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How do you tranquilize a broken heart? Here's one method:
Motorcycles and the Art of Family Maintenance
I wish that he was here tonight;
It’s so hard to obey
His sad requests,
Of me, to kindly stay away.
So this is how I hide the hurt,
As the road leads away,
Cursed in charm….
Joni Mitchell, “Amelia”
It was early summer. I was newly divorced several months after having been abandoned and had agreed, in an effort to avoid conflict, to give my ex the major appliances. Local dealers were having a sale, and I’d managed to save up money to buy new ones. My father came with his truck to help me move the old ones out to the carport and bring the new ones from the store.
I’d been spending a lot of time on weekends at Mom and Dad’s house, talking about mom stuff with Mom and dad stuff with Dad. He’d seen me reading his motorcycle magazines, heard me talk, seen me ride his blue motor scooter. He knew the family bug had bitten me.
While we were moving appliances we took a break to go look at the motorcycles at the local cycle shop. The shop mostly handled scooters, but it had some Chinese-made copies of the Yamaha Virago, an entry-level cruiser bike that was, judging from its name, aimed largely at female riders. I had only gone there to look at them.
In the back they had just finished assembling a beautiful blue model. Much to my surprise, Dad asked the shop’s owner if he could take the little bike out for a spin. He agreed—he and Dad had hit if off immediately. Dad returned from his impromptu test ride impressed with the bike’s good handling. It would be an ideal learner’s motorcycle. And the price of $2,500, for a brand-new machine complete with windshield and trunk and saddlebag kit, was nothing short of astonishing. Before I knew what had happened I had been to the bank to withdraw the $500 I still had free after my appliance buying and Dad had agreed to make up the difference. That evening he drove home with the little blue Lifan Eagle firmly secured in the bed of his pickup.
That weekend I went home to visit and my education began. I spent a couple of hours cruising around the local high school’s parking lot, making big figure eights and learning how to shift. Very soon Dad was taking me out for spins on local roads, leading the way on his huge Kawasaki. He even encouraged me to take short trips by myself to find a quiet place of road where I could practice panic stops and such.
That summer Mom headed to Spain for a summer term at Madrid as part of her work as a college professor. I kept visiting Dad every other weekend and on the Fourth of July. With Mom and her worries for her baby’s safety far away Dad shifted my education into a higher gear. We did all kinds of riding, on gravel roads, over wooden bridges, along curvy highways, through the traffic of the county seat, and up into the mountains.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. On one journey I collided with a piece of chicken wire and injured my left foot and ankle slightly. While recuperating from that I accidently dropped the blue scooter on a gravel road. Then I dropped my own bike on a very loose and rugged uphill gravel driveway.
At that point my confidence was shaken. Dad told me not to worry—I had gotten in more kinds of riding experience in a couple of months than some new riders did in years. He was putting me through an intensive but carefully graduated program of skill building. He wanted to be sure before he turned me loose on my own that he had taught me everything he possibly could.
It wasn’t easy, but it was also very, very fun. We put in better than a thousand miles of riding that summer on the weekends when I was home. We looked for every excuse to ride we could find, even riding in to Mom’s office in the county seat in the evenings to check her e-mail and the latest news from Spain. One hot Sunday afternoon after church we stayed in and watched the superbike races on TV. Dad filled me in on various points of superbike lore. “Those engines develop up to 250 horsepower on 800-cc displacements,” he said. “Think they must have pretty high compression ratios?” I knew just enough about such things (mainly from listening to Dad) to be duly impressed.
When Mom came home from Spain she got into the act, riding along with us on Dad’s bike on motorcycle picnics and the like. On Labor Day weekend we rode to Dardanelle to see the house where I had my earliest memories and to Clarksville to visit Mom’s sister. Along the way Dad put me to the ultimate test of Arkansas riding by having us go up Mount Nebo, where there are curves sharper than anything found on the fabled Deal’s Gap Road (aka “The Dragon”) in the Smoky Mountains.
Meanwhile back at my house I was learning to live by myself, gradually picking up and cleaning the half-stripped rooms. I kept up my job and made a point of being gone with a friend where nobody was likely to find us the evening my ex finally came to town to pick up the final spoils of the divorce settlement that I had left waiting under the carport. The friend was a former biker herself. She envied me my new ride.
One weekend I volunteered to assist at a local bass tournament and spent hours throwing hundreds of fish back into the river and went home smelling just like them. I couldn’t wait for the weekends when I got a chance to go home and go riding again. The rides gave me a release that I badly needed from my wound-up emotions.
Two years have passed since that summer. I’ve ridden a lot more miles, some with Mom and Dad and my brother and my nieces and one of my uncles. We do other things together besides ride, of course. But that’s when I’ve had some of my happiest hours. It’s a family thing, something we do together. Something members of our family have done for generations. Something that’s in our blood.
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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
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