The bend in the road. Time for a change. We long for a taste of the thrill from our earlier years. A confirmation that life still offers that which we once had, not going back rather a renewal.
Action is often the best antidote for our midlife warning shots…
My youngest boy would enter university in two weeks suddenly opening up this opportunity to me, the idea of coexisting with Laura in an empty house grew more and more unappealing. Out of no-where, I was struck by an idea, right between the eyes.
A motorcycle trip!
Shit yeah!
A motorcycle trip. How unoriginal can that be and I couldn’t prevent laughing out loud in the safe confines of my office studio at home. I got up from my old and nicked mahogany desk, a gift from my mother all those years ago, served myself another cup from my recently acquired Keurig coffee machine. Damn, why didn’t I invent this amazing machine?!
A recent thing: that first cup always brings good memories of a not too long ago trip to Santa Fe with my brother Sven to attend a pleasantly laid back New Mexican style wedding. The coffee which came with the Airbnb was to become inextricably tied to my memories of Santa Fes’ magical, unique early morning sun, its autumn, invigorating crispness, and rich palette of natural colors and freshly cooked aromas. Somehow was even tied to the low volume, early morning conversations amongst the long row of Indians set up on the periphery of Santa Fes’ Central Park displaying their beautiful, handcrafted jewelry. It was little wonder why the artists came to this area…
You know what I think? Starting my day out here in my office, some music, Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club band it occurs to me, very clearly: The Beatles, along with so many of the bands from those fuzzy sixties times knew. Yes, they knew. Listen to the lyrics, listen to the sleepy music. When they issued such albums we took it to be music from the gods. They knew this. Thus, they could patch together just about anything that occurred to them, and through the haze of marijuana smoke, the needle and LSD, and fighting with Yoko they put out music basically that had absolutely nothing to do with rock and roll. It was music mixing of what was current, flapper girl music, and futuristic hybrid, catchy beat and we swallowed it whole. Yes, in a way, the Beatles and others had us all happily bamboozled! Or so, in other words, unrest, I need to do something and the road seems to make most sense.
Almond vanilla combo with a very dark and powerful roasted grounds, the assuring and strange inconsistent rumbling and not quite bubbling machine, part of the Keurig mysterious allure, wisps of steam escaped from somewhere, the rich essence reached my nose, what a treat. ‘How can something be so wondrous…?’
Third cup, I almost said out loud, my limit which I’d set for himself years before after my first attack of SVT, Supra Ventricular Tachycardia, or scary as hell uncontrollable, hyper, heart-beat. Something I now controlled with a daily pill. A doctor once agreed with me that perhaps too much coffee contributed to SVTs reoccurrences.
The years passed. I gazed at my daughters’ portrait hanging on my wall, a tender twenty-eight, the freak accident on Lake Shasta, that fourth of July, the unlikelihood of two skiers encountering each other out in that large body of water. There had been drinking and playing chicken with the racing boats.
After a brief reconciliation with my wife of many years, as I’d often heard it referred as this, a brief reconciliation, we patched it up damn it and it almost worked, or so I thought. After difficult or nearly impossible family trauma it is not uncommon for the tenuous ties that hold together a couple to come undone, it just happens. Recalling the unjoyful trips to Italy and Greece, ill-fated attempts to get things back on track with Laura. Upon returning from a trip to Costa Rica, one of those, ecology, save the jungle, touristy, soft adventures and buying pounds of mediocre coffee, (”the best coffee on earth…”) I’d sworn to myself that I would never again submit myself to such hell.
Where’d I go wrong, takes two… I know there certainly was no perfection as a husband from my side of things.
Those marriage counselors, or whatever, were, laughable, incredible in their ineptness. How about the one who was rather vociferous and insistent on what we should do and yet she’d never been married herself!? A friend told me that having never been married had nothing to do with being a good marriage counselor, bullshit. Or was it that as a couple, a married couple, a couple of clients, we perhaps failed to fill the ideal profile needed for a successful go at reparations? Never know.
I couldn’t resist a smile at the not too long ago occurrence in the kitchen with her over toast and juice, she’d come clean as they say. The early morning sun streaking across the due touched yard, soft wind loosed colorful autumn leaves, Halloween pumpkins shrinking in the browning lawn, from a tree branch a now haggard, wind-blown goblin. She’d said that she and the pastor of their church, an old flame of hers, had reignited their old passion from high school days. I didn’t judge. Didn’t get thrown for a loop, just wasn’t the panic type. Of course, the loss of all those married years settled on me, I, of course, wondered in how many ways I must have failed.
I just sensed that in a strange way I had, sort of, an upper hand now. Who knows, might make the final ending less complicated now, and brought it into a phase of clarity. No longer if, but when and how… my hard-earned success as a hotel consultant, years of hard work, solid experience finally paying off. Paying off in the sense that a vacation wasn’t going to wreak havoc to our financial situation.
One deserves a break.
I sat slowly back into my comfortable state of the art office chair, an indulgence I’d permitted myself for Christmas, which meant the thing came with a brake so that it wouldn’t roll around without my wanting it to. Oh, and of course it was composite woven ‘mesh’ on the seat back the saleswoman assured me. As I sampled the chair in the showroom she used her God provided attributes, in my face, almost straddled me as she leaned in and put one hand on each armrest and now I was given a better than a birds-eye view of the happy valley as she continued to expound upon the wonders of the product, its softness, its’ sensitivity, firmness and forever reliable perfect balance. I felt like buying both of them.
On my laptop I punched in: motorcycle trips in Central America, also tried: motorcycle trips ‘to’ Central America to cover any doubts or info gaps. Not too surprisingly page after page came up full of pictures, of bearded men, very few women, differences in groups were quite apparent. Some were the dark shades, black leathers, long hair, and scraggly beards ilk; while others looked like they’d just set out from their corporate suites decked out in colorful leathers for a road trip across ‘treacherous’ California valleys atop BMWs, monster machines, beautiful and no doubt extremely expensive rides.
Inevitably the various groups gave colorful accounts of their wild and daring exploits, safety in numbers, trips to L.A. from Fresno, these mostly the black-clad, then trips to Alaska from Chicago, these the Beamers, wearing helmets with antennae sticking out the tops making them look a bit like astronauts carrying holstered bear spray; then most interesting were the loaners. Naturally a sparser set of individuals. Interestingly softer spoken than their Fresno brethren. Guys who’d set out across the Sahara, or from Alaska to Patagonia, these caught my eye. The loaners were a mix unto themselves, self-reliant types, or so it seemed to me, short hair, steel-jawed or long-haired, in shape, with a decided hipster vibe road is home sort of thing.
The sharper, entrepreneurial ones with business savvy from this set often spoke of motorcycle product endorsements. I was amazed by just how varied the groups were. I looked carefully at their bikes and saw that the loaners rarely rode the big street dream machines, preferring instead the in-between, almost off-road types, like fixed up KLRs, modified Suzuki DR650SE and Africa Twins. The Africa Twin just about the sexiest bike you ever saw…
To fill in the picture a bit more, some of these riders rode bikes for free, established reputations, and were to an extent rolling advertisements for the big manufacturers.
My brother Sven took a small Lifan 250 made in China on a solo from Guatemala to Costa Rica and back, the entire trip on back roads. No one, no one, risks life and limb on the back of a Chinese Lifan, alone, through the Central American back roads, but he did. On the highways, this would have been some 1500 miles, on back roads much more. This could have been huge for the Chinese maker but my brother decided not to pursue it! He still could! Stories like this one seem to have long legs…
A motorcycle trip. Is that something one might do after probably surviving cancer? Melanoma, three or four surgeries, a half year of radiology and a year of blood labs and just now finishing monthly infusions similar to that of chemo without its devastating effects. I thought: I’m still in the ‘probably’ category. Probably cured that should read. Because I still haven’t gotten the one hundred percent all-clear from the docs which should come after a last PET scan.
Yeah, but what happens after my trip? It’s not like something will have shifted and voila! A new life, a new chapter. But I had always been drawn to that mental knot that dealt with time and distance, and that coming through on the other end something invariably moves. Perhaps an almost imperceptible ground shift, a rebooting insight. These were my Buddhist leanings, I knew, and the up and down trajectory of my many years seemed to confirm my notion more and more, almost Einstein in essence though if my life depended on it I could not explain the scientists’ classic theory of relativity; I was more drawn to the more chewable talk of bending time through space and speed, wishing for the experiential aspect, this certainly appealed to me. That, experience over time brings knowledge and insight.
Insight certainly a word being paraded around more than ever these past several years. What sort of insight…? Be careful how you use this word.
Head down the road, to somewhere, getting away? Of course, I had to wonder and just assumed. Or just fun, a lighter load then; nothing required my journey be any sort of a quest. I know absolutely nothing about motorcycles, other than that one trip to Acapulco I took from Honduras, 1300 miles almost fifty years ago! The time span really erases so much, so that it could be said that in my case instead of being completely ignorant I might qualify as being just slightly less than completely ignorant.
This was before Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance… was published… If the thing broke down I waited around until help showed, hitched rides into the next towns’ mechanics’ shop, a slow and dragging process, even if I’d had the skills I would have had to haul a tool kit around bigger than the bike! There was something about that trip which to this day refused interpretation, the breeze, smells, ultimately satisfying unpredictability, sleeping on the side of the road, or on gas station porches or under a bridge.
Of course who was calling for interpretation then and now? Perhaps things are best left alone, let the magic of life itself determine what if anything is or was to be gained, scraping at the impossibly hard walnut shell with my tongue guaranteed nothing. This would be a new trip, though not safer, not necessarily a thing of discovery, or would it be; bad things can happen to solo bikers anytime anywhere. Buoyed this time however by the financial means to allow me to stay in clean little hotels and eat well in local restaurants, pay for the best bike maintenance along the way, this could be an experience I feel just might fit in right now.
Not the least was considering the looming change most probable in the very near future, the potential confusion that is part of breaking off, and the physical separation with my wife and mother of my children of many years.
What about the boys? Take them? This isn’t that kind of trip, you do it alone or not at all. Possible was arranging one or two points along my route where the boys could fly down to join me for several days.
How about I go down the street and ask those young mechanics at that motorcycle repair shop to let me sit in for three weeks, pick up some basic knowledge: change a flat, check my battery, oil maintenance, determine the optimum travel tool kit, what spare parts essential to carry.
The question: why? Why a motorcycle? Good question. Why not jump in a car, roadworthy machine protected from the elements, from dangers.
A car can’t fall over while standing still…
You cannot ‘lay’ down a car. Instead of one extra pair of stuff, I can take four of each, plus food, plus sleeping gear, maps, hidden cash, books, baseball bat, on and on. Why? Ask the question! Why submit myself to this torture? Central America, the huge difference in driving say a heavy road vehicle, versus a two-wheeler: you can be picked off on the two-wheeler, just that simple, so why? Add insult to injury, the day you get picked off, theoretically, you can be enduring getting pelted by a small hailstorm in the higher elevations, wondering what the hell am I doing out here and now you get picked off either by a passing or road hogging eighteen wheeler or a kid with a slingshot off the side of the road in Honduras. Fatalistic thinking? Perhaps, until it happens, then if you survive all you can say is shit happens.
No, very little allure to setting out, truth be known.
Then why damn it? It’s really very simple and at huge risk of sounding really very, very stupid and appearing as though one is egregiously lacking in anything that might approximate originality. Here it is: It’s in the blood, the call of being out there, a motorcycle gets you ‘out there’ almost instantly just as soon as you climb on the back of the machine and start down a street you are ‘out there’, it’s both physical and mental, dare I say spiritual. How do you define spiritual…?
The rumble, the vibration, the acceleration pull at the turn of your wrist, a first ride to the local gas station is likened to that time-honored first ride, like the first horse ride from another time. Whew! I made it!
That first ride. The elements kick in, the elements we are made of somehow resonate with the surroundings, plus the wind, smells, sun, sounds, a chasing dog, rain, a lousy driver gets too close and for some inexplicable reason, something inside finds it all appealing. Yeah, you look over as you slow at the stop sign near your house, late afternoon and you catch your shadow and for not even a second you’re on the back of a palomino, its mane windswept, you swear you see it nod its mighty head up and down trying to free itself of the reins to run but you are controlling the beast just as we all did lifetimes past.
Deny it and you’re kidding yourself. If you really don’t get it I suggest an emergency daily diet of fresh broccoli for a month. Change your life. Why not just be honest? The draw is visceral, a physical, mental thing which undeniably is deeply connected to the vital wiring including your animal brain, absolutely. That’s why.
Okay, turn it around to this: someone tells you they find it’s easier riding a big bike to the supermarket, oh yeah, in the rain. Bull shit!! Do you see it? Enough said.
Then there’s the apparent easy learning curve. With very little effort and the required cash, you’re out there shoulder to shoulder with pick-up trucks and youths in fast Fords. Oh, I know this was too easy. Of course, there was tons of stuff to learn, to allow to sink into your skin, could one day save my life. Knowing when to zig and not zag could save the day. All the learning curve in the world would probably do very little for an unexpected large pebble at sunset as you’re completing a sharp, downhill corner; you are going down.
Our doctor friend, plastic surgeon, his wife decided not to join on that ride, (which probably accounts in part as to why after the terrible experience he got religious, and why she-s alive), returning home after a weekend trip, wearing all the best protective gear money can buy, hits a pencil-thick twig on a sharp curve on a steep incline, doesn’t just lay it down, tossed head over heels down the mountainside; bones sticking out, knee cap on the wrong side, scalp grotesquely malpositioned on the side of his head, an arm held to his body by a string, and more. No longer rides. Ten years later still rebuilding his mostly destroyed body, pain and addiction are his soul mates. He told me that he recently started sitting, on what had once been his huge Beamer again, of course now a heap. In his garage. Can’t explain it. His wife promising divorce.
Then why doesn’t everyone take off on motorcycles? Strange thing to ask after that story. Surely I must be joking.
Serious? More information? The brighter side. Again, too simple: most never before have experienced the freedom of the ride on windswept hills in the Himalayan steppes or the great Western reaches before the U.S. became a nation of Europeans and other recent arrivals. Right. On the back of a horse. The memory isn’t there! So for many though not all, climbing on top of an old Triumph or an old formerly military Kawasaki KLR 650 with its’ unique rattles has the power to ignite the ancient memories, loves, driving the desire for adventure willingly throwing oneself in the path of possible harm.
Possible harm is key, were it guaranteed harm then only a very few would venture out on the roadways, most of us including myself are not up to delivering ourselves knowingly to great physical pain or dangers. Note: ‘most of us’… yes, the misdirected exceptions to this thinking do exist. Most of us will steer clear of such things as literally getting crushed (exposed guts and visible bones, or worse), by an irate mom driving her screaming kids home in the family van, or a drunk guy getting chewed out on Whatsapp by his wife.
Of course, this barometer varies for different extremes of men and women, there are those that seek out danger, no question, there’s plenty there for them if they so wish. As there are those who ride ‘perfectly’, in such a manner that almost, almost assures never having a mishap though this can never be guaranteed.
My life long penchant for nailing down the tiniest details of many of my most important endeavors forced me through this thinking, tiring as it was, discouraging as it was. I wondered now if I was simply trying to scare myself out of this plan! Seems a sensible thing to do I felt, I mean talk my way outta this one.
When I googled the matter I found statistics, mountains of it. Trying to grasp at the various levels and categories of dangers. The frequency and probabilities of getting into some sort of road trauma. Remembering that not that long ago such information didn’t exist! You just climbed on a bike, strapped your stuff on, in my case joined by my first wife and off you went.
An irksome thought was the issue that was obvious but for some reason swept aside. That was: human predators. Sure! Assholes that on any given day or moment could destroy us. Hey, the world is a dangerous place after all. And if I plan a trip through Central America, then the human factor is real. One option is to close myself inside my house and never venture forth: There I go again though. Skirting around the central question, ride or not…cloaking it under other titles, nevertheless valid mind you, damn it. In other words amigo: how lucky are you feeling these days…?
So that’s a requisite. Central America. Not the U.S. where the greatest threat is overeating crunchy pancakes at Cracker Barrel. So Central America, the danger element is still there. According to many, the risk of running into serious trouble is much less nowadays, take some comfort…
So trying to get back to square one: my idea to take a road trip has to do with the discovery aspect, not so much a desire to get to the next tourist attraction, thus an inner curiosity and yet, please no, not a Quest with capital Q, yeah, worn out, okay so maybe use quest with lower case.
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My used Kawasaki, KLR 650 roared wondrously up the two way, steep mountainside, tall, pine forest on either side, then almost suddenly being delivered to another geography, like landing gracefully on a flat stretch as far as the eye can see, tall, golden yellow scrub brush right up near and close to the edge of the blacktop; didn’t feel the resistance, my rides’ power astounding and assuring, the wind rushing around me, in places hot blasts, in others sudden cool patches. Small rodents, hand-sized, someone told me they were called voles, Mexico must have a different name for them, crept out onto the shoulder as though about to dash across the road then quickly dove back into the growth. At least one unlucky fellow was dispatched with a final and slightly unsettling snap, flat hide visible ever so briefly in my rearview mirrors.
Very small turtles in a particular large patch bordered by tall sawgrass and brackish water sadly fell victim to my tires. I couldn’t dodge them without taking a risk of swerving off the road, they would move out onto the blacktop as I approached, catching each of us by surprise. Plentiful in the watery areas near the coast, were crabs, called jaibas, these I was told to avoid as their jaggedness could cause flats.
Being out there relying on one's wits really did call for digging from within those tools and tactics needed to make it hopefully, contentedly worn out to the end of another day. To be clear, this is not a torture trip, if it were I’d say forget it, and it better be fun, and sure, I wanted to see stuff, the hills, plains and so on. Otherwise why? This then established the difference in motivation you might say in my trip fifty years ago, youth-driven and a sense of revolution (perhaps misaligned)., and the one I embarked upon two days ago, now hundreds of miles down the road: enjoy the trip despite there being only two tires versus four and a roof.
I told myself: just to be safe, keep the damn trip short and sweet.
