Harley and Me (13 page)

The automatic door of the largest garage I've ever seen opens as if of its own accord when we pull up to Roger and Crystal's place. In their airplane hangar of a garage, there's room for all four of our bikes. We park, unload, find the rooms they've set up for us. I'm out cold in minutes.

Dinner is served at six thirty. Hamburger Helper and an iceberg lettuce salad. I'm immensely grateful for their hospitality. Over dinner, Rebecca and I listen to stories Roger and George share about
being stuck on the road with fellow bikers, the lengths to which both have gone to help stranded fellow riders. The many nights sitting on the side of the road with a friend's broken-down bike, keeping each other company. They crack themselves up with tales of a guy named George Sanchez and his unreliable Sportster.

“Why did you keep riding with him if he was always breaking down?” I ask Roger.

“He would have stayed with me, too.”

I ponder this simple algebra of connection.

• • •

Apter tells a story about what he calls “edgeworkers”—those who voluntarily adopt experiences that take them to the “edge” of life. He says that edgeworkers recognize one another, despite great differences in lifestyle and social location. He cites gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, progenitor of the term
edgework
, to explain how Thompson won the confidence of the Hells Angels when researching his first book:

I just went out there and said, “Look, you guys don't know me, I don't know you, I heard some bad things about you, are they true?” I was wearing a fucking madras coat and wing tips, that kind of thing, but I think they sensed I was a little strange . . . Crazies always recognize each other. I think Melville said it, in a slightly different context: “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” Of course, we're not talking about genius here, we're talking about crazies—but it's essentially the same thing. They
knew
me, they saw right through all my clothes and there was that instant karmic flash. They seemed to
sense
what they had on their hands.

Those who are interested in pushing boundaries, even when they are scared to do so, may be in some kind of psychic communion with
others of their tribe. It provides a form of community that may be lacking in much of modern life.

• • •

“So,” Roger turns to me. “What kind of work do you do?” In this group, I'm the odd one out, definitely not part of the tribe. Everyone, other than Rebecca, who owns Glendale Harley, earns a living with their hands. Rebecca is accepted despite her outsider status by the beloved nature of her business.

“I write books and I'm a college professor,” I say. Roger asks more questions, and when my background as a former book critic comes up, he pauses.

“That would mean you've read something like a hundred books in your life!” he exclaims, unable to believe that such a thing is possible. “I've never read a book all the way through,” he confides.

Roger and Crystal have embraced different risks from the ones I have chosen. The same goes for George, Edna, and Rebecca. But as motorcyclists, we're all the same. We find ways to feed this need, not only because we're biologically compelled to, but also because it's actually good for us.

Cutting-edge neuroscience demonstrates that novel experience can improve our mental and physical health well into old age, Gallagher reports. Which makes total sense. When we do something new, learn something we didn't know before, we create new neural pathways, develop new skills. We come alive in a new way and develop neuroplasticity. “Research now shows that adults of all ages who want to maintain sound minds as well as sound bodies should rise from their ruts and exercise both,” she writes.

Each time we cultivate our neophilia by trying something different, we make it easier to take the next step away from dull routine. We all seek novelty in our own ways. The one thing that seems clear, though, is that it's healthy and life expanding to embrace novelty.

Researchers who investigate quality of life find that the skillful exploitation of the novelty effect can help us wrest more enjoyment and productivity from daily experience. Economist Tibor Scitovsky studied the relationship between happiness and consumerism. He argued that buying lots of inexpensive “pleasures”—fresh flowers, a piece of dark chocolate, a special meal—evoke deep appreciation and are intensely satisfying. These things are a far better investment in one's quality of life than spending on “comforts”—serious, expensive things like a deluxe car or an expensive couch. He also supported the idea that we enjoy a pleasurable event even more when we take a short break in its midst. A few moments of pillow talk during sex or a pause during a massage enhances the experience. This is because that time-out interrupts the adaptation process, so we can re-enter and re-appreciate the initial arousal of the activity's delights.

And it's arousal rather than adaptation that is often what pulls us into pleasurable activities. Someone who's terrified to hike alone or to speak in public will not adapt to that fear and will make a conscious effort to avoid it.

On the other hand—Gallagher uses the example of a hoarder—another person may stay aroused by utterly boring objects: old mail, newspapers, bottle caps, pencil stubs, and respond to them as if they were novel, not dismissing them as others would. “Then, too, some of us adapt to stimulating things that, being dangerous, should have remained highly arousing.”

It's this precarious balance between what's new and exciting and what feels okay to do that equals a healthy degree of sensation seeking.

Gallagher's words about her own quest for novelty come to mind as I fall asleep. “Novelty-seeking is the spice of my life. I live in different places, both of which are extreme—NYC and remote Wyoming—because I get bored easily. For me, novelty seeking is more a matter of openness to experience than extreme risk taking. I love the research and reporting involved in producing a book, because I get to learn new things and think new thoughts every day. Then, I get to create something new out of it all!”

•
    
CHAPTER NINE
    
•

MATCHY-MATCHY

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.

—GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

Day Two:
Saturday, August 24

Cedar City, Utah, to Jackson, Wyoming: 521 miles

The phone alarm chimes in the blackness of early, early morning. I have slept deliciously hard. I inch my way off the limp air mattress partially deflated during the night and try to stand. My back hurts, my hamstrings yowl, and my ears still ring from the roar of my pipes. I make a note to bring earplugs on my next road trip. The idea that Rebecca and I could chat via Bluetooth or that I could listen to music while riding is a joke. I may have to ditch those doggone pipes after all.

In the rooms nearby, I hear the others gathering themselves. I struggle with my T-bag. To get anything out of it, I pretty much have to dump the contents and then shove it all back in. So much for my pretrip obsessive organizational system. I select clothes for the day: Armored pants. A fresh T-shirt and socks. I wedge my feet back into the motorcycle boots. I can't believe we're going to do this again. I put two ibuprofen in my tank bag for later.

As I dress, I notice the guest room decorated in a pale blue country theme. A rocking chair perches in the corner, a cross-stitch sampler hangs on the wall. Depictions of fairies are everywhere—paintings, figurines, and a particularly large sculpted wood sprite holding a translucent bubble the size of a cantaloupe. The room is harmonized and color-coordinated and sweet. Safe.

There was a time I aspired to a life like this, predicable and innocent. When my kids were little, I insisted on matching towels in the bathroom and cute little soaps. I sewed window valances that matched bed comforters and carpet tones. As if such coordination could keep away the scary things.

My need to be so matchy-matchy came from the chaos of my home life as a child. Not only did nothing match in the physical world but also nothing
felt
as though it matched: not the emotions that swirled around, dangerous and caustic one moment, kind and warm the next, nor the devout religiosity in which everything about my childhood had been steeped, intending to keep us all safe.

My father had been raised in an institutional home in Ireland—picture a Dickensian poorhouse for kids—and had been considered an orphan, though he had living parents. Together, the government and church had been in the business of taking away children who were thought to be in moral danger from their families. Since my alcoholic grandfather had abandoned his family (single mother = moral hazard), my father and his siblings had been shipped to various institutions to be raised by Catholic sisters, brothers, and priests who were paid a stipend per child. When those children reached the age of sixteen, they were ejected from the protective system to fend for themselves. My father didn't meet his own brothers until he was ten. His sister Carmel died of tuberculosis in one of those homes.

Up until a decade before his death, my father couldn't speak with any candor about his upbringing. “It was like being sent to a reform home,” he told me, something to hide from others because it reflected poorly on oneself. Amid that discomfort—family removed, disgrace added—religion became a deep and abiding comfort for
him in a world that was bereft of softness. Perhaps one of the religious sisters or brothers had been particularly kind to him. Perhaps God himself reached out. He tried to bring that degree of security to our family life via recited rosaries, novenas, and family prayers declaimed on our knees before an altar and crucifix each evening.

My mother, meanwhile, had been the untreated victim of childhood sexual abuse, the youngest of ten children in an Irish culture that kept things about sex hidden, shamed, and hushed. At the age of ten, she had seen her father (the likely perpetrator of her abuse) struck by a bus and killed. If she harbored guilt and anger for the abuse, how might his death have complicated her recollection? Whatever she thought, one thing was indisputable: She developed severe emotional problems and medicated herself with alcohol and psychotropic drugs. The fact that my parents were able to meet, marry, move to the States, and raise five children was a miracle in itself, though their union left their children with more than a few scars. For me, there was confusion about what was real and what was the cleaned-up face we were supposed to show the world. Every Sunday, you could find us lined up, youngest to oldest, in a front pew at Holy Family Church. Shoes a little scuffed maybe, hair not always combed, hoping that looking good enough would mean that the difficulties and ugliness that took place during the week might fade into the background, a grape juice stain mostly removed, leaving only a ghost of itself.

As a young mother, I had been convinced that it was up to me to keep the whole family together and unified through my singular efforts. To let go, to see how events might unfold if left to their own devices, was to invite chaos at best and mental illness at worst. “Raising you kids did this to me,” my mother often said of her bipolar condition. And I believed her. If I had been able to relax and let go during my children's young years, to relinquish the control I held on to for dear life, what was to prevent the same specter from visiting me?

Ironically, this is what I find myself struggling with now. Can I finally let loose all the constraints I've placed on myself and see what's really here? Am I able to risk knowing who I really am?

Upstairs, Roger and Crystal have been awake for some time, brewing coffee and preparing breakfast. Though last night we'd urged them to sleep in and let us leave quietly, they'd insisted. “We don't get visitors that often. We want to see you off.”

Last night, Roger had given me his card. “You get stuck anywhere in the country—anywhere at all. You call me. I have a truck. Tools. I can be there before you know it. And I know people everywhere.”

I tuck his card into my tank bag. I am grateful for his kindness but unused to strangers pledging extreme offers of help.

We all converge at the breakfast table. I pour a cup of coffee. After yesterday morning, I worry about being lulled to sleep again. And though I don't want to have to pee ten minutes into the trip, I pour a second cup to err on the side of wakefulness. Fox News—anathema to a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like me—plays on the television. I have to reconcile my political views with the straight-up kindness and hospitality this couple has extended. We're on the bikes by 4:30
AM
, waving good-bye. Next stop: Beaver, Utah.

• • •

As I ride, the color-coordinated room comes back to me and I contrast it with my motorcycle riding. It's more than just facing my fears. I'm jonesing for a kind of vulnerability, a willingness to allow others to see me in a compromised, don't-take-a-picture-of-me-now state. A willingness to finally let the world know I'm not perfect and I don't have the answers. Part of it has to do with my readiness to ask for and receive help and encouragement from others. Usually, I want to be seen as an expert before I've even learned the subject. And that ego-preserving state has kept me, over the years, from doing many things I would have liked to have done.

In my early twenties, I trained seriously to be a professional dancer. Then I got my chance: an audition at Disneyland. I was nervous but prepared. As the audition became more competitive, I lost my nerve. I didn't want to be one of those escorted from the stage, publicly
acknowledged as not having the goods. Within seconds, I convinced myself that I didn't want the job. I was better off in my cocktail-waitress life. Before anyone had a chance to reject me, I picked up my bag and sauntered away.

And I never tried again.

I'm staring into a nasty bit of truth: I am naturally good at many things. But if you ask me to do something I don't innately excel at, my first instinct will be to shut down. My second instinct will be to come up with creative reasons why I can't possibly accept the challenge.

But now in my middle years, I realize I have a third option. If I can shut down the judgmental voices in my head long enough, another voice sometimes speaks in a timbre so gentle it's easy to miss.

It's okay to try it and not be good
, this voice whispers.
You might like it.

Rather than spending energy bemoaning what doesn't come easily or getting angry with others who seem to do what I want with ease and confidence, I realize I have a better option. If I am willing to spend the energy and resources necessary to master something that catches my attention, I now understand that I can do it.

As I was getting ready for the hospital to give birth to Hope, my youngest, my brother Brendan called to wish me well. “You going to ask for anesthesia?” he asked. I'd delivered my older children without drugs, and I hoped for the same experience this time. He thought that was a good thing, if possible. “It's important to feel all of life as it occurs.” His words stuck with me. I have spent decades trying not to feel big portions of my life, trying to hide from what feels frightening or beyond me or challenging in uncomfortable ways.

But something has changed, and I don't know exactly what. How have I become this woman, crossing the country on a motorcycle, embracing risks I would have run from in my younger years?

I have some thoughts. I saw how my children struggled with learning, how they persisted and grew from the experience. They may not have known how to draw, but they noticed how much better their fifth attempt to draw an apple was than the previous four. My friend Nancy, who put herself through medical school as a single
mother of four daughters, used to say that intelligence isn't knowing everything. It's the awareness that we're capable of learning what we don't know.

• • •

Though sleepy, I do a marginally better job staying alert as we ride out of Cedar City. The morning is cool and I've made a point not to overdress; that helps. We've barely left Cedar City when we stop in Beaver simply because everyone from back home has told us we need to stop there. This tiny town has gained fame from its “I (heart) Beaver” souvenirs. We pass through the little hamlet long before any of the souvenir-hawking businesses are open. But at a gas stop I scope out the limited selection of Beaver-related items in the service station. I pick up a rubber bracelet imprinted with
I
♥
BEAVER
and then a bumper sticker, wishing I could buy them for someone with a playful spirit at home. I'm a little embarrassed by the thought. I consider myself a feminist, someone who has a sex-positive outlook, and the beaver jokes feel a bit like teen-boy humor. Yet, I'm also kind of tickled by the silliness of it all. There is something about my life that has squelched the fun out of me and robbed this double entendre play of its inherent lightness. I want to discover what this kind of play is about. I feel giddy when I touch the words
I
♥
BEAVER
cut into this bracelet, followed immediately by a static cling of shame. I leave the gas station with no Beaver-related merchandise.

Eventually, the sun rises and the morning unfolds. We're riding along Interstate 15 with a posted speed limit of seventy, which means we're doing eighty or more. When we descend into the Utah Valley and Provo in late morning, the stark beauty smacks me awake. The sky's bright blueness hurts my eyes. The clouds are whiter than any I've ever seen, shamelessly unambiguous against their cerulean background. It's as if all the clouds I've known before had been hiding behind a kind of modesty scrim, and now, for the first time, I see them naked. I can't stop staring.

We pull off the interstate north of Provo at the Timpanogos Harley-Davidson dealership. When we turn into the parking lot, we find wall-to-wall Harleys about to depart for a charity ride, almost all ridden by men. The few women present are mostly passengers. As we park, guys wanting to take photos immediately approach Edna. A woman rider with such a girlish bike is clearly a novelty here. Still, I'm heartened to know that the number of women motorcyclists is now rising. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council, “In 2014, the estimated number of motorcycles owned by females is 14 percent, a 50 percent increase over the last 10 years.”