Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America Page 10
“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.
• • •
For 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.”
It was a quick ride to the mine, which, according to a sign in the rim-top museum, was known as the “Grand Canyon of the North.” I could see why. The pit was mind-boggling. Three miles long, two miles wide, 535 feet deep. I peered down below, pressing my forehead against the chain-link fence, and marveled at the microscopic bodies, the c
orduroy striations on the pit’s sheer walls, the convoy of mustard-yellow Tonka trucks buzzing back and forth. One of the trucks was on display up in the lot, to give visitors a sense of scale. Its tires were twice my height, its dump bucket bigger than any room I’d ever rented. I kind of wanted to move in—to Hibbing, if not the dump bucket itself. Though I knew so little about the place, or maybe because I knew so little, it seemed perfect.
• • •
We reached Grand Rapids, and the end of the Mesabi Trail, by early evening. As I coasted down the trail’s final hill, my head was pounding, not from the helmet, which I’d removed when we left the highway, but from the tug-of-war match raging inside my skull. Past, present, and future were yanking at my brain, stretching it like taffy, and though I was doing my very best to both soak up these final moments and indulge some fuzzy nostalgia, it wasn’t going so well, because up ahead, through the trees, I could hear music, and not just any music, but earsplitting, shit-kicking country music, and, look, I dare you to try and be mindful while listening to that.
I rounded a bend and found myself in a sprawling county park. Tim McGraw’s voice blasted through the loudspeakers overhanging a mess of tents and RVs and oversize pickups and people, so many people, all of them here, according to an enormous vinyl banner, for the Itasca Vintage Car Club’s 36th Annual Northern Minnesota Car Show and Swap Meet. I stared, slack-jawed, at the scene, unsure if I was more bewildered by the bursting of our bike bubble or the fact that northern Minnesotans had, for thirty-six years, put up with saying and reading and writing “Itasca Vintage Car Club’s Annual Northern Minnesota Car Show and Swap Meet” (and, I hoped, even if it only happened once, using the initialism IVCCANMCSSM).
Rachel, who I’d outpaced on the long hill that dropped into the park, now pulled up beside me, and together we took in the IVCCANMCSSM. There must have been a hundred RVs, with names like Cougar and Conquest and Avenger and, my personal favorite, Bounty Hunter. The air was thick enough to eat with a fork, a summery soup of fry oil and charcoal, singed meat and sunscreen. McGraw’s voice reigned supreme, but I could make out a dozen others—Toby Keith, Deana Carter, Sammy Hagar—floating from boom boxes and car stereos.
We tracked down a couple of bratwurst and a bag of kettle corn, and wandered through the meet. I usually loved small-town festivals, and wanted to want to stay, but I was already missing the solitude, the we-own-this-place feel of the trail, and so when Rachel suggested that maybe we head back to the woods for the night, I agreed. Soon enough, we’d be sharing the road with these RVs and anonymous throngs. But we didn’t have to share a campsite.
• • •
As we were finishing breakfast at our trailside campsite, the phone rang. Rachel picked it up, held her hand over the receiver. “It’s Galen!” She started pacing, the phone pressed to her ear. For a few minutes, I scrubbed plates and packed panniers, but soon I was pattering behind her, eavesdropping.
“Are you kidding?” Rachel stopped walking and spun toward me, wearing an expression that fell somewhere between ecstatic and desperate. Not unlike the face she made while having an orgasm. She gasped. “Gaaaaaaalen!”
“What?” I mouthed, leaning toward her, needing to know.
Rachel spun on her heel and went back to pacing. She was wearing only her hide-the-Lycra shorts and a sports bra, and I let my eyes wander over her toned, tanned legs, the dimple in the small of her back, the curve of her ass against the fab—
Galen. I caught up, circled in front of her, jumped and waved my arms like a rodeo clown. She turned and kept walking. I flicked her ears. Poked her kidneys. Goosed her. At this she shrieked, pulled the phone from her ear and mouthed two words: “Kill you.”
“Galen, I get the impression Brian wants to talk to you,” she said, then paused, her smile widening. “Yep. Let’s talk again soon.”
She handed Galen over. Turned out he was in Chicago, and Rachel had been squealing about the trip that had taken him there. The previous morning he’d woken in eastern Indiana and decided he wanted to be in Chicago. So he rode all day, past sunset, into darkness. By the time he reached the outermost circle of suburban hell, it was past midnight. Traffic was light, so he rode the Chicago Skyway—a twelve-lane, megamonster freeway—into the city, finally arriving at a friend’s place around three in the morning. By the end of his odyssey, he had ridden 132 miles. In the past two days combined, Rachel and I had barely broken 100.
“Whoa,” I said, unable to come up with anything else. I wanted to be happy for Galen. But I wasn’t. I was jealous. Angry. First at Galen, for having pulled off such a spectacular ride. Then at Rachel, for riding too slow and holding me back from doing the same thing. And finally at myself, for being such a petulant, self-absorbed dickbag.
I spoke to Galen for a few more minutes, then hung up. It was time to get moving, to prove to myself, and Galen, that while I had enjoyed the trail, I sure as shit didn’t need it.
• • •
Rachel seemed to be on the same page. After breakfast at a café in Grand Rapids, we rode fifty miles in four hours, stopping only twice, first in the charming town of Remer, to grab sandwiches and Gatorade and Grandma’s cookies, then at Mabel Lake, for a quick swim in tepid water, and now, in front of me—in front of me—Rachel was charging uphill, legs pumping, torso bobbing metronomically. A frisky tailwind was shoving us forward, and we were riding hard, twenty-miles-an-hour hard, damn near flying through the Chippewa National Forest.
This highway, Highway 200, was a gift—smooth blacktop, scarce traffic, and lake after lake after lake. We’d stumbled upon this road, just like we’d stumbled upon the trail, and I was now feeling like the luckiest ignoramus in the world. And wondering if that made Rachel and me ignorami. And, come to think of it, whether that band name was still available.
I mashed the pedals, took in greedy gulps of breeze blowing off the city-size lake to my right. This world was so gorgeous and inviting, so superlatively superlative, and I was feeling exceptional, a peak-life-experience kind of joy, and so I pushed harder, still on an incline but accelerating, catching up to share this moment with Rachel, who now turned her head and opened her mouth and just completely out of nowhere said, “I want us to live in Portland.” And because I was feeling peak-life joyful, because I was accelerating uphill, because I loved Rachel more than ever and was at the moment ready to say yes to anything and everything, I said yes to this—said, “I think I actually want that too”—and then as quickly as I’d said the words I forgot them and dropped my head and rode, because for the foreseeable future, wherever we were was where we were going, and we were here, riding blind through uncharted Northwoods, together, and it was even better than—
Ping! Ping!
I kept riding. It couldn’t be. I was still going so fast, and the road was still empty, the breeze candy sweet.
Now I took a deep breath, looked down. With every revolution, my rear wheel was wobbling left and right, as if navigating a slalom course. I pulled onto a side road, waved Rachel over, and together we investigated. I had three blown spokes. For a few minutes, I shuffled around and kicked pebbles and spat out every profanity I knew, finally landing on a gem I’d picked up from Steve, a rough-and-tumble farmer who was foreman on my old landscaping crew.
“Fuck me with a football.”
“Do you think that’ll help?” Rachel asked.
I stuck my tongue out, then dug for the cassette-removal tool I’d picked up in Ashland. I began to reacquaint myself with the instructions, but it was hard to focus. My brain was soaked in expired adrenaline, and I was aware of something like regret nosing up from the murk. Also I was being eaten alive. So many mosquitoes, biting and pinching and sucking my flesh.
Minnesota, like Wisconsin and Michigan and probably every other state besides maybe Utah, was full of T-shirts and postcards sporting pictures of hairy, scuzzy insects and this groaner of a slogan: “Minnesota State Bird: the Mosq
uito.” Well, here on the shores of Leech Lake, there was a state bird convention. A reunion. It wasn’t yet dusk, but a huge crowd had assembled for cocktails, loosening up before the main event. Rachel danced around, slapping herself and swearing, and I tried to maintain a mind-over-matter Zen state, to will the bugs away from me. After about fourteen seconds, I jumped up from my bike, screaming and kicking.
A station wagon turned onto the road and stopped beside us. A pretty woman with wavy black hair dropped her window, poked her head out, and swatted at a cloud of mosquitoes. “Can I help you?” She nodded at the gravel road ahead of her. “This is a private drive.”
“Oh, um, sorry?” Our first run-in with the this-land-is-my-land property police. Great.
Her eyes softened. “This road doesn’t really head anywhere. Do you know where you’re going?”
“Nowhere, for a bit,” Rachel said.
We told her about our trip, becoming more harmless with every detail about how far we’d come (480 miles), how far we had to go (no idea), how immobile we were at the moment (very). The woman introduced herself as Sherry and said her family lived a half mile down the drive. She looked around our gravel-strewn, sun-beaten, mosquito-besieged base of operations. “Why don’t you come and work in our yard? It’s shady, and we’ll feed you when you’re done.”
It was a quick walk to their home, a honey-colored log cabin tucked into the trees. Somehow there were no mosquitoes in the front yard, so Rachel and I set to working on the wheel. I played surgeon, Rachel the surgical assistant. As I tinkered, she read instructions, passed me tire levers and spoke wrench, monitored the vital signs of bike and biker. All the while, we remarked on the record that Sherry had put on. It was a solo fingerstyle performance, the melodies shimmering and sliding, one of those major-key songs that still sounded bittersweet.