The fifth installment on my midlife motorcycle trip, for my daughter to read someday and anyone else to read today. —DM

There is a point in every journey when you realize how very,
very far you are from home, and you face the fact that the only way back is to continue doing the
tiring, repetitive, nervous-making and difficult work that got you all the way here.

The first time I remember experiencing this was on a sailing
trip down the coast of the Baja Peninsula, and it occurred to me that between
me and a flight home was 30 miles of ocean to the coast, and then even if I
somehow got across that, I’d crawl ashore exhausted, into a desert.

On this trip, I didn’t feel truly stuck in the journey until
a rainy, hair-raising trip on the south end of the Cabot Trail. We were exactly as far away from home as we could be. Meanwhile, the rain
pin-pricked my face, the slick pavement eroded my nerve. Less-maneuverable cars were piling up behind me on some of
the coastal stretches. I suggested we stop at Baddeck, to wait out the rain.

After a week of rain, the notion of waiting it out seemed
less practical than trading in our motorcycles for a boat.

So we drank beer at the Baddeck yacht club.

Being far away—and being stuck far away—is psychologically difficult. A friend of mine tells me he doesn't like to travel because it's a
painful reminder that people get along in other places without him.

But it has advantages, the most important of which is that it makes it hard to take a self-centric view. Which makes it easier to see other people.

On this trip, the most thought-provoking insight I came to was that in Canada—at least in the eastern
provinces that I was traveling in—at the
very least in the places I visited in these provinces—women are utterly
in charge of things, and everyone seems happier in the arrangement.

First, I was bowled over by the utter beauty of a scene at a
B&B on the eastern coast of the St. Lawrence, in Kamouraska, Quebec. The
B&B owner (she had a husband, who was friendly and even witty, but a mere
spiritual sliver of the charismatic, funny, utterly intelligent wife) sat
behind the front desk talking on the phone while her two daughters, maybe eight
and eleven, stood beside her, all three touching each other, the picture of
maternal warmth.

Not long after that, I started keeping a list of scenes of
impossible happiness, all of them with women in the center, and men either
playing bit parts—Brown-Haired Man #2—altogether nonexistent:

The winking barkeeper at the near-empty pool hall in Hawksbury,
Nova Scotia, who got herself a big tip by keeping the beer and the smart
remarks coming and making us feel like we were just the young rogues we used to
think we were.

“You must be so excited!” said the starter at the Highlands
Links golf course at Ingonish Beach, when she discovered this was our first
visit to the famed course. Especially at good courses, starters are typically
cool and standoffish, their unpleasant way of making you respect the privilege of paying
an asinine sum to grace the pristine links.

Not this Nova Scotia native. After 23 years in the same job,
she gave us a detailed, deep, literate and enthusiastic geological,
architectural and even cultural history of the golf course and the surrounding
community. She told us where to see the most beauty and said she and a friend
of hers had been clearing out some brush on their own time at a certain spot
and they saw two eagles over a stream.

“We just sat down,” she said.

I almost sat down, at her self-actualized feet.

After 23 years of working at Highlands Links, the golf course starter is still stunned by its beauty.

Finally there was the scene at the Bras D’or Lakes Inn at
a town called St. Peter's. One morning, Tom wrangled in the room with work issues, and I spent
a leisurely hour reading and writing in my journal in the lobby, where a
chocolate lab slept peacefully as the sardonic owner of the lodge—the missus,
of course—drank her first cup and ordered her workers around with such a
combination of good humor and decisiveness that I was tempted to apply as a
maid, and spend the rest of my life making beds, not choices.

Her meter-tall husband went out on an errand with a male
employee and she told them, “Have a good time.” They hesitated, looking at her
guiltily. “I just said, have a good time,” she said, looking at me plaintively
and then turning back to the male babies. “For heaven’s sake, go!”

Just then the restaurant waitress came rushing in—she had
been wandering around the inn all morning, singing “A Groovy Kind of Love” near
the top of her talented pipes—to tell the owner how she just got a whole breakfast
table join her in song.

“It was priceless!” she said, and I agreed.

Also priceless, as it turned out, was our stop at the Baddeck yacht club. The
respite from the road, and the cozy familiarity of Sunday golf on the bar
television, the beer—it changed my mood utterly, and as we rode off into the
bright late-afternoon sunshine, my homesickness was gone, and my riding confidence
restored—completely, and for the rest of the trip.

Riding a motorcycle on the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton on the northeast tip-top corner of Nova Scotia
is psychedelic near-madness.

I’m climbing on a winding coastal road, and before I can
lock the sights and other sensations into my memory, I’m tearing along through
high pine trees on top of the mountain.

What happened?

Slow down!

The bike is hanging on a wet switchback by its gears and
brakes and I’m having to dare myself to get out of second. Just as I begin to
trust the tires and myself, I’m flying through a lush valley and then down at
the water, cruising around an ocean cove.

And on and on like that, moment-to-moment for a few hours.

Don't try this at home—and definitely don't try it on the Cabot Trail.

And actually, all of motorcycling is like that. From inside
a car, you have time and detachment to see things and decide to remember them
and imagine how you’ll describe them when you get back home.

Whipping through the air on a motorcycle, there’s altogether
too much happening. All the senses are working at once. And working hard.

I see cows in the paddock but an argument ensues when my
nose swears it’s a pig farm.

I feel the cool before I smell the fish before I see the
lake.

It’s raining now, but the wind got heavier five minutes ago.

Buzz past a lawn, smell fresh grass clippings, ride through
rode construction, smell fresh dirt, pass a logging truck, smell the wood, ride
into town, smell for your lunch.

I couldn’t tell you what the Molson brewery in Montreal looks
like but I remember how it smells.

Pine fumes are such a powerful intoxicant that I worried
that if I was pulled over I would fail a sobriety test. (A Mountie spokesman reported
that the American was riding at three times the legal limit of exultation.)

The instantaneous deep heartwarmth of an occasional sunburst on a
cloudy day.

The quick whiff of wood smoke.

And the one you have to earn: the salty air of the Atlantic
Ocean.

Riding down a tiny asphalt path of a road so close to the
farms it seems we’re riding on them. The horse loam transforms the Triumph into
Taffy, the leather-mouthed orange pony that I rode when I was eight. I’m riding
her bareback, charging up hill and flying down dale and galloping, galloping,
galloping, desperately, angrily, joyfully. She thinks she’s running away with me. No, I’m running away with
her!

Because it is so overwhelming, riding a motorcycle is
constantly frustrating. I’m aware I’m taking in too much too fast and I realize
my billowing brain will leave me with few words, and only a useless
emotion-memory, impossible express to anyone who doesn’t ride and unnecessary
to explain to anyone who has.

"Couldn't you just slow down a little and savor it?" a friend asks. Umm ….

The only way to alleviate the anxiety and pain is to lump
all this infinite experience together and tell myself that I’ve seen it,
smelled it, heard it, felt it all before.

But if I do, I will dismiss the smell that I can’t assign.

“What is that?” I ask myself
in those words inside my helmet and I inhale deeply, twice and three times and
fill my chest with it and let it seep into me.

By process of elimination I finally recognize it as the
summer fragrance, encountered more frequently but less gratefully in my youth,
of happiness itself.

The third in my serial account of the meaning I found on my motorcycle over 4,600 miles from here to Nova Scotia and back. —DM

Six or eight hours a day, all on bouncy back roads, on a motorcycle not at all designed for long-distance cruising. That was the plan.

“You know, it might be brutal,” a friend told me before I left.

I agreed. But then, brutality was one of the
goals of the trip, and agony and boredom seemed prices worth paying for the
sights we were going to see.

Much to our surprise though, after a day or two of getting
our haunches used to it—we slouched in different positions and periodically stood on the foot pegs to alleviate the
literal pain in the ass—we found that our chests got used to being pushed around
by the wind and our heads got used to screaming through it. So used to it, that
it was the stopping that became uncomfortable.

Montreal surely deserves more than lunch and a visit to the
local Triumph dealer. And the ancient, walled Quebec City definitely rates a
stay-over. But within an hour or two of taking in the physical wonders of those
cities, we found ourselves itching to fight our way out of the sprawl and get
back on the road.

I’ll explain this rejection of an easy chance for cultural
exploration by quoting a line scrawled in my journal during one of these brief
stops: “If somebody gave you the chance to leap up into the air and fly every
day for three weeks, you’d probably fly around the world. Paris, Rome, Beijing,
Hong Kong, Buenos Aires. But when you landed in these places, would you really want
to spend a lot of time tramping around looking at architecture and
people-watching and window-shopping? No, you’d have a quick gander, and jump up
in the air again—and fly!”

My dad would have understood that. He might have feared motorcycles, but he knew about flying. His father crushed his youthful fantasy
of signing up for the Royal Air Force in the early days of World War II; the
idea, pitched at the family table with all the reason and enthusiasm a
17-year-old could muster, was dismissed with four words from his father: “Eat
your dinner, Bud.” 

But aviation had him, and after the war, upon his return from
an unglamorous army assignment, he learned to fly.

It was that flyer—and boater and car nut and writer of essays
with titles like, “Engines In the Morning”—who I talked to almost constantly, in the
privacy of the wind and the motor.

“Come on, Dad, admit it,” I’d say, cruising up the bigwide
St. Lawrence River. “This is pretty cool.”

“Okay, okay. Yes, shooting video while riding is pushing my
luck.”

Going down a country road on the north coast of Nova Scotia, Tommy tells it like it is.

“I know you understand this trip. So why, at
40, do I need your approval, too? (Tell
me it’s okay!)”

One of the reasons Dad didn’t like motorcycles was that Tommy
introduced them to me and Dad didn’t like Tommy. And one of the reasons he
didn’t like Tommy was that Tommy—also a pilot and an all-around
engines-in-the-morning kind of guy—showed a spirit of adventure bordering on
recklessness that Dad thought of as going too far.

In fact, it was my willingness
to take a chance that I think made Dad, easing as gracefully as he could into
his seventies and then his eighties, a little jealous. Driving my decrepit
Scout through country fields and urban ghettos and breaking down and allowing
myself to be cradled for shelter, food and repair by whatever locals came upon
my sorry ass: God, you’ve got a lot
of nerve, he said upon hearing stories like that. But I had no more nerve
than it must have taken him to willfully trap himself aloft and alone in a Piper
Tri-Pacer for the first time with nothing but an empty seat as a co-pilot.

The trouble Dad and I had about adventuring was mostly that, I was
doing it and he was done doing it. And in one of the large conversations we had
toward the end, he as much as admitted it.

But he never stopped fingering my friend for leading me into danger. And so he never directly acknowledged my own courage, and
its limitations.

“That bad, bad Tom,” he would say, joking but mostly not
joking. And as we headed northeast, he found ways to keep on saying it.

For good karma, Tom and I both wore windup watches that we’d recovered from
my dad’s dresser drawer after he died. My Movado Kingmatic worked throughout
the trip, but Tom’s Timex stopped cold on the first day. There was also the record-setting
low-pressure system that dad arranged to hover over the northeast to rain on us
at least once on every one of the 12 days we rode until geography forced us to
turn back west from the coast of Nova Scotia.

But if Dad was so acutely aware of our schedule and progress, how
did he not know that Tom had rescued me from the grief-duty of tearing down the old model train layout by driving 10 hours round trip to pick it up and
take it home to give to his son someday?

Surely he knew that Tom had been the friend who finally goaded
me into feeling and expressing my deepest feelings about my dad—who caused me
to understand awkwardly and noisily that it was not his stories or ideas but his
smell and his sound and his hook nose that I was going to miss.

And you’d think someone
would have Western Union-ed him that Dad's flight logs I’d given Tom to
study, had been organized by Tom’s sister into a museum-quality shadowbox tribute—each book opened to just the right page, Dad’s pilot’s license, the lock
of baby’s hair that went with all of it—and given to me the day before we left
on the motorcycle trip.

I guess it didn’t rain the whole time we rode down through New Brunswick to Moncton, east
through Nova Scotia to Hawskbury, northeast to the head of the Cabot Trail on
Cape Breton.

So maybe I should take that as a sign of Dad’s grudging
acquiescence. In fact, I think I’m going
to take it that way, from here on out. From now on when I talk to Dad from the seat of a motorcycle or anywhere else, it won’t be with
a bashful smile, but with a winking grin.