Certainties

The Little Engine that Had No Idea was chugging along on its track, happily entering a right-hand curve, its favorite kind. It did not see the rail that had been peeled back off the ties like a paper clip. It went roaring up and off, sun was seen briefly under its wheels, and then it careened headfirst down a ravine, taking trees and brush down as it went. When it finally hit bottom, it waited a long beat before gingerly testing itself to make sure it was still intact. It was afraid to find out, really. But it had absolutely no idea it was going to be derailed that day.

And so every big life change, mine included, can be described. It happens. Yeah, so what. Good news at last: It's beginning to bore even me, so this is the last official mention. See, I realize, s**t happens—devastating, horrific s**it oftentimes—to people in life. Even worse happens to the other animals; they endure it, we don’t notice it, since they don’t have blogs. Then we pick them up after they’ve been quieted in cool plastic-wrapped packages. But I digress. Thinking of pain always makes me take long scenic detours.

Two years have passed, and I sleep through the night. Big freaking deal—me and half the population, so there. Insouciance is wince-inducing when it’s a pose, but feels as great as fleece socks on a cold night when it’s real.

So I return to the site of the accident, a voyeur, to see what remains of the wreckage. I survey it from a cool distance, assessing what might be built out of it again, what working parts can be retooled and fitted into some other conveyance. At the time I dove nose-first into the ravine, I had worked for three years gathering information for a book on the ethics of dog training. The problem was, there came more and more information, an ever-towering growth of research that threatened to topple onto my head and knock me sprawling, and a seeming inability to ever master either the amount or the intricacies of it. So the big accident was a sort of blessing—bringing with it many other blessings, too, as I have recounted here—in that it temporarily derailed a project that had been heading down the wrong tracks. But the past week, as a result of certainties delivered either with a mean snarl, or a tossed-off ignorance posing as common knowledge, I’ve been thinking of that unwritten book again. Especially as those thought-provoking comments were uttered by men who likewise thought they knew something, but did not, about me. Their self-assurance made me realize I wanted no part of them, or anything they were selling. Another blessing.

One of the earliest ideas I had when I conceived of the topic was that a certain set of beliefs about dogs led to a certain mode of training them; let us call it the Republican method. Another way of conceiving of them led to a wholly different way of teaching, and that mindset might be termed the Democratic. Each side holds fiercely to its beliefs, indeed knows their way is the One True Way.

Certainly, I strive to incorporate “live and let live” into my daily routine, suffering idiots and wise men alike to teach me what they know, which is considerable in both cases. But the fact remains, there can only be a single truth when it comes to laws: evolution and intelligent design can’t coexist, notwithstanding the strenuous contortions of some religious scientists to make them do so; medieval belief in the Four Humors does not fit with what has been learned of the human body since the early nineteenth century; a flat earth does not behave as our globe actually does. And the human nature of the Republicans cannot be the same as the human nature of the Democrats.

One of these is right, and one of them is wrong.

One fellow, snarkishly dismissing the two grand I put out to the fence builders so that Nelly would not be ground into fur and tissue on the road we live on by the sixteen-wheelers that ply it, not to mention the overpowered four-by-fours of the local populace, informed me that an electronic fence would have been a better choice. When I femininely demurred, avoiding a fight by not voicing what I believe—They are cruel and stupid and the fact that no one would put a shock collar on their children is proof enough that they are not fit for dogs—but rather by saying, “I don’t really agree with those,” he snorted and laughed, “So you think it would hurt your dog?” Ha-ha. Well, obviously he knows better. Why, he wouldn’t even need to read this; he knows better just by osmosis.

He also knows what I need, apparently. Not what I want; what I should have. Him.

Another fellow, the next day, informed me from a lofty perch high above all canine scholars that dogs just want to please people, and also that one needs to be alpha dog to one’s pets. As the owner of some labs, and not a decidedly difficult little border collie mix who would probably be dead by now were it not for a lucky affection for food before all else, and thus amenable to thousands of applications of chicken jerky that have finally made her 80 percent reliable in most situations that do not involve rabbits (in which case all bets are off), he never really had to work with his dogs. He just thought he had. He practically sneered at me, paying Nelly from the treat bag for checking back in with me on an off-leash walk. He had no idea how hard-won, and how impossible to attain other than with repetition after repetition of reward, this behavior is—and how proud I am of both Nelly and me for getting there. He does not know, and does not care to know, that science has definitively put to rest the abysmal myth of dominance. This one dies particularly hard with those who do not wish to stop doing what they’ve always done, simply because they’ve always done it.

Just like assuming women like to be pawed, without being asked first.

Sigh.

Even if he (and by “he” I actually implicate many, including myself, when I smugly think I know everything—though that is usually the point at which the universe decides to gently instruct by swinging a two-by-four in the direction of my head) would step down off the stacked concrete blocks of certainty to educate himself, there is a dearth of scholarly work on the faint signals women send to suitors they are not interested in but lack the courage to say so to outright. Or maybe desperation—a similar train having wrecked in his own past—occludes the ability to read, either signals or the knowledge of anybody else.

By this point in life, we are wheeling our broken and patched pasts around like filth-encrusted old shopping carts that have had too many hard meetings with parking lot curbs. Ba-ba-dump. Ba-ba-dump. On and on we go, the off-kilter wheel beginning to seem normal, the way it always was. Though once it spun free, chromed.

Whatever; icky though this brief passage has been, it has provided its own small gift, in my renewed interest in this paralyzed project. (I have life before derailment, BD, and AM, after motorcycles.) I’ve almost finished hoisting up those iron bits smashed against the forest floor, finished finding new use for them in the two-wheeler that’s taken me in a new direction, though it curiously feels also like an old one, back into life. I am going to spend some time figuring out, out loud, what it means to be here like this, at this particular time, with these particular people I’ve suddenly found myself in the midst of. Their extreme need to ride, if not mine.

Then I'll try to parse the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and give my dog some treats for doing the thing she is now certain is right. I find I know less and less, like I am growing backwards with the years, into a fresh young creature, a baby ignorant as bliss.


Nelly Prays (c) Andrew garn

Going Places

Go expressly to enjoy the moon and it turns to tinsel,

but discover it on a necessary journey and

its beauty bathes the soul.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every new bike comes with a warranty card, which you mail in, and an urge to travel, which you hang onto. It grows. Now, in the fall, I am overcome with an almost painful wanderlust. Remembrance of trips past, perhaps, triggered by the peculiar length and feel of these days. But no matter why, this is the season—the slant of a burning orange ball in the sky, a wash of brown and red leaves across the road from right to left, or a miniature cyclone of dead foliage chasing itself around and around—that makes me want to go find new motels. Too bad it comes in a life that is little suited to this enterprise anymore. I look in the pages of the agenda and flip them back and forth: here? No, drat; there’s that thing I have to be here on Saturday night for. Here? Shoot. The schedule got changed, and I’m a parent that weekend. The next clear one is in November, and I have been thinking Adirondack-y thoughts lately; probably too cold. And on it goes.

But I will persist, and drive a wedge somehow into the calendar, split it clean through with the adze of determination and make a space into which I can insert this novel idea: I will go away. For two days, I will be on my bike and going somewhere for the simple purpose of going and seeing what it looks and feels like.

Where? Well, that’s what god made the Rand McNally Atlas for, didn’t he? (“America’s Love Affair with the Road,” US $9.95.) I stare into its pages, too, trying to imagine myself on those thin red or black lines, preferably the ones edged with little dots (Scenic Routes). There are too many to make a choice, and I am rapidly approaching the stasis I embody before the nine-page, eight-pound laminated menu at the Greek diner: after reading entry after entry, my brain getting slower and slower like a logey computer loading more and more, I end up ordering the same damn omelet I’ve ordered for the past thirty years in Greek diners. Rye toast, please.

Where I've really been longing to go is the Grand Canyon. I want to spend the night at the soaring lodge--an architecture that meant to mimic the scenery outside, and because it was from a period in American history when we cared about aspiration as much as we did about craftsmanship (I refer to the time of, gasp, socialism's brief flower), it comes close. But two days to get to Arizona and back? Not even the Iron Butt fairy could wave her wand and make that happen.

I will probably choose someplace familiar, then, Pennsylvania somepart, or Massachusetts. Soon will come the moment I will turn out the driveway and not look back. For two or three days I will answer to no one, pace myself to no one, talk to no one, dine with no one. By necessity and circumstance alone, and potentially by choice. I will know that, though, only when I get back.

There’s a strange alchemy that sometimes works itself on the material of the lonesome trip: it can be a great movement outward, an opening that seems to propel you forward toward a boundless horizon. Or it can suck. Then, it quickly reveals itself as the dreadful mistake you just have to get through, forty-eight long hours of What Was I Thinking. This is when, paradoxically, the great act of freedom becomes a self-created prison, the close walls made of loneliness and fear. Have you never felt them both?

I am reading Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider, and it’s both fueling and cautioning my wanderlust. It is a raw and perfect cross-section of grief; it chronicles a long, aimless road trip undertaken because there was nothing else he could possibly do, having lost his daughter and his wife a year apart. Inconceivable. How does the human mind deal with loss of that magnitude? Well, he tells us how. Basically, it is not built to do it. It’s like asking a perfectly good canoe to take off from a forty-foot cliff and get you to the ground safely. It’s like taking a disconnected rotary telephone outside and pointing it at the sky and expecting to get a signal.

If he didn’t have motorcycling . . . Well, god forbid. He just had to ride it out. Having all that stuff to do—navigating, calculating, performing all the mechanical tasks of operating the machine, regulating speed, every second thinking defensively, all in a continuous, multivalent flow—protected him from being eaten alive by corrosive, overwhelming grief. It saved him.

That is why I am getting so tetchy with people flinging the danger card down on the table in front of me. Don’t they know that when you reach a place where there is nothing to eat anymore, and the cupboard is empty and you’re out of everything, then something appears that is suddenly full and ripe and tastes so good, it would be insane not to save yourself, not to fill yourself up again? What is a bit of danger on a full plate next to starving? Not a choice, but a necessity.

The weekend of October 16, then, destination to be determined. Warmer gloves to be bought, electric vest to be tested. Bags to be packed; not much is needed beyond pajamas and two sets of underwear. Book, paper, pen. Credit card. Open road, opening.

It's a Guzzi Thing

One of the most magical items in the childhood arsenal was the package of small clamshells, labeled “Japan.” Into a glass of water they went, and the waiting began. Rarely did persistent watching yield the prize; this was shy magic, the kind that wants to happen in the night, while no one sees.

In the morning, though, the glass revealed all: wonderment. The shells had burst open, and paper flowers of every color now waved slowly in the glass. It was always an unexpected blessing, a world that had bloomed for your eyes alone.

My grown-up version of the sneaky gift recently arrived through our latterday portal of magic, the listserve.

It is both with pleasant anticipation and a shaky dread that I confront the multiple switches that animate the computer every morning, as with coffee mug in hand I watch a tower of bold-faced notifications construct itself in the in-box. I’ve joined so many groups, each with such necessary information, that all I lack is sufficient time to read them all and still conduct such secondary business as providing sustenance for the household, or making money enough to be able to do so. Lately, more and more of those chatty lists are motorcycle-related: for project research, the LDRiders list; for current bike concerns, KBMW; for old times’ sake, NE Moto Guzzi. With the volume of yammering on most of them one wonders when, if ever, these people actually ride; they’re writing disquisitions, sometimes witty, sometimes lacerating, on minutiae that makes you redden with the knowledge that you didn’t even know you were supposed to worry about such things, much less the 24 steps it would take to remedy them.

The New England Guzzi list, though, was different. And so I always read promptly through: even though I no longer had a Guzzi, it was impossible to say Guzzis no longer had me. Plus, the exchanges were refreshingly free of attitude or folderol. Because these people actually knew one another, they were civil. And they were about the business at hand—where to meet on Sunday and at what time; who had a part and was volunteering to come help install it; the occasional in-joke about previous mishaps or the primacy of duct tape—carrying with them the immediacy of real motorcycles, real rides, real friendships. Some of the people I too had met and could put a face to (as well as a yankee accent); the others I felt I knew, or could imagine easily enough: they were genuine, kind, smart, unpretentious, but still daunting to me, in all their knowledge of Mandello’s great, glorious, occasionally misguided history.

So that’s what I usually clicked on first, a gentle envoy to the day. But one day last week the theme of the messages took a turn that, in as short a time as it took shells to open and release their hidden blooms, would change the world.

Their voices began to speak, not to me, but about me. I listened, frozen, because I could not believe what I was hearing.

At first I thought it must be another of those humorous volleys that keep these lists engaging. But then the thread “Lario for sale in NH” was quickly renamed “Lario for Melissa?” And that’s when something clutched at my gut: a million things, actually, a carousel of emotions going around and around at the same time they went up and down. The bike I had loved and lost, the thought of which struck me with the same chill trembling as did the prospect of catching a glimpse through a crowd of a lover last seen decades before. Joy at the idea. Fear at the idea.

Disbelief at the idea. Because it was soon apparent this had become a spontaneous uprising, more and more participants piling on--and what was this?, evincing something very much like joy as they did so. I watched from behind the screen as the velocity of joiners increased, a recruiter’s office on the day after war has been declared. “I’m in for $100”; “I don’t have much since I’m unemployed, but put me down for $50”; “I can help with transportation too”; “I’m good for $200 but only if I don’t have to work on it.” (The wag is a staple of the Guzzi club, and who indeed could last long, or want to, riding thirty-year-old machines without a cool drink of humor?) Finally I was forced to realize the impossible, which they thought very possible indeed: this congregation of near-strangers was uniting to buy me a motorcycle. They had in fact been thinking of doing so for a while. When at last this incredible truth forced itself into my head, the tears started. And would not stop for days. I couldn’t speak, or even think, of this unprecedented event without being overwhelmed by what felt mysteriously like both grief and startling happiness made into one wholly new emotion. It was like a force massing on the other side of a sturdy locked door, pushing, pushing. It would break it in splinters, and then what had been shut tight would never be closed again.

What caused the tears had to be bigger, far bigger, than the gift of a motorcycle. Huge though that was; who gives someone a motorcycle? Someone not related to them, I mean. Such an enormous, gorgeous thing could be conceived only in Guzzi land (sort of like Oz but with Italian food).

The next thing I felt was the impossibility of ever accepting such a thing.

Then, after three days of crying, it came to me at once: Whether they knew it or not, and I believe they did—crack diagnosticians that they are—what they were giving me was not just a shapely silver motorcycle with only 8,500 miles (and hopefully new valve springs). They were giving to someone who had recently found herself in a lightless place nothing less than the sunrise. They were using the perfect vehicle to send me the kind of news that would change everything, if I was wise enough to simply accept:

I am not alone, though I thought I was.

Love is possible, though I thought it was not.

What kind of people band together to give such a gift? Guzzi people. What kind of people then give more, the work of setting to rights an example of one of Mandello’s “experimental prototypes”? Guzzi people.

Lest too much cloying sentiment arise from this profound generosity and gum up the carbs, however, the breed’s native dryness quickly acted as emotional solvent. In an ungainly effort to show how moved I was, I wrote effusively of how one night I had dreamt of the Lario. You don’t get more ethereally excited than that, do you? "I dream of riding every night!” came the response. Calm down, lady.

And it is true, Guzzi people get to live a dream every day. They have figured out how to do life right, just as they know how to party, an important skill set for rallies, particularly those where a Teutonic spirit prevails. And, it turns out, they are as good at fixing a broken heart as they are at pouring wine, phrasing wry opinion, or sourcing parts.

Togetherness is a fundament of motorcycling, but these people have brought it to the level of high art. I do not know whether there is something about foreign V-twins that draws a certain type of person to them, or whether the sound of valve clatter and the smell of Italian sausage finally changes them into what they become, earthy angels of the road. I only know that I want to be among them. And now that they have brought me back, I will never, ever leave again.

Because what am I, crazy?

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for one of the most amazing episodes of my life, to John C., Tom H., Bud C., Sean R., Allen C., Jay D.,

Chris E., John G., Dave K., Tim F.,

Dave C., Peter K., Mark B.,

IMOC Rally,

Leslie A., Grace F.,

Adam M., Doug and Jacquie R., Peter Kj., John S.,

Pierre D., Anonymous, and anyone inadvertently left off

the list of those who supported

this cause. You better believe it: Guzzi people ROCK.

Wrong with This Picture

Ah, how lovely they are, rot and degradation.

All that we have built, all that we are, will ultimately melt back into earth. Far from maudlin, I find this happy-making in the extreme, as it is a reminder that all is as it should be. Scarier than this indeed is the reversal contained in the post-apocalyptic vision (now afoot in several "children's" movies, as if the young alone are still impressionable enough to heed the message that we should think before we act) of the technological un-dead--our creative acts turned against us, animated metal with gleaming diode eyes who cannot be killed, though they can kill us.

This thought occurs during a reconnoitering in the woods nearby: I may live on a claustrophobic postage stamp of a lawn, but there are opportunities aplenty to trespass on city-owned expanses just up the street. As I scrambled over the rock walls that to me are eerie reminders of sweat and pain expended by men long forgotten, but who had loves and cares and woes that now rise like vaporous mists from the forest floor when they are imagined into being, I suddenly found myself looking down into what had been one of their houses. The house of one of these stone-wall-building ghosts I keep meeting, for our strange unmentionable rendezvous, in the untraveled woods.

This was the foundation, still neatly laid up and square, looking like it would never change, hidden as it was by its rocky camouflage even though it lies just beside the road, one I'd walked a dozen times before. But everything else was gone. Doors, sills, windows, floors, all vanished into the immortal earth, done in by microbes too small to see.

A satisfaction, to me at least.

What was in no way satisfying, however, was an event the next day marking the kind of loss that represents the opposite of Everything As It Should Be. This--this was nothing like what it should be, because it was about a child's death.

The rest of us were going around persisting in living, at least for a little while, as yet unspecified. Under the picnic pavilion of the local town park, hundreds upon hundreds of origami paper cranes hung from the ceiling, were heaped in their myriad colors and sizes on the tops of tables. Photos, blown up and exquisite, for the boy's father is a photographer, of the family and the child that he used to be, adorned the columns. I could not look at them; the happiness that shone from them felt too brutal. Food was piled high everywhere, for if we have no idea what to do with ourselves, we eat. Different musicians played all afternoon and evening on a little stage in the corner; the boy had been in love with music, the guitar, the ukulele. Children ran and played, a game of softball ongoing on the diamond. The adults walked around shell-shocked, for we could not change speed that quickly back toward life, as the children did; we could not forget what we were here for. And it was godawful, and not comprehensible, and no one could deal. You kept stepping onto landmines, and the shrapnel of "what if it were my . . . " kept lacerating your skin. You'd haul yourself back from this brink, whipped with guilt for knowing you did not have to go all the way there, like the boy's parents did. But then you'd start toeing that line again, because you were helpless not to. The sirens lured you toward the rocks. You'd think what it might be like to be that mother, radiant in her grief, smiling and then sobbing and then smiling again, as if only she knew they were really all the same emotion, a slippery continuum.

This is not the way it should be, but it is really not given to us to know how it should be. Unless, perchance, that is what you are meant to learn in the final moment when it is all taken back into the breast of the earth, in order to someday be born again, into something else.

Coming Up for Air

I put my child on the bus for the first day at a new school, in a new season that feels very, very old--isn't fall the Methuselah of seasons, ancient and wise though it's not going to tell you what it knows?--and he hated me for it. His face through the window was a mask of misery and it made me remember my own hideous experiences with the coming of September: a cold, vague fear squeezing relentlessly from inside.

The night before, he asked me what a "gulag" was. Such an interesting query from your grade-school child. Then he paraphrased the immortal Calvin & Hobbes: "Off to the gulag in a bus."

He berated me all the way to the stop in the morning. You don't know what this feels like! (Ah, honey, but I do; you make it fresh for me, and I am suddenly eleven again.) Why can't I still go to my old school? (The reasons are too many, and have to do with the childishness of the adults who were supposed to have more care for your helplessness.)

Then the bus rumbled out of sight, and I was free again, with a day to get caught up on the life that for the past several weeks has been fleeting like highway scenery past the long-haul trucker's windows. The trees rimming the black waters of Onteora Lake yesterday reflected red and yellow suddenly on their surface. I can breathe a little now. I wonder what my son is doing today, though, in that new school. Is he breathing easily, or is his chest still tight with the newness and the inchoate fears that change always causes to rise in the human heart?

I myself would welcome some change. I think. Right now, though, I want to sit still for just a moment, in the presence of the late-summer cicadas, the light sleepy breaths of the visiting dogs at my feet.

Then to the bank and the auto parts store, for the giant bottle of 15W50. The bike will have change, at least.

Oh Deer

Working part-time at Time-Life in the eighties gave me many things. A place to be in the middle of the night once a week; free telephone calls to anywhere; all the insipid magazines to flip through in down-time that one could ever want; an acerbic, brilliant proofreading partner who could keep me awake with his commentary on every aspect of American mismanagement of life; full health benefits, and, equally amazing, ten dollars cash in an envelope to buy take-out from the Japanese noodle shop; upon a temporary firing--followed quickly enough by re-hiring that it didn’t matter--a check for a thousand dollars that bought my first motorcycle. And something that just now reminded me of this whole gravy-train episode: records and books from the freebie table that held the outcasts from the critics’ desks. One night I took home an album called How Did You Find Me Here by someone I’d never heard of, and bet you haven’t either, named David Wilcox. It featured an image of an acoustic guitar, which is no doubt why I expended the effort to pick it up, and a promise that among its tracks was a song titled “Eye of the Hurricane.”

I learned to love that album, with Wilcox’s honeyed voice and tight, classic songwriting lines. It plays now in the background. And that one song has new resonance now.

It is about a girl who buys the farm on her Honda Hurricane.

The tank is full, the switch is on,

The night is warm, cops are gone

Rocket bike is all her own;

It’s called a Hurricane.

She told me once it’s quite a ride,

It’s shaped so there’s this place inside

Where, if you’re moving, you can hide.

She wants to run away, but there’s nowhere she can go

Nowhere the pain won’t come again

But she can hide, hide in the pouring rain:

She rides the eye of a hurricane.

Tell the truth, explain to me

How you got this need for speed.

She laughed and said,

Might just be the next best thing to love.

. . .

We saw her ride so fast last night

Racing by, a flash of light.

Riding quick, the street was dark,

The shiny truck she thought was parked,

It blocked her path, stopped her heart.

But not the Hurricane.

It can be one of many things, what can get you. Or you can fit together several of them to make your own individualized catastrophe. Often, deer figure in the scene.

The way motorcyclists hit deer is sometimes impossible, sometimes spectacular. The bike may stay upright; it may go down. Riders die, or they live through it; the deer always go. They explode upon impact.

Think about that.

As a motorcyclist I am supposed to hate them. They are, as one friend says, The Enemy. The appropriate response is to want to kill them before they kill you. This is the American way, after all.

But I love deer. I cannot hate anything that is made of fear, and pure beauty, and has to come up against us.

They call them “forest rats,” and I hate hearing that disparaging term; it comes from the same place that thought up "gook," and "nigger." Makes all of them easier to wipe away, diminished like that. But who in fact made deer so plentiful? Their inflated numbers are another creation of our penchant for killing; we took out the wolves and coyotes, too, so now there are no controls. We need not control ourselves.

I had a wonderful stop in Hendersonville, drinking coffee and talking with a friend. I should have been watching the clock. Because I should have gotten on the Blue Ridge Parkway an hour earlier; I needed to make Roanoke that night. Which meant I had an hour and a half of that lonely byway, made mysterious by the dark, after sunset. The deer had reclaimed the roadside; their heads raised, startled, at my headlight. They were the armies of the night, and I had invaded their territory. Fortunately, the BMW, aka the Blender, was as silent a goer as a bike can get. They watched me go by. But I could only do so at thirty miles an hour. There were so many. And though I was frightened—or at least, respectful of the possibilities—I still felt privileged to be in their presence.

The next day, after enjoying the remainder of what is surely one of the great motorcycling roads of the world, I had to face the clock again, and hop onto I-81 for the race home. The Parkway had been my gift to myself, but its wrapping paper was now torn aside.

The happy rhythm, the growing intimacy with the physics of riding the turns on the parkway, made me feel cocky and invincible. So I forgot things, important, basic things. Do not follow trucks. Do not follow anyone closely. Especially trucks.

It emerged from under one of them so quickly I could not do anything, swerve, move over. I fixated on it, and in one portion of a second it was burned onto the film of the inner eye and even now I cannot get it out of my sight. A foreleg first. Then a head, black eyes staring, shocked. Then a brown body, and the crunch of my wheels as it went over, through.

If it had been something solid, made of wood or metal, you would not be reading this. Or, if I had been going slower, it might have brought me down.

A hundred miles later I pulled up next to the pump. I looked down as I put my heel to the sidestand, and what I saw made me ill—at the same time I smelled it, which made me more ill. Not only physically, but right in the heart. I had brought that dead deer with me, dripping from every part of the machine, covering my boots. It had baked onto the engine; hair was caught behind bolts. I felt tears pushing behind my eyes, and maybe only some of them were of relief that I had escaped a spill to which I had been so close.

She had not escaped. She had no hope to. They have been made, by the same evolutionary pressures that made us, to wheel and throw the predator off track. How to hate the dead? And I saw, hanging in threads from below me, that what is inside them looks exactly like what is in us. We are the same under the skin.

Today I walked with Nelly on one of our old trails; we have missed our walks lately. It was nearing dusk; their time. I would have felt lonely, as I sometimes do this time of day, out in the woods far from anyone. Except I knew they were there, watching. And that I find myself wondering if I am more like them than I am like you.

Postscript: The above was written well before the news that several riders on the Iron Butt Rally, which just finished yesterday, were the victims of deer strikes, and one was hurt critically. This kind of news makes me feel nauseous with sadness. Do I want motorcyclists to go down in collisions with deer? No. Do I want to go down myself? No. Do I like having to split my sympathies? No. Do I not even understand why I must? Yes. I feel the framing of this problem is what has gone seriously wrong: Ride a bike; must desire to kill.

"Solve the deer problem!" say the posters on the riding forums. But it's not the deer's problem.

Bring back their predators. Control human numbers. I hope I am ready for the flak this is going to cause to rain down on me.

See SPOT Run

The morning dawns—or not quite.

My first thought upon lifting the coffee cup to my lips, 4:30 a.m. on the 21^st, the bike standing outside, shrouded in its cover and ready to go: Remind me why I am doing this?

It is, naturally, a fundamentally unanswerable question, like all the most essential ponderings about life. And not just the ones concerning riding. Suddenly it seems so pointless, just like many of my ideas when they come to the point of doing, as opposed to the point of conception. Ride a thousand miles in one shot?

The purpose—for the lark of doing it, that’s all—was to know a little whereof I hoped to speak. Google Maps graciously gave up the simple number, the mileage to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where on August 24 at 10 a.m. a hundred of the best motorcyclists would leave a hotel parking lot on the mother of all pointless quests, the twenty-fifth running of the Iron Butt Rally. For the next eleven days, at the rate of more or less a thousand miles each day, they would crisscross the country on the trail of bonus points procured with camera, flag, gas receipts, and pure inhuman drive. The pointlessness was the point.

Some things you just have to see for yourself.

With the addition of a couple hundred more miles, I could find out for myself what it felt like, this racking up of numbers for their own sake. I could find out if I was capable. I had no idea, but I was going to try for my first Saddlesore 1000, an Iron Butt Association certified ride. I would do so under the tutelage of an IBA master, who offered his signature on my initial witness form, and myriad other bits of invaluable information, as well as a SPOT tracker to memorialize the event; no one else would care, but one must have a SPOT track these days, apparently. He would stay behind me all the way, permitting me the semblance of my own ride. And more than a semblance of my own mistakes.

My hoped-for 9 p.m. bedtime somehow turned into 11:30 p.m. (and it was not just fault of last-minute preparation of the two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that, together with the six bottles of water already tidily asleep in the topcase, would form the cornerstone of the next day’s sustenance). Then it was hard to sleep. And then it was hard to stay asleep.

The sun rose as we went west, into what felt like beautiful adventure. It always feels like beautiful adventure when you’re only an hour into the ride.

That was the thing: we were going west, in order to go south. We were going west to add miles, not to go anywhere in particular. This knowledge, this South Carolina by way of Erie, Pennsylvania, struck me at once as shameful and as gleeful, like paying a good five dollars for a ride on a Ferris wheel that returns you to exactly the same place after rotating you for seven minutes.

The majority of motorcyclists do not get this; some are adamant in their belief that this is not motorcycling, as they understand it. Motorcycling is about travel. It is about hitting the turn signal when the urge strikes, lying in the grass by the wayside, being taken by serendipity, and taken in by alluring signage. About stopping as much about going. But as I was throttling down the highway, it hit me: Long distance riders do see things along the way; they just do it faster.

Indeed, I was seeing things: after six hundred miles, I was either seeing a state border sign, or I was imagining it. Where the hell was I now, Virginia or West Virginia? Did I cross just as I was inserting myself at 80 mph between the closing gap of one truck about to overtake another?

It turns out I was going too fast, which was tiring me, which made me anxious, which made my muscles ache, which caused me to take too long to stretch out at the gas stops, which then made me feel like I had to go fast once I got on the slab again.

I felt the imperative now to go, to go. My bike and I were pressed by time and desire into one item, and we needed something. I was getting it.

The miles continued to fly past. My mentor was keeping track, in a way I was unaccustomed to thinking, along lines of pure consumption. “Only two more stops,” or “This is number 5,” he would say, so I could note the stop number and the odometer reading on the back of the gas receipt, sparing me the more picturesque method I had originally conceived of, or a few minutes of searching through the previous receipts because of my inevitable inability to remember my own past, immediate or not. If not for him, and the IBA’s raison d’etre in record-keeping as crucial partner to experience, I would have been laboriously notating things (and thus attenuating effort) in a small black loose-leaf binder that had belonged to my father and for which I had previously never found other use. I wonder what he would have thought of his daughter out here on the highway; no, I know. Bemusement. And acceptance. Just as he accepted all the permutations of human endeavor, especially the most extreme and therefore the most pointless of all.

Was this the purpose of the rainbow that, around one corner, now banded the sky and made one end the goal of the road’s vanishing point? Oh, sure. Saddlesore; pot of gold: same thing.

The state lines were passing; not exactly flashing by, but here comes North Carolina, and with it the sudden piercing thought of someone who lives there, someone whom I think of often and always with an aching sadness. That made thirty miles go by. What is geography but memory painted over a map like those topographical greens and browns?

The last 80 miles were the ones I did not think I could make. Probably because I knew there were only 80 miles left to go, and I would not, could not stop now. I blinked my eyes quickly; I felt angry at the traffic this late at night. It did not seem fair to impose tailgaters on someone who was just trying to get somewhere, and stay awake doing so.

Then, suddenly, Spartanburg. And in a few miles, the glowing red letters that spelled Marriott. We made the last turn, and I was there. A thousand miles were past, gone forever. And here, arrayed in neat lines, were the hundred bikes of the truly devoted, waiting shrouded for their own start, just as mine had been earlier that day, though it seemed like in another life entirely.

I got to bed at 1:42 a.m., after nearly twenty hours awake. The next morning, watching at the meticulous multi-step tech inspection of these greatly modified machines, with their fuel cells, dual GPS, hydration systems, and shipboard packing layouts, I realized the smallness of what I had done, and the enormousness of what they were about to launch themselves into. For the next two days, the intensive preparations continued, as they had for each of these hundred riders for the months and even years before. The Big Dance was nigh. The quiet motorcycles radiated an energy of anticipation, it seemed. And finally, at ten a.m. on Monday, the signal was given, a hundred engines cranked, and something caught hold of my throat. I was held motionless as one by one they were taken by motion: in a precise ballet, each one at thirty-second intervals cut a smooth, sharp turn out of the parking lot. The riders waved, and the air filled with the sound of their horns’ final farewell. In minutes they were gone. What they left behind was a memory, heavy as air, of their having been there.

Now I am haunted. I keep thinking of them still out there, running the roads of North America, back and forth across the map of the nights between then and now. I have resumed my life, gone to my own bed night after night, but they are each alone with a machine and the miles falling away behind them. More, and, more, and more. I think I see the point.

All the Way Down the Road

The first hour was pure joy. A state route of two lanes, good pavement, and happy memories from not too long ago. Butter yellow sun in sky blue sky at the outset of a trip much anticipated. Therefore, no other traffic was to dog my heels, or bar my progress, however fast or slow that wanted to be: nobody to interfere with streaming along these high-speed sweepers and the feeling that in the base of them, the road was trying to dip down and kiss the lips of the dense green Catskills reservoir waters at its edge.

This was Route 30. I say it now as others say the names of their favorite roads, too—Oh, man, you gotta do 221, it’s amazing; Don’t miss 79 whatever you do—as if numbers themselves could sing.

On 17, where 82 mph is discovered to be this particular machine’s optimal cruising speed (though 75 also works, as does 91), and where it is rediscovered that some earplugs, though necessary, sometimes cause the cartilage to start aching terribly, thoughts started to appear like passing scenery. One of them was a sinewy line about the notion of a “biddable” motorcycle, just as they use that word to refer to a soft but smart, acquiescent but independent-thinking working dog. That little sashay you do when changing lanes, when the subtlest shift of weight in the seat causes the bike to lean in, cross the dividing line, then stand up, so quickly it might never have happened, might just have been something you imagined but are not quite sure. The faster, more subconsciously this can be done, the more biddable the bike. My definition, then, of “biddable,” whether applied to dog or motorcycle, is that it will do anything for you within reason. For a dog, that means exercising the intellect (in the case of a border collie, that is substantial indeed) and weighing the evidence. If what is being asked is injurious, morally or emotionally, the dog refuses. For the machine, though, although it can almost feel like ethics or emotion, it is really physics and mechanics that draw the line. Ask it to push past what it can do according to these laws, and it refuses.

Sometimes the refusal is rather spectacular. We don’t want to go there.

Stay inside the lines, though, and the sensation is inimitable. It is the joining of two things that were made separately but are now a single creature. The bike and the dog both lend to us their impossibly greater powers. They ask only in return that we remember that we are only borrowing these for a time. Stay humble, stay moral, stay in gravity’s precincts, and the reward is to be borne heavenward. Or at least toward a road you will bore everyone else by telling them they just have to try. It will stop being boring only at that moment when the contact patch shifts, the throttle pours on.

Build Me an Ark

Oxfam has reported that, in the past twenty years, the incidence of weather-related disasters has quadrupled. If the great consensus of credentialed climatologists is correct (barring the occasional right-wing crank who claims “the jury’s still out” regarding climate change—yeah, out of its mind, and into the pockets of Big Industry), then we’re in for more. Much more.

We are getting a little foretaste here in the northeast. (The polar regions, where none of us pitch our tents and therefore is off our radar, is changing at a far more rapid rate, with frightening levels of icemelt reported.) A little time to build our big boats, the only thing that will help us now. But whither to set sail? Why, let us dock in the deserts of the southwest, there to tie our ropes to the railings of a million abandoned Arizona palais de trop, now sunk ten feet atop the drained aquifer. Let us climb the mainmast to train our spyglasses on the vast browned fields of desiccated golf courses that represent our willful childishness, greenswards that should never have been put here in the first place.

This is the summer that wasn’t. I kept waiting for it to begin, waiting through rainshower after rainshower. Mushrooms sprout in the side yard; the scent of incipient mildew spreads through the house. The boy waits, waits for a day in which the temperature climbs enough past 70 to make swimming, that old summer pastime, a desire. The dog waits, going to the doorstep to peer out through the sheets of silver wet, then giving me a baleful look (You’re not going to push me out into that, are you?) and turning around to take up her supine position on the kitchen rug again. Or else on the couch. Or maybe my bed. Her hair coats the house, in this humidity.

Summer was once the Promised Land, stretching into infinity, three months of heat and various stickinesses (popsicle juice, sweat) to enjoy for what seemed like forever. This season, we have gone to the swimming hole exactly once, and it began raining shortly after we arrived. The dogs and people started streaming back to their cars, but we stayed. We were wearing our rain gear, I mean bathing suits, after all. Last weekend I pitched my small tent, last used years and years ago at a rally in West Virginia in another young life, and shivered through two nights in a cheap sleeping bag that was rated for warm summer nights, while the cold descended from a hard, deep sky occasionally giving up wishes in a flash of shooting star. It had been hard to pull myself away from the bonfire, even though I was tired, and even though I did not really want to see what might happen if the one person overindulging in gulps from a bottle of bourbon lost his balance near the pot of flames that was glowing red from all the wood being heaped on it; by midnight he had attained the general status of gas-soaked rag, which needs only one spark to combust.

In the couple of weeks left of this season—though it seems impossible that another one is in our sights, or on the calendar already, but nature does not lie, and this morning I walked partway up Ticetenyck Mountain on a path gently littered with scarlet sugar maple leaves—I will have to work hard to get my share of summer. Ice cream cones and ferris wheels head the list. I need these to make myself feel, if only for a little while, that we have not lost this all, these pieces of the past that seasonally recur, just yet.

There You Go Again: Part III, Finally

Duality is all. Eleven years after falling into that numbed slumber, I awoke to both new perils and new joys. It seemed significant numbers of people were having serious difficulty these days distinguishing between their right and their left, because both sides of the road were much more often occupied at once by the same rather large car. It turned out I did need to buy some new gear, because there was this new stuff called “armor” they now put inside all the joints of clothing to make you walk funny. Well, better to walk funny than not walk at all, so pony up I did. The wonderful sight of so many, many more motorcycles on the road was tempered by the fact that a proportionate number were themselves hazards to other bikers, when they rode in trick-riding close formation without trick-riding skills, wearing plastic teacups perched atop their heads to protect the exact 15 percent of skull surface that is rarely to never landed on.

Far happier to me was the presence of vastly greater numbers of women riders. A couple weeks after taking possession of my new bike, I had an experience that could never have occurred a decade before: on a Friday afternoon jaunt up Route 28 in the Catskills, a woman rider overtook me in the passing lane at exactly the same moment we both waved to another woman heading toward us in the oncoming. The only three riders in sight.

The omnipresence of GPS units on virtually every other machine made me defensively question what the heck was so bad about yellowing map pockets anyway, as well as the fact that I don’t really like the idea that a satellite knows exactly where I am at all times—not unless it’s going to care about me too. I had resisted a cell phone far into the transformation of human beings into animals who sprouted wads of black plastic and wireless impulses from their left ears. Then, suddenly, the night that found me riding an unfamiliar machine up the Thruway in the dark alone, a decision was made to enter the new century, and lo, yet another monthly bill from Verizon.

But GPS—could I really embrace this? I have yet to really figure out how that cell phone works, after all. And I was always so proud of my well-honed ability to read maps and distill them into magic-markered hieroglyphics easily read at speed. You’re going to tell me this was obsolete.

Well, yes.

The thought briefly visited that I sounded like someone irritably protesting how crank telephones had been good enough for Aunt Olive; what did I need one of those new dial machines for? Then came the evening when a few motorcyclists were visiting, and I brought out my 1997 Rand McNally atlas pulling apart at the seams in order to show off my local-roads prowess: one of them started laughing and said, “Look! It’s analog GPS!” I figured I would soon succumb there too. And figure out how to pay for it later, like so much else.

Yet motorcycling remains a fundamentally mechanical experience in a digital and electronic world, one that is increasingly distant from three dimensions. In it we still put our feet on the pegs, engage our muscles; our eyes relay information to and from our brains, and then there we are, in a real cutting-through-the-air moment. The dirt under our nails is real, and hard to get out. We are members of a society with drive and purpose to life, a world larger than ourselves. We create situations with certain difficulties, then go about solving them—together. Something to do, and in that concrete something, we find a way to be. It allows us to be good, to express that goodness to others. The gift of giving that becomes a gift to ourselves. It’s all a great relief. And this is the secret we hold.

It is still morning for me. I have just arisen from sleep. I learn new things while memories of the first life gently float to the surface, bursting as they reach air. I remember thinking I had written everything I had wanted to say in the first book, but this time I know for certain I did not. I could not. Because this is an infinite experience, spiraling deeper and deeper, all the way into what it means to be human. But how could a simple machine take us there? I do not know. And if you have to understand, I couldn’t possibly explain. But I still just might try.

You Didn't Stop Me: Part II

For the first year after the break, voices reached out to me, through the electronic ether. People who just wanted to know how I was doing. People who could read my dreams. They were the ones who would not give up. “Get a bike.” “Get a bike.” “Get a bike.”

Till I began to repeat it too, “Get a bike?” And suddenly, one day, impossible as it seemed, ill-fitting to my life as middle-aged mother of one, fairly alone in all ways, the question mark became period. It did so in part because of the messianic fervor of some of these voices, impossible to ignore in the same way it is impossible to breathe in fumes of incense while gazing at the heaven of a gothic vaulted ceiling, medieval chant bearing you aloft, and not believe in the holy spirit. These priests shall remain nameless in case some of them are here. But what they wanted to bring me back to is in fact better than a religion, which after all is just a set of beliefs. Biking is more than that. It is an experience in this time and this space, one that takes not just the mind, but the body and its heart, for a ride.

It now seemed proper for a more sedate mount—and one that would start more reliably, too. Gone were the days (or so I needed to believe) of laying out parts on a city sidewalk over the course of long weekends, a metal picnic shared with other unencumbered friends, or chasing mail-order spark plugs in rare sizes across continents. The time was right for the Other Europe.

Still, I fretted. The world had changed, and so had I. Reading glasses. Another few million cars every year I had been out. The advent of cell phones, and of SUVs. Worse, cell phones and SUVs together. But I had been fretting for so long, and about so many things, that I finally wore myself out. And the day that I heard, at long last, a smooth, low triple singing in increasing volume from down the hill, then turn in to my drive where I saw it coming from behind the window where I had been watching, I stopped. I could no longer fret, because all I wanted now was to ride.

The relief. Relief from incessant what-ifs, the voices of unreason and counter-reason in my head. A relief to act, to start living again. To wake from sleep.

And so my bike’s first act of salvation was to provide a community to replace, or at least enfold, the one that was shattered for me. It came rushing back, the memory of open arms, the generosity of strangers, who are not very strange, so long as they are riders too. I was united, powerfully, not only through common desire, but by the very constitution of the blood, shared in what feels like an evolutionary drive that forms you like this, needing to ride, and joining with others who “get it.” We were isolated, together, by something that is beyond the ability to explain. Or, anyway, the time it would take to explain is time you cannot spare.

I wondered about what it is, exactly, that binds us so tight together that people you barely knew would, say, ride two hundred miles to lend you gear until you could free your own from the prison of crated storage. Or spend a few days hanging out to fix a leak, with the only payment a couple of salmon burgers and a not unreasonable amount of chocolate. Or answer endless e-mails about the new issue of “lowering,” which you learn has generated a veritable Wikipedia of insight into the arcane world of Bavarian after-market expenditure.

I found an answer one day, in a book about those utopian communities of mutual aid that spontaneously spring up in the wake of disasters. It is titled A Paradise Built in Hell, not that that is always apt in reference to motorcycling, though it is on those days when starters fry or rubber ruptures or cables snap. The author quotes a sociologist named Charles Fritz, who was an Army Air captain stationed in Britain in World War II, and so presumably knows whereof he speaks. What I am about to read here from Fritz’s conclusions about group behavior seems to strike most closely to the heart of why motorcyclists represent one of the most cohesive, and caring, groups it is possible to encounter. Quote: “The widespread sharing of danger, loss, and deprivation produces an intimate, primarily group solidarity among the survivors, which overcomes social isolation, provides a channel for intimate communication and expression, and provides a major source of physical and emotional support and reassurance. . . . The ‘outsider’ becomes an ‘insider,’ the ‘marginal man’ a ‘central man.’ People are thus able to perceive, with a clarity never before possible, a set of underlying basic values to which all people subscribe. They realize that collective action is necessary for these values to be maintained and that individual and group goals are inextricably merged. This merging of individual and societal needs provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely achieved under normal circumstances.” End quote. Indeed, I had always thought, What a funny idea, bikes antisocial. Who’s more social than bikers?

As proof, I now encountered the new brave new world of online forums, wherein countless like-minded riders spent every last minute they were not on two wheels on their modems, slinging clever barbs at one another with such astounding vigor one could only duck to avoid dismemberment. I could not even hope to participate until I overcame the fear that I could never create an avatar and moniker that would meet the off-color comic standards of most of these groups, much less enter the fray that made yet another of our great secrets manifest: per square inch, bikers possess more humor as well as more intelligence than any other group it is possible to name.

In re-encountering this aspect of belonging and commonality, I felt another kind of salvation coming down like gentle rain. What was this strange yet vaguely familiar feeling? Good god. It was happiness. I could not remember when I had last known that rich, smooth sensation. Here now was not only the animal happiness of riding, but the happiness of laughter, and the happiness of unearthing something wonderful and well-missed that had been long buried as in those attic boxes—my own sense of humor. Even if I was not yet a full-fledged wiseass.

Although I aspired to it. Oh yes I did. Thus I found bikes rejuvenating, literally, returning to youth, more specifically, age twelve, the height of one’s powers as a caustic comedian. This was purest pleasure, and I was now ready for pleasure; the lusciousness of the road and the shared wave cut into high relief how long it was that I had gone without. I had to make up for lost time, then, drink a double. Every sort of desire: the newly awakened do not differentiate among physical, emotional, intellectual pleasures. It was on a ride one day that it occurred to me that perhaps the biggest secret we share is that what we are doing out there in the open as we brake and gear down and lean is exactly (so far as our neurology is concerned) what other folk usually hide behind the bedroom door.

It was all bound up, too, in the pleasure of dreaming of where to go on my bike, and what it would feel like. Yes, I still had school lunches to fix, and bills to worry about, but I also now had road trips to plan: the promise of pleasure made only to myself, after years of what felt like living only for others. Although I did have monthly girls’ night out, I admit. Selfishness as salvation, arriving on the back of a blue ’92 K75.

Me: The Serial, Part 1

What follows is something I recently wrote. And read, out loud, to some people gathered in a schoolroom down south. I don't know if it's the afterword to a book
written quite some time ago, or if it's
the foreword to a book yet unwritten.
So I offer it here, in three parts. The next comes next week.
Unless you tell me to stop.
* * *

Once upon a time, I fell asleep. It was a long sleep, and it carried me down under the waters of forgetfulness. Yet I was buoyant still, and I would not be held down entirely. Thoughts and visions of movement down swift roads appeared, disappeared. But sleep on I did, a dark slumber of motorcyclelessness.

When I awoke, it was eleven years later. And everything had changed around me. But inside, where it counts, I was to find that nothing had. Because I had already been changed, a long time before, by the machine that specializes in altering cellular structure, the equations of desire.

What awakened me was the loud and brutal crashing of an edifice coming down, blown from its foundation by the dynamite of divorce. When it happens to you, you think that no one in the world has experienced this, this profound and dislocating destruction of everything you have carefully built. The shock waves radiate out and out, slowly taking in everything: where you live, who still wants to have you at their dinner table, the spark of fear you sometimes see in your child’s eyes.

Later you find, of course, you are not the only one. Hardly. But before realizing this, you are isolated by woe. It feels a little like you are undergoing a very painful operation. One that goes on for, like, nineteen months. But inevitably, at some point, the anesthetic starts to wear off. Your dreams become vivid then. And in a large percentage of them, motorcycles appear.

I was coming out of it.

Bikes were going to take me the rest of the way.

One moment stands out in clarity as the turning point. As is usual of these moments, it takes you by surprise, in the most mundane surroundings--your fairly dirty office, sitting at the paperboard cabinet that houses your aging computer and a thousand ignored Post-Its. Through the portal called “YouTube.” Everything in the world is there. So to stumble on one particular sight that will change the trajectory of your life is in the category of finding a piece of the Holy Shroud in the drawer with your kitchen towels. I have, unsuspecting of miracles, opened a video clip of some guy somewhere in Europe with a shaky grasp of English taking a ride (“in the montains”) on a Moto Guzzi 1100 Sport. The camera is mounted somewhere above the instrument panel so it gives a view of the tachometer, the triple clamp, and a piece of foggy gray road ahead. But it is what comes out of the single speaker behind the monitor that reaches out, goes inside my chest, grabs hold of a vital organ and squeezes till I feel the pulsing of blood in my ears. It is the sound of a big twin, the aria of an exhaust note that sounds impossibly beautiful, a tone that rises and falls within the high sweet spot of the power band.

I could never have expected what happened next, which is exactly the operating procedure of turning points. Tears, pooling at the rims of my eyes. The only other music that has ever made me weep is that of J.S. Bach, and I realize at once that the two share a metaphysic: pure cold mathematics tinged with longing by virtue of being worked by mortal hands.

It is also the sound of my past, to which I now feel a sudden wide yearning to return.

I had forgotten so much, but now it began to flood back. E-mail messages in the Save file from three years before, when—in one of those sporadic moments of buoyancy—I had apparently been sounding people out about finding a K75, the only other machine besides the Italians that turned my head; there was something about those lines, inexplicable in the way that the essence of this whole thing is beyond reason.

Up in the attic, packing to leave my home, I find another buried sign, in the boxes that hold sixteen years of my life. When I come upon these three, I stop to remember packing them eight years before for their journey from Brooklyn to here, two hours upstate.

Why am I keeping this? I thought then; I have built a life that cannot fit a bike, with a child, a husband, a dog, a house, and a progressing series of other interests. But I could not let it go, either, this jacket spotted with vague memorials to so many insects’ lives, these gloves, a second skin permanently shaped in the form of my own hands. You don’t get rid of your skin! And you owe them something, these things that have seen you through: rainsuit, brake bleed kit, battery tender, lock. Also, the gnawing sense that if, just if, you have made a mistake, it will cost a damn fortune to replace. So into the boxes it all went, and then up into the attic.

I think I knew. I may have left riding, but it could not possibly leave me.

What it does is change you chemically, and this is the first of the secrets you learn, the ones that hold you together with your ilk, against all those who don’t, and aren’t, and won’t. There is the sense, even the first time, that you have come back. Strange, yes? But not at all: you know it is working with that flow of electrical fluids originating in our animal core, the glandular lab of the brain, and that this is something we were fundamentally built to do. This is why it feels so right. And this is why no one who has never done it can understand—because the rightness is contained within, in the mirroring of the intricate circuitry of your body and the equally complex astonishments of the machine. You look at it, and it looks back at you. There is no place here for someone else.

See. There. I have just explained the biker’s in-joke, the sticker that reads, “If I have to explain it, you wouldn’t understand.” Even more to the point is the one displayed on the helmet of the man who perhaps embodies above all others the essence of the motorcyclist, the one who simply wishes to do nothing else: “If I have to understand, don’t bother to explain.”

I had thought, at one time, that I had said all I wanted to say about bikes. I was pretty much through with them.

Uh, no. For I had no idea they could also save you.

The Child Threatens

"I have a little Nelly. And I'm not afraid to
use it."


--boy, age 9,
July 13, 2009

Reading Maps

Unpacking after a move is a road map of sorts--to one's past. Former enthusiasms are reflected in box after box of books: apparently I was seriously interested in film, on the evidence of two bookshelves' worth (my annotated What Is Cinema, Andre Bazin, pretentiously dated the day I bought it, in a girlish hand, 1978). I had almost forgotten. Who else was I? Photography, one and a half shelves. Modern poetry, one shelf. Philosophy--s**t, almost two shelves, and all nearly incomprehensible to me now. Is it the loss of brain cells, or is it just the inability to focus in that manner of the youthful book-eater?

No, I still have the capacity for enthusiasm. Lord knows, I still have the capacity for a whole line of temporary insanities, or at the least, very, very bad judgment.

The vinyl collection reflects times frozen in amber. High school: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (I still remember slow dancing to them, but not the person with whom I did it; music lasts while young love does not); almost all of David Bowie, and when I stop unpacking to listen to Changes, it has some new resonance. Later, I see, I had collected the entire oeuvre of Talking Heads and its offshoots; I also managed a fair amount of Bootsy Collins and Parliament Funkadelic--we used to dance ourselves silly in college. Here comes R.E.M. and XTC. UB40, the Clash, Beastie Boys (Let me clear my throat!). And look--Robyn Hitchcock! Now I sing with him as I try to put things to rights in this new place, in a new time ("Brenda's iron sledge . . . Please don't call me Reg, it's not my name"--you really can't beat that, can you?). Of course, I should not be playing these records at all with this old cartridge--or, for that matter, with what I assume is a rotten belt, since the drive is making funny noise all the while--but the combination of being both a lazy SOB and broke never bodes well for having equipment that works right. And so nothing I have quite does.

The other evening, after humping boxes and furniture and books and clothes and toys and pictures and records for eight days straight, having stayed up till 2 a.m. the night before carving a path through the ancient detritus left by the movers in what would, in the best of all possible worlds, become a living room, I finally allowed myself a respite. A glass of Campari and soda, and a dinner comprised of hors d'oeuvres ("a Melissa meal," in the term of one of my college friends, since some stripes do not change; or, to spin it another way, I was serving tapas to people in place of meals before it became fashionable to do so). Then I sat down with the maps. Paper maps. (I had just unpacked my map collection, as well, and it too is a record of the past I had forgotten: is it really possible I have been to all these places?) I am going to make my first big trip of a new life the old way: no GPS, no radar detector. Sharpie'd directions written for the map pocket, and pray it doesn't rain, because the tankbag rain cover obscures it, and then you have to go on memory. That which I have no longer.

There is nothing, nothing, better than dreaming over maps. The first one I consulted, between handfuls of smoked almonds, was the map of the eastern U.S. that, eighteen years before, had gone with me on a journey of five thousand miles. The route was traced in green highlighter, and so it was the ghost impression of trips past, left on the windowpane through which trips future are glimpsed.

Yesterday at the auto parts store at the Kingston Plaza, where I'd gone for bulbs and fuses and the bits and pieces that will be stowed in the topcase for a few days from now, another man at the counter was looking at me, noticed my jacket and my helmet in hand. "Nice day for ride, eh?" he said in a longing voice. "Absolutely perfect," I agreed. He told me he used to ride, but had now quit. I told him I had once quit, but now I was back. I told him he could go back, too. And wouldn't regret it. "Yeah," he allowed. "I'm beginning to think maybe you can quit riding, but riding never quits you."

As the sun set, I drained the glass, refolded the map that was coming apart at every seam, taped and retaped. This time I am not trying to re-create the past. I am trying to live in the present, in this exact second, unaware of the next, and trying to make it last for miles.


[There will be no post next week, since the person responsible for writing them will be here and also because she has been spending too much time in front of maps/boxes/Campari to have been able to write anything in advance. But she might have good tales to tell the week after next. Nelly, by the way, is going to Camp Janet, where she will eat better than most upper middle class humans.]

Free and Not So Easy

Nelly is finding places to be at home in her new home: yesterday afternoon, she hopped into the laundry
basket, and curled up on the dirty clothes. See, dogs are not like you and me. Trust me, there was some really ripe stuff in there. She looked so peaceful and happy. I suspect that will be where this evening will find her, when we all celebrate some vague memory of something that none of us truly appreciate or understand anymore. I am not talking flag decal on the pickup here. I am talking slog to the ends of the earth, to the ends of tolerance, to the ends of what a human being can withstand.

We hear what we want to. Talking politics with someone you care for but do not yet know is a frightening business, maybe more so than delving into personal past history. Which, when you come to a certain point in life, can be more potent than anything that could come in the future. And that is frightening too. Because what occurred in the past occurred in an ethos of endless hopefulness and unseeable boundaries. That is why, I guess, I kept carting around this vast tonnage of stuff--some of it was going to be useful in one of my infinitely numbered future lives: dishware to serve the crown prince; enough pictures to line the great hall of a Tudor mansion; evening wear for whatever gala or prize bestowal might pop up in years to come. But now I finally know I won't have twelve more lives of differing intensity; I might just get to live this one out in some modicum of happiness, occasional pleasure, and decent output of work. Enough for me.

I am still not certain what to do with my wedding shoes, however. I look at them, metallic leather winking at me from inside their tissue paper nest, and try to imagine throwing a box containing shoes that cost many days' wages, that were meant to make me feel like a princess and did, into what feels suspiciously like a dumpster at the Salvation Army. Uh-uh. I can't. But neither could I imagine wearing them at another such ceremony, even in the unlikely event of a water landing. I put the box away again. Perhaps something new will yet occur, for which beautiful bronze pumps will be just the right thing.

Offloading the detritus of the past--after carefully turning it in your hands, marveling that you have such chances, such moments, and so very, very many of them--is a kind of freedom. Not so hard-fought as the one we eat popsicles and watermelon in honor of today. But one that is just a little difficult, because it requires letting go. Once the ballast is gone, though, see how high you can fly!

Back, and Gone

Moving is such a special hell. Get out the trowel, and dig. Dig under the hairy roots of vines, hit rock. Break shovel. Throw away. See something peeking up from the dirt; recoil in morbid terror but reach out with irresistible curiosity. What forgotten thing from the past is coming up from under the dirt? Put it in a cardboard box. Take it with you.

Driving the station wagon across the reservoir on moving day--I moved the bike to the new house first thing in the morning, because I was already so tired that later on the exhaustion would have made it like riding drunk--I was ferrying another load of stuff and listening to anthem rock from the eighties blaring from the radio. I was wondering how I'd gotten here. No, not via 213 to 28A. I mean toward the brink of freedom. Joy was peeking out from behind the clouds, sending its rays to glint against the priceless drinking water belonging to the great city to our south. (The drinking water into which one summer day I dipped my naked body some twenty-five years ago; someone had a great sip of me later that week.) Pain and regret and fear were also tearing at me. It was wonderful, it was awful. It was life. And in that moment, realizing this, and that this was my life, and that it could not have possibly been any other way--this move, at this point in time, in the midst of this curious passage on the other side of which is I don't know what, which is both blessing and curse--I found myself laughing out loud and sobbing in the exact same moment.

The Town of Olive dump has views so magisterial they could make angels sing. Two of my friends appeared, at different points in the packing and lifting, but unbidden both, just when I needed them most. They can have no idea what it meant to me; possibly that I am connected by live wire to their hearts. I can still receive a signal from WVKR, because though I am much farther away, I am also 300 feet higher in elevation. I get to drive across that reservoir, in the witness of a cradle of mountains, whenever I want to visit my old haunts. I am one mile by the clock from wood-fired pizza. The frogs play the banjo all night long in the woodland swamp out back. I have a blank slate on which to make the first tentative chalk marks of a new life.

I have my own place.

These are some of the gratitudes I bear. There will be more to come. I wish I could lift furniture by myself. I wish that I did not have so much stuff. But I lift it tenderly out of its cardboard vaults, and turn my past gently and wonderingly in my hands. Then I look for somewhere to put it.

No Rhyme

Black Dog

Once squeezed into the four inches under the armoire; once

Small as a hand; once nearly

Fictitious, mischievous, self-permitting, round and

Filled tight with worms.

Now my friend, not shadow, but gone --

Off in the distance tail flying, arc a streamer, reminder, smudge;

A gay tail they call it, proving bad for work but good for black dog.

She has a smile. She eats her oatmeal with meat and greens.

She draws the world in bounds and springs,

Rounding back, finally, territory covered, miles understood.

Then later she sleeps once more, while overhead beyond the couch

We spy silver planes now changed to lines of light in the dark.

They move distantly past a thin curved moon

Not unlike a gay tail flung in biologic joy over the back of black

Dog, black dog who is here at this moment

Far from me but closer than you know.

[R.I.P. Mercy my love]

Affiliated

I keep a list of subjects someday I want to write about, including Why I Love Dollar Stores. That one would be three sentences long. Far lengthier, though, would be my rumination on friendship. What is it, really? The catalyst there is my dear friend A., and the fact that in no sensible universe would we have ever become friends. Me, the suburban Ohio girl who went to what they call "good schools," who dined at holiday time in velvet frocks at a table dressed with Georg Jensen silver. Him, the Italian-Irish punk from the Bronx streets, who served time in Vietnam, jail, and detox of various sorts. Our lives intersected, however improbably, in the park in Brooklyn, and the means of our linkage was the dog community. Then we found out that deep inside we are essentially the same person.

First, we saw that we would do anything for our dogs. Then we saw that we would do anything for each other.

Thus is the insider/outsider structure of deep bonding built. From the outside, to many people, our attitude looked at worst like insanity. At best like something inexplicable. So we learned not to try to explain it. This drew us even closer together. Motorcycles divide the world even more starkly than devotion to dogs.

In a former life, I traveled on two continents befriended and cared for beyond even what my family might do by people with whom I shared only a common love for a marque, Moto Guzzi. And my door was always open to them, too, strangers who could never truly be strange to me. Unknown people were invited to share whatever I could give, and I had absolute confidence they were "all right." It is really not conceivable that someone with criminal intent would arrive on a Guzzi.

Now I am embraced again by a brotherhood of altruists, motorcyclists who are bound together by something that is deep in our human natures, and that requires only the glue of commonality to flower forth. These are my villagers now. Their generosity is sometimes breathtaking. And I think I have found at least part of the answer why, in a new book by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, which is an exploration of the utopian communities that spring up in the aftermath of disasters, from earthquakes to fires to man-made devastation. Time and again, people come together under duress in acts of mutual aid that represent the finest that our evolution as social animals has bred us for. We need one another, and for these moments, we become the gift and the giver both. This is friendship. This is my life now.

I'm a Dissenter

Apparently I am the only person in the world who has problems--deep, deep problems--with the thinking of Temple Grandin. Everyone else falls all over themselves loving her ostensibly profound connection with animals. Myself, I get tripped up over the fact that she is employed by the slaughter industry: a bit hard to claim total identification with the Other in that case. And she knows a bit about dogs--but not enough. She has not read the basic texts. This may be excusable for the rest of us, but for a bestselling author . . . ? Here's my take on her book Animals in Translation. This was originally published in the Village Voice. And I still stand by it.

***

Temple Grandin is no doubt the most famous autistic person we have. She first came to the attention of the public as the subject of one of Oliver Sacks’s neurological studies, in which she described the way she experienced the world as that of “an anthropologist on Mars.” Finding her way on this planet, she discovered an affinity for animals—specifically, that she shared perceptual abilities with domesticated cattle. She has become a valued consultant to the beef industry, responsible for designing humane slaughterhouse equipment that helps dispatch half the animals done in every year in this country. Her profile has risen so high she is employed by McDonald’s to ensure that the Big Macs, while in their pre-edible state, are handled to a standard that will keep PETA relatively quiet.

In a previous book, Thinking in Pictures, she described how her brain functions: not by translating perceptions into words, and thence to concepts, but by keeping input visually discrete. In this more readable book, she has elaborated on the idea that the malfunctioning frontal lobes of autistic brains are more similar to animal brains, with their smaller frontal lobes, than they are to “normal” human brains. She may, as a high-functioning autistic, have succeeded in getting a doctorate in animal science, but at heart she is a prey animal on the plain, alert to every movement in the undergrowth.

Her purpose thus is to rehabilitate animals in the eyes of the humans who for too long have scorned their intelligence. For what goal—psychic ease of maltreatment, perhaps?—she does not assay. But she does give copious evidence, from a far-flung map of seemingly every behavioral, ethological, and biological outpost in the animal kingdom, that it is us who are lacking in the smarts department, at least when it comes to assessing or even noticing different ways of thinking. This is clearly the voice of someone who has endured grave misinterpretation herself; in her 1995 book Grandin wrote, “Some renowned scientist speculated that humans had to develop language before they could develop tools. I thought this was ridiculous . . .” no doubt because she designed tools all the time, and she thought visually, not verbally. (But why not just ask the owner of any dog who by crawling into a lap and depositing something in the hand has turned his human into the ideal tool for holding bones so they might be chewed with optimal vigor?) Here, though, she proves herself hardly outside the usual human pale, for she has been reading the same popular opinions as everyone else: like many, she has confused “language” with “speech.” She corrects herself later with examples of some terrifically complex animal communications systems, notably that of Gunnison’s prairie dog, but first discusses at length how being deaf-mute affects thinking, at one point complaining that it is so little studied a Google search on “language-less people” turns up only nine hits. She might have tried “people without speech”: that one yields 11,300,000.

To those who find themselves daily shocked by the narcissism of humans who contemplate the rest of creation through tiny spyglasses only to find the view uninterestingly circumscribed, Animals in Translation will be clutched to the breast in relief. And then, perhaps, removed a little distance. Because it is ultimately troubling, not for the questions it does not answer—the author is wise enough to say that the probability of animals’ rich emotional and communicative lives coincides with our inability to ever know for sure—but for the ones she does not ask. She claims a native ability to understand animals from the experiential level, yet she often works from the same analytical prison cell we all do, confined by prevailing philosophy. (Certain of her interpretations of dog behavior are likely wrong, which is not just an academic distinction, since it leads to training advice.)

At the beginning of the book Grandin offers the hope that “what I’ve learned will help people start over again with animals,” and at the end she reiterates a desire that animals “have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do.” Devoutly to be wished—except impossible, without dismantling the gigantic construct of factory farming, the industry that employs Grandin. She never swims into the dark waters where reside the sharks of debate between animal rights and animal welfare, because she might not come back alive. Yet there is no figure who more perfectly exemplifies that vexing conflict. She goes only so far as to wet her toes at the edge, addressing the apparent riddle of her avowed love for cows giving rise to a career of facilitating their deaths.

One of the true “mysteries of autism” is how a neurological short-circuit can cause extreme emotional dissociation. In Temple Grandin, though not her book, it explains a lot.

Where I'm Getting To

I spent today looking at people and trying to figure out how old they were. Ten or twenty years older than I am now seems a mere little hop over a drainpipe trickle, not the rolling wide Mississippi that it was a little while ago. Time collapses like an umbrella all of a sudden. Today becomes tomorrow morning before I can adequately grasp that it's afternoon.

That man with the cart ahead of mine--he moves very slowly and deliberately, fully enmeshed in his task, which is trying to lift his groceries onto the belt. He is having some trouble. But given his intense concentration, at least he is living in the moment.

The twelve-pack of individual bottles of spring water is challenging him (and me, too, because I don't understand why such things exist). It slips askew; he tries to regrip. His fingers don't seem to want to work the way they were meant to when they were given to him. They're like something not quite connected, not quite flexible, and he ends up holding the package somewhere off to the side, with his palms.

Is this me in fifteen years? I think with what feels like a startling, and very mean, smack upside the head. Shock of white hair, inability to focus on anything but the job at hand? Certainly, then, unable to swing a leg over a motorcycle, much less guide it safely (or at anything above 15 mph) down the road?

Then I'd better get busy.

A lot of living to do, quick. Suddenly, I want to throw my head back and gulp, the whole tall, sweaty glass of physicality: hike up to High Point, rocks underfoot; dance to exhaustion at a friend's party in a hillside art studio, luminaria glittering below on the path to home; hammer in the tent pegs and gather the night's tinder; dress for dinner on the patio of a restaurant with a view; touch the place where the brown hairs fleck the white ones and then join the black ones, the tenderest place on Nelly's lovely face; sway on the chairlift in a bitter wind, knowing that soon warm speed will wash me downhill; wear the gold sandals; unfurl three contiguous maps and look at them for a long time, make lists of what goes into the saddlebags, then early one morning put the key in and go; ride. Do a lot of riding. If all this is a midlife crisis, I don't care. I call it coming back to life.

Recently one of my friends on a social networking site that shall remain nameless mused on how ("at my age!") he was starting to feel the urge for a motorcycle. He was soliciting opinions; wanted to hear from anyone who'd ever crashed. One friend posted about the two times she'd dropped her bike; another one wrote about someone he knows who's now an amputee. Many, many people wrote to express alarm: "Don't do it!" they pleaded. I weighed in on the opposing side: "1. Yes, do it! but 2. Do it only with training, training, and more training, so you can be in the group that is underrepresented in accident statistics." Unfortunately, my comment appeared just below one that tersely said, "My son-in-law was killed on a motorcycle."

I felt awful. And then came my trip to the shopping plaza, where I went shopping for a glimpse of the future. Which would be worse? Deciding that, since so many of these intense flavors will be untastable in a short while, I should decline them now? Or taking the risk that I might not get all the way to 75 and custom-made orthopedic shoes if I drink that whole glass?

Maybe I wouldn't reach 75 anyway, all my efforts to preserve this web of blood, bone, tissue blown to powder one day in a surgeon's office.

And what is so great about 75, I'd like to know?

I do not have a death wish. I have a life wish, one so strong that it requires me to scoot a little closer to the silent but breathing hulk of death's form; I reach out and take his hand in the dark. We are together in this, not like friends, not like lovers, but like parts of the same self. It's the life wish that makes you want to open wide every sense, go screaming into the air, waving wildly to your partner, he who is The End, as you go. It's the death wish that makes you slow down to an acceptable speed for someone your age, comparison-shop for walkers and canes, resolutely denying the existence of the quiet watcher. He who is going to get you, sometime. Not to be morbid or anything.