Born to Run (63 page)

EPILOGUE

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, a sunny late fall day springs upon Central Jersey. Sixty-degree temperatures send me out to the garage to fire up my motorcycle and catch the last good riding weather of the season. I head south to Manasquan Inlet. A two-day nor’easter has just subsided, blowing through, driving the ocean up to the dune grass at the boardwalk’s edge and washing away a
significant amount of my old beach back into the whitecapped, still-churning sea. The jetty my sister and I so gingerly tiptoed out upon in the late-summer dark is topped with a good three or four inches of damp sand over black rock that makes navigating its shifting surface in engineer boots a minor adventure.

Here in November the sun sets over the southwest—Point Pleasant—side of the inlet,
unsheathing and casting a shimmering sword north across the gray inlet waters to the Manasquan side. There I sit on the jetty at sword’s point. As the waves lap upon the rocks at my boot heels the tip of that sword shatters into shards of golden light on the waters below, breaking
into mini suns, microcosms of the God source that brings life to our planet. Here I am amongst and greeted by friends
known and unknown. It comes with the turf. A well-meaning menagerie of schoolkids, old folks with their metal detectors, dogs, surfers, fishermen, folks from Freehold who’ve always used Manasquan as their Shore getaway, the kids behind the counter at Carlson’s Corner, the endless strangers who wait in cars, sitting in line facing the inlet. There behind those driver’s-side windows could sit the
merry, puzzled ghost of my old man dreaming of another life somewhere, someplace, far away from all the goodness he has wrought and his beautiful treasures. It’s my place now, another small and bittersweet inheritance.

As the sun sets into a range of gray-blue clouds I fire the engine on my bike back to life, tighten my helmet, throw my scarf around my face, toss a wave good-bye and slip from
the small town of Manasquan out into the five o’clock traffic along Route 34. The sun is down now and a cool evening falls. At a light, I zip my leather jacket to the neck, notice my boot heel resting upon the hot, wrapped exhaust pipe of my V-twin, leaving a swatch of rubber and lifting a thin swirling slipstream of blue smoke into the crisp autumn air. The light goes green and the road stirs and
rumbles beneath me as I pop over small sections of highway that have expanded in the summer heat, then cooled, leaving irregular ridges, sequential speed bumps where sections of asphalt meet. Rumble, rumble, rumble . . . pop . . . rumble, rumble, rumble . . . pop. With every “pop,” I’m bouncing up off my sprung seat and suddenly I’m back going round and round, rolling over the blue slate driveway
outside the convent house of St. Rose and waiting, wanting, once again, to hear my grandmother’s voice calling to me at dusk. I listen . . . but tonight the past fades and there’s only the present voice of sparks, firing pistons . . . sweet cold mechanics.

I travel into a stream of headlights as commuter cars holding their day travelers flash by inches from my left handle grip. I move north up
the highway until the traffic recedes, leaving only my headlight illuminating blank road and dashes of
white line . . . white line . . . white line . . . white line . . . My “ape hanger,” high-rise handlebars thrust my arms out and skyward to shoulder height, opening me up to the winds full force—a rough embrace—as my gloved hands tighten their grip on that new evening sky. The cosmos begins to
flicker to life in the twilight above me. With no fairing, a sixty-mile-per-hour gale steadily pounds into my chest, nudging me to the back of my seat, subtly threatening to blow me off six hundred pounds of speeding steel, reminding me of how the next moment holds no guarantees . . . and of how good things are, this day, this life, how lucky I’ve been, how lucky I am. I turn the corner off the
highway onto a dark country road. I hit my high beams, scan the flat farm fields looking for deer. All clear, I twist the throttle as rushing into my arms comes home.