7th of July. Mansfield, PA to Washington, PA . We slept late, woke up slowly and showered together in the morning. We didn't kiss. It was sexier that way, just watching each other, like two kids at camp. It was the first morning I'd woken up feeling like Kate was all mine. The day before had been our first long ride on the bike. We were getting West finally. We were far from anyone we knew and we were alone. We were not going to turn around. The physical boundaries between us were gone. We walked around naked. We touched each other when we felt like it. You can spend a lot of time thinking about what you want in a woman, or a man, but what you really need is to be naked with someone else.

We stopped at a gas station in a small town not too far from the boundary of the Allegheny National Forest. A couple on his and hers bikes pulled up next to us. The guy was riding a huge Yamaha Road King and the woman rode a Harley Sportster 883. They were from western New York somewhere near Rochester and were riding a big loop for the weekend. It was the first time the woman had ever ridden a big distance.

From there the road went into the hills, winding its way west along the northern slope of the Alleghenies. Kate kept right on dee-jaying. It was longer than I thought to get to the entrance of the National forest boundary but not as long as the guy had thought either. The air got more fragrant and cooler as we got higher up.

We got back on the bike and rode away from the forest. We were pretty close to the top of pass that went through and it wasn't long before we tipped over and were riding across a little plateau with mountain farms on either side. The farms were smaller and more exuberant than their lowlander counterparts, suggestive of vaguely hippie origins or just of mountain people's universal value of defiance. Instead of the ship-shape uniformity we'd see in the main valley, these farms were littered with clutter, like rusty home-made sculptures of the sun, or chairs in a field facing the sunset, and big overflowing vegetable gardens plowed roughly in a meadow. The regions of this country may change, and the normative values along with them, but there is always the same divide between the highlands and the lowlands.

The ride on I-80 wasn't comfortable. High speed riding in late afternoon traffic and all the while the dark clouds piling up menacing on the horizon. I was feeling shitty about everything, shitty in the desperate kind of way. Like we should just scrap the whole thing, but I couldn't do that so I was thinking of just running on I-80 all the way to Chicago. It would just be one more long day's ride that way and Kate and I could cut our karmic losses and I could head out West. I would have to stop and tell her though, at least that's what I told myself. The decision point came at the junction of I-80 and I-79 at Grove City.

"Do you want to call Blake before we go?"
It was the first time I'd said his name out loud.
"Nah," she said. "I'll do it in the morning or something."
I was surprised. The phone call had seemed mandatory so far. It was never long and she always rolled her eyes after it, but she did it first thing every time we unloaded. Or at least second thing.
"I don't think there's a helmet law here," Kate said.
"I don't know."
"I saw a bunch of people riding without on the way in."
"Let's not take em then."