On the home stretch, I
found myself tallying up what little I know about good fortune and fate. —DM

“Does this seem like kind of a long trip to you?” I asked
Tom as we motorshambled around the mountain town of Woodstock, N.H.,
looking for a our 14^th straight motel room.

“Yes,” he said, without a hesitation. “This is a
long trip.”

But it had been utterly the right thing to do.

That was proven far beyond doubt during a few sweet, easy morning
rides in the sun that made my heart swell so palpably that I worried—I hoped!—it might be permanently
stretched.

The road to ruin doesn't run through Cooperstown,
N.Y.

Lou Gehrig said, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." But of course he was only guessing.

And only when you're swimming with the universal tide do you happen into scenes like the one at the
family-owned gas station back near St. Peter's, Nova Scotia. Dad is manning the pump. Mom is inside at the
cash register, keeping warm on an unseasonably cold and windy summer's day.

Meanwhile, the seven-year-old son is carefully examining our
motorcycles, muttering his impressions to himself.

“Which one do you like better?” I ask with a smile.

Unhesitatingly, the boy weighs in, first pointing to my
bike. “Orange is my favorite color,” he says. But then he points to Tom’s red
tank and offers a counterpoint. “But that one reminds me of Christmas.”

I say the weather reminds me of Christmas, and we all laugh
and the kid happily flits back into the warm station to tell his mother about the men and their motorcycles.

When Tom and I get drunk, we’re given—increasingly with age,
I’m afraid to say—to go on to one another about how lucky we have been in life, to
have had wild adventure and family love, to have had interesting work and rich
friendship too.

But pondering fortune is a drunkard’s game, because it can
lead to conclusions. And conclusions about fortune are almost always foolish
and usually dangerous.

Our good fortune was on my mind as we rode through Pennsylvania, on the
last leg of the trip. Two lucky bastards on a three-week trip on
shiny toys—kids, wives and work to go home to—using a poor state's leached land
as our personal roller coaster.

We stopped for lunch at a tavern in Troy.

The bartender ascertained we were tourists and rattled off a
half-formed standup redneck routine about how she had her third baby on Sunday
and returned to work the following Thursday. About how she’s so ill-educated that she
grew up believing that the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania was connected to
the Grand Canyon (of Arizona). About how, if we think she’s a hillbilly, down
the road we'd find they have “even less teeth.”

And the teeth were bared.

A
yard sign in Meadeville read:

Support the Troops.
Period!

In Warren, we stopped at a gas station to ask for a steer
toward a cheap motel. The attendant asked where we were from.

“I like Cleveland,” he told Tom approvingly, “because it
reminds me of Western P.A.”

“But I don’t like Chicago.” He was glowering at me.

Why not? I asked.

“BHO!” he said.

I looked at him blankly.

“Barack Hussein Obama, the President!”

At the bar at the Holiday Inn that he directed us to, a
patron left his USA Today. On the
front page, President Obama was throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star
Game.

With a ballpoint pen, the guy had casually drawn on horns, and a tail.

 

During the presidential campaign last year, Obama said, “You go into some of these small towns in
Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been
gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the
Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and
they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to
guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Of course it was the most accurate thing Obama said during the whole campaign, and the hot water he got into proved the old axiom about politics: a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.

But a broader axiom also applies: Be mighty fucking reluctant to explain people’s fortunes, good
or bad, yours or others’. Remember the chipmunks!

Most of the time, your best bet is to ride as aggressively
as you dare down the best road you can find and try not to take the weather
personally—or take credit for it.

And enjoy what presents itself to be enjoyed. Like the
moment on the hotel patio at Lake George, New York, where our wives met us.

As we sipped beer and waited for Cristie and Juli to arrive
in the rental car from Albany, I admitted and Tom copped to being a little
nervous. And shortly after the happy and giggling reunion, we got the first hint as to why:

Without telling us (or consulting one another) each woman had used the occasion of our absence and the inspiration of our self-will, to get a tattoo.

The old guy talked tough outside the New Hampshire motorcycle shop, but I think if his wife ain't goin' to Sturgis, he ain't goin' either.

I told my five-year-old daughter I was writing this book, just for her. "Good," she said. —DM

Our conversations on this trip were happily punctuated by
long stretches inside the privacy of our own helmets. Actually, the conversations served as
punctuation for those hours. At
lunch, at the mid-afternoon tavern-stop, at the end of the day, we’d get off
the bikes, take off our helmets and, if we remembered, turn off the gas valves.
("I'm reading at a third-grade level," I remarked as I stared dumbly at a dinner menu one night.) Then we'd groan a little and stretch, and swagger into the bar like dusty cowboys and order a beer rub our
faces and try to re-acclimate to an eerie new windless, motionless, soundless
world.

It wasn’t usually until the second beer that we started
talking at all. But once we started talking, the talking was often very good.

In a magazine story about a long sailing race, I
wrote, “there’s really something marvelous about sitting on a sailboat all
night, trying for once in your hectic modern life not to make long stories
short, but rather to draw short stories out, adding context and depth and
detail and color in order to pass the time. Which is the principal reason human
beings started telling stories in the first place.”

Similarly:

Over lunch at a bar in Halifax we were all too pleased to
let the beautiful young bartender ease out the madcap stemwinder about how she moved here nine months ago from her native St. John, New Brunswick. One morning she didn't feel like being at work. "Wasn't the first time I ever felt that way," she said with a shrug. But in the course of this day, she quit the job, canceled her lease, dumped her
boyfriend and told her parents she was leaving. She gathered a bag of clothes
and a bag of booze, and hitched a ride to Halifax, where she took up a life of Riley that she was already beginning to tire of, as she contemplated moving on.

The story was pure cock and bull, of course—each crafted and
carefully honed detail surely a cover-up for some unspeakable agony and teenage
humiliation—but we pretended to believe it (pretended for a while, even to
ourselves) and we sincerely wished her luck on her next plan, to blow out of
Halifax and take up temporary residence in … Hawaii. So beautiful and tragic
and evocative of our college Girl Days was she that we had to drag one another
out of there by reciting cold, hard statistics: We are 40 years old (not 26);
we’ve had four beers and we’re riding two motorcycles; we have to be in
Yarmouth in 24 hours, to catch a ferry back to the States, where our wives are
meeting us in three days. Somehow, we brought ourselves to bid the lass farewell and got back on
the road.

Man smiles through tears as he prepares to leave his heart in Halifax.

Loaded with people and cars and motorcycles, the famous Cat
ferry from Yarmouth to Portland main screams across the North Atlantic in
four and a half hours. We sat in the cabin, slowly drinking cans of Budweiser, and talking even slower. After two weeks together, we were fresh out of
news, beyond bravado, and just trying to pass the time. We quizzed each other
about our daily lives—portraying the rhythms of our weekly routines—and we
re-examined stories about each other's childhoods that we’d heard years before
but, not having been parents before, not known what to make of. In newly demanded
detail, our dog-eared childhood stories became richly interesting again—in the
hearing and in the telling.

The time got away from us, and we were startled to see that ship
was pulling into the harbor at Portland.

The United States staged a sneak attack on us, at Portland Harbor.

Frantically I dashed up to the concession counter
to get us a couple of hot dogs and tall coffees to get ourselves in proper
shape to unstrap the bikes and ride off the boat through Customs.

“What, no more beer?” said one last charismatic Canadian woman with one
last sardonic wink.

A careful clearing of Customs.

But certainly the most productive conversation the trip
afforded us came the next morning when, after a long, hot search, we found the
rock under which hid the owner of “Once Upon a Triumph.” It was one of several
Triumph shops I’d found on the Internet, that we visited along the way for
minor repairs and major harangues about pistons and cylinders and carburetors
and valves, low-end and top-end and jets and floats, seats and fenders and
cables and tanks.

When we found this gear guru—in a tiny house in a cramped little human-warren across the tracks from the frolicking July sunbathers in Old Orchard
Beach, Maine—we had to rock him like a motorcycle stuck in the mud. Or the
human equivalent: what appeared to be a depressive, defensive Demerol haze.

“Is this Once Upon a Triumph?” Tom asked eagerly.

“Used to be,” he grumbled, blinking in the shade.

The motorcycle mechanic didn't start on the first kick.

Once we got him started, though—he reluctantly offered to
show us his personal bike, in the shed in the back—he went right through the
gears. Soon, he invited us into the house to see pictures of bikes he’d worked on over the
years. Introduced us to his 10-year-old daughter, who he used to deliver to
kindergarten in a sidecar. Told us at great length his method for lacing the
spokes to make a motorcycle wheel. And finally pushed his 1969 Triumph Trophy
out of the garage so we could take photos of it, "if you guys want to."

"I can pull it out if you guys want to take a picture."

An hour and a half later, he was Rick!, posing for snapshots, giving us each his
phone number and shaking our hands and seeming pretty sorry we had to go.

We never figured out what had happened to Rick, where
his daughter’s mother had gone, or why he had lost enthusiasm for his business. The few explanations he offered didn't add up.
And, not on a journalism assignment, I didn’t have to get to the bottom of it.

But as Tom and I walked around town looking for a place to
eat before heading west toward New Hampshire and the White Mountains, I suggested hopefully
that maybe our visit had reawakened the giants within Rick, and we agreed that
if Once Upon a Triumph makes a big comeback in the vintage Triumph restoration business in the Northeast, this day might have had something to
do with it.

Just then we heard the familiar sound of an old Triumph and
there came Rick, all cleaned up, shoes on, hair tied up neatly, roaring up the hill
on his ’69 Trophy with a big grin on his face and a happy wave for us.

The sixth in an
ongoing (but not endless) series written to explain to my daughter, when she’s older, what drove her
40-year-old dad to buy a motorcycle and ride it to Nova Scotia. —DM

On our last day of scribbling around Cape Breton, we made
our gray, rainy way to Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. The weather was discouraging, the scenery
was monotonous, we'd been at it for 10 days and I allowed myself to forgot the full-time emergency that is motorcycling. I
settled into a numb motormeditation.

We were behind a car as we rounded this curve, and we saw
two chipmunks on the side of the road. They made a break for it, together, ahead of the car. They must have been good friends. They
must have been thinking, “As long as we’re together, nothing can happen to us.”

Boom-boom, and suddenly, both were lying twitching, in the
road.

The trip contained a number of incidents like that, which I might
have taken as omens.

But omens are only omens if you ignore them. I took it as a
warning, and reminded myself to wake up—and to fight the creeping assumption
that just because Tom and I have survived lots of recklessness before, this
probably wasn’t the first time the chipmunks crossed the road, either.

As Tom and I get older, our idea of danger matures—did Knievel leave his turn signal on at Caesar's Palace?—even if our sense of humor retains its dorm-room flavor.

A gentleman farmer friend of mine says from experience, “When you have a
bulldozer, every problem looks like something to be pushed over.”

When you ride a motorcycle a long way, the metaphors ride on
two wheels too.

Convictions require
courage. You want to accelerate through trouble, generating more
centrifugal force and pushing you down harder on the pavement. Chicken out in a turn and
hit the brakes and you’ll stand up, wobble and crash.

You can handle more
than you think. Just when you’re leaning over as far as you can imagine
without losing traction—you must have faith that you can go down farther. You can!

You’ve got to know
where you’re headed, not just where you are. When making a sharp and long
turn, the sure way to blow it is to look down at your front wheel to see how
you’re doing against the white line. The sure way to make the turn perfectly is
to look 20 or 30 or 40 yards ahead at where you’re headed. As if by magic, the
motorcycle simply goes there.

The most important motorcycling metaphor has to do with risk
versus reward, confidence versus competence, and how all those calculations
change with age.

I once interviewed a 64-year-old motorcycle racer who told
me nothing had changed since he was raced as a young man, “I still crash and I
still get hurt. I don’t have fear. I’m still good. I still do the best I can
with what I’ve got.”

And then he forgot to put gas in the tank and stalled on a
practice lap and had to be brought back to the pits on trailer.

But better—and even safer—to be overconfident than overly cautious.

And much more importantly, better to think about reward than
to dwell on risk. Better, and as I age, harder.

When I was young, the reward was infinite, and all out in front. (In a college journal, I once allowed myself to doubt I’d be satisfied
if my writing career amounted to no more than Kurt Vonnegut's.)

It’s easy to risk your potential, because it doesn't really exist.

It’s harder to risk your kid’s father, your wife’s husband.

And even harder than that to risk missing a mortgage
payment, to risk running out of tuition money, to risk having to work hard for
money when you’re 70. Losing the two vacations a year, having to choose between golf and drinking money, cooking instead of going out, giving up the babysitter (and the movies).

To risk the “personal brand.” To say “fuck you” to your boss or your wife, and risk
being punched in return. To tell someone you can do something you've never done before and risk fucking it up
royally. To surround yourself with strangers and risk comprehensive rejection.

To learn, to feel, to actually listen: Natural to a young person; increasingly terrifying as we get older.

When you’re young, you must try to control your impulses. As you
get older, you must notice your impulses. Outer aggression demands inner
aggression. “Every once in while a man must do something he’s a little afraid
of,” is how my dad used to put it.

But when you do that—and it really is all you have to do: something you're a little afraid of—the risk and the reward melt together,
into one single good thing.

When motorcyclists pass one another on the road, they take
their left hand off the grip and give each other a casual, low wave. Early in
the trip, I spent a lot of time thinking about what that wave signifies, what the right-wing Harley
guy thinks he has in common with the Eurostyle BMW rider and the city geeks on
new Triumphs made to look old.

It is: Everybody in the world knows the risk of riding a
motorcycle, and anybody with an imagination could probably conjure the reward.
But nobody knows quite how good it feels when you mix the risk and reward together—and
how the mix feels better every year you get older.

Nobody but us—and we'd rather keep it that way.

That's why the wave is casual, and that's why it's low.