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“So how do you like that saddle?” She had a Terry model designed specifically for women. He thought it looked overpadded and overdesigned, but he could keep his opinion to himself in the interest of being not-horrible.
She gave him a look laced with skepticism. “You’re attempting polite chitchat now? After a week? While we’re busting our asses climbing a mountain?”
Tom winced. He wasn’t any good at this. “Bad timing?”
“It’s creative, anyway. But I’m not going to talk about my seat with you, because you’ll just try to sell me on one of those rock-hard monsters you’re riding.”
He had a Brooks saddle, a smooth, hard leather seat handcrafted in England. With thousands of miles on it, it was perfectly molded to his anatomy and incredibly comfortable. So yeah, he’d have tried to sell her on the Brooks.
“What do you want to talk about then?”
“Why should we talk? We were doing okay with silence.”
She was making this a lot harder than it needed to be. He should’ve seen it coming. Playing the good guy always landed you in the snake pit. But now he had to get her talking. He had something to prove, and her resistance felt like a challenge.
“If we get to know each other better, we’ll have a firmer basis for our mutual dislike,” he ventured with a smile he hoped was charming.
The grade of the road got steeper, forcing him to stand up on the pedals and climb hard for a few minutes. Lexie dropped into a lower gear and fell behind him, and when he let her catch up again, she had a resigned expression on her face.
“Okay, we can talk,” she said in a tone that suggested it would be a chore. “But I’ll ask the questions.”
“I can live with that.”
“What do you think of Walden?”
That caught him by surprise, though maybe he should’ve seen it coming. He’d noticed her interest while he was reading it. “You want to talk about books? While we’re busting our asses climbing a mountain?”
She gave him a small smile. “Yeah. Humor me. I teach Thoreau.”
“Yeah, all right.” He thought about it for a minute. It was no accident that he’d brought Walden along on the trip. It was one of his favorites, and he’d read it several times since first encountering it in college. “I think Thoreau had the right idea when he said you can get a clearer view of society if you remove yourself from it, and how that’s a good way to figure out what really matters and what doesn’t. I love the line about how he knows in his soul that most of what his neighbors call ‘good’ is bad. I mean, you’ve seen it, right? You spend enough time on a bike, answer enough questions from people who can’t even begin to conceive of getting from point A to point B without a car or spending a single night without their DVRs, you start to understand Thoreau’s frustration with humanity for being so convinced we need all of this stuff that’s not important. He really pares it down to the essentials: humans require fire, food, clothing, and shelter. The rest is just frivolous.” He paused. “Maybe I’d add ‘bike’ to the list. Fire, food, clothing, shelter, and a bike. That about does it for me.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time, and he started to worry his answer had been too weird. Taryn was always giving him a hard time for alternating long stretches of silence with gloomy, apocalyptic speeches. Had that been a gloomy, apocalyptic speech? Pretty close. Damn.
Finally, he couldn’t stand it. “Sorry, I’m kind of rusty at chitchat. Was I supposed to say ‘It’s pretty good’?”
Her lips drew together in a bow and then slowly stretched out into a wide smile. Maybe he wasn’t completely botching this after all.
“I’m just a little stunned to hear you string so many words together, Geiger. Are you aware people don’t usually converse in paragraphs?”
He grunted, and she laughed at him—another victory, even if it was at his expense. After a pause, she said, “I hear what you’re saying. I love the book, too, the whole idea of living in solitude to find out what life is really all about, rejecting the parts of society that are just convention. My students go crazy for it.” She frowned, biting her lip. “But I’m not sure you’re getting the whole point. Thoreau went to the woods to find out what life was about so he could be sure he was really living. That’s my favorite line in the book—‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.’ ” Her eyes went all dreamy as she quoted, her speech growing more passionate.
“I bet you’re a good teacher,” he said without thinking.
She frowned. “I do okay. I’m kind of burned out on it, though, after seven years. Anyway, my point is, part of the book is about getting away from society. But it’s about recommitting to it, too. He goes back home eventually, you know? And he tells his neighbors about what he’s been up to, even though he more or less thinks they’re idiots. He writes Walden, and he tours all over the country giving lectures. Thoreau wasn’t saying the answer was to go live in the woods and hoe your own bean field. He was saying you also have to mix with the rest of the human race, get your hands dirty, try to solve the problems. Otherwise, yo
u’re not really living.”
The comment was so naive, it made him smile. If testifying in the trial that had brought Vargas Industries to its knees had taught him anything, it was the futility of trying to change the world for the better. Tom had gone to bat for his convictions, and the result was fifteen thousand people out of work, his divorce, and three members of his family who wouldn’t speak to him. Not exactly a banner day for the good guys. He’d have been better off hoeing beans and keeping his head down.
“Eh,” he finally answered. “I think I’ll stick to my ‘life of quiet desperation’ and leave the marrow-sucking to idealistic English teachers like you.”
Lexie looked amused that he was quoting the book back at her. “Lucky I’m not a vegetarian.”
They lapsed back into silence as the grade grew steeper again. Tom took a swig from his water bottle, curling his lip at the taste of hot plastic. The sun was getting more intense, and the landscape shifted abruptly from ponderosa pine forest to bare lava rock. Geologically speaking, central Oregon’s mountains were among the youngest in the country, and there were a lot of places where nothing grew at all. Tom loved the barren lava fields of this part of the state. They reminded him of the moon, and in fact astronauts had trained for the first moon landing at Lava Lands, not too far from here.
“Can I ask you something?” Lexie said after the ground leveled out a bit.
“Fire away.”
