Motorcycles I've Loved Read Free

decide.
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    T HERE WAS ANOTHER STORY my mother told me, about another crash. This one was a little after she’d wiped out while she was learning in Illinois, in 1968 or so. She had just abandoned her sophomore year at Monmouth College and gone back to her parents’ house in New Jersey while she figured out what to do next. In the meantime, she got an office job designing pamphlets at an insurance company and a blue Honda 305 cruiser to make life more interesting.
    She had an old high school friend who had gotten into dirt bike racing, and one weekend the two of them and three other guys made the trip out to western Pennsylvania so that he could compete. The four guys rode in the van with the dirt bike, but my mother decided to ride her motorcycle. It was a beautiful day when they started out, a stubby little caravan of motocross misfits. The race itself was warm and sunny, but on the way home the weather turned. Rain began to bounce against her helmet and the sky darkened. She slowed down, tried to be careful, but she was tense, terrified of how easily she could lose control. There is a delicate ridge one must ride between fear and reason on a motorcycle—lean too far in either direction and there will be consequences.
    They were on a winding road in the Pennsylvania mountains, twisting and turning their way down from the misty peak. The van followed her, and as she rounded a corner on a downward slope she braked and lost her traction on the wet asphalt. The wheels locked and slid out from under her. It was over in an instant. She laid the bike down, and together they slid to the shoulder of the road. The scrub grass caught her by the jacket, but the bike kept going. She lay there, a quivering, shaking mess, as the boys stopped the van and ran to her, shouting over the thrum of the rain against the road. Her left side ached from the impact, and she began to cry as they fussed over her, through gritted teeth, trying to will away each tear. They managed to fit her boxy little 305 into the van alongside the losing dirt bike, and they stowed her in the seat of honor, battered and aching from her battle with the road, then proceeded to give her the frame-by-frame replay of her crash the whole way back to New Jersey. She returned to her cubicle at the insurance company after the weekend, and her entire left side was a rainbow of bruises beneath her corporate-casual shell.
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    â€œL OOKIN ’ GOOD ,” the motorcycle man said after he saw I was just shaken up. I rubbed my knee and brushed mud from my pants. My hands were shaking and my heart was pumping like it might combust. He flicked the starter button and the engine turned over a few times before it caught. He revved it. “It’s now or never,” he said, and I knew what he meant. I hesitated, but I got on, and this time I found fifth gear out there among the shorn crops and the dry farm roads, the dust leaping up behind me like a banner.
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    D URING MY MOTORCYCLE safety course a month or so later, we practiced on a big square of asphalt in the middle of a field, way out by a tiny airport. There was a jumble of students: two teenage boys with crotch rockets who couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there; two middle-aged women with long nails and dents on their ring fingers; an older, soft-voiced gentleman who used to ride as a young man and wanted to refresh his skills; and me. At twenty-one, I was done thinking about Australia, but I didn’t know what to think about next. For months I had been in a state of shock, wondering what I had done, how I had managed to destroy everything that felt safe about my life with one well-aimed blow, and what I was supposed to do now. Thom was back in Melbourne, I’d found a place to live in Massachusetts, and time was creeping forward. I needed something to catch me up and catapult