Go Big or Go Home (4 page)

W
E LEFT A NOTE FOR
my dad, then jumped on our road bikes. Our mountain bikes would get their chance another day.

From home to Hill City normally takes twenty minutes on the Mickelson Trail, the rails-to-trails bike path that runs the length of the Black Hills. We did it in fifteen. It was one of those perfect Black Hills days, deep blue sky and dry mountain air scented by ponderosa pine.

The Mickelson Trail continued along Spring Creek, but we got off it and pedaled into town. Hill City sits halfway between the mountain carvings, Rushmore and Crazy Horse. It got its start as a mining camp during the 1876 gold rush. Its boom went bust when word came of nuggets big as candy bars being found to
the north in Deadwood Gulch.

We rolled past the sign that says,
HILL CITY, HEART OF THE HILLS, POPULATION
800
PEOPLE, ONE OLD TRAIN, AND FIFTEEN DINOSAUR SKELETONS AND SKULLS.
As we waited to cross the main street, we could hear the steam whistle of
The 1880,
the train that takes the tourists eleven miles over to Rushmore. Traffic was heavy with the usual RVs and swarms of bikers roaring north to Sturgis.

Downtown is about eight blocks long. We walked our bikes along the sidewalk on the west side of Main underneath the hanging flower baskets and past the art galleries, gift shops, and restaurants.

“Trendier than ever,” Quinn said. “I can't help myself. I like it.”

A few blocks past the museum, we headed for Crystal's window at the Grabba Java.

We were fifth in line. It was one o'clock, still prime time for the legions of fans addicted to the hearty bean ground and brewed by the famous Magdalena “Maggie” Ruiz.

Even at the height of tourist season, half of Maggie's business came from locals. Crystal's mom even did a good business in winter. Her smile and personality were so magical, there were stories of Mormons driving through, buying four-dollar coffee, then throwing it in the first trash can they came to. It didn't hurt that Maggie was beautiful and single.

By now we'd moved up to third. Quinn asked if Crystal and her mom were still living out of town at the
Creekside. I told him they were. The Creekside was a string of cabins on the opposite side of town from us, on Spring Creek as it flowed north toward Sheridan Lake.

Finally, our turn.

Crystal's smile lit up, and she let it shine. “What's up, Brady? Hey, Quinn! I haven't seen you since a couple of hours ago. I was afraid you weren't going to show up this summer.”

“Glad I did,” Quinn said.

Crystal took our orders and got to work putting together our smoothies. The sandwiches were premade. “You guys see the meteor shower last night?”

“Show her, Brady.”

I slung my daypack off my back and pulled out the space traveler. “Meet Fred. Fred arrived at my house last night.”

“Fred? Is that really a meteorite? How'd you find him?”

“He pretty much found me.” I filled her in on a few of the nearly gruesome details but had to cut it short. People were waiting behind us, and time was at a premium.

Crystal poured our smoothies out of their blenders into tall to-go cups, lidded them, and popped in the straws. My bike was closest to the window, and I took them one by one from her hands. I handed Quinn his smoothie and glanced back at Crystal. Her long, raven-black hair had a sheen to it that seemed miraculous. Quinn was bumping my shoulder, trying to distract me
with something. He was handing me a twenty. Somehow I'd forgotten this whole exchange had anything to do with money. I passed it along to Crystal.

“Keep the change,” Quinn said.

“Hey, thanks.” Crystal beamed, and handed out our sandwiches. “That was cool meeting your dad, Quinn. What a guy!”

“I'm sure he made quite an impression on your mom.”

“How's that? She didn't say anything.”

“Nothing about his foot in his mouth?”

“Not at all. When he came through the second time, on his Harley, he looked so cool—”

“He came back?”

“Yeah, to get a sandwich for the road, came to my window. He knew how jammed the restaurants would be up in Sturgis.”

I shouldn't have looked over my shoulder. The guy right behind us, a biker, gave me a scowl that could have corroded titanium. That was one scary-looking character. We said good-bye to Crystal and started to walk our bikes over to Grabba Java's picnic tables. “Hey, Quinn,” she called. “I like your hair!”

Quinn tossed his head a little, opened his mouth for a quick comeback, but settled for a flustered wave. I made like I didn't notice.

“Cool that your dad came back to Grabba Java,” I said as we sat down and started in on the sandwiches. “He should've come through Maggie's side, though, and
flirted with her some more.”

“Not gonna happen. Anybody he starts to get interested in, next thing I know he runs the other way. My theory is he thinks there can't be anyone to measure up to my mother.”

“My parents say she was awful special, your mom.”

“I know. Everybody says that. I wish I could remember her…”

“So tell me about Wyoming. Your dad's looking at work in the gas fields over there?”

“Yeah, at twenty-one dollars an hour, in the Jonah field.”

“You might really move there?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“He's already gone over and checked it out?”

“We both did, a couple of weeks ago.”

“Isn't Yellowstone over there somewhere?”

“Not close enough.”

“So, what's it like?”

“A total wasteland. Dustiest place I've ever seen, and the wind blows hard all the time. My dad has a line on a fifty-year-old trailer somebody's been using for storage. It's totally a piece of junk and the rent they want for it is unbelievable. They're punching gas wells like crazy over there, and all these guys from Michigan are pouring in for the jobs. I guess they used to be autoworkers. Anyway, my dad had to put a thousand bucks nonrefundable on the trailer so they'd save it for him, even though he's still undecided about the whole deal. At least he says he is.”

“Sounds bleak.”

“Bleak is the word.”

“Sure hope he doesn't have to go through with it.”

“It looks like he will. We've got a ‘For Sale' sign in front of our house in Lead.”

“You could stay behind and live with us.”

“I think my dad's going to talk to your dad about it after Sturgis.”

“That'd be awesome.”

“I guess.”

“You guess? We could start high school together, play basketball together, flip a coin over who asks Crystal out…She likes your hair, dude.”

Quinn popped me one on the arm. “You're such a fungus, Brady. Let's buy some water and some Gatorade, a couple of PowerBars, check our inflation, and blast off on that ride. Sort out who gets dropped and who does the dropping.”

I
T TOOK US NO TIME
at all to blast over to Keystone, ten miles east with a lot of downhill. I led the way, which was unusual. Quinn was the stronger rider, and I'd always let him draft me. The guy out front is working so much harder, there's no comparison.

Whatever was going on, I had never felt stronger. With a look over my shoulder, I knew exactly what Quinn was thinking: it was brainless of me to go out in front on these first ten easy miles to Keystone. Once we started up the Iron Mountain Road, I wouldn't have anything left. He would drop me like a rock off the Empire State Building.

What did I care? It wouldn't be anything new. I had this amazing feeling that the sky was the limit. Who knows, maybe I could turn the tables on him twice in one day.

We pulled into Keystone, which is just around the corner from Rushmore. Its boardwalk was jam-packed with tourists flocking to the T-shirt shops and burger places. We rode side by side through town, sucking from our water bottles. I wasn't even breathing hard. I couldn't believe it. I felt like an iron man. “Wanna stop for a rest?” I asked.

I guess it came out like I was offering to go easy on him. Quinn shot me a look like I'd never seen from him before. “Not unless you do.”

“Alrighty, then.”

It took only a couple minutes to breeze through Keystone. When I hung a left onto the beginning of the Iron Mountain Road and started to climb, I glanced at Quinn and saw fire in his eyes. I was in for some serious humility training.

I put my head down and went to work. This scenic byway, narrow and winding, was a big draw for tourists, and this was Sturgis week. In addition to the cars, SUVs, pickups, and RVs, motorcycles were flying by like squadrons of hornets. I kept my front wheel safely on the white shoulder line. By now Quinn should have been breathing down my neck, but I couldn't hear him at all. With the first tunnel in sight, I looked back. Amazingly, he was a hundred yards behind.

He's only playing with you, I thought. Still thinks you're going to burn out anytime now. He's waiting for the steepest grade, and then he's going to blow by. Drop you like you're standing as still as a ton of bricks that
slid off the back of a truck.

Can't let that happen, I vowed as I passed through the cool of the tunnel. On the far side I stood up on my pedals and really pushed. Maybe I could open up an even wider lead.

The gears I was using weren't as low as I usually had to go to. My heart was pumping like a steam engine. My muscles felt like iron, my tendons like cables of steel. That strange electrical buzz was running through me all the way to my grip on the handlebars.

Climbing all the while, I was about to enter a big sweeping corner. I took another look and found Quinn even farther back, two hundred yards at least. He had his head down and was working hard. Quinn wasn't used to this. What was going through his mind?

As the corner straightened out, I saw three riders up ahead decked out in identical Lycra outfits of orange, white, and neon green. They were attacking the grade like they were taking no prisoners. Probably they were training for a race.

For a while I held my position, breathing deeper while wondering if it might be possible to reel them in. It would have been more fun for Quinn and me to both try to pass these guys, but Quinn had fallen back some more.

Wouldn't that be something, I thought, if I could catch these serious riders, these Lycra guys? Probably they were from a competitive cycling club. For all I knew, they were pro racers.

Go for it, I thought, and began my attack. I put my head down, kept pumping hard. Incredibly, I kept gaining on them. As I got close, approaching the second tunnel, I checked to see if there was any traffic trying to overtake the four of us. There wasn't. I swung out wide and put the hammer down as I climbed up one of the famous pigtails, where the Iron Mountain Road actually passes over itself. My burst of speed placed me alongside the three. The Lycra guys were in their twenties. They were lean, mean bicycling machines.

I stood on the pedals long enough to regain the white line in front of them. The mountain was dishing out the pain, all right, but I had something left. I opened up a gap in front of the trio.

What a feeling! It was like I'd broken through some threshold and come out on the other side. It was like I'd never had a problem with my lungs. They felt as big as a whale's. Now I wanted to see if I could keep pushing like this all the way to the top. No letting the Lycra guys catch me.

As I approached the tunnel, I had a great view almost straight down to where I'd been shortly before. I looked for Quinn, but he wasn't there yet.

The road bent south again, climbing another pigtail toward the last tunnel. From behind, another pack of Sturgis riders roared by, all thunder and chrome and black leather. The grade was brutally steep. With the summit tunnel in sight, I stood on the pedals and let it rip. This one was going to go in the record books.

Riding through that last tunnel, I was on top of the world. On the other side, I jumped off the bike and took in the awesome view to the south with the green, rolling prairies meeting the mountains. Then I looked back from where I'd come and found the Lycra guys emerging from the tunnel. As they coasted by, the lead rider bobbed his head in my direction. “Strong rider,” he called.

Strong rider! He was talking about me!

A pickup with a slide-in camper squeezed through the tunnel, then a rumbling swarm of motorcycles, but no sign yet of Quinn. The view north through the tunnel is an American classic, just the way the engineers planned it. The tunnel frames the faces of the Rushmore presidents perfectly, bright white granite surrounded by deep green forest and blue, blue sky.

If you live in the Hills, you think about those four a lot. In my book, Abraham Lincoln has to be the greatest, but Theodore Roosevelt will always be my favorite.

T.R. knew and loved the Black Hills, and not only that, he had a scary time with asthma as a kid before the medicines in my inhaler were even dreamed of. After he was president, T.R. went on an expedition to South America to explore a tributary of the Amazon that had never even been mapped. He ran into piranhas, starvation, rapids, malaria, mutiny, and Indians with poison-tipped arrows. Talk about extreme and insane. He lived to tell the tale, even if his health was broken.

Right here, right now, I felt closer to Teddy Roosevelt than ever before. I murmured those heroic lines of his I had memorized in fifth grade: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

Here came Quinn at last, maybe five minutes behind me. Five minutes was incomprehensible. Had he been dogging it? Was he feeling sick? What was going on?

Quinn got off his bike and joined me on a big granite boulder with a drop-dead view of the prairies of Custer State Park. No gloating, I told myself. Quinn didn't have much to say. We drank Gatorade and chewed our sticky PowerBars. He looked more wasted than I'd ever seen him. Finally he came out with “What was that all about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don't give me that, you Nerf ball. I'm talking about that climb you just did. I'm talkin' about what in the world's gotten into you?”

“Feelin' good, that's all.”

“You were an animal.”

“I can't account for it.”

“At least tell me you had to honk on your inhaler. Did you put it away just before I limped in like a ground sloth?”

“I haven't had it out.”

“Dude, you rule. Never thought I would see this happen.”

Remembering my no-gloating rule, I changed the subject. “What a view, eh?”

Quinn didn't answer for a long time. I wasn't sure where his head was at. Finally he said, “You couldn't pry me out of the Black Hills with a crowbar.”

Me neither, I thought. But Quinn might not have a choice. No wonder he seemed so far away.

I tightened my chin strap for the descent into Custer State Park. Quinn did the same.