-pit-crater lakes to birch-filled bogs, all the while tucked into hushed boreal forest. When it did emerge from the woods and hug the highway, the trail dipped and dove, following lazy S curves that wound around nothing at all, as if the pavement had been poured that way because, hey, it’s a bike trail, why the fuck not?

Upon reaching an “urban” area, the trail would dump us onto Main Street or take us through the town park, as it did in Mountain Iron, the Taconite capital of the world. Its little park was a veritable mining museum. Had I seen it at age six, I’d have had a brain aneurysm. There was a gargantuan tire, its treads as thick as my thighs; a nine-foot-high shovel bucket; and a tar-black steam engine that had once hauled ore from the open-pit Mountain Iron Mine, visible from the park. It was just past seven when we arrived, and despite our rumbling bellies and the waning light, we lingered, eating almonds atop the train car, then snapping I-bet-we’re-the-millionth-people-to-do-this-but-I-don’t-care photos: Rachel in the tire, doing her best La-Z-Boy lounge; me inside the shovel bucket, arms overhead, barely able to reach the upper lip.

At dusk we rolled up to Stubler Beach, a taupe-sand crescent hugging a glassy little goose egg of a lake. Nearby was a campground tucked into shoreline pine. Sold. We got off the bikes and stretched. Quads, calves, hamstrings, hip flexors. No amount of stretching could soothe my bruised butt, but otherwise I felt great. My legs were buzzing pleasantly. They felt tender. Succulent. Like choice cuts of slow-cooked beef.

We were planning to sneak into a campsite under cover of darkness, hoping to avoid the outrageous five-bucks-apiece fee. So we jumped in the lake, washed grit and grime from our bodies, then pulled out the beer can and prepared palak paneer. At sunset we tiptoed into the campground, past a heaping pile of firewood, which, according to a filthy cardboard sign, was “FREE!!!” So much for stealth; how could we pass up a campfire?

We lingered by the flames for some time, gushing about how lucky we were to be where we were: beside a fire, under a star-speckled sky, on this trail, this adventure. Together. We were covering ground and getting surprised and rolling with whatever the world threw at us, and it wasn’t killing us. We were killing
it
—day by day, mile by mile, killing the ridiculous notion that our grand adventure, the very idea of which had kept our relationship alive, would end us. When the flames began to fade, Rachel kissed me good-night and headed for the tent. I crouched by the fire awhile longer, watched the embers flicker and fade, listened to their snap, crackle, pop. Rachel was still awake when I slid in next to her, and before I could crawl into my bag, she unzipped hers and pulled me inside. We were alone in the campground, but still we moved slow and silent, our fingers feathering cheekbones and eyelids, both of us exhaling slowly, reluctantly, then pulling the same air back inside. Savoring it. Preserving it.

 • • • 

F
or the thirteenth straight morning we woke to sunny skies, and by eight we were on the bikes, following the trail as it darted around like a tail-wagging puppy, arcing north to sniff wildflowers, shooting south to peer into abandoned mine pits. We didn’t encounter a soul for ten miles, not until we reached Chisholm, where we saw both man and
Iron Man
, the latter the third-largest freestanding statue in the States, a cast-iron, pick-and-shovel-toting miner perched atop two crisscrossing circles bisected by an artfully flared I beam. I loved this beacon of small-town pride, this hint of the big story behind the Mesabi Range. I still knew few of the details, but that almost made it better. Mile by mile, I was discovering this place.

Just up the trail was Hibbing, birthplace of two American icons—Bobby Zimmerman and Greyhound Bus—and home to a pair of obligatory, icon-worshipping museums. We visited neither. I have no idea why we skipped the free Dylan shrine, and honestly I don’t want to talk about it, but I will say that we at least tried to check out the Greyhound exhibit. Unfortunately, the guy at the gate said admission was five dollars, and since five dollars was equivalent to twenty Nutty Bars, we just loitered in the lobby, paged through pamphlets and picture books, and eventually decided the place had nothing we couldn’t find on Wikipedia.

We continued into Hibbing proper and stayed a full four hours, writing and sending off stacks of postcards, checking e-mail at the library, hitting up the town’s hundred-year-old bakery for fresh éclairs and day-old muffins, and napping off our sugar-crash comas in the town park. This was quickly becoming our in-town routine (coma very much included), and I was really beginning to appreciate the structure it brought to our otherwise formless days.

Just before leaving town, we visited the local bike shop. Rachel was still having trouble with her wrists and knees, and she said as much to the head mechanic, a clean-cut guy named Pete. He nodded and said, “Not surprising. You’ve got a men’s frame there.”

“I know,” Rachel said. “I couldn’t find any women’s bikes that worked for me.”

“Pretty common, unfortunately. There aren’t a lot of good women’s touring frames on the market. The geometry of most bikes, yours included, is better suited to riders with longer torsos and arms. Men, generally.”

Geometry.
Yeah, I liked that. I was going to use it in a sentence as soon as possible.

I glanced at Rachel, who looked like she couldn’t give a flying fuck about expanding her bike vocabulary. Her eyes were fixed on Pete, her face falling into a frown.

He noticed and changed his tack. “We can, of course, make some adjustments.”

He had Rachel stand over the bike, sit on the saddle, grip the bars in various places. He shifted the saddle, lowered the seat post. Tilted the bars and raised the stem. Rachel tried a lap around the block and returned smiling. Pete had done good. We chatted awhile longer, and he asked if we’d checked out the Hull-Rust mine. When we said we actually hadn’t done any of the things one was supposed to do in Hibbing, he pointed and mouthed, “Go,” and when we both hesitated, he added, “It’s free.”