Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America by Brian Benson

Author:Brian Benson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The Photographer

At half past dawn in a well-treed park in a town called Hazen, I sat up and yawned and nudged Rachel awake. With sleep-swollen eyes and rumbling tummies, we dragged ourselves out of the tent and over to the Cenex station, where we holed up at one of the faux-fir booth tables by the window, and for the better part of an hour, we sat and sipped coffee and ate oatmeal and read the paper and pocketed butter packets and, whenever the clerk was distracted, which was often—the place was teeming with carpenters and ranchers and truck drivers, few of them paying for gas, most just nursing coffee and talking about the weather, the jobs they’d lined up for the week, the fish they’d caught that weekend—we tiptoed over to the airpots and topped off our cups.

After her third refill, Rachel slid back into the booth and crossed her arms on the table and said, “So, don’t get me wrong, I love cooking over a beer can and having ants in my sandwich and all . . . but how the hell have we never done this before?”

I spooned the last bit of oatmeal from my tin bowl. “I don’t know. But I say we plan to sleep within sight of a Cenex from here on out.”

“Why don’t we just sleep at Cenex? We won’t even have to set up the tent, what with the canopies, and we can huff gas right from our sleeping bags.”

I laughed, and shook my head, and said, “You’re ridiculous.”

Whenever I found myself unable to keep up with Rachel—with her wit, her intellect, her decisive clarity—I’d say those words. I didn’t, of course, find her the least bit ridiculous. But it was a way less vulnerable thing to say than “I am in awe of you.”

Now she stood and announced her plan to have a sponge bath in the gas station bathroom. I decided to follow suit. My skin hadn’t seen soap since Sykeston, but it had seen a whole lot of dirt and sun and grain dust. My torso in particular felt like it was covered in Velcro. I headed to the bathroom and locked the door and pulled off my shirt, and as I washed away the stink, I considered myself in the mirror. Weeks ago, in Duluth, I’d trimmed my beard back using a pair of kitchen shears, and now that it had grown out, I could see I’d done a particularly shitty job. The beard was bushy in a very literal sense: there were several little hair shrubs with their own shape and structure, and they only appeared to be one composite thing—one beard—when viewed from afar. The oldest shrubs, the ones I must have missed in Duluth, had taken on a rusty red that, I thought, contrasted nicely with the ruddy bronze of my cheeks. Add in the bloodshot eyes and Kramer hair and candy-cane-contrast farmer’s tan, and I looked like a hardened bike tourist. Or maybe a militia member.

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