Motorcycles I've Loved (17 page)

•   •   •

S
OON ENOUGH WE CROSSED
the border into Florida and stopped at the welcome center, where they gave us small paper cups of freshly squeezed orange juice. The Magna had been running smoothly the entire way, and it seemed that my father had been right all along about the bad gasoline. It was a beautiful, clear day, and I began to see more palm trees with each passing mile. We stopped once more for gas and calculated we were a little more than an hour away. Jacksonville, with its hellish traffic, was behind us, and the rest was cake.

Falling Bodies

W
e arrived in New Smyrna Beach tired but happy. My mother was in her garden out front, pulling weeds and listening for the sound of our engines. As we got off the motorcycles, she came toward us, waving her arms and smiling. I gave her a hug, and she smelled like sunscreen and fresh dirt and gardenias, as she always does in the summertime. After my dad and I had unloaded our gear and washed away the dust of our travels, we all sat down and had dinner together.

We ate early, and when we were done my dad came over and patted my head on his way into the kitchen. He decided to take the Magna for a spin around the neighborhood, because he still hadn't tried it out yet, and while he was gone, my mother and I sat together in her garden, propped up in lawn chairs. She pointed out her newest plantings: honeysuckle vines and firebush for the butterflies, her little citrus grove, with its fat green grapefruits hanging low, clusters of kumquats and huge Meyer lemons. The blue glass bottles she had hung from the branches of a live oak twirled and bobbed in the breeze, and the bamboo stalks quivered. Perfectly white clouds, like scoops of whipped cream, sped across the sky, and a feral cat darted into the yard, saw us, then slipped back out into the street. In the distance, I heard the familiar rumble of the Magna's engine, and my father came into view.

When the mosquitoes came out I went inside to unpack and put in a load of laundry. I threw everything—including the duffel bag itself—into the washing machine and added detergent. My father came in and reported that my tire pressure had been way too low, that I had practically been riding on sand for days and I was lucky not to be a smear on the highway. Of course, I hadn't noticed—didn't even remember when I'd last checked my tire pressure. I was just relieved to
be
somewhere, instead of always being on my way. After the past few weeks on the motorcycle, I was ready to pause for a beat. I hosed down the Magna until it sparkled and a little stream of mud ran down the driveway and into the street, then I threw the keys in a drawer and forgot about them for a while.

The next few months I stayed in Florida. In October I found an abandoned kitten in a torrential rainstorm, barely a week or two old, lying on her back in a pile of woodchips, and named her Maybe. I read, lay in the sun, went fishing with my dad, stayed up late watching television. Stillness settled, the pause stretched, and I began to worry about what came next. I wondered where I should go, whether I'd found what I was looking for, and what that was exactly.

I went to the beach in the evenings and mulled it over, just after the sun had set and the people with foldable chairs and kids and coolers had packed up and gone home. I would pick a direction and walk until it got dark, then I would turn around and walk back. I had begun to look for jobs in all sorts of places: Japan, Korea, Europe, New England, California. Location didn't matter, but it was time to move on, I could feel it. I made a list of the things I wanted and it was only three items long: I wanted to live alone, to keep the kitten I'd found, to not work in restaurants anymore.

In January I heard from an interesting job prospect back in Massachusetts, and I bought a one-way plane ticket for the interview, come what may. All of my things were there anyway. It felt odd to be going back to the place I'd just left, but I'd begun to recognize that the location of my feet mattered less than the substance in my head. All I needed was one thing to keep me curious and passionate and ambitious, and the rest would follow. For a while this had been motorcycles, but there's a whole world of fascination out there, an endless supply of mind-blowing possibilities. I had put the Magna on the market by then and I was ready for the launch—still unsure of where I was headed and what I would do when I got there, but aching for the challenge. A falling body is an object accelerating under the influence of gravity, and whether an object is thrown straight up, projected sideways, or released in midair, it will fall at the same rate. This rate is generally defined as 9.8 m/s
2
on earth, and while it can fluctuate slightly depending on geography, it is constant regardless of mass. Falling is such an uncertain, unreliable feeling. It helps to know that there are rules.

The motion of falling has captured me from the beginning. As a child, I was an outdoor gymnast, always climbing trees and doing tricks and jumping off things. On the property where I grew up, I had a balance beam, and I would rake the autumn leaves into a soft pile at the end for somersaulting into. And there was a rope swing, too, with a slim rectangle of wood for a seat and a single rope tied through the middle and knotted on the underside. The tree it was fastened to was an enormous maple, nestled into the cup of a steep hill. I would go down the hill to retrieve the swing, then run back up to one of two platforms my father had made at the top, one at the right and one at the left, and I would hold on to the rope with both hands and leap. Then, a delicious moment of suspension: the force of my legs pushing off from the ground would cease and the effects of gravity would take hold, pressing me back down toward the earth—only instead of dirt my feet would touch air, and the wooden rectangle would be under me, the rope in my hands and pressed against my cheek as I looked down more than thirty feet to the tall grass below.

That swing occupied me for years. Before I could manage it alone, my brother would swing with me. He would jump on first, and then I would wait at a more modest slope of the hill for him to swing back toward me so that I could hop onto his lap and we would swoop out over the meadow together. As soon as I was old enough, I mastered the simple art of leaping lightly onto the seat without him, then quickly moved on to more exciting challenges. I practiced mounting the wooden seat standing up, and holding the rope with one casual hand as I swept out over the meadow. I practiced jumping on backward—with my back to the hill and the heels of my feet at the edge of the platform. I practiced swinging upside down, then I practiced swinging upside down with one hand, then upside down with no hands at all, my legs wrapped tightly around the rope, my hair hanging down to kiss the grass.

Every time I perfected a new trick I would drag someone out to bear witness: my mother, my father, or Phin, and they would clap dutifully and I would name it something funny. The Brooks Double Twist. The Dalton Scrambler. The Rope-a-Dope. If I spent too long practicing, my hands would become chafed, and so my mother bought me a bag of white resin, like what baseball pitchers and serious gymnasts use. Tender calluses rose on my palms, soft and red at first, but they quickly became hard. I never felt more graceful, or more in control, than I did when I was upside down, thirty feet off the ground and counting, accelerating smoothly to reach an even loftier height. The motion of falling is familiar to me; I forget to think and I just feel.

•   •   •

I
N
F
LORIDA
, I thought of my next free fall. Leaping into the unknown, yet again, with no place to live and no job for certain and no real goal besides paying off my student loans, but there was a hint of possibility in the air, and the promise of things to come. As a teenager, I'd gone to Ireland trying to escape myself; in Australia, I finally did lose her. Returning to New England and falling for motorcycles was the beginning of realizing I wanted her back. Over the course of three years and four motorcycles, I learned a little more about who exactly I was looking for: a woman who has power and knows how to wield it, who knows when to hold fast and when to give way. A woman who is independent, resourceful, and strong enough to ask for help if she needs it.

I had taken leaps like this before—the only difference was the person doing the jumping. There was the landing to worry about, but whether one sticks the landing or gets a face full of dirt, it hardly matters. When I was practicing tricks on my childhood swing, the landing was always the easiest part. The trick was over, the risk either rewarded or wasted, and dismounting was simply a matter of waiting for the ground to arrive beneath my feet, then knowing when to let the swing slip away.

Dark Matter

G
rasping for some kind of spacer to put between myself and the world—a way to avoid it, or a way to control it—has always been my first and strongest instinct. I started by hiding my face in my mother's skirt; then, as I grew, I shielded myself with whatever was on hand: alcohol, drugs, traveling, other people, isolation.

Existing behind these barriers, finding ways to block out or alter an uncontrollable reality, made things easier, but it never made them better. On a motorcycle, I learned to let go of the vast uncertainty and focus instead on what is in front of me: the surface of the road and the curve of it, the vehicles in front and behind, the wind and the rain and the wildlife peeking out of the grass. There are times when I struggle to manage every last detail as it whips past me, to hold on to past and present and future simultaneously, but they're not mine to understand, or to control. I have to remind myself, again and again, that only this is mine: this moment, this heartbeat, this decision.

I'm just the navigator, riding through unfamiliar territory, in uncertain weather and unknowable traffic. There is only the thin shell of my helmet, the warmth of my own breath, and the road in front of me. The wind crashes against the sides of my head in waves, and the purr of the engine is like a mechanical
om
, shivering through me. The road rushes past and instead of struggling to possess it, I remember to exhale and feel the buzz of the pavement against my tires, the thrum of the open throttle beneath my palm. I remember that I don't own this road; I'm just using it.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
STARTED THINKING
about the concept of matter, it seemed so simple, so universal, that I didn't consider much beyond the presence of matter and the absence of it, its composition and its dynamics—but more is unknown than known. Consider
dark matter
: the concept that some matter is visible—known and understood, cataloged and quantified—and that some matter simply
isn't
. It exists, but we can't see it or understand it, can't touch it, hear it, haven't the slightest clue what it's made of or how it moves. There is no direct evidence of dark matter, because its existence is currently impossible to verify, yet its effects are apparent in the behavior of visible matter throughout the universe.

When the theory of dark matter first arose, it was because of a discrepancy between cosmic mass calculations based first on a body's gravitational properties, and second on the same body's luminosity. The numbers didn't match: gravity was exerting a force far superior than the visible mass of the body and its surroundings would allow, so scientists began to consider the possibility of particles we couldn't see or detect that could be creating gravitational pull. Matter that neither absorbs light nor emits it, yet has enough mass to sway the movement of neighboring galaxies.

Now consider the accelerated expansion of the universe itself—not only does the universe contain more mass than we can account for, there is also some unknown energy at work, making it grow exponentially. If matter is the fabric of the universe, and energy the thread that binds it together, then what can we make of dark matter and dark energy? These ideas, abstract notions we can't see, can't prove, and can't explain, yet which make their presence known in some indirect way, aren't exactly new—I think some people call this God.

Ultimately, atoms, the regular matter that is the grass and the sun and every living thing on this planet, not to mention the planet itself, make up less than five percent of the universe. The remaining ninety-five percent is unknown, a mystery. It stands to reason, then, that what we
do
know is precious. Not only that, it's fleeting: a malleable, moldable, living thing. What I know now might need revising in one year, or ten, or twenty, but that doesn't make it any less important. It doesn't make it any less valuable. Even if what I know is nothing—that's important, too.

So this is what I think I know, right now: The universe is expanding; so am I. Of all the things to know, very few of them are known. Keep the truth close and keep it handy, it will almost certainly need reshaping. If in doubt, return to the foundation: examine the blocks, test their weight, their composition. Consider them as though for the first time. Take stock of what can be used, throw away the rest, and rebuild. Or, better yet—don't rebuild. Stack the elements and forgo the structure. Sleep under the stars instead, let the air move through the empty floor plan, and be awed by the infinite, unknowable dome overhead. Breathe. Expand. Forgive.

•   •   •

M
Y FATHER AND
I took one last ride together before I sold the motorcycle and flew north. We rode out to Ormond Beach and turned onto the Loop, a scenic stretch of road that follows the coast and then doubles back through the wetlands. I smiled at the familiar sight of my father's motorcycle bobbing along in front of me and I breathed in the smell of hot, wet greenery and thick, black soil.

As we rode along the Loop, my father and I stopped at a small bridge that lifted to let a sailboat go through, and he turned off his engine while it passed. I kept mine running. I looked down at my instrument panel while we waited and thought of how much I would miss the rumble of this engine, and the curve of these handlebars, but I knew that there would be other motorcycles to love. After a moment, the sailboat passed, the bridge lowered, the gate lifted, and we moved on, over the river and back into the cool, dim marsh.

We took our time.