Motorcycles I've Loved (14 page)

There is an incredible amount of satisfaction in sharing that vista with no one, and I felt a fresh surge of it as I sat next to my raised motorcycle and surveyed the mountains. I love cooking for one on the gas stove, and bathing on the east porch beneath the solar camping shower, strung up with a pulley, not a soul for miles to see me dancing and shivering as I rinse my hair with rainwater. I love reading on one porch, then standing up, turning sloppy cartwheels on the lawn, and moving to another porch to keep reading. On clear, warm days I would go stomping around the meadow, following forgotten, intermittent paths, absently picking bouquets of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod, then throwing them back into the field. When it rained, I built enormous fires inside, so that if one were to look out the window the misty drizzle and the wood smoke would twine together and it would be impossible to tell which was which. My motorcycle, slick with mountain rain, would blaze through the fog like the beacon of a lighthouse, its red gas tank shining through the thick white air. On days like that it was as though I were caught in a cloud—come to think of it, I was.

I stayed on the mountain for almost two weeks. I thought of the generations who had stayed there before me, my grandfather in particular, and I thought of a story he had told me once. When he was a younger man there had been dirt bikes kept up there, the same sort of 60cc or 90cc bikes he eventually bought for his daughters. There was a web of logging trails throughout the woods surrounding the bungalow, but with a good pair of tires and a little luck, a trail wasn't even necessary. On one ride, however, luck hadn't been on Gordy's side, and he'd strayed from the trails. Somewhere out in the woods he hit a fallen tree, hidden by the undergrowth, and went flying over the handlebars. The bike had refused to start after he brushed himself off, and so he trooped back to the bungalow, looking for a little help towing it home. When he returned to the scene of the accident with a few other guys, they couldn't find the dirt bike anywhere—they searched for hours, but it was gone. Eventually, they had to give up, scratching their heads. It was almost as though the universe had folded in on itself for a moment, creating a split-second singularity, an inexplicable event within spacetime, which happened to suck the matter of one small motorcycle through a wormhole and into another, incomprehensible dimension. Either that or the damn thing's still out there, covered in moss, forgotten among the rocks, and the trees, and the dirt.

Propulsion

F
rom the bungalow, I crossed into New Hampshire and stayed with my mother's sister and her husband, my aunt annie and uncle Woody, for a few days. The return to civilization was as satisfying as the departure had been. I traded solitude and mountains for endless, scalding-hot showers, television, and the Internet. I slept in a soft bed and ate food cooked by someone else. I watched movies. I checked my e-mail. It was glorious. Before long, though, I was ready to go. I still needed to swing back through Northampton to pick up the windshield I had ordered, and I could feel the season beginning to turn. Halfway through September, the nights were getting cold and the foliage was coming out: time to head south.

I talked to my dad while I stayed in New Hampshire, and he eagerly offered to meet me in Virginia on his own motorcycle so that we could do some riding together. At first I didn't want to. I felt protective of my adventure south. I wanted to do it alone, without help, without company. When I went abroad at seventeen I had no friends to visit, no contacts, nothing but the maps and my own whims to guide me, and this had seemed like the right way to go about it, like the experience was worth more because it was so lonely. As I considered the journey south, I began to wonder if I might not enjoy having my father along for part of it—if there might not be a different sort of value in inviting him to join me. I wasn't looking to lose myself anymore, I was setting out to find something, and it occurred to me that sharing this adventure with my father could be part of the treasure hunt. So I invited him, and he got serious about packing. So serious, in fact, that my mom called me the day before I left New Hampshire to tell me about it.

“Lily,” she said, “there is a tent pitched in my living room.” She sent me a picture to go along with this claim, and I saw that it was true. My father had spread out his entire arsenal of camping and traveling items in a grid on the floor, and there in the middle of it all, a medium-sized tent was pitched, complete with rain guard and ground cloth. I was still laughing when he got on the line and started telling me about his GPS system, and how he had rigged it to fit on his bike, and how he wasn't going to take his camping stove, because we probably wouldn't use it much, et cetera, et cetera. It struck me that I was going to be traveling with
the
most prepared man on the planet. It was a comforting thought—but I wasn't there yet. It was a long way to Virginia.

I made my way back down to Massachusetts slowly, trying to diminish the beating I was taking from the wind. I stayed in Florence for a night, then the next day I rode over to my friend Seth's house in Northampton and set up a little living room nest for myself there. He said he could use the company, not to mention the fact that he had a Honda Super Sport 750 parked in his driveway—it drew me like a moth to the flame.

The next day, I picked up my windshield. When I ripped open the box, however, I realized that while the windshield itself was all I had hoped it would be, the mounting brackets were not included. I called around to the local parts dealers to see if they had what I needed in stock, and no one did. Defeated, I ordered the mounting kit, which was of course very expensive, and settled in to wait for a few more days, until the part arrived. During this time Seth showed me some of his favorite back roads, and we spent a few autumn afternoons flitting through the hill towns of western Massachusetts like fat red hummingbirds. The leaves had begun to turn in earnest there, and the trees were exploding with color. One afternoon we stopped at a little roadside eatery called the Snack Shack and ate shrimp po'boys while we admired our motorcycles, one new, one old, both red.

After a few days, I got the call that the brackets had arrived and I went over to pick them up. I fastened the mounting brackets, slotted in the windshield, and loaded up the motorcycle. I had been taking everything on and off so frequently that by then I was becoming increasingly familiar with where to put it all and how to strap it down. I was done in no time. I used a wrinkled roll of blue painter's tape to stick my directions to the gas tank, where I could look down and reference them when I needed to, then Seth and I rode over to my favorite coffee shop. We sat outside and I admired the Magna, piled high, while we drank our coffee. The sun was in our faces, and the fallen leaves were swirling around our feet. I drained my cup and stood up to go. I wasn't quite sure where I was going to spend the night, but I knew it was time to get started.

“I'll see you when I see you,” I said, and got moving.

It started out as a beautiful day. I took a road I'd never ridden on before, and headed west toward the Taconic State Parkway along Route 66. The trees stretched out overhead like a smoldering, leafy awning. It was the end of September by then, and the colors were vivid. Burnt sienna and carmine red, gold and umber, and the thick needles of the evergreens bristling in the background, sliding into one long smudge of color as I whipped past.

Propulsion is the means of creating forward motion. In Latin,
pro
means forward and
pellere
means to go, or to drive. As I forged ahead on my journey south, leaving the stillness of the bungalow behind and opening up my engine, letting it propel me across Massachusetts and into New York, I thought of other cross-country journeys. My own, as a twenty-one-year-old returning to a home country that didn't quite feel like home anymore, and my brother's, propelled west with such venom, such confusion that I don't think even he understood why he was moving or where he was hoping to arrive. And yet, for all the reasons I have to be angry with my brother, many of them fell by the wayside when I wasn't looking. In the years since I'd seen him on the West Coast, he'd become a small but persistent part of my life. We didn't talk often, maybe once or twice a year, but they were awkwardly pleasant conversations and he sounded mostly even-keeled and healthy. The proselytizing gave way to biblical scholarship for the most part, and my disinterest in discussing religion and conspiracies no longer needed to be reiterated, it went without saying. We learned to talk about other things, and although that repertoire isn't large, we're working on it. It still feels like speaking with a stranger, but a friendly stranger; it's encouraging.

I didn't notice at first, I was moving too fast myself, but I eventually saw that Phineas had stopped his wild propulsion away from our roots some time ago, and was in fact drifting back in the direction he'd come from. He's a different man of course, but that's okay—I'm different, too. Perhaps it was my own propulsion that kept us so far apart for so long, but now, rather than drifting apart, we are moving incrementally closer.

When we were young my mother made us matching capes that fastened at our throats with Velcro and were emblazoned with our initials on the back. I picture those two mismatched kids, the gangly, black-haired boy next to his girl-shaped, goldfinch-sized sidekick, and I think of them blasting off in different directions, capes flapping in the wind, stubborn fists stretched out overhead to punch through the air resistance, and I realize afresh that we're not all that different.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
HIT
the New York border, the sky opened up and fell on me. The rain was torrential, soaking me from above, and then jumping up from the road and soaking me from below, too. I was drenched in a matter of seconds—there was no time to pull over and don my rain gear, and once the rain had begun there was no point. I was already as wet as I could possibly be. What I didn't realize was how cold I was about to get. The farther I went, the more violently I shivered. Since I had chosen a secondary road to take me through New York, widely skirting the city, the places to stop were few and far between. At first I kept going because it felt safer than pulling over. The pounding rainfall was making road shoulders and turns hard to see in advance, and if I kept going I could ride in the riverbed left by the tires of the car up ahead, hopping on the coattails of their momentum. Later, when the rain slowed and then stopped, and the road was slick but no longer flooded, it seemed like I might as well forge ahead. It wasn't until the sky darkened and my hands became numb within my waterlogged gloves that I began to look for motels.

I pulled into the first place I spotted, but found it utterly deserted. The sign remained, but the motel was long gone, an empty row of boarded windows and padlocked doors. I turned around in a driveway thick with mud and went back to the road, disheartened. I kept going, beginning to wonder if I would ever find a place, until eventually the word
MOTEL
emerged from behind some trees. I stomped down on my rear brake and swung into the parking lot. The sign said
STAR BRITE MOTEL
and the neon was lit. I heaved a sigh of relief, parked the bike, and rang the bell next to the door labeled
OFFICE
.
I waited for almost ten minutes, and rang the bell twice more before a little old woman pushed aside the lace curtains, peered out at me, then opened it.

“Oh,” she said, “you're so wet.” She had a thick German accent and a little apron on over her dress. “Come in, come in—you'd like a room, yes?” I nodded weakly and she guided me inside. I handed her my credit card without even asking how much. As she led me back outside and down the long row of rooms, she eyed my motorcycle and asked me about my trip. “Oh! All by yourself?” she exclaimed. “How brave, my dear, how brave. Me, I've never been on a motorbike, not once.” I told her maybe she should try it, and she responded, “Oh, no, I'm much too old for that sort of thing. But you—you're young. Motorbikes are for young people.” She offered to let me park the bike underneath the overhang, just outside my room, but by then I couldn't care less if it got wet. I thanked her anyway. She told me there was a diner just down the road a piece, and so after I unloaded the Magna and took a shower, I walked there. I'd had enough of the motorcycle for one day.

The Rainbow Diner was every bit what I was expecting: red vinyl booths, a pie case, and grizzled old men at the counter. I ordered the roast beef dinner, which was enormous, swimming in gravy, and came with a bowl of cream of chicken and rice soup so thick my spoon stood up in it. I ate what I could, which was roughly half of everything on my plate, and hurried back to the motel so that I could crawl between my scratchy starched sheets and close my eyes.

The next day I got up, chose the least wet pair of jeans available to me, and set to repacking the motorcycle. The old German woman waved as I strapped down my last bungee cord and came over to say good-bye.

“You are to have a safe trip,” she commanded. I nodded.

“I will certainly do my best.”

She squeezed my arm and went back to cleaning rooms. My gloves were still soaking wet, so I tucked them under one of the straps to dry in the wind, then turned the bike around and headed back to the Rainbow Diner for breakfast. The waitress, a different one this time, told me there was a waffle and egg and bacon special for five dollars, so I said, sure, lemme have that, then got out my map and traced my way down into Pennsylvania. A silver-haired man and his grandson two booths away were checking out my motorcycle, and after a minute he called over to me, “Hey—that thing yours?”

“Yup,” I said.

“Where ya goin'?” he asked. I told him Florida, and he let out a little whistle from behind his teeth. My breakfast arrived, and again it was so huge I could barely finish half of it. He asked me if I needed any help with directions heading out of town; I said no, thank you, I think I've got it, but he scribbled down a couple things on a piece of yellow paper anyway. As I was finishing my watery coffee he started telling me about a tree-house hostel in Georgia that one of his sons had gone to. I told him it sounded pretty cool, because I am a sucker for tree houses, and he said that if I felt like giving him my e-mail address he'd make sure and pass along the website for it.

I paused, but he was a sweet old guy having breakfast with his grandson, and I liked the sound of the hostel, so I wrote it down for him. After I finished my breakfast and paid the check, I gave him and his grandson a smile and headed out. When I started the bike I could see them both waving furiously at me through the window. I revved the motorcycle extraloud for the kid, who went nuts, then I raised a hand at them and pulled out of the parking lot.

•   •   •

A
LTHOUGH THE MORNING
was clear, there were still deep puddles on the road from the heavy rain the day before, some more like rivers than puddles, so by mid-morning my feet were soaked again—not to give the impression my boots had actually dried overnight, because they hadn't.

I had crossed over into Pennsylvania by the time the torrential rain began again, appearing out of a clear blue sky like a magic trick, and this time I was on a two-lane highway headed toward Philadelphia. When my tires started hydroplaning across the road I slowed down, crouched behind my windshield, and struggled against the suction of enormous trucks whipping past me, waves of water crashing into my left side. I struggled to find the safety of someone else's wake, but the road was too busy, with too many lanes. It would have been best to pull over, but there was nowhere obvious, and moving at a diagonal through the quickly moving water was treacherous, so I kept going. The rush of traffic and the water beneath my tires had sucked me up into its chaotic flow. As the highway became a river, all of its travelers seemed to become one. An enormous, snaking body with more momentum than any one vehicle could possess alone.

Forging ahead, I endured the battle into the late afternoon, when the rain eased and the sun emerged, somewhat sheepishly. I took my next exit, which spit me out near a shopping plaza, and swooped around the parking lot until I spotted a Starbucks. It would have to do, I thought to myself, and parked.