That evening Larry and I pitched our tent behind the coffee shop in the only patch of green grass in the seventy-five miles between Newell and Faith, forty miles up the road. The mosquitoes were so thick that we ate dinner inside our tent. We were exhausted from battling the headwinds all afternoon, and we fell asleep early.
The ripping and chomping started around two o’clock in the morning. I was the first to wake up, and I listened to the sound—rip—chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp—rip—chomp, chomp, chomp, rip, rip—chomp, chomp—for a few moments until the ground began to vibrate under the weight of heavy footsteps, and something snorted. I looked out the window; we were surrounded by six steers, each with a pair of two-foot-long horns. The animals were grazing on the grass around our tent. While I watched them graze, one of them tripped on something and nearly put his horns through the side of the tent.
By now the chomping had awakened Larry, and we agreed that we’d better chase off the steers before a couple of them accidentally stumbled into the tent. We shooed them off fifty yards, then climbed back into the tent, squished the half dozen mosquitoes that followed us in, and fell asleep.
Ten minutes later the rip—chomp, chomp, chomp started again. And again we chased the steers away, and again they came back. We chased them away four times, and they stumbled back four times. The fifth time that they wandered back, Larry bolted out the tent door without taking the time to pull on any clothes, grabbed up a stick, and herded the steers across the prairie. Had the McGillivrays wakened and looked out their bedroom window just then, they would have witnessed the peculiar sight of a human form, stark naked and glowing in the moonlight, chasing behind a group of trotting, four-legged, long-horned beasts. I watched Larry and the steers top a rise in the plain and disappear. Eventually Larry came back, but the steers never did.
“Rodeo steers!” Larry grimaced when Mrs. McGillivray gave him the news in the morning. “You mean the kind that gore the cowboys in the rodeos?”
“That’s them,” she nodded. “They’re a tough bunch, those six. Real prizes, too. I can’t figure how the blazes they got out of the corral last night. But there’s no need to worry. My husband’ll catch ’em. ’Round this country, there’s no place to hide.”
Mr. McGillivray was still off searching for his steers when we left Mud Butte to start our second day in South Dakota, and Larry was feeling quite lucky to be in one piece.
We cycled eighty miles that day, and they all looked exactly alike. It was as though we were pedaling yet standing still. Our surroundings never changed, and the boredom grated on our nerves. We felt trapped. All day we argued and complained about trivial things.
The next morning both of us agreed that we’d better make a real effort at getting the hell out of South Dakota, because if we weren’t out soon, our mental health would disintegrate altogether. We started out from Eagle Butte at seven-thirty. One hundred ten miles and fourteen hours later, the two of us collapsed in a deserted camping area outside of Faulkton. This was the farthest and longest we’d ever pedaled in one day, and except for the Missouri River, which we crossed at midday, the landscape remained just as monotonous as it had been for the last two days. We battled a headwind the whole day, and by evening every part of my body hurt. I couldn’t pedal fast enough to keep ahead of the mosquitoes, but I was too tired and sore to care.
When we pulled off the road at nine thirty, our knees had given out. Standing was painful and squatting proved impossible, so we pitched the tent while sitting down. Our aching bodies kept us awake all night.
In the morning I awoke to the terrible realization that I was still in South Dakota and that the sharp pain in my knees hadn’t gone away. Always before, when I’d gone to bed with sore knees, they felt fine by the next morning. We hoped to put in another one hundred-plus miles this day, which would take us as far as Watertown, so that by the following morning we’d be out of the state. But with my knees as sore as they were, I wasn’t sure I’d last that distance.
We pedaled into Faulkton after breakfast and bought our day’s supply of food. Faulkton turned out to be a kind of oasis. Unlike the other towns we passed through in the last three days, it was a pretty place with lots of greenery. It had neat, well-kept houses, lawns, and flowerbeds, and there weren’t any mosquitoes in the city park. We locked our bikes outside the grocery store and spent an hour walking around the town, looking at the grass, and standing in the shade of the trees, pretending we were someplace far away from South Dakota and its barren plains.
This was our fourth day in South Dakota; August 30, the day that state nearly conquered us. We pedaled for six hours and covered a grand total of forty-one miles, thanks to the howling headwind that was waiting for us at the edge of Faulkton. Larry cycled in front, to block the wind, and he cursed it for the whole two hours it took us to go the twelve miles from Faulkton to one of those rare points of interest in South Dakota—a turn in the road.
At the turn, we stopped to eat lunch. The terrain offered no trees or bushes to block us from the wind, and it occurred to me that I’d forgotten what it was like not to hear wind all day. Frustration and depression overcame us as we stared at the empty land. There were 125 miles of Route 212 still before us, and it appeared as if we were going to have to fight through each and every yard of them. Larry talked about hitchhiking to Minnesota, but as sick as we were of the headwinds and the never-changing plains, we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit defeat.
After the turn, the wind hit us at a slight angle instead of straight on, but even so, it was tough pedaling. In the next two hours we could only manage to cover fourteen miles. We argued a lot during those two hours, mostly out of frustration and pain. Larry didn’t think we were moving fast enough, and I thought my knees would fall apart. There was nothing to look at except each other, as had been the case all morning and for the last three days, and by now we could hardly stand the sight of one another. To escape the other person’s constant griping, we began cycling farther and farther apart. Two hours after the turn we inched into Zell—the first sign of civilization since Faulkton—another Mud Butte minus the fire station. We hadn’t spoken to each other in well over an hour. Even so, we both entered Zell’s lone store and coffee shop with the same idea in mind: to get drunk quick.
There were two wooden benches outside the store, one on either side of the front door. I dropped onto one with my three cans of beer, and Larry sat down on the other, as far away from me as possible. I popped open one of the cans and looked over to my left, toward the east, at the long, straight, flat band of pavement that cut through the flat featureless plain. The wind picked up the pop top and whipped it out of sight. For forty minutes I drank beer, watched the road, and let the wind spray me with dirt. My knees never quit aching. When all three cans were empty, I climbed back onto my bike. I didn’t feel any different mentally or physically from when I arrived.
It took us almost another two hours to pedal the ten miles to the town of Redfield. By the time I could make out Redfield’s cement buildings, the dry heat and the wind and dust had cracked my lips and parched my throat. We stopped at a hamburger stand at the edge of town and ordered a snack, and Larry asked for two cups of cold water so we’d have something to drink while we waited for the food.
“Sorry, you’ll have to pay for water just like you would soft drinks,” grumbled the man behind the counter.
Larry canceled our order, and we pedaled to the grocery store in town.
Redfield had a bad feel to it. The people on the sidewalks looked away when we cycled toward them, and no one returned our greetings. As soon as we picked up cold drinks at the store, we headed for the state campground eight miles to the east.
Just outside of Redfield, Larry stopped at the Wilson Motel, which had an adjoining camping area for trailers and recreational vehicles. And for the first time in half a day, he spoke to me in complete sentences.
“What do you say we call a cease-fire? I’ll apologize for saying you’re the world’s slowest bicycler, and you can tell me you didn’t really mean it when you said you didn’t care if I disappeared off the face of the earth and you never saw me again ’cause you’ve never had a