Being Earnest

by Chris Klibowitz (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find USA

I had flown in under the cover of darkness, both physically and metaphorically. The morning light had revealed the mountains around town, but also my lack of any knowledge beyond who was picking me up from the airport the previous night. The gravel of the highway’s shoulder crunched beneath my boots as I walked into town, in search of coffee, which I found in the back of a bookshop. I had some clarity in my veins and was standing within the greatest local resource. My expectations were low for this assignment. Fly to a professional rider’s hometown, ride bikes in an event, fly home. I honestly hadn’t even Googled the town, which is how I ended up in this bookshop learning for the first time that Ernest Hemingway had lived, died, and was buried right here, in Ketchum, Idaho. As I had barely known that Hemingway resided in Key West, Florida, and Cuba, I was stuck by this new information. The charms of this town had already began to reveal themselves to me during my walk, but armed with this new information I set off to do the only thing I could think of at the moment—get drunk and visit his grave. Knowing that he died in 1961, I looked for a bar that was older than that, and found a 2010 Sun Valley Magazine article online that stated, “…the Casino is probably the only bar in town Hemingway would recognize.” To the Casino then. After a boilermaker, or three, I fumbled with my sunglasses as I stumbled back onto the afternoon street from the familiar dark embrace of the dive bar. Had I known what I’d find in this town, I still would not have had an offering as I stood over Hemingway’s final resting place, just down the highway. The grave was littered with them—trinkets, pencils, bottle caps, and dried flowers. I sat in the shade under a nearby tree and pondered the amount of time and effort that had gone into my gear choice, and packing the right clothes for this ride I was doing the next day. I wondered how someone posing as a writer could’ve done all that, and missed something like this. So I decided to leave him that imposter, the one who had become worried only about the bike, and nothing else. The next morning, I lined up with hundreds of others and rode a bicycle up over the mountains, through the woods, and beyond into a valley unlike anything I could recall having seen. I don’t remember what I wore, or much about the bike I rode—things that seemed of utmost importance at the time—but I do remember the taste of the roasted potatoes that some volunteers cooked for us. And I do remember riding along the dirt road as a calf ran alongside the fence, playing with me as a rolled past. After the post-ride celebration in the town square, I rode through the cemetery, past his grave and the tree, dropping my hand off the bars in a tired wave—a common acknowledgement among cyclists—before pedaling back onto the gravely crunch of the highway shoulder.