Motorcycles I've Loved (13 page)

Singularity

A
lthough I was ultimately journeying south, I began by heading north for a few weeks to clear my head. My destination was northern Vermont, on the outskirts of a little town too quaint for its own good. On top of a mountain and a few miles west of the village green, there's an old cabin that's been collectively owned by my mother's side of the family for more than a century. It is affectionately known as “the bungalow,” perched at the top of a treacherous dirt road, afflicted with deep potholes, washed-out ruts, and the occasional fallen tree branch. It's incredibly isolated up there, without electricity, phone lines, or neighbors. The way up the mountain becomes impassable when the snows come, and even during the warmer months it is a steep and troublesome stretch of road. Spending time up there alone is a singular experience—solitary, and also extraordinary, like nowhere you've ever been before.

After less than an hour on Interstate 91, I was over the border and into Vermont. The Magna was handling beautifully, though without a windshield, traveling at highway speeds was brutal. I thought of the Silverwing wistfully, with its enormous windscreen and bulky fairing, its bottomless gas tank, but the moment I pulled off the highway for lunch and set both feet flat on the ground to park, I knew I had made the right choice. I resolved to order a windshield and pick it up on my way back through western Massachusetts, then bent my head into the wind, crouched down low, and made the best of it.

As I went north I saw the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Irene, which had overwhelmed the entire state of Vermont near the end of August. Covered bridges were washed away, chunks were taken out of the roads, and houses on the brink of collapse teetered all along the riverbanks. I rode past a little diner that was a childhood landmark, where I had been eating clam chowder and slurping chocolate milk shakes since forever, only to find it gone—a pile of soggy rubble in its place. As I continued on toward the bungalow, I began to have doubts about the road leading up the mountain, started wondering what I would do if I couldn't make it. It would be a long walk for help if anything went wrong. I pressed on; it was the only thing to do. Eventually, I reached the beginning of that last mountainous stretch of road and turned off the bike. The trees rustled their leaves at me, and I saw a deer bound away through the underbrush. The sudden quiet after the incessant rumble of the motorcycle was soothing against my eardrums. I unlocked and opened the gate, then walked up a little ways, trying to gauge the difficulty. The road seemed miraculously unharmed. In its usual state of disrepair, but no worse than I had come to expect. I went back down to where the Magna waited and restarted the engine, then began my ascent.

I went as slowly as I dared—while speeding up the mountain wasn't the plan, neither was taking it too slowly. With a motorcycle, the accelerator is a friend on steep, treacherous ground: lose momentum and you're toast. I gritted my teeth and gave it my best, roots and rocks throwing my front wheel all over the place as I zigzagged around the largest obstacles. What I can only assume would have been a thrill on a dirt bike was genuinely terrifying on a heavy street motorcycle, loaded with a bunch of extra weight, but when the trees opened up to reveal the plateau on which the bungalow was built, I felt a rush of exhilaration. My shoulders were in knots from gripping the handlebars so fiercely, my hands ached, and my lower back had been screaming since White River Junction, but none of that mattered. I had made it, and I could see for miles.

As a child, I would go there, mostly with my mother, though sometimes my dad and my brother would come, too, and we would all stock up on library books and groceries and art projects before ascending the mountain for a week during the summer, maybe two. We always seemed to be there for my birthday in August—I remember a cake shaped like a bunny head with string licorice for whiskers, and one with icing the color of twilight: soft pink and dusky blue swirls. My mother went there as a child—my grandfather, too. At this point the land is collectively owned and managed by more than a dozen cousins and second cousins and cousins once removed, but when the bungalow was built, in the early 1900s, it was my great-grandfather who commissioned the construction, Henry S. Brooks—Brooksie, they called him.

There are old photos and portraits lining the walls of the living room at the bungalow, a spread of Brooksie's descendants. My grandfather as a boy, sketched in pencil and colored charcoal, next to sketches of his three siblings, and my mother and her sister, rendered in two oil paintings; their five cousins on the opposite wall. The dust lies thickly on the picture frames and the air in this room is stale, like the contents of a time capsule. The idiosyncrasies of four generations crowd the bungalow's walls, cupboards, and drawers. Yellowing notes written in bossy tones, old maintenance logs, chipped china and musty doilies, mutilated board games and endless redundancies in three drawers of rusty tools, a few raggedy fur coats in one closet, an old cot in the other. The singularity of the bungalow lies not only in its isolation but in the peculiar personality that emanates from its beams, the composite of at least a dozen relatives who have etched themselves into this building in one way or another over the past century.

The sun was beginning to set as I unpacked the Magna. I heaved my duffel bag onto the west-facing porch then sat next to it, watching as the mountains in the distance turned indigo and the sky became a dusty pink, the smoky blue clouds cracking open like an egg to reveal the yolk of the sun, molten orange, dripping down behind the horizon. I admired the silhouette of my motorcycle set against the panorama of mountains in every direction, and then I brought my things inside before the light disappeared altogether.

I set my gear down in one of the two bedrooms, then began to light the kerosene lamps. I left one next to my bed, another in the kitchen, and another near the fireplace, where I busied myself lighting a fire to soak up the chill in my fingers and in my toes. The crumpled newspaper smoldered at first, then burst into light, illuminating the room and flickering across the old family portraits that lined the walls and the farming artifacts that perched along the ceiling beams. I went into the kitchen and heated a can of soup on the gas stove. The sound of my spoon against the bottom of the pot made a quiet, metallic rasp, and I kept stirring it just to hear that soft scraping—so peaceful.

In the living room the fire popped suddenly, then settled back into a static whisper, the wood shifting occasionally. With the relative quiet of the mountain, the tiniest sounds stepped forward, and a whole new layer of white noise became apparent: the crickets; the wind; the house itself. My own small sounds seemed to become smaller still when I heard the echo of a large truck downshifting on Route 101, miles away. But this particular kind of smallness—this cosmic insignificance—I have always found comforting. In this sense we are all small, we are all alone, and I felt content to hear the shallow thumps of my own movements, set against the deep buzz of the outdoors, and the urgent, transcontinental breath of the wind.

•   •   •

I
N PHYSICS
, a
singularity
is an exception to the rule: a point in the spacetime continuum that defies the laws of physics as we know them. One of the basic tenets of physics is that its laws are constant and universal, but a singularity is a point in space where these laws can't be applied. Black holes emanate from singularities, concentrated centers of infinite mass. Considering the contradictions of infinite mass is only the beginning—by association, other infinites come into play, including infinite force, infinite momentum, all sorts of things beyond the scope of what we can understand. A singularity is like a bookmark—a placeholder for something we can't yet comprehend but that we know exists. Essentially, all we know is that we don't know much.

They say the universe itself emanated from a singularity: the Big Bang. A moment in spacetime when a point of infinite density exploded outward, becoming the universe as we know it. A concentrated moment of both endless existence and utter destruction, all bundled together in one cozy little speck of matter. There's something about being at the bungalow that makes me more inclined to think these big, universe-sized thoughts. Most things seem inconsequential when you're up on the mountain. I think it must be the uninterrupted view of the sky that does it, how at night you can actually see the creamy swirls of the Milky Way, and sometimes, if you're really lucky, the shimmering, opalescent curtain of the aurora borealis.

I poured the soup into a cracked porcelain bowl and took it into the living room, where I ate it, watching the flames rise and fall, listening while the wind howled around the mouth of the chimney and chased puffs of smoke into the living room. I read in the dim light for a few hours, then dragged the screen in front of the fireplace and started getting ready for bed. I brushed my teeth with bottled water, wrapped myself in musty wool blankets and my sleeping bag, and blew out the kerosene lamps. The fire still crackled softly in the living room, and a cricket couldn't have been far as I drifted off to sleep.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP
the sun was streaming in through the windows, and past the open bedroom door I could see the kitchen, which faces east, glowing with brand-new yellow light. I heaved a deeply satisfied sigh, rolled over, and didn't wake again until almost noon. The bungalow inspires sleep, reading, and little else—a welcome break from the rest of the world. There is nothing up there but history, trees, birds, and, of course, the sky. Eventually, I shuffled out onto the porch with a cup of tea in my hands, and I sat. My thoughts wandered, I finished my tea, and still I sat, watching the clouds melt. There was a monarch that stayed close to me, sailing this way, then that, always with the wind. I felt at home.

My parents lived in Vermont for thirty years, but in a sense I am the only true Vermonter among our little clan, born and bred. My brother was born in Montana, my mother in New Jersey, my father in Michigan, which just leaves me. Now that the rest of them have relocated, Vermont doesn't feel like home in quite the same way it used to—there's no house to draw me back, no family to return to—but there is something about just being there that feels familiar, and there is always the bungalow, where some of my oldest memories took place. Something about Vermont's quiet towns, her rotting, red barns, the way old men in pickup trucks lift a hand from the steering wheel to each car they pass on a lonely road, speaks to me of home. I get this feeling, like my roots are buried somewhere deep beneath my feet, but that they aren't connected to anything aboveground anymore. They don't grow; they're just there, marking the place where I sprouted. I feel their presence and I feel their severance in equal measure.

The sun was on my face, and the wind nipped at my bare toes. The nostalgia faded, and thoughts of the journey ahead began to emerge. I strung up the hammock and lay there for a few hours with a book of crossword puzzles, then I went inside and made a pot of rice, heated up a can of kidney beans, and wished for an egg to fry or a handful of spinach to wilt. Alas, groceries hadn't been part of my luggage plans. I pawed through the cupboards, finding some mismatched nonperishables—instant coffee, powdered iced tea, pancake mix, canned green beans, popcorn kernels, bow-tie pasta—remembering that at some point I would need to go down the mountain and bring back some real food, and that meant braving the treacherous road all over again. I stalled for a day or two, but eventually I had eaten what was edible and down I went.

To my great relief, going down was less difficult than that first time going up. I had already made a point of remembering the most difficult patches of road, and one particular pothole that would have been an instantaneous game-over had my front tire fallen in, so I knew roughly what to look for and where. I made it down without too much trouble, visited the overpriced local grocery store, and checked my e-mail at the public library. Stocked with a backpack full of provisions, I headed back up the mountain, again without too much trouble. It was when I was already at the top, turning the motorcycle around on the slippery wet grass, thinking I was in the clear, that I went down. The engine stalled and I lost my footing simultaneously, and for the second time in a week I had a really heavy, really hot piece of machinery fall on top of me. The smell of my blue jeans melting against the tailpipe was all I could think about as I got out from underneath it, hit the kill switch, and sat down next to my heavy fallen steed, knowing full well that there was no one in my proximity to help. I let loose an inconsolable wail, and the echo must have traveled for miles—the romance of singularity clashing with the reality of being alone on a mountain.

After a few futile efforts to lift the motorcycle up off the ground, I sat down and caught my breath. There is a certain method for lifting heavy motorcycles, which goes like this: you squat with your lower back against the seat, feet shoulder-width apart, one hand on the handlebar, swung in close to the body, other hand gripping somewhere stable near the back of the bike. Then, the idea is to press your butt against the edge of the seat and lift with the legs, pushing back with the butt, and walk it up bit by bit. The motorcycle needs to be in first gear so it doesn't slide. They say even a grandmother can lift a heavy bike like this, but I couldn't manage to get it off the ground. Maybe it was the wet grass, the incline, or the fact that my feet kept slipping out from underneath me right when I had the full weight of the bike in the air—or maybe that line about the grandmother is a load of bullshit. Either way, it didn't work, but I wasn't ready to give up. There had to be another way.

I had an idea. I went over to the porch, found a thick block of firewood, and brought it over. I lifted the motorcycle as high as I could with the method described above, kicked the wood underneath the bike to prop it up while I readjusted my feet, then lifted it a few more inches, pushed the block farther back toward the tires, and from there I walked it upright, flipped out the kickstand, and there it sat, good as new. I flopped down on the grass next to it, pulsing with adrenaline and feeling joyous, but also tired, right down to the bone, and emptied my lungs in what might only be described as a victorious battle cry. For someone who is often accused of being quiet, creating a sound so ragged and raw felt strange, and somehow important, as though I had just uttered bold truths in another tongue—as if I'd just had a fight with Goliath and won. It didn't even matter that there was no one around to tell.