Motorcycles I've Loved (16 page)

We left Canada, and went back down through New York and finally into Vermont, where my parents were waiting in the driveway of the house I grew up in—the house they had just sold—where I hadn't set foot for three and a half years. Thom and I had a fight in the car, maybe half an hour before we arrived. I don't even recall what it was about, something stupid I'm sure, I just remember gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles bulged, and wishing that when I turned my head the passenger's seat would be suddenly, mysteriously, empty.

•   •   •

N
EWTON'S THIRD LAW
states that every force has an equal and opposite counterforce. Every action therefore has a reaction: I lift a book, and the book presses back on my hand with an equal force, in the opposite direction; I press on the ground with my foot and the ground presses back with an equal force, again, obviously, in the opposite direction. According to this third law, there is no such thing as a solitary force—by nature, it must create a reaction. It doesn't matter which event is the action and which the reaction, because both forces act simultaneously and there is not one without the other.

Traveling with another person, a father, a friend, a lover, is an inevitable challenge. Everyday relationships are difficult as it is, but take one on the road, toss in some variables like finding new places to sleep and eat, getting lost, and getting delayed, and things become twice as hard. There is always something not to like, always something to clash over that sends both personalities flying backward like two bulls after a sharp, confrontational
crack
, and it's always different, depending on whom you're with. There was no way to know that my relationship with Thom wouldn't survive that trip, particularly after we had traversed Ireland, India, Thailand, and Australia hand in hand; there was no way to know that I wouldn't go back to Australia, or hold my little ginger cat, or see Thom's family, or watch another footy game with the boys, or walk through Carlton Gardens, as I had done every day on my way to work. I pushed my life with Thom away, and it pushed back—with equal, and opposite, force.

•   •   •

T
HE SECOND DAY
riding with my father on the Parkway was freezing. Clouds clung to the mountains and the sun was nowhere to be seen. We stopped for lunch at a little gift shop where they sold sandwiches and coffee. My gloves were useless in those temperatures; they weren't made for motorcycling at all, were in fact carpenter's gloves, which I had bought some time ago and ended up using for gardening. My father took off his own thick, insulated gloves and gave them to me. “What about you?” I asked him, and he said he would be fine, that he had another pair for warmer weather that he would use. “But then
you'll
be cold,” I protested.

“This is what fathers do,” he said, and he gave me a pat on the head.

Later, he presented me with a little pin he had gotten from the gift shop that said
Enjoy the view—Watch the road—Blue Ridge Parkway
and had an engraved picture of a motorcyclist on it. He had bought himself one, too, and we both attached them to our jackets. He was so proud of those pins—he still is. When I visit, he always asks me if I still have it, and I always do.

My father and I had our fair share of collisions, but after being thrown backward from the impact, we always seemed to return to each other. At one point on the Parkway he slammed on his brakes to make a wrong turn, and I had to stop so suddenly I almost ate road going forty miles an hour. He didn't even notice, just sped up when he realized it wasn't the correct left. I was so shaken I shrieked at him when he finally parked a few minutes later, and started seriously considering parting ways with him, continuing on to Florida solo. I sat on a big, flat rock by myself and cried a few tears of relief, and surprise, and fear, because I had almost forgotten that shitty things could happen, even with my dad here, even, sometimes, because of him. He got a sandwich at the overpriced Park restaurant while I steamed away, perched on my rock, and when he finally came back and offered to share it with me, I accepted, and we continued on.

At night, after we turned out the light but before we fell asleep, we would lie in the dark and sometimes he would ask me if I remembered how he used to throw me in the air and then catch me, or if I remembered the two pet rabbits who had so many bunnies they wouldn't fit in the hutch and we had to set them loose, or if I remembered the brush piles he used to make in the meadow, that he would then pour gasoline on and light with firecrackers. Reminiscing about the things we used to do together when I was little has been one of his favorite activities ever since we stopped doing those things.

Sometimes I remembered, sometimes I didn't, but it was remarkable to me how clear it all was to him. He's always had a way with small children—his silly, larger-than-life sense of humor thrills them to the core, and he in turn is thrilled as well. I suspect I had grown up much faster than he would have liked, our connection fading as I became more serious and less childish. I began to practice math by balancing my parents' checkbooks, then I started balancing them for real. My mother would rely on my brain as her grocery list: before we left for the store she would recite five or ten or even fifteen items to me, and I would memorize them. I didn't have time for my father's games, I was busy trying to be the youngest adult who ever lived.

We spent a week traveling along the Parkway, and as we crossed into North Carolina the foliage became widespread. Where before it had been only a tree here, a hillside there, suddenly it was as though the whole world were smoldering. The valleys below us were luminous with changing leaves. Tulip trees and hickories turning golden yellow, sassafras becoming orange, oaks and red maples, all exploding with color, while in the high altitudes the shaggy conifers lined the road, steadfast green sentries.

By the time we made it to Asheville, we were ready to take a break from being on the road. We stayed with friends of my father's in Bat Cave and took an extra day to rest there before continuing on. Flipping through a local newspaper, I saw an article about chimney swifts, small birds that roost in the same chimney in downtown Asheville every year when they fly south. It struck me as exactly the kind of thing my dad would have taken me to see when I was little, so we went to see the swifts the night before we hit the road again. It was just after the sun had set that they arrived in droves, flooding the sky and creating a living whirlpool that funneled into the chimney. It went on even as the sky darkened, birds arriving from every direction and adding their beating wings to the melee, until slowly the birds dwindled and disappeared. The chimney looked vacant—no way to know that inside it was teeming with thousands upon thousands of little swifts.

It reminded me of my father taking me once to see a flock of geese resting on a pond. He unfolded the tailgate of his truck for me, boosted me up, and told me that the geese were on a long, long journey, and when they got to where they were going, it would be time for them to turn around and do it all again. This made sense to me at the time—I figured that if
I
could fly, then I would probably want to fly and fly and never stop also. I would stop to sleep of course, to rest on a lake for a night or to catch a fish, but then I would beat my wings against the water and keep right on flying.

The next day we left Bat Cave and finished the last stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway. At the end of it, we found ourselves in the small town of Cherokee, tucked between the end of the Parkway and the beginning of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The last piece of the Parkway had taken us the better part of the day, and so we spent the night in Cherokee, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. We stayed in a sweet little motel that had two rocking chairs set out in front of every room. My dad and I sat in ours for a while, looking out at the mountains that loomed over the glaring neon of the reservation. It was a motorcycle mecca on account of its proximity to the Parkway and all the gambling possibilities, and the sounds of backfiring exhausts and revved-up engines echoed late into the night. The dark blue sky was mottled with even darker blue clouds and the kudzu vines carpeted the power lines, dripping down the poles like curtains. We ate fudge and looked at our motorcycles, talking about how much farther we had left to go, and where we would stop along the way.

We had come to the terminus of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and it would be highway from there on out, all truck stops and fast-moving traffic. After the idyll of the Parkway, it would be an abrupt transition, I knew, and would elicit a far different reaction, but I was feeling the pull of Florida; the comforts of arrival were beginning to sharpen in my mind, and so we planned to take the quickest route available to us, along Interstate 26, heading down into South Carolina.

Buoyancy

M
y father and I developed an affinity for Waffle Houses. They were everywhere, they were cheap, and goddamn if the food wasn't pretty good. A creature of habit, my dad would order the same thing every time. Three over-medium eggs, wheat toast, hash browns, and decaf coffee—I still know it by heart. In a Georgia Waffle House, the fry cook waved me over when I walked in—my dad was getting gas—and asked me, “How 'bout them socks?” It took me a few minutes of asking him to repeat himself to figure out what the hell he was talking about, but eventually I realized he'd seen my Mass plate and wanted to talk baseball. “Ohhh,” I said, “Sox.” I don't really follow baseball, but he kept on talking, about a game I hadn't seen and a few players I hadn't heard of. I just nodded and slipped in a couple of space-filling remarks, happy to be engaging with someone other than my father for a moment, even if we were talking about something I knew nothing about.

Eventually, the topic moved from baseball to motorcycles and I perked up. Ah, I thought, here we go, this I can talk about. He asked me if we were headed down to the Daytona Biketoberfest, and I said that we were, in a manner of speaking. I explained that my dad lived near there, and that we had met up in Virginia to ride down together.

“Well, good for you,” he said. “I've been seeing brand-new Harleys roll through here all week, but none from so far away as Massachusetts. And with a little girl riding it! I'll be. Most of these guys trailer their bikes and drive 'em down.”

I dissected the compliment from that remark and threw away the rest. The thing about the trailered motorcycles was true—all through South Carolina and into Georgia we had been seeing hordes of beautiful, shiny bikes, but most of them were strapped to the back of a truck. Just then my dad walked in and we got a booth. A waitress strolled over and asked us if we wanted coffee.

“Don't mind him, sweetheart, he's the village idiot,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the fry cook and chuckling at her own joke.

“Don't you listen to a
word
that woman says,” the fry cook shouted over. “She's just sour 'cause she ain't done nothing interesting in twenty years.”

•   •   •

T
HAT WOULD HAVE BEEN
our second-to-last day on the road. A few days previously, I had gotten an e-mail from the man I met at the Rainbow Diner in Pennsylvania, and he'd sent me a quick note and the website address for the tree house hostel in Georgia he had told me about. It turned out it was on our way, just past Savannah, so we decided to spend the night there. From the hostel it was only a four- or five-hour ride to New Smyrna, so it would be our last stop.

In terms of highway riding, we had only just managed to find a compromise. I thought my father went too slow, he thought I went too fast—we eventually agreed that 5 mph over the speed limit was acceptable to us both. I had also started making a point of writing down the day's route on little note cards before we began each morning and sticking them to my gas tank. As the trip wore on, I found I had less and less faith in my father's GPS system, so I slowly began to take over the navigation duties. My father graciously handed over this responsibility, and I started making note cards for him, too, just in case. I had lost him once or twice before, going too fast, of course.

After we left the diner I took the lead and found my way to Interstate 95. From there it would be a straight shot to the hostel, and then down to New Smyrna. As we sped along, I started to become excited about the conclusion of the trip. We were nearly there. At this point, I was tired of long days of riding, tired of living out of my duffel bag, tired of pressing on. Almost there, I kept telling myself, almost there.

It was right about then that the Magna stopped responding to the throttle and began to lose speed. I swooped over to the right lane, to be close to the shoulder should I need to pull over, and then tried again to accelerate with no response from the engine. The bike began to lose momentum more quickly after that, and so I put on my blinker and veered off into the breakdown lane. By the time I rolled to a stop, the engine had died completely so I hopped off the bike and started fiddling with things. I checked the gas line, that seemed okay, then I jiggled the spark plugs, thinking maybe they had come loose, but they seemed solid. My dad had pulled off behind me, and as he approached I took off my helmet and told him what had happened.

“Huh,” he said, and a semi ripped past a few feet away. The bikes shuddered in its wake. I fiddled a little more, checking that all the exposed wires were secure, then I tried to restart the motorcycle. To my delight the engine turned over and almost caught—I tried again, this time with my hand on the throttle. I fed it a little gas and it roared back to life. I let it run for a minute and shrugged at my father.

“Well,” I said, “I guess let's see what happens.” He agreed, insisting that I go slow and stay in the right lane. We were less than an hour away from the hostel.

Things seemed to be going well, then fifteen minutes later the same thing happened again, and again I was able to restart the motorcycle after messing with it for a few minutes. We kept going, but when it happened a third time we pulled off at the next exit and inquired about the nearest motorcycle mechanic at a gas station.

While we were stopped, my father wondered aloud if maybe I had a bad tank of gasoline. This had happened to him recently, he said, and if that was the case then it was a relatively easy fix. There are a couple ways in which gas might go bad, but what he was talking about was water in the tank. Because water's density is higher than that of gas, the two substances separate and the water sinks to the bottom of the tank. If this happens, it essentially cuts off the gas supply and slowly starves the engine of the energy required to fire the pistons. The diagnosis would explain a lot, but we decided to get a mechanic's opinion anyway—after all, we'd already gotten the directions. Before we left, though, he poured a little gasoline dryer into my tank just in case, a substance that encourages the gasoline to absorb the water, which will then run through the engine as pure gas normally would. The problem lies in the separation of the two substances—they can be combined, but one will eventually separate from the other. Using a gas dryer delays this process and binds the two together.

It turned out that the shop we were directed to was a Harley dealership, and when I went inside and told the young, tattooed man behind the service desk that I was riding a Honda and it was giving me trouble, he said the dealership only worked on Harleys. He did, however, direct me to another place that dealt with Japanese bikes a few miles away, so I located my dad, who had wandered off, and we got back on our motorcycles to go see what we could find.

•   •   •

W
E WALKED INTO
a huge empty showroom. One or two motorcycles, a four-wheeler, and a lone rack of accessories only made it seem emptier. I heard voices in the back, so despite the
NO ADMITTANCE
sign, I followed the sound and found a few mechanics hanging out in the service area. I told them my problem, and one of them stepped forward and told me to bring my bike around back. I did, and after about half an hour or so of troubleshooting, he admitted to having no idea what was wrong with it and then told me he had someplace to be.

“But,” he said, “come back in a few hours and I'll keep working on it.” I said okay, collected my dad, who had again wandered off and was chatting with someone on the phone, and in the interim we decided to take our chances with the Magna, head for the hostel, then come back after we ate something. By then it was getting late, we were both hungry, and I was truly annoyed at my motorcycle for taking me all this way only to fail me at the very last minute. It had been behaving pretty well since we'd used the gasoline dryer, but it's a scary thing to lose power on the freeway.

•   •   •

W
HEN WE TURNED OFF
onto the dirt driveway that would lead us to the hostel there were more problems. It had rained pretty heavily the night before, and so the road was a mess—huge puddles and lots of mud. I motioned for my dad to go first, and of course he zipped right through these obstacles. I followed, somewhat more hesitantly, until we came to the mother of all puddles. Maybe
lake
is a better word. It literally took up the entire road, and looked to be about two feet deep in the middle. My father stopped in front of it for a minute, then went ahead and gunned the engine, splashing right through the middle and up the other side.

Let me pause here and say that my father's motorcycle is much higher than mine, and is in fact a dual-sport bike, which means that it does pretty well in off-road situations. I knew right away that the puddle was a bad idea. My dad waited on the other side to see what I would do, and I just sat there looking at it, trying to decide if I could possibly skirt the edge—no—or maybe try to ride through where it was not quite so deep—again, no. As I contemplated my options, a little voice told me to stop being such a wuss, if he could do it I could do it, and so I ignored my well-informed doubts, aimed for the middle as my father had done, took a breath, and went for it.

It made me think of a dream I'd had a few weeks before, in which I was back on my trusty little Rebel, riding through the countryside, when suddenly I found myself approaching a pond that I had gone swimming in a lot when I was a kid. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the pond sparkled like a big, murky-green gem. Zooming along, I began to bank left, so as to ride along the perimeter of the pond, only my motorcycle didn't respond. It kept going straight. I leaned hard and twisted my handlebars with all my might but to no avail—I was headed straight for the middle. In slow motion, I helplessly rode the length of the wooden dock that my father had built, and then plowed into the water, where my motorcycle sank beneath my furiously churning legs, lost forever to the depths.

In reality, I got halfway through the puddle when the mud reached up and grabbed my tires. I lost my momentum, the engine stalled, and the motorcycle went down. It was a lot like my dream, except that I didn't wake up in a sweaty sigh of relief. Instead of waking up, I got wet. I had enough presence of mind to flip the kill switch before I half swam, half climbed out, utterly drenched, covered in mud, and totally hysterical. As I sat on the bank and wailed, my father leapt into action. I don't know what I would have done if he hadn't been there. He plunged into the puddle, somehow started the Magna, and half rode, half dragged it up onto dry ground. The exhaust pipes were spraying muddy water everywhere, pretty much all my gear had been submerged, and the engine sounded like it was a drowning animal. I was a mess. My motorcycle was a mess. Everything I owned was a mess.

“Are you okay?” my dad asked me quietly.

It took me a few more minutes of despair before I could peel away my waterlogged jacket, scrape the mud off my helmet, and tell him that no, I was absolutely not okay. Miraculously, my motorcycle was. We pressed on.

•   •   •

S
TAYING IN A TREE HOUSE
boosted my spirits somewhat. I changed out of my mud-soaked clothes, found a little cotton T-shirt dress that was somehow dry, and put that on. I hung a few things from the rafters, and regarded my boots with dismay. They were caked with mud, not only on the outside but inside as well. I put those under the bunk beds and tried not to think about them for the moment, then I went outside and explored a little. There were chickens everywhere, strutting around the main cropping of buildings, collecting bugs, and laying eggs wherever they felt the urge. Little wooden boardwalks zigzagged through the jungle, leading to other tree houses, to composting toilets and outdoor showers, to hiking trails and a garden and a labyrinth. It was a flower child's paradise, and my father, of course, was right at home.

After we had eaten and darkness had fallen, I took a flashlight and made my way to one of the outdoor showers. There was a moon that night, and as I stood in the hot, sulfur-scented water, washing the remnants of caked mud from my hair, I looked up at it and began to feel a little better.

I slept fitfully, and was eventually awoken just before dawn by two roosters crowing to each other from the branches of the live oaks. I heard my father get up and leave the tree house to commence his morning routine of jogging and meditating, and I drifted off again. By ten o'clock I had packed my soggy things and was ready to go. When he finally returned, he announced that he had found another way out—a road that was marked for service vehicles only, but that was paved and smooth. We got permission to use it, then we packed the motorcycles and rode out of the forest.

•   •   •

W
E RESO
LVED TO KEEP GOING
and hope for the best. We were so close, after all. To be safe, after breakfast we stopped at a gas station and I bought another bottle of gasoline dryer. The whole motorcycle was covered in mud, and even though I wasn't really in the mood for this last leg of the trip, I couldn't help but admire how incredibly badass it looked. I wiped away a little of the grime from my license plate, but just enough to be legal, and then we got going, heading south—always south.

In physics,
buoyancy
is defined as an upward force that opposes the weight of an immersed object. Inside my gas tank, the two substances had separated, and the fuel was pushed up by the effects of buoyancy, whereas the water sank because of its comparative density. There is a clever trick for quantifying buoyancy: it is always equal to the weight of the displaced fluid. In its metaphysical use buoyancy is unquantifiable—it's the propensity for levity, the ability to recover, to float. Weightlessness. But weight is intrinsic to buoyancy, they are cause and effect, and ultimately one defines the other. It's the weight that triggers the upward climb, because without the depths there would be no delicious gasp upon reaching the surface.