I’m eighteen years old, a sophomore in college. My major is Japan Studies, and I decide that in order to really learn Japan, I’ll tour it by motorcycle. I bug a senior until he teaches me to ride dirt bikes. My parents are uneasy but they give me a leather jacket for Christmas. Using the money I’ve earned at holiday and summer jobs, I buy my first bike, a small Yamaha, from another senior named Colleen. The feeling of riding is breathtaking, liberating. My freedom of movement depends only on something I can fix myself. It’s a marvel, and every time I get on the bike, something lifts me.
I’ve just turned twenty. I’m taking my junior year off and touring Japan. It’s a far more demanding place to ride than the US, and through constant challenge, my skill level is way above what it would have been had I not come. My possessions are limited to what will fit on the machine, and that’s a wonderful feeling, freedom through restriction. It’s December, in the middle of Tokyo, and a car has just made a perfectly legal but incautious right turn in front of me. I hit his rear door hard enough to crumple it and bend my forks. He never saw me. The police arrive and determine the driver is at fault. While his insurance company arranges repairs, I, battered, take the subway to a friend’s. On the train I meet a Malaysian girl and we become passionate lovers for the week it takes the shop to fix my Suzuki.
I’m twenty-one, back in the States, and it’s summertime and I have the best job I ever had—maybe the best I will ever have. I’m a security guard for a huge private estate in Greenwich, and my job is to patrol the woods and fields on a dirt bike. I’m equipped with a walkie-talkie and a pair of binoculars. I also bring to work a birding book and a lunch, and for this I earn $10.00 an hour. When I check the boathouse on my rounds I stand still, arms spread, as swallows dart and swoop perilously close trying to chase me away: featherlight miracles of speed and maneuver. There is nothing more I can ask of an employer. I’ve just rounded a corner on one of the small, curvy roads bordering the property, and right before my eyes a young girl comes around the turn way too fast and flips her car. It comes to rest on its roof, a bulky sedan with its wheels still turning, like a turtle on its back trying to get up. I help her from the vehicle and seat her by the side of the road—she’s unhurt—and while she has hysterics I radio for the police. I give them my statement when they arrive and then ride back into the woods.
I’m thirty-one and soon to be a father. I’ve ridden constantly since I was eighteen. But now my wife wants me to stop, for the baby. I’m in grad school and money is tight, so I agree. We’re in frosty upstate New York anyway, far from the Southwest where we used to live and the riding was good all the time. I sell my current bike without regrets. Those come later.
By the time I’m thirty-eight it’s all different. We’re back out West, in New Mexico, the owners of a struggling small business. Two daughters, now. I ask my wife the Question, and she doesn’t say no. The next day I borrow someone’s Yamaha sportbike and go to the motor vehicle department to get my motorcycle endorsement. I haven’t even sat on a bike in the intervening years. I pass all tests with ease. It’s literally like I never stopped. The balance, the control, the smoothness…it’s all still there. It was sitting in my brain and my muscles, just waiting to be called upon. I buy a new motorcycle, my first brand new one ever. This begins a couple of years of intense riding, all over the West, long, long solo trips. Something is pulling me into the spaces where I’ve never been before. Meanwhile my marriage is fraying and I never see it.
I’m forty. My finances are in shreds and I’m living with my parents back in Connecticut. My wonderful, wonderful children are living all the way across this big country. I still have the bike. I’m coming around a corner on a back road near Ridgefield and the van right in front of me loses control, overcorrects, slams into a pole, and flips over. I swerve—plenty of room—kill the engine, slam down the kickstand, and dash over to help the people get out of the van. It’s hard to get the door open, car doors are heavier than people think and lifting them up overhead takes effort. The police arrive and I give them my statement, and then ride home.
My bike has almost no chrome on it and it’s kind of a weird design, but it’s so tall that I can see ahead over traffic, and I can see what you’re doing in your SUVs when you should be paying attention to the road. And to me. Full-face helmet, Kevlar and carbon fiber gloves, ballistic nylon jacket with augmented armor, and work boots are the minimum gear I ride in. I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s Basic and Advanced courses; they were easy. The street is the challenge. When I’m riding, there’s not room for anything else to happen. I fear you, I want to escape you, I can’t get away from you. This level of alertness consumes me when I ride. Open places are rare but they pull like magnets.
The news tonight had another story about a motorcyclist killed. Forty-two year old guy, wearing his helmet, not speeding. Car turned in front of him. “It was probably turning left,” I say absently. My mom watches. I know what she’s thinking. I’m thinking, He should’ve been watching for the left turn. That accident I had in Tokyo was the last one I ever had on a motorcycle, all these years. I know I’m good. Very good. Because I’m very careful, always. I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in the odds. Is there an accident out there, waiting for me? Has it been biding its time, patiently, all these years? Are the near misses brushes of its finger; gestures; flashes of impatience? Or merely reminders that it hasn’t forgotten about me?
I’m getting older. In a couple years I’ll need glasses. My back sometimes aches after a workout, or for no reason at all. I can muscle my tall bike around with ease. But in fifteen years? Twenty? Still, it pulls me. The bike is pulling me, past where I was, always beyond. It’s so good when I ride. I wish I could explain it to you. It keeps owning me—not just the motorcycle, but the reflexes inside me, the ones that never quit. I don’t know why they’re there. I guess sometimes I wish it would stop. One day, one way or another, it will.
[Edit - written November 2007]
