Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America

“Let’s hope Benson has more travels in mind. He is a gifted writer, an observant human with an eye for the telling detail and how to tell it.” — Booklist Brian has a million vague life plans but zero sense of direction. So when he meets Rachel, a self-possessed woman who daydreams of bicycling across the States, he decides to follow her wherever she'll take him. Brian and Rachel soon embark on a ride from northern Wisconsin to Somewhere West, infatuated with the promise of adventure and each other. But as the pair progress from the Northwoods into the bleak western plains, they begin to discover the messy realities of life on the road. Mile by mile, they contend with merciless winds and brutal heat, broken bikes and bodies, each other and themselves—and the looming question of what comes next. Told in a voice "as hilarious as it is wise" (Cheryl Strayed),  Going Somewhere  is a candid tale of the struggle to move forward. "Brian Benson’s memoir about riding from the hinterlands of Wisconsin to Portland, Oregon on his bicycle is as poignant as it is gripping, as hilarious as it is wise. Going Somewhere  is a tender, sexy, take-it-with-you-everywhere-you-go-until-you’ve-read-the-last-page beauty of a book.”— Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail “Irresistible. . . . Let’s hope Benson has more travels in mind. He is a gifted writer, an observant human with an eye for the telling detail and how to tell it.”— Booklist “Charming… His travelogue is vibrant and engrossing, with wonderful portraits of Western landscapes and scruffy small towns, Job-like ordeals of gusty headwinds and breakdowns, and piquant portraits of kindly, parental folks who offer the cyclists food and shelter and another of a menacing drifter on a dark road.”— Publisher’s Weekly Brian Benson grew up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. He now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches writing at the Attic Institute. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 Brian Benson CHAPTER 1 Here or There or There or Here   I pressed my cheek to the clouded glass, took a deep pull of diesel and wood smoke and rain-kissed leaves and sweat-soaked cotton, and watched as ayudantes swarmed the pavement, hoarsely exhorting ancient women in Technicolor traje and cow-eyed backpackers in full-zip rain pants to go here or there or there or here. “¡A Guate a Guaaaate! ¡A Sololá! ¡A Xela a Xela, a Huehue!” My heart was pounding. My skin tingling. Because, here or there or there or here. Because maybe I was on the wrong bus. Because Cuatro Caminos looked a lot like Los Encuentros looked a lot like every other traffic-jammed junction town I’d seen from a sticky vinyl seat on El Madre de Dios or El Don Diego or the dozen other buses that had carried me from destination to destination, from this dusty market to that Mayan pyramid, from that must-see waterfall to this realization: I had mistaken distraction for destination. I had no destination. Beside me, Dave choked on a snore. I turned to see his head listing toward port, his drooping lower lip on the verge of spilling saliva onto a faded brown T-shirt. Somehow, amid all this, he was sleeping. El Madre coughed a Rorschach of smoke, shuddered to life, and lurched forward. Again we were moving, and again that goddamn song was looping through my head: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels . . . I knocked my forehead against the window, hard enough to wake Dave. He blinked his eyes open and rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder. “Almost there, Barney?” he asked, yawning. I’d met Dave two years earlier, back in Madison. He’d instantly forgotten my name and the second time we saw each other had called me Barney Bosworth. I’d been Barney ever since. I nodded. “I think it’s like fifteen more miles to Xela.” “So three hours, then.” “Right.” He pulled a ratty paperback from his bag and opened to the bookmark. I slumped down, jack-knifed my legs against the seat in front of me, and stared out at the roadside market, at the mangy dogs and roasted corn and stacked tortillas and seven-cent avocados and people, so many people, headed here or there or there or here or . . . Honestly, I could no longer tell the difference. Just a year earlier, I’d graduated from UW–Madison with a fill-in-the-blank lib-arts double major, a glut of idealist energy, and the deeply felt conviction that I was meant to be a union organizer, or a high school history teacher, or a writer, or the second coming of Che Guevara, or, ideally, all of the above at once. But I’d missed the app deadline for Union Summer, and getting a teaching certificate seemed like a lot of work, and I hadn’t ever written anything more than term papers and student-rag op-eds, and so, having just watched The Motorcycle Diaries for the third time, I decided what I really needed was that whole “if you want to change the wor