He was right in front of me, but I actually had time, as I swerved around the wreck on the wet mountain curve and looked for flat enough place to park the motorcycle, to think: And here I thought getting robbed two days ago in Cuenca would be the low point of our trip.
“Adventure travel” seems packaged and safe until you’re in the pouring rain in the Amazon jungle with an injured buddy and a bike that won’t start, a satellite phone that won’t work, and a 20,000-foot Andes mountain looming between you and a warm bed.
During our motorcycle trip, Tommy and I were trading for shitter lit One Man Caravan, the account written by Robert Edison Fulton, Jr. about his 1932 motorcycle trip around the world. I finally finished it this week and can now vouch for the veracity of its concluding sentiments:
Then late one afternoon I drove into the Avenue, a slicker buttoned about my mud-caked corduroys, and my boots took the splashing of the New York delivery wagons and shiny limousines alike. It was the day before Christmas.
As I lifted my foot over the saddle in the courtyard of an apartment building, I shed a surreptitious tear. The haughty doorman, watching from behind the grilled door, didn’t see that tear. Or perhaps he thought it was rain on my face, if he thought anything other than Mr. And Mrs. Fulton were having a strange visitor.
So from Christmas to New Year’s the motorcycle stood in the courtyard. I looked at it when I came and went, but I did not touch it. And when I glanced down from the lofty windows it appeared forlorn, a small thing in a vast wilderness. It had looked that way when I strode out with the Commandant at dawn to start across the Syrian Desert—so small a thing in such a large place.
The New Year came and went and sometimes I found myself going a whole day without a single thought of the year before. Then one day I started the engine again. The saddle felt strange. I was unaccustomed to it. Together we headed over to the North River, to go out to Riverside Drive into the country. But my trip was all over. All finished. This was just a little jaunt where there would be traffic lights and gasoline fumes and crowds on the highways.
At her dock lay the Queen Mary. Was it my imagination or did the front wheel twist toward the boat? No, the motorcycle was tugging at me. It wanted to ride aboard the Queen Mary, across the Atlantic to London and its home. Suddenly all became clear. The trip ’round the world was not yet finished for the motorcycle ... Nor for me. ...
I’m alone in a diner in Butler, Indiana, eating potato soup and an
egg salad sandwich and drinking coffee.I considered one last beery lunch, but I’m already dazed from four hours of pounding into a hard and rainy headwind.
Scout has been counting the days until tomorrow, so I’m determined to get to Chicago tonight.
But I’m not home yet, and I'm still thinking about last night’s party at Tom’s
boathouse, on Lake Erie.
Though it was organized as a homecoming thing, there wasn’t
any ticker tape.
People don’t care about other people’s travels except as a
jumping off point to talk about their own travels. So the more exotic the
travel, the less they care.
And to Clevelander, Nova Scotia is exotic. (To a Chicagoan
too. I had to show my life insurance agent an electronic map to prove that traveling
to Nova Scotia didn’t mean leaving North America.)
So we talked about other things: a fire at a prominent
Cleveland bar, a federal investigation of Cuyahoga County politicians, and the locally relevant topic: how guys
got their fingers cut off. (At one point in the party, there were three guests
with missing digits. Cleveland is a tough town.)
It was a Thursday, so everybody was gone by midnight.
Tommy and I took the dog and a bottle down to the beach and talked about the
trip—the high points and low points, what the whole thing had meant, what an insufferable know-it-all dick Tommy really is, and how it all came to a head one night
on a pool table in Binghamton, New York ….
Now that that writing is done, the trip is finally over.
I’m
squarely back into the disorganized daily churn of ambition versus money, small
pleasures, regular chores, pointless guilt, bad habits, familiar worries, self-doubt,
occasional panic, exceptions to rules, special favors, other people, tight
schedules, awkward moments, boring mornings, unplanned-for joy and the
whispering hint of a toothache.
What I miss about the trip is the way it organized my life:
Gave it a focus—the broad focus of the years and months and weeks of laying the
groundwork at home and at work, logistical planning, emotional preparation.
And then the daily doing: Wake up, drink coffee, get on the
motorcycle and ride. Take spontaneous detours, or stop only for gas: your call.
The journey was a happy, easy place to live.
Home, I must acknowledge, is where the real adventure
is.
On the home stretch, I
found myself tallying up what little I know about good fortune and fate. —DM
“Does this seem like kind of a long trip to you?” I asked
Tom as we motorshambled around the mountain town of Woodstock, N.H.,
looking for a our 14th straight motel room.
“Yes,” he said, without a hesitation. “This is a
long trip.”
But it had been utterly the right thing to do.
That was proven far beyond doubt during a few sweet, easy morning
rides in the sun that made my heart swell so palpably that I worried—I hoped!—it might be permanently
stretched.
The road to ruin doesn't run through Cooperstown,
N.Y.
Lou Gehrig said, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." But of course he was only guessing.
And only when you're swimming with the universal tide do you happen into scenes like the one at the
family-owned gas station back near St. Peter's, Nova Scotia. Dad is manning the pump. Mom is inside at the
cash register, keeping warm on an unseasonably cold and windy summer's day.
Meanwhile, the seven-year-old son is carefully examining our
motorcycles, muttering his impressions to himself.
“Which one do you like better?” I ask with a smile.
Unhesitatingly, the boy weighs in, first pointing to my
bike. “Orange is my favorite color,” he says. But then he points to Tom’s red
tank and offers a counterpoint. “But that one reminds me of Christmas.”
I say the weather reminds me of Christmas, and we all laugh
and the kid happily flits back into the warm station to tell his mother about the men and their motorcycles.
When Tom and I get drunk, we’re given—increasingly with age,
I’m afraid to say—to go on to one another about how lucky we have been in life, to
have had wild adventure and family love, to have had interesting work and rich
friendship too.
But pondering fortune is a drunkard’s game, because it can
lead to conclusions. And conclusions about fortune are almost always foolish
and usually dangerous.
Our good fortune was on my mind as we rode through Pennsylvania, on the
last leg of the trip. Two lucky bastards on a three-week trip on
shiny toys—kids, wives and work to go home to—using a poor state's leached land
as our personal roller coaster.
We stopped for lunch at a tavern in Troy.
The bartender ascertained we were tourists and rattled off a
half-formed standup redneck routine about how she had her third baby on Sunday
and returned to work the following Thursday. About how she’s so ill-educated that she
grew up believing that the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania was connected to
the Grand Canyon (of Arizona). About how, if we think she’s a hillbilly, down
the road we'd find they have “even less teeth.”
And the teeth were bared.
A
yard sign in Meadeville read:
Support the Troops.
Period!
In Warren, we stopped at a gas station to ask for a steer
toward a cheap motel. The attendant asked where we were from.
“I like Cleveland,” he told Tom approvingly, “because it
reminds me of Western P.A.”
“But I don’t like Chicago.” He was glowering at me.
Why not? I asked.
“BHO!” he said.
I looked at him blankly.
“Barack Hussein Obama, the President!”
At the bar at the Holiday Inn that he directed us to, a
patron left his USA Today. On the
front page, President Obama was throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star
Game.
With a ballpoint pen, the guy had casually drawn on horns, and a tail.
During the presidential campaign last year, Obama said, “You go into some of these small towns in
Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been
gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the
Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and
they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to
guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Of course it was the most accurate thing Obama said during the whole campaign, and the hot water he got into proved the old axiom about politics: a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.
But a broader axiom also applies: Be mighty fucking reluctant to explain people’s fortunes, good
or bad, yours or others’. Remember the chipmunks!
Most of the time, your best bet is to ride as aggressively
as you dare down the best road you can find and try not to take the weather
personally—or take credit for it.
And enjoy what presents itself to be enjoyed. Like the
moment on the hotel patio at Lake George, New York, where our wives met us.
As we sipped beer and waited for Cristie and Juli to arrive
in the rental car from Albany, I admitted and Tom copped to being a little
nervous. And shortly after the happy and giggling reunion, we got the first hint as to why:
Without telling us (or consulting one another) each woman had used the occasion of our absence and the inspiration of our self-will, to get a tattoo.
The old guy talked tough outside the New Hampshire motorcycle shop, but I think if his wife ain't goin' to Sturgis, he ain't goin' either.
I told my five-year-old daughter I was writing this book, just for her. "Good," she said. —DM
Our conversations on this trip were happily punctuated by
long stretches inside the privacy of our own helmets. Actually, the conversations served as
punctuation for those hours. At
lunch, at the mid-afternoon tavern-stop, at the end of the day, we’d get off
the bikes, take off our helmets and, if we remembered, turn off the gas valves.
("I'm reading at a third-grade level," I remarked as I stared dumbly at a dinner menu one night.) Then we'd groan a little and stretch, and swagger into the bar like dusty cowboys and order a beer rub our
faces and try to re-acclimate to an eerie new windless, motionless, soundless
world.
It wasn’t usually until the second beer that we started
talking at all. But once we started talking, the talking was often very good.
In a magazine story about a long sailing race, I
wrote, “there’s really something marvelous about sitting on a sailboat all
night, trying for once in your hectic modern life not to make long stories
short, but rather to draw short stories out, adding context and depth and
detail and color in order to pass the time. Which is the principal reason human
beings started telling stories in the first place.”
Similarly:
Over lunch at a bar in Halifax we were all too pleased to
let the beautiful young bartender ease out the madcap stemwinder about how she moved here nine months ago from her native St. John, New Brunswick. One morning she didn't feel like being at work. "Wasn't the first time I ever felt that way," she said with a shrug. But in the course of this day, she quit the job, canceled her lease, dumped her
boyfriend and told her parents she was leaving. She gathered a bag of clothes
and a bag of booze, and hitched a ride to Halifax, where she took up a life of Riley that she was already beginning to tire of, as she contemplated moving on.
The story was pure cock and bull, of course—each crafted and
carefully honed detail surely a cover-up for some unspeakable agony and teenage
humiliation—but we pretended to believe it (pretended for a while, even to
ourselves) and we sincerely wished her luck on her next plan, to blow out of
Halifax and take up temporary residence in … Hawaii. So beautiful and tragic
and evocative of our college Girl Days was she that we had to drag one another
out of there by reciting cold, hard statistics: We are 40 years old (not 26);
we’ve had four beers and we’re riding two motorcycles; we have to be in
Yarmouth in 24 hours, to catch a ferry back to the States, where our wives are
meeting us in three days. Somehow, we brought ourselves to bid the lass farewell and got back on
the road.
Man smiles through tears as he prepares to leave his heart in Halifax.
Loaded with people and cars and motorcycles, the famous Cat
ferry from Yarmouth to Portland main screams across the North Atlantic in
four and a half hours. We sat in the cabin, slowly drinking cans of Budweiser, and talking even slower. After two weeks together, we were fresh out of
news, beyond bravado, and just trying to pass the time. We quizzed each other
about our daily lives—portraying the rhythms of our weekly routines—and we
re-examined stories about each other's childhoods that we’d heard years before
but, not having been parents before, not known what to make of. In newly demanded
detail, our dog-eared childhood stories became richly interesting again—in the
hearing and in the telling.
The time got away from us, and we were startled to see that ship
was pulling into the harbor at Portland.
The United States staged a sneak attack on us, at Portland Harbor.
Frantically I dashed up to the concession counter
to get us a couple of hot dogs and tall coffees to get ourselves in proper
shape to unstrap the bikes and ride off the boat through Customs.
“What, no more beer?” said one last charismatic Canadian woman with one
last sardonic wink.
A careful clearing of Customs.
But certainly the most productive conversation the trip
afforded us came the next morning when, after a long, hot search, we found the
rock under which hid the owner of “Once Upon a Triumph.” It was one of several
Triumph shops I’d found on the Internet, that we visited along the way for
minor repairs and major harangues about pistons and cylinders and carburetors
and valves, low-end and top-end and jets and floats, seats and fenders and
cables and tanks.
When we found this gear guru—in a tiny house in a cramped little human-warren across the tracks from the frolicking July sunbathers in Old Orchard
Beach, Maine—we had to rock him like a motorcycle stuck in the mud. Or the
human equivalent: what appeared to be a depressive, defensive Demerol haze.
“Is this Once Upon a Triumph?” Tom asked eagerly.
“Used to be,” he grumbled, blinking in the shade.
The motorcycle mechanic didn't start on the first kick.
Once we got him started, though—he reluctantly offered to
show us his personal bike, in the shed in the back—he went right through the
gears. Soon, he invited us into the house to see pictures of bikes he’d worked on over the
years. Introduced us to his 10-year-old daughter, who he used to deliver to
kindergarten in a sidecar. Told us at great length his method for lacing the
spokes to make a motorcycle wheel. And finally pushed his 1969 Triumph Trophy
out of the garage so we could take photos of it, "if you guys want to."
"I can pull it out if you guys want to take a picture."
An hour and a half later, he was Rick!, posing for snapshots, giving us each his
phone number and shaking our hands and seeming pretty sorry we had to go.
We never figured out what had happened to Rick, where
his daughter’s mother had gone, or why he had lost enthusiasm for his business. The few explanations he offered didn't add up.
And, not on a journalism assignment, I didn’t have to get to the bottom of it.
But as Tom and I walked around town looking for a place to
eat before heading west toward New Hampshire and the White Mountains, I suggested hopefully
that maybe our visit had reawakened the giants within Rick, and we agreed that
if Once Upon a Triumph makes a big comeback in the vintage Triumph restoration business in the Northeast, this day might have had something to
do with it.
Just then we heard the familiar sound of an old Triumph and
there came Rick, all cleaned up, shoes on, hair tied up neatly, roaring up the hill
on his ’69 Trophy with a big grin on his face and a happy wave for us.
The sixth in an
ongoing (but not endless) series written to explain to my daughter, when she’s older, what drove her
40-year-old dad to buy a motorcycle and ride it to Nova Scotia. —DM
On our last day of scribbling around Cape Breton, we made
our gray, rainy way to Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. The weather was discouraging, the scenery
was monotonous, we'd been at it for 10 days and I allowed myself to forgot the full-time emergency that is motorcycling. I
settled into a numb motormeditation.
We were behind a car as we rounded this curve, and we saw
two chipmunks on the side of the road. They made a break for it, together, ahead of the car. They must have been good friends. They
must have been thinking, “As long as we’re together, nothing can happen to us.”
Boom-boom, and suddenly, both were lying twitching, in the
road.
The trip contained a number of incidents like that, which I might
have taken as omens.
But omens are only omens if you ignore them. I took it as a
warning, and reminded myself to wake up—and to fight the creeping assumption
that just because Tom and I have survived lots of recklessness before, this
probably wasn’t the first time the chipmunks crossed the road, either.
As Tom and I get older, our idea of danger matures—did Knievel leave his turn signal on at Caesar's Palace?—even if our sense of humor retains its dorm-room flavor.
A gentleman farmer friend of mine says from experience, “When you have a
bulldozer, every problem looks like something to be pushed over.”
When you ride a motorcycle a long way, the metaphors ride on
two wheels too.
Convictions require
courage. You want to accelerate through trouble, generating more
centrifugal force and pushing you down harder on the pavement. Chicken out in a turn and
hit the brakes and you’ll stand up, wobble and crash.
You can handle more
than you think. Just when you’re leaning over as far as you can imagine
without losing traction—you must have faith that you can go down farther. You can!
You’ve got to know
where you’re headed, not just where you are. When making a sharp and long
turn, the sure way to blow it is to look down at your front wheel to see how
you’re doing against the white line. The sure way to make the turn perfectly is
to look 20 or 30 or 40 yards ahead at where you’re headed. As if by magic, the
motorcycle simply goes there.
The most important motorcycling metaphor has to do with risk
versus reward, confidence versus competence, and how all those calculations
change with age.
I once interviewed a 64-year-old motorcycle racer who told
me nothing had changed since he was raced as a young man, “I still crash and I
still get hurt. I don’t have fear. I’m still good. I still do the best I can
with what I’ve got.”
And then he forgot to put gas in the tank and stalled on a
practice lap and had to be brought back to the pits on trailer.
But better—and even safer—to be overconfident than overly cautious.
And much more importantly, better to think about reward than
to dwell on risk. Better, and as I age, harder.
When I was young, the reward was infinite, and all out in front. (In a college journal, I once allowed myself to doubt I’d be satisfied
if my writing career amounted to no more than Kurt Vonnegut's.)
It’s easy to risk your potential, because it doesn't really exist.
It’s harder to risk your kid’s father, your wife’s husband.
And even harder than that to risk missing a mortgage
payment, to risk running out of tuition money, to risk having to work hard for
money when you’re 70. Losing the two vacations a year, having to choose between golf and drinking money, cooking instead of going out, giving up the babysitter (and the movies).
To risk the “personal brand.” To say “fuck you” to your boss or your wife, and risk
being punched in return. To tell someone you can do something you've never done before and risk fucking it up
royally. To surround yourself with strangers and risk comprehensive rejection.
To learn, to feel, to actually listen: Natural to a young person; increasingly terrifying as we get older.
When you’re young, you must try to control your impulses. As you
get older, you must notice your impulses. Outer aggression demands inner
aggression. “Every once in while a man must do something he’s a little afraid
of,” is how my dad used to put it.
But when you do that—and it really is all you have to do: something you're a little afraid of—the risk and the reward melt together,
into one single good thing.
When motorcyclists pass one another on the road, they take
their left hand off the grip and give each other a casual, low wave. Early in
the trip, I spent a lot of time thinking about what that wave signifies, what the right-wing Harley
guy thinks he has in common with the Eurostyle BMW rider and the city geeks on
new Triumphs made to look old.
It is: Everybody in the world knows the risk of riding a
motorcycle, and anybody with an imagination could probably conjure the reward.
But nobody knows quite how good it feels when you mix the risk and reward together—and
how the mix feels better every year you get older.
Nobody but us—and we'd rather keep it that way.
That's why the wave is casual, and that's why it's low.
The fifth installment on my midlife motorcycle trip, for my daughter to read someday and anyone else to read today. —DM
There is a point in every journey when you realize how very,
very far you are from home, and you face the fact that the only way back is to continue doing the
tiring, repetitive, nervous-making and difficult work that got you all the way here.
The first time I remember experiencing this was on a sailing
trip down the coast of the Baja Peninsula, and it occurred to me that between
me and a flight home was 30 miles of ocean to the coast, and then even if I
somehow got across that, I’d crawl ashore exhausted, into a desert.
On this trip, I didn’t feel truly stuck in the journey until
a rainy, hair-raising trip on the south end of the Cabot Trail. We were exactly as far away from home as we could be. Meanwhile, the rain
pin-pricked my face, the slick pavement eroded my nerve. Less-maneuverable cars were piling up behind me on some of
the coastal stretches. I suggested we stop at Baddeck, to wait out the rain.
After a week of rain, the notion of waiting it out seemed
less practical than trading in our motorcycles for a boat.
So we drank beer at the Baddeck yacht club.
Being far away—and being stuck far away—is psychologically difficult. A friend of mine tells me he doesn't like to travel because it's a
painful reminder that people get along in other places without him.
But it has advantages, the most important of which is that it makes it hard to take a self-centric view. Which makes it easier to see other people.
On this trip, the most thought-provoking insight I came to was that in Canada—at least in the eastern
provinces that I was traveling in—at the
very least in the places I visited in these provinces—women are utterly
in charge of things, and everyone seems happier in the arrangement.
First, I was bowled over by the utter beauty of a scene at a
B&B on the eastern coast of the St. Lawrence, in Kamouraska, Quebec. The
B&B owner (she had a husband, who was friendly and even witty, but a mere
spiritual sliver of the charismatic, funny, utterly intelligent wife) sat
behind the front desk talking on the phone while her two daughters, maybe eight
and eleven, stood beside her, all three touching each other, the picture of
maternal warmth.
Not long after that, I started keeping a list of scenes of
impossible happiness, all of them with women in the center, and men either
playing bit parts—Brown-Haired Man #2—altogether nonexistent:
The winking barkeeper at the near-empty pool hall in Hawksbury,
Nova Scotia, who got herself a big tip by keeping the beer and the smart
remarks coming and making us feel like we were just the young rogues we used to
think we were.
“You must be so excited!” said the starter at the Highlands
Links golf course at Ingonish Beach, when she discovered this was our first
visit to the famed course. Especially at good courses, starters are typically
cool and standoffish, their unpleasant way of making you respect the privilege of paying
an asinine sum to grace the pristine links.
Not this Nova Scotia native. After 23 years in the same job,
she gave us a detailed, deep, literate and enthusiastic geological,
architectural and even cultural history of the golf course and the surrounding
community. She told us where to see the most beauty and said she and a friend
of hers had been clearing out some brush on their own time at a certain spot
and they saw two eagles over a stream.
“We just sat down,” she said.
I almost sat down, at her self-actualized feet.
After 23 years of working at Highlands Links, the golf course starter is still stunned by its beauty.
Finally there was the scene at the Bras D’or Lakes Inn at
a town called St. Peter's. One morning, Tom wrangled in the room with work issues, and I spent
a leisurely hour reading and writing in my journal in the lobby, where a
chocolate lab slept peacefully as the sardonic owner of the lodge—the missus,
of course—drank her first cup and ordered her workers around with such a
combination of good humor and decisiveness that I was tempted to apply as a
maid, and spend the rest of my life making beds, not choices.
Her meter-tall husband went out on an errand with a male
employee and she told them, “Have a good time.” They hesitated, looking at her
guiltily. “I just said, have a good time,” she said, looking at me plaintively
and then turning back to the male babies. “For heaven’s sake, go!”
Just then the restaurant waitress came rushing in—she had
been wandering around the inn all morning, singing “A Groovy Kind of Love” near
the top of her talented pipes—to tell the owner how she just got a whole breakfast
table join her in song.
“It was priceless!” she said, and I agreed.
Also priceless, as it turned out, was our stop at the Baddeck yacht club. The
respite from the road, and the cozy familiarity of Sunday golf on the bar
television, the beer—it changed my mood utterly, and as we rode off into the
bright late-afternoon sunshine, my homesickness was gone, and my riding confidence
restored—completely, and for the rest of the trip.
Riding a motorcycle on the Cabot Trailon Cape Breton on the northeast tip-top corner of Nova Scotia
is psychedelic near-madness.
I’m climbing on a winding coastal road, and before I can
lock the sights and other sensations into my memory, I’m tearing along through
high pine trees on top of the mountain.
What happened?
Slow down!
The bike is hanging on a wet switchback by its gears and
brakes and I’m having to dare myself to get out of second. Just as I begin to
trust the tires and myself, I’m flying through a lush valley and then down at
the water, cruising around an ocean cove.
And on and on like that, moment-to-moment for a few hours.
Don't try this at home—and definitely don't try it on the Cabot Trail.
And actually, all of motorcycling is like that. From inside
a car, you have time and detachment to see things and decide to remember them
and imagine how you’ll describe them when you get back home.
Whipping through the air on a motorcycle, there’s altogether
too much happening. All the senses are working at once. And working hard.
I see cows in the paddock but an argument ensues when my
nose swears it’s a pig farm.
I feel the cool before I smell the fish before I see the
lake.
It’s raining now, but the wind got heavier five minutes ago.
Buzz past a lawn, smell fresh grass clippings, ride through
rode construction, smell fresh dirt, pass a logging truck, smell the wood, ride
into town, smell for your lunch.
I couldn’t tell you what the Molson brewery in Montreal looks
like but I remember how it smells.
Pine fumes are such a powerful intoxicant that I worried
that if I was pulled over I would fail a sobriety test. (A Mountie spokesman reported
that the American was riding at three times the legal limit of exultation.)
The instantaneous deep heartwarmth of an occasional sunburst on a
cloudy day.
The quick whiff of wood smoke.
And the one you have to earn: the salty air of the Atlantic
Ocean.
Riding down a tiny asphalt path of a road so close to the
farms it seems we’re riding on them. The horse loam transforms the Triumph into
Taffy, the leather-mouthed orange pony that I rode when I was eight. I’m riding
her bareback, charging up hill and flying down dale and galloping, galloping,
galloping, desperately, angrily, joyfully. She thinks she’s running away with me. No, I’m running away with
her!
Because it is so overwhelming, riding a motorcycle is
constantly frustrating. I’m aware I’m taking in too much too fast and I realize
my billowing brain will leave me with few words, and only a useless
emotion-memory, impossible express to anyone who doesn’t ride and unnecessary
to explain to anyone who has.
"Couldn't you just slow down a little and savor it?" a friend asks. Umm ....
The only way to alleviate the anxiety and pain is to lump
all this infinite experience together and tell myself that I’ve seen it,
smelled it, heard it, felt it all before.
But if I do, I will dismiss the smell that I can’t assign.
“What is that?”I ask myself
in those words inside my helmet and I inhale deeply, twice and three times and
fill my chest with it and let it seep into me.
By process of elimination I finally recognize it as the
summer fragrance, encountered more frequently but less gratefully in my youth,
of happiness itself.
The third in my serial account of the meaning I found on my motorcycle over 4,600 miles from here to Nova Scotia and back. —DM
Six or eight hours a day, all on bouncy back roads, on a motorcycle not at all designed for long-distance cruising. That was the plan.
“You know, it might be brutal,” a friend told me before I left.
I agreed. But then, brutality was one of the
goals of the trip, and agony and boredom seemed prices worth paying for the
sights we were going to see.
Much to our surprise though, after a day or two of getting
our haunches used to it—we slouched in different positions and periodically stood on the foot pegs to alleviate the
literal pain in the ass—we found that our chests got used to being pushed around
by the wind and our heads got used to screaming through it. So used to it, that
it was the stopping that became uncomfortable.
Montreal surely deserves more than lunch and a visit to the
local Triumph dealer. And the ancient, walled Quebec City definitely rates a
stay-over. But within an hour or two of taking in the physical wonders of those
cities, we found ourselves itching to fight our way out of the sprawl and get
back on the road.
I’ll explain this rejection of an easy chance for cultural
exploration by quoting a line scrawled in my journal during one of these brief
stops: “If somebody gave you the chance to leap up into the air and fly every
day for three weeks, you’d probably fly around the world. Paris, Rome, Beijing,
Hong Kong, Buenos Aires. But when you landed in these places, would you really want
to spend a lot of time tramping around looking at architecture and
people-watching and window-shopping? No, you’d have a quick gander, and jump up
in the air again—and fly!”
My dad would have understood that. He might have feared motorcycles, but he knew about flying. His father crushed his youthful fantasy
of signing up for the Royal Air Force in the early days of World War II; the
idea, pitched at the family table with all the reason and enthusiasm a
17-year-old could muster, was dismissed with four words from his father: “Eat
your dinner, Bud.”
But aviation had him, and after the war, upon his return from
an unglamorous army assignment, he learned to fly.
It was that flyer—and boater and car nut and writer of essays
with titles like, “Engines In the Morning”—who I talked to almost constantly, in the
privacy of the wind and the motor.
“Come on, Dad, admit it,” I’d say, cruising up the bigwide
St. Lawrence River. “This is pretty cool.”
“Okay, okay. Yes, shooting video while riding is pushing my
luck.”
Going down a country road on the north coast of Nova Scotia, Tommy tells it like it is.
“I know you understand this trip. So why, at
40, do I need your approval, too? (Tell
me it’s okay!)”
One of the reasons Dad didn’t like motorcycles was that Tommy
introduced them to me and Dad didn’t like Tommy. And one of the reasons he
didn’t like Tommy was that Tommy—also a pilot and an all-around
engines-in-the-morning kind of guy—showed a spirit of adventure bordering on
recklessness that Dad thought of as going too far.
In fact, it was my willingness
to take a chance that I think made Dad, easing as gracefully as he could into
his seventies and then his eighties, a little jealous. Driving my decrepit
Scout through country fields and urban ghettos and breaking down and allowing
myself to be cradled for shelter, food and repair by whatever locals came upon
my sorry ass: God, you’ve got a lot
of nerve, he said upon hearing stories like that. But I had no more nerve
than it must have taken him to willfully trap himself aloft and alone in a Piper
Tri-Pacer for the first time with nothing but an empty seat as a co-pilot.
The trouble Dad and I had about adventuring was mostly that, I was
doing it and he was done doing it. And in one of the large conversations we had
toward the end, he as much as admitted it.
But he never stopped fingering my friend for leading me into danger. And so he never directly acknowledged my own courage, and
its limitations.
“That bad, bad Tom,” he would say, joking but mostly not
joking. And as we headed northeast, he found ways to keep on saying it.
For good karma, Tom and I both wore windup watches that we’d recovered from
my dad’s dresser drawer after he died. My Movado Kingmatic worked throughout
the trip, but Tom’s Timex stopped cold on the first day. There was also the record-setting
low-pressure system that dad arranged to hover over the northeast to rain on us
at least once on every one of the 12 days we rode until geography forced us to
turn back west from the coast of Nova Scotia.
But if Dad was so acutely aware of our schedule and progress, how
did he not know that Tom had rescued me from the grief-duty of tearing down the old model train layout by driving 10 hours round trip to pick it up and
take it home to give to his son someday?
Surely he knew that Tom had been the friend who finally goaded
me into feeling and expressing my deepest feelings about my dad—who caused me
to understand awkwardly and noisily that it was not his stories or ideas but his
smell and his sound and his hook nose that I was going to miss.
And you’d think someone
would have Western Union-ed him that Dad's flight logs I’d given Tom to
study, had been organized by Tom’s sister into a museum-quality shadowbox tribute—each book opened to just the right page, Dad’s pilot’s license, the lock
of baby’s hair that went with all of it—and given to me the day before we left
on the motorcycle trip.
I guess it didn’t rain the whole time we rode down through New Brunswick to Moncton, east
through Nova Scotia to Hawskbury, northeast to the head of the Cabot Trail on
Cape Breton.
So maybe I should take that as a sign of Dad’s grudging
acquiescence. In fact, I think I’m going
to take it that way, from here on out. From now on when I talk to Dad from the seat of a motorcycle or anywhere else, it won’t be with
a bashful smile, but with a winking grin.
It started raining while we ate lunch in Erie, Pennsylvania
and ripped into our faces and seeped into our boots until we finally slogged into a
motel in Lakeville, New York.
While we sifted through our clothes to determine just how
waterproof our waterproof saddlebags were—about 70 percent, was the answer—we
turned on the Weather Channel to get the next day’s forecast. The guy came on
and prattled ruefully about a massive, stationary low-pressure system that
hovered over the entire northeast of North America and promised rain across the
region for the next week.
The attachable face shield I'd bought for the trip looked so absurd that I chose to use it only in the most extreme downpours. As I've always said, if you don't look cool on your motorcycle, you've failed to meet your primary objective.
My old college roommate Tom Gillespie gave me a look that said: Tomorrow
morning, it won't be too late to turn around, or change our destination. Tomorrow
evening when we’re in Montreal and at the epicenter of this circling
rainbomber, it will be. Why should we knowingly subject ourselves to certain,
daily misery? This was supposed to be a vacation, wasn’t it?
That’s why I didn’t have to reply: Of course it wasn’t supposed to be a vacation. Vacations are for
married couples and candy asses. Like all of Tom’s and my trips together, starting with a mad car ramble around Ireland when we were kids not long out of college, this was
supposed to be an odyssey. To turn back at the first sign of difficulty would be to turn back at the first sign of an odyssey.
And Tommy and I know travel difficulty when we see it. We
once drove to Las Vegas from Chicago without stopping: 27 hours and a whole
carton of cigarettes. We smashed up his International Harvester Scout while
four-wheeling in a strip mine in West Virginia, and as I went to start the
crippled vehicle to drive to a hospital to get Tom’s face stitched up, the key
broke off in the ignition.
This trip was inspired, at least for me, by a trip west 10
years ago, on which we bought that Scout, in Albuquerque. Actually, we bought
two Scouts, one for each of us. And we took two motorcycles. And returned to Chicago in two days, a
two-man caravan, one Scout leading the way (it had no brakes, so it was the
natural pace car) and a pick-up truck following, with two motorcycles in the
bed and another Scout on a trailer, behind.
There was a logistical improbability to that story that I wanted
to recreate with this motorcycle trip. And the rain, discouraging as it was, contributed to the built-in insanity of flying thousands of miles holding for dear life onto motorized bicycles.
Were we still capable of doing the
impossible?
After dinner at a roadhouse across the street and a fast six
drinks with an entertaining and equally fast-drinking young local couple, we borrowed
hair dryers from the front desk and went to sleep with them blowing into our
boots.
Soaked to the bone in Lakeville, N.Y.
Forecast, hopeless.
Unexpectedly, the next day was perfectly sunny and we were
off at 9:00, roaring over hills and cheerfully buzzing through the green towns
atop the Finger Lakes. The vistas grew vaster as we approached the Adirondacks,
and I thought of the crass entrepreneurial bumper sticker, “If you ain’t the
lead dog, the view never changes.”
Yes, it does, if you’ll only back off a little, and slide over.
Tom and I ride in a staggered formation, developed over a number of trips, that
has Tom in the left third of our lane, and me in the right third, one man ahead by anywhere from a bike length to 50 yards, depending on the terrain. No matter who's leading, we hold the lane positions, so that the follower can
briefly slide up beside to communicate.
Usually,
Tom is ahead to the left and I'm behind to the right, in a
comfortable slot that lets me see how fast he’s taking a turn or how hard his
bike bounces on a railroad tracks. He’s the more experienced rider, so it makes
sense he’d usually be in the lead. But sometimes I take the lead. And sometimes the lead switches back and forth in a way that, mesmerized by the road and the sound of our engines and the goings-on inside our minds, we hardly notice.
It doesn't matter who's leading, because it's not a race.
Riding side-by-side—that's as taxing in
friendships as on motorcycles. There’s no room for error left or right, and
you’re always having to adjust your speed to stay perfectly even.
No: If you know where you’re going, lead
the way. If I know where I’m going, I’ll lead the way. We’ll pull side-by-side
only in order to notify one another of urgent needs: we need fuel, we missed the turn, your bungee chord is dangling dangerously close to your rear spokes, how about let's stop for a beer at this lodge by this lake.