Motorcycles I've Loved (8 page)

I've flown a lot over the years; the view from high above the earth is nothing new to me, but flying with Chuck was different. It felt new. The wind shook our little plane, and we shouted at each other over the roar of the engine. My headset kept slipping off my head, and my feet tingled from the vibration of the floor. Cold air slipped in between the window-panes. The sky was so close I could have touched it.

We crossed the New Hampshire border and flew to Keene for lunch at an Indian restaurant—the only restaurant—in the airport. The airport itself was cold and empty, and mainly just a lobby with two restrooms and this little gray Indian place off to the side. The décor was surprisingly somber, like that of a nursing-home dining room, but the woman who took our order was awash with color, wearing a red-and-orange sari with gold borders and bangles and kohl around her eyes. Her bracelets clattered whenever she moved.

Chuck and I talked about flying and riding and the opera while we ate chicken makhani and saag aloo and watched the planes take off, like shaking little birds buffeted back and forth by the wind as they rose into the sky. We walked around the runway for a bit and then flew back to Massachusetts. Toward the end of the flight he told me to look out my window. “Seem familiar?” he shouted over the engine. I looked hard, trying to figure out what I was seeing, and then I realized it was Amherst, and there was my house, a tiny gray dot of shingles down among the fading foliage and the green-brown pastures. “I'll just drop you off here,” he said and grinned. “Grab that parachute in the back and get ready to jump.”

•   •   •

G
RAVI
TY PRESENTS ITSELF
to us most often as the force that gives weight to mass and causes objects to fall toward the ground, but in its essence it is a phenomenon that attracts matter to matter. It is the force behind the creation of the earth, of its orbit around the sun, and of the sun itself. The cosmic implications of gravity are both thrilling and overwhelming, though perhaps its earthly qualities are what we tend to think of first. The effects of gravity are so widespread, so all-consuming, that when the ancient Greeks began to think about motion, they couldn't see it—it was too big. From its manifestation in celestial mechanics down to keeping our shoes firmly pressed against the ground, gravity is a force to be reckoned with.

Newton said that the law of gravity dictates that mass is attracted to mass, with a force directly proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them: the stronger the force of gravity, the larger the masses and the less distance between them.

•   •   •

T
HE LAST RIDE
Chuck and I took that year was to the Ashfield Fall Festival, an annual Columbus Day weekend fair in rural Mass, a little west of Conway, with artisans, food, live music, dancing, and throngs of locals and tourists alike. My motorcycle was making an unsettling noise in high gears and I hadn't had the time to get it looked at, so we just took Chuck's. I rode on the back and admired the leaves as we puttered along the scenic route. The fair itself was quaint and crowded—we met Nick, one of Chuck's sons, and some other friends there. We scouted out the french fries at the fire station and then the cider doughnuts at Elmer's. At a fine woodworker's tent my friend Kieran called me over and showed me a wooden spoon with a challenge attached—
Guess what variety of wood this spoon is made of and win something
—I forget what the prize was. The vendor said that in more than ten years of fairs and festivals no one had guessed, although it's a tree everyone knows. “Only one guess,” he said. “Them's the rules.”

I thought back to my childhood; tried to imagine my father's workshop, the smell of sawdust, the stacks of sliced burls and planed boards. Curly maple, black walnut, ash, pine, cedar. I don't remember what I guessed, but the spoon kept its mystery.

On the ride back, we went the long way again. The leaves were at their best, the sunlight shining through their veined skin and dappling the road with muted color. We were going slow enough not to feel the bite of the wind, and the sun was high enough to keep us in its gaze. I remember everything—my feet on the pegs, Chuck's windbreaker under my fingers, the warmth of his back, the warmth of the afternoon and those colors: exploding all around us, burnished and gilded branches stretching out over the freshly turned road.

Somehow my memory of that day is crisper than my memory of yesterday. It's so strange the way a moment can crystallize that way, like a fly in amber—another mystery.

•   •   •

I
SAW
C
HUCK
a few times over the winter. On Thanksgiving Day I ate dinner at the long trestle table in his house. He presided over all those pies as the loving patriarch, and though he was a diabetic, I do believe he tasted every one. It was a good day; the house was full, the expensive whiskey was out and the fancy china, too. An inebriated relative got a little too flirtatious, and Chuck limped to my rescue, a gentleman to the end.

Over the holidays, I went out to Conway a few more times, and sometime after New Year's I set him up with a woman named Elizabeth I thought he'd like. I'd been meaning to see if he would be interested in the idea for ages, and then one night I went for it. I described her, and he was intrigued. “She looks like me at fifty,” I said, because we have often been mistaken for mother and daughter—something to do with the color of our hair and the way we smile. “Well, then, I definitely want to meet her,” he replied with a wink: pure Cary Grant. I gave him her number. That was the last time I saw him before he went to South America for a few weeks with Anna, a father-daughter adventure. After he got back, Chuck had some surgery on his leg and was laid up in Conway for a while. I heard, secondhand, that Chuck had called Elizabeth, that they'd gone on a few dates—but I hadn't gotten the scoop, not yet.

•   •   •

N
OT LONG AFTER
I heard all this, I got a phone call from Elizabeth. Something was wrong, that much I knew immediately. There was a blood clot, she said, and she stopped. I could hear her choking on tears in the silence that followed. I didn't need her to finish—I felt the weight settle on my shoulders and there was nothing to do but bear it, even knowing that elsewhere the gravity of the situation would be telescoping spines and crushing sternums: the less distance there is, the stronger the force of gravity. The weight of loss is different for everyone. What I thought had been our last ride of the year became our last ride altogether. I couldn't wrap my head around it. To accept the finality of death over the years that follow is one thing, but to understand it when it is right next to us—sometimes it's a truth we approximate, an idea too big to think about all at once.

I couldn't help but think of Phineas, and though death and absence are two very different things, it was the gravity of loss that connected them for me. I wondered how everything would have turned out if he had died or disappeared completely instead of becoming someone else—if the gravity of that loss might have hurt more, or perhaps less. I wondered if my fourteen-year-old heart might have been better equipped to grieve for the dead than for the living.

•   •   •

A
FEW DAYS AFTER
Chuck's death, I went to his house in Conway, where his family, his children and grandchildren, and some of his friends gathered around the dining room table and shared the casseroles, the fruit plates and the cheese plates, the pies, stews, and cold cuts that had been accumulating as the waves of sympathy crashed against the front door. Everyone said “I love you” more often than usual, and hugs turned into hanging on. I'm not the only stray that family has taken in over the years—Chuck's roof has housed more lost souls than I care to count, and so the mishmash of family and friends simmered, the line between them crisp and fuzzy all at once. An electric charge of grief ran through the floorboards, and the air was humid, heavy with salt water. We told stories and looked at photo albums, and I remember lingering over a list I found on the kitchen table. I counted
MILK
three times. The first two were crossed out, but the third was unmarked. There was an altar near the window, covered with old snapshots and little memories: a few feathers, an empty bottle of expensive whiskey, Chuck's reading glasses. The candles were lit, and reflections of the flames played across the glass panes behind them.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
REMEMBER
C
HUCK
now I feel a sharp, quiet ache, and a warm glow. I think of something he said. We were on a dirt road framed by maples just beginning to turn—flakes of yellow and orange speckled the canopy above us, and the trees curled overhead like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. The road stretched out in front of us, and from where I stood it seemed infinite. The air was warm and humid, the dirt softly steaming after an unseasonably hot day, and between the trees I could see the sun settling down into the crook of the mountains, glowing red-hot as it sank, straight ahead from where we stood. I watched him as he picked up his helmet, strapped it on, and started his bike. I started mine, too; swung my leg over.

“I wish these things had wings,” he shouted over the roar of the engine, then he got on and took off: down the road, toward the sun.

Inertia

M
y second motorcycle wasn't much to look at. It wasn't much of anything, really. It didn't run, had no title, and although I briefly entertained the idea of fixing it up, the fact was I didn't have the skills or the money required. It quickly became an educational demolition project, one that only progressed about as far as the transmission before the gearbox seized and it was stranded outside for good.

I had just moved to a drafty old farmhouse in Amherst, on the other side of the Connecticut River, about a half hour northeast of Northampton, and I borrowed a pickup truck to relocate the motorcycle from its temporary home at Chuck's house in Conway. It was just before my first semester back at college when I went to collect it, six months or so before he died. A few musician friends leaving to go on a cross-country tour were staying there, and they helped me load the motorcycle into the back of the truck with a plywood ramp; then we waved each other off on our respective journeys. The truck was riding low from the extra weight, but it was still higher than I was used to. The motorcycle swayed against the straps as it peeked over the cab, parked at a jaunty diagonal angle, kickstand down, its disconnected headlight hanging from a single wire that knocked against the frame of the bike as I rumbled out of the driveway.

I watched in my rearview as the boys crammed one last amplifier into the trunk of the green Subaru that was about to become their home and swung out onto the dirt road. Dust came in through the open window and rocks jumped up to bite the thin flooring under my feet. I tilted the seat back a notch and dug around in the center console until I found a pair of shades, then hit Seek on the radio and let it flip through the stations for a minute, letting half-measures of pop songs slip past until at last I found some music without words. The wind, the gold ragweed pollen, and the dust from the road trickled in, settling on my skin like fine, sun-kissed silt. I tried to empty my head, to let my thoughts slip out the open window. I just followed the road, one eye on the motorcycle in my mirrors. It was good to be so high above the pavement for once. I surveyed, rather than participated in, the traffic, and when a gang of hogs rolled past me in South Deerfield, I lifted my arm from where it rested on the edge of the window in greeting. They sounded their horns at the sight of the motorcycle carcass I was towing in back and nodded solemnly to me as they roared past, as if we were all in on the same secret.

•   •   •

T
HE PLACE
I
HAD
just moved to in Amherst was a big, butter-yellow farmhouse set close to the road, with a backyard that reached all the way to the woods. When I arrived in early September, it was a leafy paradise; there was a front porch, a back porch, and a side porch, a vegetable garden, a glimpse of the river, and tangles of wisteria and morning glories that might have swallowed the house whole if left to their own devices. My Rebel was already parked in the driveway next to the ancient Yamaha XS650 my new housemate, Matt, rode, and the CM250 I was towing was expected to take up residence against the weathered plywood fence for the time being. Matt was already outside when I pulled in. We didn't know each other well yet, but we had already bonded over our love of motorcycles, and there was something about him that felt familiar. In some ways he reminds me of my father: slight but muscular, bearded, with a goofy sense of humor, an uncanny knack for working with his hands, and an overwhelming reserve of kindness and generosity. The streak of rage that hides in my father is absent in Matt; he is prone instead to anxiety, quiet resentments, and self-doubt, vices we share and often commiserate over. Throughout the years that I've known Matt, he's become a precious friend to me—a resource of handiness, a compassionate confidant, and my favorite companion on an errand to the hardware store, a swim across the pond, a walk in the woods.

He helped me unload the motorcycle from the truck, and we rolled it over to the space we had cleared for it. The ultimate plan was to get it into the basement when it was time to winterize the other bikes, but when the frost finally started to bite that autumn, the gears had seized and we couldn't push it far. I fiddled with the gearbox a little but eventually gave up and left it where it was.

The other bikes, the Rebel and the Yamaha, we stowed in the basement without too much trouble. We packed away the gas tanks in big Tupperware containers to guard against spills and so that the smell of gas wouldn't stink up the house, then plugged the fuel lines with chopsticks and some Saran wrap. The house was built on a hill, and the basement was accessible from the downward-sloping side of the yard without the hassle of stairs. On the other side of the house, where the hill leveled out, was the driveway. To get the bikes into the basement it was a simple matter of a quick ride on the main road down to the neighbor's driveway, then up our narrow garden path and in through the defunct greenhouse door. The old CM, however, wasn't going to be moved easily with the gears locked, so it stayed where it was. I kept planning to mess with it some more, to figure out another way to get it inside, but eventually the snow came and enveloped it. It dropped to the bottom of my to-do list and, by the time I couldn't see it anymore beneath the drifts, off it completely.

•   •   •

T
HERE WAS ALREADY
a jumbled workbench set up down in the basement, next to the washing machine and dryer, and we parked the other bikes within striking distance. I had planned to do some winter tinkering with the CM, but instead I spent a few lazy hours flipping through Clymer manuals, listening to the rattle of spare change in the dryer or the thud of the washing machine's spin cycle, admiring the slumbering motorcycles and dreaming of spring. Long fluorescent bulbs flickered over the bench, which Matt had dubbed “the office,” where at least two ratchet sets, a dozen spray-paint cans, a busted violin, and jars of nails, screws, and drill bits crowded the surface. There was a grimy window to the right of the bench, looking out into the little greenhouse that was built onto the basement.

From my perch on a tall wooden stool I could see through this window and into the adjacent greenhouse, a view I became very accustomed to: the ripped plastic stretched over the windows, the stacks of empty plastic pots, the half-empty packets of seeds. There was a narrow path cleared between the basement door and the greenhouse door, but the rest of the greenhouse was filled with old bicycle frames, half-empty bags of fertilizer, what must have been fifty dollars' worth of redeemable bottles, and a vast collection of house paint, contents slopped all over the sides of the cans. Cobwebs hung from bulbless heat lamps and from between the seed trays. The black plastic roof seemed to be holding up against the elements, but that was about all the little greenhouse had going for it.

Despite its dilapidation, the space had captured my imagination when I moved in; the idea of a sunny, steamy room full of parsley and cilantro and flats of seedlings waiting to be planted thrilled me, but, as with the CM250, I never really managed to get things moving.

•   •   •

I
NERTIA
IS DEFINED
as
an object's resistance to change
in its state of motion. Newton's first law of motion states that an object must remain at constant velocity unless it is acted on by an external force. Like so many other terms in physics, inertia leads a double life. In its layman's form, inertia has a stagnant sort of connotation, one that implies laziness or slothlike behavior, a tendency to do nothing. When the term
inertia
is applied to people or organizations, it's hardly a compliment, and yet this connotation is far from the whole story; resistance to change is the most succinct way to quickly define inertia, but don't be fooled—an object doesn't have to be at rest for it to apply.

An object in motion is also affected by inertia, and it is this facet of the word that seems somewhat neglected in its standard usage. The motorcycle that rips past going over a hundred miles an hour has inertia the same way it would if it were parked in a driveway. Inertia simply describes the property of matter that resists changes in motion, whether it be at high speeds or at a standstill. It can be quantified by the mass of an object or by its momentum depending on the situation, but the principle itself is the same either way; if it's moving it will keep moving, if it's at rest it will stay at rest.

With the CM buried beneath a snowdrift and the Rebel hibernating in the basement, the stasis of winter reached out and snatched me, too. The ice on the river got thick, and the air became dry, almost brittle, like tissue paper against my skin. I spent most of my time indoors, studying and working, or in my car, commuting. I drove a boxy little Corolla that hurtled along back roads, mounted with tufts of snow and a surfboard rack, a relic of its California origins, the arcs of the windshield wipers and the dashboard heaters defined against the salted, ice-capped grime of the hood. I had never noticed the end of motorcycle season before, never thought twice about the sudden absence of deep, thumping rumbles on familiar winding roads, but that winter I missed them. I didn't miss them enough to find a way to include them in my life—like turning the heat down on a long-distance relationship instead of talking on the phone every day, I left my fascination for warmer months and an easier reunion. The scrape of the plow on the pavement outside my window didn't instill the same excitement that the roar of a two-wheeled, six-cylinder engine cruising by did, but I didn't dwell on comparisons like that for long; I had more than enough to think about. Icy mornings commuting to the university, the dark, muffled afternoons spent doing endless schoolwork, and those tiresome dinner shifts began to wear me down.

From my bedroom window I had a view of the road, and I would sit at the foot of my bed and consider the cars that stopped and started at the traffic light, frozen moments of conversation or contemplation spread across the tiny faces below me, shooting through the intersection and past the frame of my window. The movement within the cars below, relative to me at my window, all seemed slow and distant that winter. The weight of the snow seemed heavier than usual, and then in February Chuck died and it became heavier still. It's a perilous season, dark and cold, and sometimes it seems as though it will never end, as though it might actually swallow you whole. I think of Narnia, frozen in eternal winter by the White Witch, and the tiny talking animals that have given up on spring's sun ever warming their fur again. But it does. Winter will
end. I repeated that to myself, over and over. It is the salve we New Englanders rub on our cracked hands and chapped lips when it snows in April or when it freezes in September. We must remind ourselves often: Winter will end.

I curled up at the end of my bed in a patch of afternoon light whenever I could, sometimes rushing home in anticipation of that precious last half hour of sun, before the cool blue light of early evening iced the trees and snatched that golden rectangle away, thrusting it behind the mountains. It softened the rawness of my arms and legs and face; it warmed my blood and nuzzled my eyelids, but it was never quite enough.

•   •   •

W
HEN SPRING
finally did come to Amherst the first year that I lived in the yellow house, I propped open the basement door and let the sun stream in through the ripped greenhouse plastic, illuminating a flock of tiny dust motes, like fireflies combusting in unison, lighting up the dim, chilled basement. The motorcycles parked just inside the door took on a soft glow. In the next few weeks the air began to warm, to melt around me like liquid glass. The ground softened. It gave. The roads turned to slop. The earth was being awakened like it always is, and this time I wanted to be awakened also. I felt the momentum of gathering heat, beneath my feet and in the air. I felt the leap and the lurch of the earth all around me as she raised her sleepy head. I wanted to wake up, too—
wake me up, too.

Like a tangible answer from the earth, I began to develop a spring in my step, and it wasn't optimism; it was the sponge beneath my feet. Then there was a day that heated everything to the core. The snow shrank, the ice cracked, and I felt my heart rise at least a centimeter in my chest. I remembered, suddenly, that the trees would bud and then leaf, that the snow would melt, the grass would sprout. The days would be warm and pleasant and long. I thought of sun tea and ratty lawn chairs and cleaning out the greenhouse and taking my Rebel for the first ride of the season. I felt my toes begin to thaw for the first time in months. I willed the snow to melt, and I'm pretty sure it worked.