Motorcycles I've Loved (15 page)

When I peeled myself away from my motorcycle, it felt something like removing a Band-Aid very, very slowly. My back was a twanging mess from the way I had been crouching behind my windshield, and my fingers were white raisins. The day had miraculously turned sunny and warm, so I unstacked my tower of luggage to try to find something dry to change into. I quickly realized that nothing I owned was dry, and so I picked a few of the least damp things out. As I walked across the lot to the Starbucks, my feet squelched inside my boots and I looked back to see watery footprints following me across the pavement. I went inside and into the bathroom, leaving a slug trail of mud and rainwater in my path. Stripping off my jeans, I wrung them out in the sink and crammed myself into my other, slightly less wet pair. I slipped the thermal lining into my leather jacket and squirmed out of my T-shirt, replacing it with a scratchy wool sweater. My socks were disgusting. I threw those away, and held my feet underneath the hand dryer for a few minutes, one by one in an awkward stork pose, then slipped on my other pair of shoes, which were rubber-soled and made mostly of cloth. These were not ideal for a motorcycle, but then—nothing about my situation was ideal at that moment.

I emerged from the bathroom with a wad of wet clothes in my hand and got a cup of coffee, then I sat at the counter and went over my map. The guy next to me was giving me some curious glances out of the corner of his eye, so I leaned over and asked him if he had any sage advice for getting into whatever suburb I was aiming for. He gave me some directions—then the guy two seats down looked over and gave me some different directions. I feigned gratitude to them both, went outside, and called the friend I was going to visit. He gave me some altogether different directions, which I scribbled down and taped to my gas tank.

Two hours, a few wrong turns, but no major disasters, later, I pulled into my friend's driveway somewhere in the Philly suburbs and received a warm welcome, a hot shower, good company, and dinner. I spent a lovely weekend in Pennsylvania, and when Monday rolled around I was excited to be back on the road and headed south again. There was no rain when I left, but it was so cold I had to stop every twenty miles and run hot water over my hands in public restrooms to regain feeling in my fingers. Through Maryland and West Virginia the windchill was brutal, but by the time I finally crossed over into Virginia I was too numb to notice, going too fast to care.

I found my exit and turned off into the rural pastures of Virginia. From there it was just a few more miles to my second-cousin Vail's house, where my father was waiting for me, and even though my fingers were frozen, I was dying to pee, and I hadn't stretched my legs since Maryland, I kept the throttle open. I almost missed the turnoff, but saw the street sign at the last minute and slammed on my brakes, skidding onto a long gravel road that went on and on, until finally I caught a glimpse of my father's motorcycle at the end of it and knew that I had made it.

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A
s I got off the motorcycle, I saw my father and Vail walking in the pasture near her horse barn. The pasture was vivid green, and a mist rolled in toward the house in slow white plumes. The smell of sweet, wet grass rushed at me as soon as I took off my helmet. They strolled over and my dad wrapped me up in a big hug. I've never been so relieved to see him. After a moment, my dad released me and patted me on the head, as one pats a beloved dog. He's always done this. As a teenager, I managed to somehow be offended by it—as an adult, it felt like an unbearably sweet gesture made by a man who has never fully been satisfied with the effectiveness of his own words.

I gave Vail a hug also, and she practically lifted me into the air. Vail is at least ten years older than my father, and probably half a foot taller. She's a buxom woman, with an iron-gray bowl cut and a broad smile, always wearing black Velcro shoes and jeans pulled up to here. She lives alone in a big, cluttered house in rural Virginia, and although she was married in her youth, it's hard to imagine her as anyone's wife. Quite frankly, she is a bachelor; the
ette
suffix is simply too frivolous for a woman like Vail.

We went inside, my father insisting on carrying the heaviest of my things, and I was delighted to find that Vail had turned the heat way up in anticipation of our arrival—I could barely unzip my jacket, my fingers had become so stiff. Her little Jack Russell terrier leapt up to greet us, bouncing on the wood floor like a living tennis ball, and Vail began to show us the food items she had bought for dinner. Since she was not the cooking sort, this consisted of a deli container of clam chowder and a large vegetable assortment with a round well of ranch dressing in the middle. I volunteered to organize the heating of the soup, and while I did this, Vail complimented my cooking skills without a hint of sarcasm. I had to wonder about her definition of
cooking
, but I smiled and thanked her. She's had her own motorcycling streak, of course. When she lived in England for almost a decade, she owned several motorbikes and developed a fondness for driving on the left.

The evening passed quietly and Vail informed us that we would most likely miss each other in the morning, as she was going on a fox hunt very early. I nodded, as though foxhunting was something I did all the time, and then said good night and thank you for everything. The house was huge, and full of old newspapers and magazines, dead plants, and horse bridles and dog leashes over every doorknob, thrown over every chair.

My dad and I shared a room with two single beds, made up with sheets and blankets that had not been disturbed in years, perhaps even a decade. I slapped my pillow, and dust rose from it. My dad and I sat down on our respective beds and talked about how we might approach our first day on the road together. We had planned to pick up the Skyline Drive, and from there continue onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was to be the main feature of our trip together, but beyond that we hadn't really discussed much.

My dad looked up some directions to the northern end of the Skyline Drive on one of his gadgets, and eventually we turned out the light. In the morning, true to her word, Vail was already gone when we woke up, and so was the horse. We had a quick snack of blueberries and pistachios, and then carried our gear outside and strapped it onto our motorcycles. I could see I was going to have a little trouble backing up on the steep gravel driveway with all my stuff loaded up, but I didn't have to worry about it, because my dad was there. He gave me a hand, and what might have seemed like a dilemma to me only a day ago was no big deal.

After that, the first hour or two on the road was a little rocky. We got lost right off the bat, and the relief I had felt at relinquishing navigating duties quickly became exasperation at watching the person who was supposed to know where we were going get more and more turned around. The pros and cons of joining up with my father came to the surface immediately in those first few hours together, but eventually we found the Skyline Drive, and once we passed the little tollbooth entryway it didn't matter anymore. It was as though we had climbed to another level of the atmosphere. Clouds rolled across the road like tumbleweeds, and we rode right through them.

After a little while we pulled off onto one of the lookout shoulders and my dad lay down on the stone wall that edged the precipice and announced he was taking a nap. I am constantly amazed by his ability to fall asleep anywhere—in mid-sentence, for example, or on the edge of a steep drop. Some guys on Harleys pulled up and gave me a confused look. I shrugged at them and they moved on after a moment. When I started getting bored I took a picture of him with my cell phone, keys set on top of his chest like the bouquet at a funeral, hands folded across his abdomen, and sent it to my mom. She responded with raucous laughter, text message–style. After fifteen minutes or so he sat up with a sleepy gurgle and pronounced himself refreshed and ready to go. Sometimes hanging out with my father is a little bit like spending time with a cartoon character.

We continued on, stopping occasionally at the lookouts to check in with each other, to appreciate the rippling mountains stretched out before us, and to breathe the clear Appalachian air. As we continued I decided that the Skyline Drive was, without a doubt, the most beautiful road I had ever ridden on. The altitude, combined with the total seclusion, made it seem like another layer of civilization, something between the earth and the sky but part of neither. The road itself was so smooth, so well cared for, it was like riding on nothing at all. At the end of the 105-mile-long Skyline we crossed directly onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was just as spectacular, if not more so. We planned to traverse all 469 miles of it, from Virginia all the way down to the Smokies, at a leisurely pace. We had no deadlines, no place we needed to be. All my plans had led me here, to these mountains, and it was anyone's guess what lay for me beyond them.

As we rode, I realized that I had entered a part of the country that was totally unfamiliar to me—I had visited Vail once in Virginia, but the miles between her home in Boyce and my parents' home in New Smyrna were all brand-new to me. I get a jolt of inspiration from going where I've never gone before; I think covering new territory sparks dormant corners of the brain. With every new place comes a wider vision of the world—a more complete view and a better understanding of myself in relation to my surroundings.

I'd felt the same way five years earlier when my plane from Bangkok touched down in Australia. A new continent, a new hemisphere, a whole new way of looking at the seasons, at what north and south meant to me. When I landed, I knew I was there to stay—I hadn't been able to say the same throughout any of my travels, that next step had always been a question mark, but there, in Australia, I found new friends, a new family, and a new home waiting for me. Occupying such a radically different quadrant of the globe turned my inner compass on its head, and while riding along the Blue Ridge Parkway was not nearly so extreme or discombobulating, I couldn't help but react. It was a trip that widened my experience of the United States, contextualized it, and with that came a reevaluation of what
this
country, my home country, was all about.

•   •   •

T
HE GLOBAL EQUIVALENT
of this reevaluation was somewhat more jarring, and hung in a different frame of reference. As I made a home for myself in Australia, met Thom's family and friends, and explored an unfamiliar city within an unfamiliar country, I began to lose track of where I had begun. In hindsight, I think that was the point. My origins as an American dimmed, and the stronger my Aussie life got, the fainter everything else became. I only wanted to blend in, to belong somewhere. In Ireland I had tried so hard to assimilate, to become one of them—contriving accents and drinking like it was a contest and going along with all the weird slang, even when I didn't understand it. By the time I ended up in Australia, I wasn't trying to hide anymore, I'd just forgotten where I'd begun, and the collage of sayings and customs and habits that I had picked up throughout my travels in Europe and Asia had melted into one fragmented identity.

I applied for a de facto spouse visa that was based entirely on my relationship with Thom. It necessitated combining our bank accounts, doing endless paperwork, spending a bunch of money, and proving our love over the past year to a government official (letters, photos, interviews, et cetera). While we waited for the visa, Thom found work with an Australian online HR company, writing ad copy, and I worked illegally at a tiny dress shop, where I lasted barely a month. The woman who owned the shop was my personal nightmare, constantly belittling everything about me: my country, my accent, my clothes.

Eventually, I quit, and then came the months of unemployment while we waited for the visa. We lived on Thom's paychecks, and even though Thom said he was happy to support us, I was drenched in guilt over not being self-sufficient for the first time since I'd left Vermont, and so I threw myself into projects at home. I baked—scones, muffins, cookies, pies. I cooked—compiling a thick black notebook of recipes I'd tried and would try again, filled with my notes and pink stains where blobs of made-from-scratch tomato sauce had been wiped away. I nested, hanging curtains and arranging “art” (postcards and posters) on the walls. And I waited—I waited for Thom to come home, I waited for the visa to be approved, I waited for one day to end and another to begin. If I hadn't loved Thom so very much I would've been unhappy, but I did love him, and for a time it was enough.

The visa finally came through and I was able to get a legal job. I found myself behind the reception desk of a boutique market research firm, with black lines drawn around my eyes and tight pencil skirts shortening my steps. At first I was just relieved to be working—to have somewhere to go every day, something to do. With another paycheck coming in, a substantial one at that, we began to save. The need to revisit my childhood home, to see my parents, had been growing inside me since Thailand, and so we began to put something aside each month.

In the meantime, I felt the crush of inner-city commuters for the first time, the thrill of a nine-to-five life that only someone who has never had a nine-to-five job before can feel, however brief. It was all very domestic and grown-up, which is what I wanted after feeling afloat for so long. The routine was exciting for a moment, then unbearably boring.

When I think of Australia now, it's tempting to try to pinpoint where things went wrong and what I could have done to change it, but ultimately I was both happy and lonely there, lost and content, trapped and free to do what I liked. The game of trying to understand my twenty-year-old subconscious is interesting but ultimately futile—I was mixed up, acclimating to someone else's life in a new country and just trying to figure it all out, piece by piece. Thom was my best friend through all of it, and even when I began to feel trapped in Melbourne, he always knew how to set me at ease. We were a team, and we conquered each other's problems together. Our home in Armadale was cozy, our kitten had a fenced courtyard to stalk birds in, I got on well with his family. His parents were always sweet, his two younger sisters would come visit us often, and even his aunts and uncles made me feel at home. Everything seemed complete.

Thom was close to his family, but he was even closer to his boyhood friends. There was a whole crew of them who had grown up together in a little town a few hours outside Melbourne, and I learned to love them, too. They were good guys, and even though they were never mine, even though the moment I hurt Thom they all fell away, as the friends of an ex tend to do, they were one of my favorite parts of Australia. I loved drinking beer and watching football and hearing about the women they chased and sometimes caught. I loved how deeply connected they all were, how most had traveled the world, yet still returned to the same city, same friends, same shared memories. There was an undercurrent of permanence in their tightly knit group that I envied, the intrinsic knowledge that they would know each other forever.

Instead, Thom was my permanence—the rock around which I built my idea of the future. In each scenario that passed through my mind, Thom was at the center. Neither of us wanted to get married, but with the de facto visa, the joint bank account, the way we shared everything, we might as well have been. We talked about going back to school, him for his master's, me for my bachelor's; we talked about traveling more, teaching ESL again; we talked about getting out of Armadale, a stuffy, domesticated part of the city, and moving to Carlton or Fitzroy—neighborhoods where instead of bridal shops and antiques stores there were hip cafés and young people and secondhand shops. It never crossed my mind, not even for a second, that we would part ways so soon.

•   •   •

A
FTER ABOUT A YEAR
of diligent saving, we went to the United States for what was intended as a long, leisurely visit—a four-month, cross-country-and-back-again road trip. We touched down in California, where we bought a car and drove north, up the coast, through Oregon and into Washington, where I saw my brother for the first time in seven years—a visit that both terrified and encouraged me. It reminded me that I
had
a brother, and then it reminded me that I had
this
brother. Thom stood by, awkwardly taking photos, while Phineas and I rehashed pieces of our childhood. We stayed for almost a week, and when we left I was both relieved to go and heartbroken to leave my brother. Phin has always had this way of inspiring contradictory emotions in me. I promised to come back soon—he didn't offer to visit.

Thom and I continued, through Idaho and into Montana, down into Wyoming, across South Dakota, through Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, to Michigan, where I saw Detroit, my father's hometown, for the first time. I think Detroit is where things began to fall apart with Thom. There was no tangible event; it was just a sense of disconnection, as though he were drifting away from me—or vice versa. As though whatever had kept us together was eroding. The baseball games and the fishing and the family barbecue and even the Fourth of July fireworks all seemed to carry us further and further away from each other, and by the time we left, and dipped up into Canada, there was a tiny shard of doubt rattling around inside my rib cage like a piece of broken glass, and the more I moved, the more it hurt me. I still couldn't name it, couldn't look head-on at the possibility that we might not stay together, but it was there. Thom had predicted, years before, that I would one day break his heart. I laughed when he told me that, couldn't imagine ever not wanting to be with him, but now I wonder if he knew something I didn't. He was twenty-three when we met; I was eighteen. He always worried that I'd met him too young, and maybe he was right.