Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of “The Perfect Vehicle” and other books.
In 1997, Melissa Holbrook Pierson published The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles, a delightful book that chronicles her love affair with motorcycles as well as the unique cultural and historical landscape of the two-wheeled world. In 1998, while struggling my way through graduate school in Philadelphia, I bought a motorcycle and learned to ride.
Within the first year of my own love affair with motorcycling, I read – no, I devoured – The Perfect Vehicle. Not only did Pierson artfully articulate the full spectrum of emotions, sensations, and experiences that are familiar to any motorcyclist and evoke the “ride to live, live to ride” credo, she educated me about the exciting new world I had come to inhabit.
When I read Pierson’s account of buying a Moto Guzzi Lario from a small European bike shop called The Spare Parts Company tucked away on a narrow street in the Old City section of Philadelphia, an area I explored regularly on late-night pub crawls and weekend wanderings, I felt an even stronger connection to her book. I had been to the shop before, and my then-girlfriend was friends with the proprietor.
On the 25th anniversary of The Perfect Vehicle, considered one of the best books ever written about motorcycles, we reprinted a review published in the August 1997 issue of Rider and which can be found on our website here. We also reprinted Pierson’s introduction to the Spanish edition of the book, which was published in 2021 by La Mala Suerte Ediciones, the first and only publisher devoted to motorcycle books in Spanish.
Flashback to August 1997, the issue that featured our review of Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s “The Perfect Vehicle”
Introduction to ‘The Perfect Vehicle’ Spanish Edition
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Twenty-five years have elapsed between the time I began writing The Perfect Vehicle and the moment you are reading these words. The impetus for writing was, quite simply, unbridled joy. Why had no one ever told me motorcycles were so transporting? Why didn’t everyone know how affecting they were, how they enriched and condensed experience? How they were a powerful force for personal good?
So I attempted to say in my book every last thing I could think of to say about these machines that both capture and express the human imagination. But no amount one can say about something that’s essentially infinite can comprise “everything.” Even I would go on to find more things, and more things, to say. I wrote articles and poems and another book about bikes. I’m not finished yet. The meaning of the ride is never-ending, which is why we ride: to taste immortality in the form of the resounding now.
A quarter of a century is a long time. Time enough for everything to change – governments to rise and fall, species disappear, cities spread, new technologies revolutionize daily life and rewire our brains. In that long span, I can now report, much has changed about motorcycling. And very little. There have been technical advances in the bikes we ride – fuel injection, ABS, “ride by wire” (explained to me half a dozen times to no effect), things once visibly mechanical now directed in the dark by computer chips. No longer for me long garage bullshit sessions among friends, where I would marvel at the ingenious arrangement of parts mirrored in the minds of people who are to me equal marvels of nature: they manage to comprehend the way complex systems, the motorcycle’s biomes, flow together and apart.
I always knew my bike had a heart, but now it has a separate brain. In its advanced evolutionary state it may only be attended to at the office of the appropriate neurologist, I mean, dealer with the codes. This has put an unhappy distance between the soul of the machine and its rider, but the tradeoff is performance well beyond the imagination of the last century.
There are concurrent changes in the types of people who ride. The so-called adventure bike has become hugely popular, along with global journeys on it that once were rare but are at this moment being undertaken by astonishing numbers of people of every age, nationality, and gender. The percentage of riders who are female has more than doubled since I started riding, and these women are often pursuing it in cultures that openly disapprove. They don’t care; they do it anyway. That’s how powerful the allure is: we risk death to do it.
Much verbal handwringing has materialized, in the United States at least, about the “graying” of the motorcyclist, and the sport’s diminishing hold on youth who are reputed to care more about virtual life than the real thing with its weather and difficulties and the 360-degree view onto a disappearing but still gorgeous planet. Economic factors are often discussed. But that is in the small corner from which I write. Shift the scope to India, which has emerged as the world’s biggest motorcycle market, and see (as I recently did for myself) throngs of young people enthralled by riding and the places it takes you. I’m not worried about the demise of the motorcycle. The planet itself will be destroyed long before the peculiar happiness riding confers.
I, too, have come closer to my end. Going toward it on my bike is the only reasonable mode of travel through these years.
Motorcycles amplify all that is glorious about living. It is not an adjunct to waking up in the morning, or an occasional occupation. It explains everything, gives a purpose to being alive, and a place in both community and history, which still and forever unreels, like the road itself. I have lost dear friends, who happened to die doing the thing they loved most. But that was happenstance, not cause. Motorcycling has brought me the deepest friendships I’ll ever know, acceptance into a worldwide brotherhood, and the ultimate knowledge that love is real – love for an inimitable collection of parts that mysteriously opens a window onto the most vital of experiences, as well as love between two people brought together by what I can only consider a magical agent. Yes, motorcycles are even matchmakers for the lovelorn.
So much has changed in the years between then and now. So much has stayed the same. I still feel boundless anticipation and hope and desire and a fleck of worry every time I engage first gear. The world becomes new on every ride. But now I know a deeper secret, one I have both lived and witnessed, again and again. Motorcycles save lives.
A large crowd gathers for the biannual Slimey Crud Run in Wisconsin. Photos by the author.
This essay first appeared in Motorcycles Are Magic: An Anthology, edited by Melissa Holbrook Pierson with assistance from George Sarrinikolaou and published in 2021 by 10mm Socket Press. Pierson, the author, participates in the legendary Slimey Crud Run and explores how motorcyclists stay connected, intended or not.
The invitation to dinner might have been a spring petal on the wind, gone by unseen in the turn of a head. How did I manage to hear the ding of the incoming text, even as it mimicked a tone identical to the imperative summons of the hotel desk bell, over the layered noise of so much coming and going? It configured itself from the molecules of the air of the bar at the airport Chili’s, where I sat killing two hours between flights. The name of the person who had issued it was “Jeff,” to whom I’d been “introduced,” also by text, that morning. He was the vague someone I was told would help procure a bike for me to ride in the vaguely understood run I’d attend the day after I gave a talk at the Black Earth Library. This was the reason I was downing Sam Adams in the first place in the Chicago airport en route to Wisconsin.
The earth was, indeed, black in southern Wisconsin. This startling notion would pierce my thoughts only after 10 continuous miles of passing it. Sometimes I don’t pay attention to the obvious. It pays attention to me.
Thank you, I had typed back: It looks unlikely, since my connecting flight was just delayed by 45 min., and unless you are eating on European time, it doesn’t look like I’ll make it.
“These guys are old. They eat at 7:30. You could check the menu online, give me your order, and the food won’t arrive till 8 anyway.”
Although I could probably make it by 8, truth be told just the thought of walking into a restaurant, asking where I might locate a table of strangers, explaining myself and then making small talk, made me tired. More precisely, exhausted, to the point of panting. I have an internal timer ticking down the minutes I can be in the company of others before an insensible need to get away whispers urgently Go, run! This is when the Fairfield Suites sings its Siren’s song, urging me toward the soothing deja-vu of anonymity. I could already feel the upswelling of relief loosed by the appearance of the green light after sliding the key card through the door lock: the lighthouse’s lone beacon. Through the stormy spray it promised safe harbor beyond the treacherous rocks of engaging, smiling, the effort of looking interested. I hang on to the rope that after so long is about to burn itself into my palm and I can feel I am about to let go. All I can think about is the comforting embrace of the bed it seems I have known all my life, with its marshalled pillows stacked in predictable order, and the Corian-countered bathroom that represents coming home again, only to a well-cleaned one. Its washcloth-folded-corner identicality will finally activate the exhale of distress withheld while communing with others of my species.
A borrowed ride is a forever friend.
Then the late plane lands at the exact hour assigned to the on-time plane. As if the reason I too might be late had run backwards, time itself accordioning to something that had already been arranged. My phone’s map, asked to show the destination provided by Jeff, returns the arrival time. 7:30. Precisely. The restaurant is placed directly on the route to the hotel. I am being ordered to Smokey’s Steakhouse.
The minute the door opens I see the oracle knows me well. It is the kind of place I live for. Not for the food – I had to order salads in steakhouses, or potatoes – but for the chance to walk into the past, where it has been kept safe so we may breathe its lost air in the present. We are to laugh and order drinks from within circles of warm yellow light yielding to a velvety dark just beyond, mysterious shadows that are not so much the result of low light in dark panelled rooms but of accumulated layers of happiness. We are to dine in our own history.
At the front desk I ask where I might find the motorcyclists, most of whom are without motorcycles on a cold, wet night. I had thought this would pose some difficulty. Instead I hear my name. And “Right this way.”
We pass the bar where under festive string lights people order exotic Midwestern beers that have likewise been preserved unchanged since another time, the one that existed before the need to make new versions of what had been discarded without a second thought. The nearest we get now is a label with a carefully researched font, designed last week.
Before the run, a favorite activity commences. During and after it, too.
We head toward a private room in the back. As we go he tells me how his parents opened this supper club 63 years ago. Also that the Slimey Cruds eat here regularly. It is odd to feel such a pang on hearing the word “regularly.” There is nothing I have longed for more than a group of people to whom I could belong, where I might at last lay down a weary load. I most want what I fear most: to be with others, regularly.
The Slimey Cruds are people who appreciate legacy in all its forms. This old place, their old group, their old bikes especially, the European café racers that defined cool to a generation of yore. Like the brews here, their bikes are originals from before the era of nostalgia fetish, not a simulacrum of old – only with fuel injection and ABS (real spoke wheels though) – but genuine old. Lovingly polished, that’s all. In need of no reimagining because the original imagination was wholly sufficient.
I know none of the people arrayed around the U-shaped table. I spy one empty chair, at a corner. In moments like these I engage an old foe, a formidable prizefighter who is good at throwing a hook I never see coming. The sharp sting from the broken septimal cartilage floods my body with shock.
Or rather, I smile. It is a preemptive feint against humiliation, the punch I fear is coming. I sit in the empty chair and arrange my expression. I watch the butter, study the far wall. I turn to the man to my left just as he turns to me.
“Jeff,” he says. Then, “Glad to finally meet you.” But I’m looking into the eyes of someone whose story I have helped live, someone I’ve known all my life. The only seat at the table had to be next to Jeff.
Man’s best friend – that goes for both the bike and the dog.
The woman to my right extends her hand, gives her name. I know her too. But in a more conventional way: she is an officer of the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America, a club of which I am a member. She organized a panel on which I participated at a national rally. I had no idea she lived in Madison, much less that she would end up next to me at a dinner I came close to passing by. Her husband, next to her, leans over and tells me he had reviewed my first book years ago. In a few minutes he will stand and raise his glass to me with a quote from that review. After some more toasts everyone will turn their attention to plates of hash browns, served family style.
Jeff starts talking, ignoring the clam chowder in front of him (the menu’s alternative is tomato juice, a choice I last saw when I was 10). What he says is of course familiar, since I have spent days and weeks in his company. He’s at every gathering; we meet on the road and hanging around in shops. We speak often on the phone, as he’s one of those I turn to in times of need – of opinions, of answers. He knows so much about so much. It’s a small detail, almost beneath mentioning, that we’ve never met. I know already he is the type who has no time to waste prevaricating because he’s been in enough tough scrapes, in foreign countries, alone, had ties severed to loved ones through all the usual ways people go away, lots of loss under the bridge. He never spends a second talking bullshit because that would be a second lost to living. That’s why I always go to him. He reveals he owns 20 bikes; of course. I knew that. He shows me his phone. There’s a picture of his Mike Hailwood replica in the desert of Moab taken the week before, a surreal flash of red and green posing in the scrub like the looker she is.
At age 45, he went to law school so he could finance a life in which riding takes preeminence. By practicing law for six months, he earns enough to ride the other half of the year. Ride anywhere he wants.
Living is mainly about losing and I’ve lived very little, I think as I listen to Jeff’s stories. Sometimes it’s blood. (He is limping currently.) There’s losing things, getting lost, losing people, losing houses and money and your way, and then leaning back on a couch in your skivvies, rain-soaked gear having been peeled off, transforming these stories into Homeric poetry in front of a group of people who have just gotten off bikes too.
This very old-looking Olds is actually contemporary custom built around a 1970s Honda XL350.
There must be a story about the missing tooth, but I haven’t heard that one yet. His smile is warm and takes you in.
And in. I excuse myself from dinner – the others will stay, apparently until this day becomes the next – almost desperate for the Fairfield but glad I lashed myself to the mast earlier. I have become smaller and smaller as my reserves were sucked out through a tiny aperture and now I need solitude and the ice machine and a chocolate chip cookie from a tray near the effervescent desk clerk, always happy to see me and say the same thing each time the door slides open. “Welcome to the Fairfield!”
As I leave Jeff too pushes back his chair. He tries to limp as fast as I walk, as if it doesn’t matter. It matters. I slow down, much as I don’t want to since my car is at the back of the lot and I don’t know why he’s coming out here in the first place and it puts me at 90 seconds’ disadvantage for the elevator to relief, I mean my room.
On the way he diverts our path briefly toward a great white extended Mercedes Sprinter van. What else. It can hold bikes and everything else you need while waiting for the destination, the signal to go past. He reaches in. “I’m going to give you my GPS. That way you can just press the home button and it will take you to my house so you can pick up a bike on Sunday.” He hands me the ruby slippers. And then a backup pair in case the GPS doesn’t work: by the time I’ve turned the ignition on the rental car a text pings. His address.
Riding so much, alone, in foreign parts, and in places far from people (the farther the better), requires installation of new software in the brain, a program that makes you think of everything. In fact the GPS would not work, wouldn’t let me in. But two mornings later the address from his text would be the north star guiding me out of the city into the countryside, winding through gentle hills and into what appears to be nowhere, which is naturally where Jeff would live.
What communal ride doesn’t mean having an Adventure?
Before this, however, there is an intervening 24 hours. If this wonderment has happened tonight, what will occur tomorrow? First, the talk at the library to which five people or 50 may come, and maybe what I plan to say will please them or it will bore them. Then, as I understand it, a motorcycle movie at night. In fact I don’t know what tomorrow will hold, what black earth will belatedly appear.
I always thought Kismet was a place. Actually, it is, a few of them. The one on Fire Island represents it well, being a bit of Atlantic beach I visited as a teen. Ergo, kismet.
It is also another term for “the will of Allah,” and predestination is Allah’s thing. The will of Allah might well have another name: this wondrous place. Here I am no longer in charge. It is sweet to relinquish the semblance of control, that which dogs me and bites me and wearies me all at once. Here I meet people and on looking into their eyes for the first time hear a voice in my head that contradicts unimpeachable evidence. “I’ve known you all my life.” But that’s strange. You live in Richmond, Madison, Milwaukee, Seattle. This is the first time I’ve been here. Yet here I am looking at you now and I’ve always known you.
A weird sensation that touches me only in this world. It is replete with its own colors and language and atmospheric disturbances. It is a separate cosmos, hidden within the one everybody thinks is the only one. Its portal looks nondescript, just another rusty door, but this is just to hide the gilded paradise that waits on the other side.
Motorcycling. It’s like a living Watteau, sunshine and pinks, flying swings and satin whispering to the air. Every day a fête galante of baroque sensuality, though there’s black grease under the fingernails and a pocket torn half off the FirstGear jacket. (Happened one memorable day long ago in Baja. Or maybe Alaska? On the Haul Road.)
It is raining. The librarian has stationed long tables outside the room, above them signs reading “Motorcycle Helmet Parking.” Clever. Of course there are helmets there. There always will be in a place like this no matter the weather, for the people who cannot do anything but ride.
A miniature bike ridden by a giant.
I stand before the room of people and talk. I read a poem called “Coda: Road.” Road is always the coda to the story called road. I am taken out for lunch by some riders who have come from Chicago.
I have half an hour in my generic hotel room of solace, after hours of parley with those of my kind who never quite seem exactly like me – they are all connected to others, and to the world, in ways I ache to be, like the child wishing hard on the other side of the pane from the brand-new Flexible Flyers or the cupcakes with frosting towers and sugar flowers – before I must reattach prosthetic wings. In the neverending rain I drive into the heart of Madison. There’s the Barrymore Theater, but ah – here’s the parking space. It’s so far away I get lost and soaking trying to find my way back on foot.
I arrive on time for the beginning of the movie even though I should have missed it. This is a trend in the magical land that is Wisconsin. I have time to buy a beer in the lobby and retreat to a pilaster which will be my spine. I stand tall and invisible, watching clots of motorcyclists gesticulate, laugh, confer. (My tribe, to which I both belong and do not, composed as it is of humans.) The group is especially tight in Madison, a family of a few hundred.
In the ’70s, a couple of university grads noticed each other, or, more to the point, each other’s bikes. When you see someone riding your type – a Triumph, a Ducati, a CB750 – you recognize a kinship that goes deeper than mere DNA. And when you’re doing it in the same environment that sorely tests the person who loves to ride that motorcycle, denied during the long months of ice and wind blowing off the lakes (both small and Great), the recognition is like solder, hot and fast.
They got together to ride and wrench. Information was exchanged, in garages and over dinners. Next, necessarily, came the name: any loosely affiliated group of motorcyclists is a gang, in the eyes of the outside world. Up to no good.
Variety is the spice of motorcycling life.
This group of intellectual hell-raisers, who in truth did like to ride fast – why else fall in love with metal beings in whose veins flows the blood of born racers? why else ponder the depths of carburetor jetting and aftermarket exhausts, ratios of bore and stroke? – decided to give the public what they wanted. What moniker would best suit these exemplars of the anti-social’s lowest rank? The Slimey Cruds it would be. A little in-joke. Next they would put on a run, where they might show the townspeople who really owned the roads, their slow-rolling thunder implicit warning.
Or not. Because the run is no run at all: you find your own way between Pine Bluff and Leland. Together, but apart. It’s 30 miles. So your run might take the better part of the day; there is no such thing as a straight line in a motorcyclist’s desires. There is wandering, exploration, and chance. There is time stretching to whatever length the way demands.
When you meet again, a thousand machines will be parked side by side in a roadside museum of individualism. The old, the painstakingly restored, the elegant and the rare – and sometimes all of these in one: the one you love to ride, and the one others love to pause to eye and imagine these lonely, embraceable curves on. (For that is the real secret of Madison and its diehard riders – their personal possession of endless roads through some of the most heartbreaking scenery in all America.)
Showing a movie the night before the run is the ritual warm-up to this riding-season warm-up; the next run, for it is a biannual event, will mark the end of the season four months later in October. It is not unusual for it to snow, or be cold enough anyway. Tomorrow it will also feel cold enough.
The obligatory scenic stop for a photo of new friends.
I overhear one man say to another, “That bike saved my life,” followed by knowing laughter. All that needs to be said, multivalent meaning. I know all the levels instantly, intimately. Bikes saved my life too. And gave me this one. Now comes a temporary pause in the beer-drinking portion of the evening. It will resume at intermission. I enter and find a seat alone. The lights go down and the movie begins to roll. It tells the story of a New Zealander who was crazy enough to hand-build a race bike from the ground up. Its design is revolutionary. He works on it night and day. He brings it to America to compete in the Battle of the Twins; there is crisis and devastation and triumph and death (Isle of Man, of course) and more triumph, amid continuous mind-bending work and invention. Then the New Zealander is dead at age 45, of cancer. Now 10 of his bikes remain in the world, frozen forever at some indeterminate point in the progress toward perfection. There will never be any more, so individual an object they are. The man who was their beating heart is gone, and they are like Lenin’s embalmed corpse: at once his monument and his requiem mass. The one that got away.
I feel Jeff behind me. I know he’s there even if I don’t see him in the dark. At intermission I do, and I move to sit one row in front of him. I hear his voice, first to one side and then the other. Making plans with his cohort: What time will you be over? Yeah, not sure what I’ll ride. So-and-so is bringing the truck at 9. She’s coming a little later.
“You’re coming at 10, right?” Right, I say. The lights go down again.
The next morning I pass through a cattle gate left ajar at the end of the driveway to Jeff’s farm. The place is well hidden. It is also Penn Station for motorcyclists. There are five or six bikes on a concrete pad outside what looks like an old dairy barn; a Quonset hut on the other side of the farmyard holds what must be the rest of the stable. I had overheard one of Jeff’s friends answer a question from someone the night before: “Well, if you’re counting frames too, then I have around 40 bikes. I think.”
I have my choice of two specimens from the early ’70s, a Moto Guzzi Eldorado or a BMW slash-5, the second of which a friend of Jeff’s is just unloading from a van. Its shiny chrome with insets gave rise to a perfect nickname, Toaster Tank. Ask and ye shall receive. As I get out of the car another friend arrives, a gentlemanly writer who is a celebrity in the motorsports world who will later tell me about the happenstance that led to his career, one sheaf of typescript fluttering to earth and caught by these hands, not those. Decades later, he is known to millions. What might have happened to him otherwise? He does not know. Pure chance has a central role in deciding everything of moment.
We are getting ready to go. I’m standing in the kitchen – I have seen places like this before, where unmarried men live, and the bottle of bourbon is always in the same spot next to the sink, the same old grease giving the patina of history to the stove, dishes from yesterday or last month in the same leaning tower on the counter – and I ask Jeff if I might use his bathroom. He points to the front door. “There’s no bathroom.” Oh, I say. My brain automatically scrambles to make a sensible narrative out of facts suddenly tumbling as if during an accident: What happened here?
The difficult choice between two hardy classics, in front of a true motorcyclist’s cabinet of mysteries.
For now it’s a simple matter of disappearing into the brush behind the garbage cans.
But how does one go without a bathroom at night, in the winter, when there are houseguests? How does one live without a bathroom?
One lives to ride.
When Jeff is on his big dual-sport with the enormous plastic gas tank that drapes the frame like saddlebags on a camel, carrying enough fuel to take him ever deeper into unpeopled regions, even the concept of a bathroom is unnecessary, a word in a defunct language. You learn to live without what you no longer need. He tells me the house he bought when he was younger, an old farmhouse, burned down a couple years ago and with it everything he owned. His history, that of his family. His books and his music and his memories. It taught him something, about the impermanence of things and their ultimate irrelevance. That the lesson was grotesquely painful was a testament to its necessity. Now he lives in what was the old farm’s chicken coop.
As we head toward Pine Bluff, motorcycles thicken. They pass us, shoom. We pass them, on the side of the road, in the other lane, in gas stations. The highest concentration occurs in the parking lot of a big barn of a bar – inside are coffee urns and “Welcome Motorcyclists” banners and people chatting and meeting, again or for the first time, and still the place feels like an empty cavern – then it is time to go. Jeff leads with a friend following on a YSR pocket bike who looks like a cartoon, a man on a machine half his size, hovering a few inches above the pavement. Nonetheless I have to work to keep up although I crack the throttle wide on the old BMW. The journalist is behind me (I critique my riding through his eyes, hoping he doesn’t hear when I mis-shift, precisely as I always hope no one notices the red-faced panic or quiver of fear in my voice when nothing has caused it but being with you), and behind him the owner of my borrowed ride, his 12-year-old son riding pillion.
We fly under open sky. We are lost, one by one, around curves that rise and fall mid-turn, then are met again on the straightaways. We ride in precise concert, singers who have practiced the harmonies on this particular chorus so many times we are one voice in many parts. I’ve just met them but we’ve known each other forever.
The end of the Slimey Crud Run is a lot like the beginning: talk and tire-kicking.
In Leland, its population of 50 temporarily boosted by a factor of 15 this day, the concentration of motorcycles has reached critical mass. The Slimey Crud Run functions just south of pure anarchy, which means it functions as it was intended: valve clearances spot on, carburetion dialed in, torque a propulsion of sensual ideal, everything else the possession of gorgeous chance. Bikes line both sides of the road around Sprecher’s Bar, an aboriginal watering spot set down in the middle of a nowhere that was also pretty much nowhere in 1900, when the elderly owner’s father bought it as a general store. To keep it going through two world wars and a great depression in between, Sprecher’s tried a little of everything. The recipe that ended up the keeper was beer and guns. It might be the only place in the country now for one-stop shopping, your argument and its conclusion obtained in the same room. A sign tacked on the back wall reads “If you voted for Obama, please turn around and leave! You have proven that you are not responsible enough to own a firearm!” Over it hangs a Confederate flag, no doubt a recent addition to the décor, as Wisconsin recruited and lost 91,000 men for the Union cause, many of them in the famously noble Iron Brigade.
Inside Sprecher’s, guns for sale and beer for drinking.
We get cheese and salami sandwiches (mine minus the salami), and even though the town is flooded with people, as in the parable of the loaves and the fishes there are still stools available at Junior Sprecher’s bar. There one can sit and gaze at the wall, its rifles and shotguns racked and handguns displayed in a glass case near the establishment’s framed license to sell them. I don’t leave even though I was asked so politely by the sign. Jeff has been absorbed somewhere outside into the mass of his countrymen. When it’s time to leave he materializes next to me.
We mount up again. Back a different way; here there is always a different way, and that is the only way. An hour and a half later we snake up the driveway, lean bikes on sidestands. At home he peels off his gear and now wanders around in his long underwear. He’s a big man. He loads the potbelly stove with lumber scraps and gets a flame going. Beers are found. We sit variously on office chairs and other scavenged seating. We are in the only place we belong at an unrepeatable moment. I sense something in the room I have either been longing to become or something I already am: elementally human, molecularly social. Kin. But I will leave.
Two days and a thousand miles separate us now, jet fuel long burned or offloaded to the long-suffering earth. It presaged our return, a trail between us and all those we were soon to rejoin, or hoped to anyway.
I am outside, home, when I hear a sound from the phone in my back pocket. I pull it out and see what I or someone else or maybe some thing have made happen. The phone is calling Jeff. I quickly end the call, praying I punched the button quickly enough. Filled with rising curiosity about how this might have happened. Chastened. Afraid. I did not mean to connect.
“Connected” first appeared in Motorcycles Are Magic: An Anthology, edited by Melissa Holbrook Pierson with assistance from George Sarrinikolaou and published in 2021 by 10mm Socket Press. Pierson is the author of The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles; The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing: Long-Distance Motorcycling’s Endless Road; The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home; Dark Horses And Black Beauties: Animals, Women, and Passion; and The Secret History Of Kindness: Learning From How Dogs Learn. Her essay “Alone: Onward Through The Fog” was published in the September 1992 issue of Rider. For more information, visit MelissaHolbrookPierson.com.
This essay was originally published in the September 1992 issue of Rider. (Illustration by Roland Roy)
Sometimes you don’t know where you are, the name of the town or even the state. The place is located by days and miles. It is remembered by highway proximity. And by what kind of terrors gripped you there.
For me, that April night fell on day four. I had already passed through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, finally stopping in Tennessee. Yes, that’s as far as I must have gotten. Near U.S. Highway 81. Days Inn.
After a little practice, divesting a motorcycle of all its luggage for the night and carrying it into a motel — three trips, including the tool pack with its 10 tons of lock, spare cables, liter of oil, roll of tape, tire tube, rain gear — doesn’t get any more fun. But such a trip, all alone, is about repetition as much as it’s about welcoming the blessedly new. I’ve always stayed at Days Inns or Knights Inns, make of that symmetry whatever you will, because a woman searching for lodgings after dark by herself is looking only for predictability and the guaranteed anonymity these places make it their business to provide.
After three days of telling myself different, the truth was coming through like green oxide on bogus silver: this wasn’t such a gas. My vacation, my proud declaration, my little adventure, was oppressing me as nothing before. I hadn’t suddenly become loquacious the minute I hit the road, the sort who meets locals at every way station and makes them fast friends over a bowl of chili, or gets invitations that start a new trajectory of discovery about the places passed through. I was still myself only more so, saying not much more than was necessary to purchase gas, coffee, a place to sleep, glossy post cards on which “Wish you were here” was written with no little urgency. Night would bring the same: take-out food eaten at the plasticized fake-wood veneered desk; a long bath to leach the cold from the bones; the local news indistinguishable from any local news anywhere; five hours before sleep to kill in the confines of the double-double-bedded room because continuing after nightfall pushed the stakes up a tad too high; a dose or two of Jack because of that.
I was feeling every one of the 975 miles that separated me from home. The most comfort I’d had was talking to my painfully estranged boyfriend, a mechanic, from a hotel room in Waynesboro, Virginia, the first night. Earlier in the day, stopping at a truck plaza after riding through two hours of the most imposing rainstorm I’d ever encountered, I’d noticed the box at the rear axle spewing the 90-weight oil that lubricated the shaft drive. My boyfriend was properly worried on my behalf and told me to seek out a bike shop in town the next day and have it checked out before I started down the Blue Ridge Parkway. The second deepest conversation I’d had in all the intervening time was at that shop, when four mechanics stopped to inspect my bike.
Now, near U.S. Highway 81, I spread the map out on the rigid bed and scanned it for some promise that I might make it all the way home tomorrow, three days before schedule. There didn’t seem much point in drawing it out longer, to look for more motels just like the last. I’d simply had enough of blissful solitude.
However I looked at it, though, the miles would collapse no further. There were at least 15 hours of holding the throttle open at a steady 70 mph etched in those lines, and it couldn’t be done — not by me at least. The force of the wind at that speed, the temperature, the buzzing, the constant watchfulness, the tension that crept up the neck, took it out of you too fast. You got more tired on a bike than you ever thought possible.
The days had grown so elongated that to look back on them seemed to be to glance into history: had it really been this same afternoon that I had ridden up the side of Mount Mitchell, parked, and ascended the lookout tower in the persistent wind that blows up there? Taking in the small exhibit room empty of visitors except for me, I read the placards that described Mitchell’s quest to prove that his mountain was actually higher than Clingman’s Dome, that it was in fact the highest spot in the East. Scrambling around on the desolate peak with his calibrators, he slipped and fell, perhaps dying instantly, perhaps waiting days for death in the cove of rocks. His was a bitter feud with Clingman, and his victory was posthumous. He lay now under the stones there, unable to give up his purchase on faith. At the height of my own futile journey, I realized that he and I were about the only people up here on this cold day, and he was dead.
I had known from my trip down this bucolic byway the previous October, legendary among motorcyclists, that the next stretch would take me farther into the Smokies, and that the higher I went, the lonelier the way. Then, though, I had simply felt alone, not lonely; I was with a man I was beginning to love. At that stage you welcome the height, the wide vista over uninhabited wild. It feels fine to be there and feel small, together. Now, the peculiar lunar landscape at 6,053 feet, the highest point on the Ridge, was crushing. The wind singing over the rocks had an edge of cruelty. I had climbed into the thinner air with my Guzzi’s beating engine without seeing but a car or two hurrying in the other direction, and the groups of riders I’d hoped to fall in with were still home, waiting for the next month and warmer air.
I wouldn’t let it stop me from going through the motions of marking my trip in the customary manner, and I stopped the Moto Guzzi in front of the sign that declared this the highest point in order to take the obligatory photo of proof. As I did so the lone man who had been standing, looking out over the view from the opposite end of the parking lot, came up behind me and told me I could get into the picture, too.
After handing my camera back he engaged me in a conversation that felt somewhat unreal: he told me his destination, his reason for g here in such an unvacationlike month, all the while glancing at my bike. As often happens, he informed me he used to ride, too, and asked me if the road was good for riding. My enthusiasm was a little forced – it certainly was, but I would have hardly known it from this experience. He said he wasn’t sure if he’d ever make such a trip alone, and he kept complimenting me on my bravery, though I wanted to correct his misapprehension so it could bear the more proper label: foolishness, a bid to prove I would have a grand time without anyone else at all.
But I couldn’t say it to this stranger. It took too much explaining, too much time-intensive shading between black lines. The simple version was more appropriate to this meeting, so I let him have it the way he wanted. He insisted on writing his name and address in my notebook, extracting a promise that if I ever passed through Iowa I’d look him up. I put it in my tank bag with an assurance that I would, while the knowledge that I wouldn’t sunk down hollowly inside.
There was nothing else to do but get on the bike and keep going, to the next mark on my map, the end of the Parkway in Cherokee.
On the prior trip, too, I had insisted on stopping in this gewgaw heaven, darting into stores on a restless search for the perfect ridiculous souvenir, tiring out my boyfriend until he cried uncle. He let me go on rushing from shop to shop while he waited outside by the row of glass windows that housed the Drumming Duck and the rattlesnake and the python and the rabbit clown and the other sad creatures on display for the visitors who paused a moment, pointed to the displays for their ice-cream-sticky children, then hurried on to buy their rubber tomahawks and beaded belts.
On this day I went looking again, having never found the perfection in plastic I sought, but after two stores I wandered back to my bike and glanced at the sky. It was getting late, and I needed to make it through the winding ways of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with plenty of light. Besides, I had it in mind to visit Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, before nightfall.
Pressing on. I began seeing monumental billboards, on which a horrific, huge butterfly loomed, for the attraction miles before town, a formerly bereft Hamlet that had been Dolly Parton’s hometown before she made it big and it turned into a theme park of cheap restaurants and Western-wear outlets. I turned into the massive parking lot for the amusement park and saw the sign that informs two bucks is the price for parking; besides thinking that was steep for the few minutes I wanted to spend inside, I always resented paying anything to put such a narrow machine into a corner that couldn’t have been used by anything else anyway. Then I found out the admission was $18, and that clinched it. Who spent that much money to ride a ferris wheel alone? Shady characters in old movies did it, but they had ulterior motives. I could only turn around, another wistful goal having come in sight and revealed itself useless in plain view.
The sky was lower as I headed back out of Pigeon Forge, and I wanted to do it fast. I wanted to find somewhere I could be alone where no one would see me being alone. It was time to find the night’s Days Inn.
I hauled in all the garbage — the saddlebags, tank bag, helmet, tool bag. I went back down the hill to the service station’s convenience store and got some Italian rolls that were too white and too soft and a package of string cheese, thus exhausting their variety of real food. I sat in the bathtub and turned on the orange-red heat lamp so that the timer buzzed judiciously for 20 minutes. I unfurled the map and read it with a side of bourbon, so that some time in the future I might be able to fall asleep in the strangely familiar room. I made my peace as best I could with the discovery that I would have one more night like this, but I could do it. Since I had to, I could.
I turned on the news, and just when I was listening intently to some important-sounding item about the municipal airport of the nearby town I can’t recall the name of, I heard the voice.
It spoke in a stage whisper that reached to the fifth tier and back.
It said, “Tomorrow is the last day you will spend on earth.”
A shaking started in my gut, my feet felt very far away. The words of the anchorperson continued to accumulate in the room like cotton batting being stuffed into a mattress. Behind my eyes a scene was now projected, and I saw a white car of some general make coming at me and my white bike — a horror all dressed in the tones of clouds — but there the movie stopped, although I knew its end.
The utter precipitousness and incongruity of this final pronouncement made me unable to avoid its truth. I had apparently had one of those supermarket-tabloid premonitions: WOMAN FORESEES OWN DEATH.
It seemed just as certain that I couldn’t stay in a Tennessee motel in order to stave off death; the irony of that, I presume, is completely obvious. I reached for the glass of Jack Daniel’s and saw my hand quivering in midair. I spoke to myself sharply: Don’t be ridiculous! It kept on shaking.
It was intolerable, more than merely nettlesome, to be here alone now, and I caught sight of the decorator-almond telephone with its little red siren light sticking off the top. Besides the fact that it was well past midnight, how could I explain to anyone I could rouse from sleep what I’d just experienced? I was beginning to think that most of my friends thought I lived on the border of sanity anyway.
I lay back on the bed with a groan. Say, eight hours isn’t too long to spend lying here in the leaden grip of an absurd fear, until it’s light and you can go out and bravely prove the folly of your fantasies, shaking all the way.
If I couldn’t talk to anyone real, I figured I could make someone up and talk to him on paper; God knows I’ve got enough characters in my brain that one of them must be up and willing at this hour.
In the desk drawer were three sheets of motel stationery. Not enough, but a start. I took them back to the bed and started talking. We discussed why at this particular time I would be feeling afraid, why fear was often my co-pilot on my motorcycle. From the moment I’d bought my first bike three years before, I’d managed to pin most of my previously free-floating anxieties on some aspect of machinery. And wasn’t that why, later, I’d realized I wanted one in the first place, to wage war on this fear in the concrete?
At the bottom of the second page, the TV well into a rerun of “All in the Family,” the writing trailed off. I slipped into sleep and dreamt of nothing.
II
There is a beginning to this story, of course, far before the beginning. I was boarding at a prep school in Ohio, the town — a miniature replica of a New England hamlet replete with town green, white steeples, stone wall around a campus of gentle slopes and neatly tended playing fields — was midway between Akron, where I am from, and Cleveland. Although I had opted to attend (pleasing my father, who had also gone there) and escape public school for which I was decidedly not cut out, by my third year I was beginning to feel I had chosen another type of prison instead. I was blissfully happy up in the art room, a sun-filled kingdom ruled by the brilliantly eccentric Mr. Moos, but I was not allowed to spend all my time there as I would have wished. I had to do sports (for which I was equally woefully miscast), science, woodshop (which I flunked, for “refusing” to keep my plane sharpened), and, most loathesome of all, math.
No one has ever erred in calling me stubborn. I have a place, like the end of spring, beyond which I can stretch not a millimeter further. I hit that wall one achingly green spring day, on which I was not uncoincidentally expected in math class at 8:30 a.m. — stupefyingly early, to add injury to insult. I looked at the clock when I opened my eyes, saw it was 8:20 and pulled off the covers. I put on my jeans, forbidden in class, a T-shirt, and put my money and keys in my backpack. I wheeled my Raleigh 10-speed out the door, carried my prize possession bought with hard-won summer babysitting funds down the stairs and outdoors. And I rode past the streams of students heading up the brick walks toward school.
The trip took a half hour in the car. I was thankful in more ways than one that the direction was reversed this time. Approaching the quaint crossroads of Peninsula, a half-mile hill shot down into the town. I coasted, let the bike pick up speed. The wheels were flashing now in the sunlight. I couldn’t go fast enough; I shifted into tenth gear and pedalled as hard as I could, pumping, pumping. The wind dried my teeth clean so my lips stuck to them — that was because I smiled.
When I turned up the drive to my house my mother looked up from her gardening. She hardly seemed surprised to see me. Without her asking, I told her that I simply couldn’t take it anymore. She nodded, and we had some lunch. I think she must have called my father at the office, because when he came home he didn’t seem too stunned either. I was relieved, near elated. I could stay — we would work out the credits and whatnot later. We had the usual nice dinner my mother prepared. Then my parents rose from the table and announced it was time to get going.
Now it was my turn not to be surprised. I had achieved at least that much maturity to understand a certain version of reality.
The next day I was summoned into Sherwin Kibbe’s office. The school’s dean was a dead ringer for Norman Mailer, and he looked frighteningly out from under overhanging silver eyebrows and inquired just what I thought I had been doing. I was several pages into my explanation, which combined a bit of Jefferson with a smattering of Kerouac, when he cut me short. “Well, I think you just wanted to take a ride on a nice day.”
My deeply felt protests met with an offer of demerits and probation. Tears of misunderstood frustration coursed down my cheeks after I shut the door. My issues were high – how could he have leveled me with such an insignificant charge? It was contemptuous.
Sixteen years later and I still ask myself the same question. My answer is still stubborn. So why shouldn’t I run away because it’s a nice day? There is never a better reason.
III
I’d made it as far as the Delaware Water Gap in one day. I’d been riding for 13 hours, and it was now 1 a.m. I was strung out from the numbing consistency of the highways, the same speed, the light, persistent rain that shrouded everything in mist, just like my brain felt. If I could just stay awake and bear down hard enough, I could be home in another two hours.
It was just me and the long-haul trucks now, and nothing broke the dark outside my headlight beam. I didn’t know if I’d been riding for one day or 10. Time had no meaning, except that it was what had exhausted me. I probably could have gone on. Suddenly, though, a thought came into my head, a small distillation of all the biking horror stories I’d ever heard: I was outrunning my headlight’s visibility, and if there were a railroad tie across the lane, I wouldn’t see it till it was too late. I was awake enough to appreciate what that meant.
In a few miles I saw the green Holiday Inn sign rise above the gloom of trees. In the office the woman behind the desk gave me a wide-eyed look as I clomped in in my rainsuit. No, no rooms, all full; there was another place 20 miles away — she’d call. No room in that inn, either, she informed me on putting down the phone. I felt at that moment I was going to collapse.
Actually, she considered, there was one, but the air conditioning had gone out in it. If I didn’t mind….
No, I didn’t. A couple of hay bales would have sufficed. I fell asleep in moments in the sickly, still air.
It was still raining in the morning, and I jerked on the same still-wet clothes and covered them up with the rubber-lined suit. I got an early start.
Two hours later I made the last turn onto my street, and for the first time was forced to slow to a near halt. It had stopped raining. The sun was calling up the hot moisture from the pavement to choke the air. Halfway down the block an earth-mover and police barricades barred the way. Workmen were sweating in their undershirts. I felt the heat rise up from the Guzzi’s cylinders and envelop me. I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, sweatshirt, jeans, leather jacket with winter lining, rainsuit on top of that; my hands were encased in rubber gloves with a thick synthetic liner, and the vents on my helmet were closed against the early morning chill that was an incredible memory now.
The men tried to wave me to a stop. Instead I let out the clutch and came toward them, provoking wilder gesticulations. At the last moment, I jumped the curb onto the sidewalk to pull up in front of my garage. Only then did I apply the brake.
I switched off the key, then pulled off my helmet and sat for a second, steam rising around my neck. The bike let out its little clicks and coos, already cooling in the heat.
This is how 2,000 miles ends. I’d made bigger trips, but not alone. There was a certain purity to this one, a perfect insularity. It was as though I had done all that distance without leaving a mark on any atom in the universe. I had slipped quickly and quietly by, and the wind in my wake only a vague memory of disturbance in the grass by the edge of the road. Maybe we were white dream-cars ourselves. Yet now I was home, and that’s all that mattered.
