Harley and Me (3 page)

I examine my fellow students. The three other women in the class are outfitted in Harley gear—leather jackets, black half helmets, tight-fitting sequined tank tops, and kick-ass boots. Our faces are going to be enclosed in helmets in ninety-degree weather, yet two of the women are wearing makeup. The guys are almost as decked out. Most wear boots and leather jackets. The youngest guy in the class—who has yet to touch the starter button on a bike—has just bought a designer leather jacket along with a $400 helmet already wired with Bluetooth. The corporate-looking guy from Santa Monica, who confessed last night that he was taking this class while his wife is out of town, is carrying a new modular flip-up helmet. If his wife finds out, he says, she's going to kill him. I wonder where he plans to hide his helmet.

And me?

In baggy men's Levi 501s, a stained T-shirt, gardening gloves, and hiking boots, I look more like a hired hand than a biker chick. At this moment, I'd love a pair of killer motorcycle boots.

I pick out a helmet and our instructors, Mario and Kathie, review the safety rules and then assign us each a bike. We will be riding Buell Blasts, yellow or black, 492-cc bikes manufactured by a division of Harley, the standard trainers for first-time riders in this course. The plastic bodywork pieces covering the bikes are made from Surlyn. It's a substance used on the outside of golf balls, which gives some idea of the kind of beating they are intended to take. The side-view mirrors have been removed and the taillights are cheap plastic expected to be replaced. They say there are only two kinds of bikers in the world: those who have put down a bike and those who are waiting to do so. (This is not comforting.) I am assigned a black motorcycle, number sixteen. Finally, we are told to mount our bikes.

I've ridden on the back of a motorcycle before. In my late teens, I dated a guy with a Honda Rebel and rode around L.A. and up and down Angeles Crest Highway, a twisty mountain road notorious for
the number of motorcycle accidents there. The sheriff's department Life Flight helicopters practically run a shuttle between the winding crest and the trauma centers down on the flats. No helmet, no safety gear. Those were the days before California's mandatory helmet laws. I was young; I felt nothing bad could happen. I was lucky, but now I am too old to believe myself invincible.

But riding by myself? Not a passenger but the driver?

I swing my right leg over the saddle and sit. When instructed, I turn the handlebars to straighten the wheel. I lean the bike to an upright position and sweep away the kickstand with my left foot. I stand, straddling a machine that weighs 360 pounds and rock it gently side to side beneath me. I feel every ounce of the bike's weight and heft, a gravity I didn't expect that makes the hairs on the base of my neck bristle. I touch the starter button, and the engine fires. It seems to want to do whatever I might ask it to; friendly, even eager to please.

There is something mystical about the moment, as if I've been handed powers. I am sitting on this machine that can go—go fast—at my slightest touch. It is intoxicating. And terrifying.

• • •

In our evolutionary history, those who took risks and responded well to the chemicals released by their brains during the ensuring danger lived to take other risks and pass their risk-taking tendencies on to their offspring. And those who didn't succeed didn't. According to Charles Darwin's theory, we can surmise that the successful risk takers survived because they were the “fittest” of our species. The risk taking helped them and the entire species evolve.

Over millions of years the human body has grown so used to taking risk and being rewarded chemically and socially that people go out of their way to expose themselves to risk, though the degree to which we need or want risk varies within each individual.

Women, for instance, are more risk averse than men when risk is confined to a physical realm. This stance makes perfect sense from
the perspective of the species' continuation. While men ventured forth, hunting and exploring, women stayed back with the children to care and nurture, insuring the species' survival. I wouldn't have left my children when they were young for anything. No motorcycle, no handsome man, no adventure could have pulled me away. This was not simply a matter of virtue. The chemicals a woman produces while child-rearing, oxytocin and estrogen, almost ensure her risk-averse response.

Cultural conditioning may also play a part in a woman's reluctance to expose herself to physical risk. I was recently challenged to name a book or movie in which a female character embarks on a road adventure without ending up raped or dead. This was harder than I would have thought. Think about it: Thelma and Louise drive off a cliff. There is no female Huck Finn, nor even Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (characters from Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel
On the Road
). Women in road films are rarely driven by a pursuit of adventure—more likely they're in flight from abusive males.

It is in the films we consume and in the stories we read that the stage is set for the choices we believe are available to us. Yet seldom do we question the stories. A few film critics have seen the truth about the male bias in cinematic depictions of road narratives and nail it: “The women are essentially along for the ride, and are not part of what is constantly being redefined as an exclusive male enclave,” writes Mark Williams in
Road Movies: The Complete Guide to Cinema on Wheels
. “Time after time, one can detach the females without endangering the structure of the main plot,” writes Frederick Woods in the essay “Hot Guns and Cold Women.”

The importance of female role models who take to the road, enter the male realm, or engage in other kinds of adventure cannot be understated. Not only do women need to know it's possible to pursue their dreams by watching others. It's just as important for the larger culture to witness her exploits. If a woman undertakes a road trip because she watched a film that encouraged her, or read a book that gave her nerve, great. But if the men she encounters on the road
have not seen that film or read that book, they may not have in their consciousness the same idea: that it's okay for women to be on the road. That such a choice is not an invitation to abuse or danger. And that many women want to see the world and experience different ways of being just as much as men do.

But until women are depicted that way in the stories that form our cultural consciousness, very real perils will remain.

Vanessa Veselka, a writer and former hitchhiker, writes about this issue, arguing that true quest is about agency and the capacity to be driven past our limits in pursuit of something greater. “It's about desire that extends beyond what we may know about who we are. It's a test of mettle, a destiny. A man with a quest, internal or external, makes the choice at every stage about whether to endure the consequences or turn back, and that choice is imbued with heroism. Women, however, are restricted to a single tragic or fatal choice. We trace all of their failures, as well as the dangers that befall them, back to this foundational moment of sin or tragedy, instead of linking these encounters and moments in a narrative of exploration that allows for an outcome which can unite these individual choices in any heroic way.”

The archetypal stories that drive us as a species—the hero's journey and its many incarnations—either leave women out of the picture, or ask us to mold our adventures onto a male prototype. Or worse, they scare us into inaction with their warnings of failure and violence. Male-driven stories subconsciously limit the options women think we can explore. Where are the heroines' journeys that are life enriching?

Surely, countless other women like me want to engage adventure. But we hesitate for lack of a role model, for lack of a story line that provides a positive outcome, or out of fear of being ostracized or harmed.

One positive role model comes shimmering into the foreground. I speak with Cheryl Strayed, author of
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
, a memoir about hiking 1,100 miles alone in her early twenties that was recently adapted into a film.

“It was hard,” she says of days she spent alone on the trail, dirty, bruised, sometimes lost. “It was physically hard for me to move over that space. I traveled by foot with a big weight on my back. But,” she pauses, “it was life changing . . . Once you have had that experience, you never forget that you're capable of giving yourself everything you need and surviving.”

• • •

Back on the motorcycle range, we learn to walk our bikes in first gear across the asphalt, pushing them at the end of each lap to turn. And then, before we know it, we're riding. Just little jaunts, but we're moving and our feet are off the ground and on the pegs. My fear has been that I won't be strong enough to keep the bike upright. How will I maneuver a machine that is three times my body weight? But physical strength isn't the key. It's more about agility and coordination, nimbleness and vigilance. And a bit of courage.

When the morning break arrives, we're all jubilant. Everyone figured out how to ride; no one flunked out. Mario and Kathie call us into the shade and ask us to record our thoughts about riding a motorcycle for the first time. I write a sentence or two and then step behind the storage building to call Dad.

For the past two hours, it's been a relief not second-guessing whether I should have gone out there this morning. Attempting something new and scary focused me, crowding out all other thoughts. I talk with my stepmom and hear that Dad is much the same. Very weak. Hardly able to stand, much less walk. I speak to him and tell him I love him. I don't mention that I'm learning to ride a motorcycle this weekend, that I've chosen to do this rash and perilous thing rather than come visit.

And now my brief moment of triumph has been replaced by shame.

• • •

I believe on some level I am a legitimate risk taker. But I don't feel proud of that fact. People generally associate
risk taker
with irrationality and impulsiveness, terms I don't think apply to me, someone regarded by family and friends as cautious and reserved. So who are these risk takers? Am I really one of them?

Risk takers have brains and bodies adapted with an enhanced capacity for dopamine reuptake: Our brains respond more strongly to that chemical than other people's brains. We seek out risk because we experience a more intense and pleasurable response to dopamine than other people. Risk takers are speculated to carry what's called the risk gene, or D4DR, the fourth dopamine receptor gene on the eleventh chromosome, a gene mutation that functions primarily in the limbic portion of the brain. Although one study showed this gene is responsible for only 10 percent of human risk-taking behavior, I feel both indicted and explained by it. I know, without really knowing, that I have this gene.

Risk takes many forms. Surgeons, for example, report the same kind of adrenaline surge during an operation that skydivers and other extreme athletes experience. Musicians, too, are familiar with the flood of euphoric chemicals while performing though no one's life is on the line. Even day-to-day choices like quitting an unrewarding job can rejuvenate a life and instill a sense of excitement. These choices are metabolized in the body with the same rush as jumping out of a plane. Scientists on the cutting edge of discovery regularly risk professional ridicule and humiliation in pursuit of complex research problems. They understand the “exposure” of announcing a breakthrough finding today that may be rejected and possibly mocked tomorrow. Charles Darwin waited twenty years after he developed his theory of natural selection before he finally published
The Origin of Species
. He understood the controversial nature of his findings. The gamble of going public with the suggestion that humans descended from apes was enormous. In fact, in some settings, it still is today.

Undoubtedly the risk Darwin felt was greater than my experience coming out as a biker chick in suburban Los Angeles at age
forty-eight. Still, my feeling of vulnerability and exposure may not be any less intimidating.

• • •

A month after I pass the motorcycle safety class, I receive my M1 endorsement from the DMV on my driver's license. A month after that, death arrives. After sitting by my father's bedside for a week, going home at night to grab a few hours' sleep, praying for his peaceful passing, feeling awe and frustration at how the body hangs on by its cracked and bloodied fingernails long after the spirit has begged for rest, I get the call at 5:00
AM
.

I drive, numb, to his home in Thousand Oaks. I bathe his lifeless body with the help of the hospice nurse, startled at how small and shrunken he has become, this man who in life both adored and terrified me, reduced now to a cooling, fleshy bag of bones. When the mortuary men put him on the gurney, I ask them to wait a few minutes while I touch his face, hold his hand, whisper my good-bye.

The next day, I walk into the Harley dealership and buy myself a two-year-old all-black Sportster Iron 883 motorcycle. An example of grief made manifest? Absolutely. It is also a fullhearted embrace of life.

•
    
CHAPTER TWO
    
•

IZZY, MY LOVE

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.

—ABRAHAM HAROLD MASLOW

That night, I lie in bed tormented over the $8,000 used Harley parked in my garage, taking up space that might otherwise be filled with my Honda Civic. What is
wrong
with me? I will call Rebecca tomorrow and beg her to take it back. I am not a biker. I am a mom. A suburban mom. This is grief talking. I am coming completely unhinged.

Given my family history, these are not thoughts I take lightly. My mother was severely bipolar. She spent most of my childhood hidden away in her bedroom, medicated into a stupor, or institutionalized and undergoing shock treatments. I have struggled my entire life to ensure I don't follow that path. I feel as if I'm treading dangerous waters.

Resisting the impulse to call Rebecca and return the bike, I do research instead. I make phone calls. Carl Lejuez, a psychologist at the University of Maryland and an expert on addiction, reassures me. He tells me that risk is a good thing.

And the downside? I ask.

It takes only one bad judgment in any kind of risky situation, he says, and “you're toast.”

See: I
am
treading on thin ice.

He tells me to take heart. The fact is most people are overly protective and risk averse. The field of psychology mostly focuses on pathologizing risk, looking at all the ways risky behavior can create problems. Scientists don't tend to study what's useful about it. And that's a shame, because risk taking can be an enriching and important part of life.

He tells me about BART, the Balloon Analog Risk Task, a computer game used to assess a person's capacity for risk. The player in goggles sees a cartoon balloon on a computer screen and presses a button to inflate the balloon. As the balloon gets bigger, the player accumulates money or points. But when the balloon pops, the player loses everything. The player can cash out at any time before the pop. The idea is to see how big the player will inflate the balloon before it bursts.

Most people are not willing to take on a healthy degree of risk, he explains. They're not expanding the balloon far enough to find the balance between risk and benefit. They cash out far too soon. As a species, he says, we have become much too conservative. This trend is especially notable as we age.

“If you think about transitions in other parts of life,” Lejuez explains, “there's always new things. You go to a new school, you get your first job, you have your first child. I'm not saying everyone does all those things, but in life, up to middle age, there's always another transition, there's always something to knock you off balance and keep you smart.”

We usually grade someone's success at midlife by how well they've removed all these types of transitions. And that, he says, is unfortunate. You've now landed in a safe spot and you feel comfort. The very success and prosperity you strived for becomes a double-edged sword. Risk taking, though, forces you to have transitions, to not always know the answers. It forces you to wake up and think that maybe something
will happen today that is totally unexpected. Because by middle age, we don't usually have those days anymore.

The day-in, day-out process of midlife, especially for those who crave novelty and sensation, will start to feel deadening. “At first you think:
Wow! This is success!
And then you wake up one day and think,
What the fuck just happened? I thought this was what I wanted and I'm actually feeling less alive than before
,” Lejuez says.

The benefits of risk taking are operative whether the risk is physical—rock-climbing, BASE jumping, hang gliding—or not. Financial, emotional, spiritual, and creative risk can all provide the same stimulation. As a species, we often focus on physical risk because it's so tied to our biological need to persevere and continue life. But emotional risk can be even more influential because it keeps us healthy and sharp. It can hurt more than physical risk, too, as anyone who's ever had a heart broken can attest.

“We get to a certain point in life when we don't make mistakes anymore. We don't have negative consequences. Negative consequences are seen as bad things. But think of all the growth we go through when we're younger and how good it feels when you grow through things.”

Lejuez explains the “learned industriousness theory,” a way of thinking about resilience and perseverance. When bad events happen to us and we persevere, eventually the bad event goes away. The hard work that led to getting through it is what gets rewarded and reinforced.

“At a biological level, some people learn that effort and hard work and trying something new actually starts to feel good, because in the past, those behaviors were associated with what got them through something hard.” If you're trying new things and taking risks, all that effort is getting rewarded. “Not only when they work out, but especially when they don't and then you keep at it until you get them to work out. The exertion and hard work make you feel more alive, as if you've been given another chance to learn and grow at a time in your life when, if you don't want to learn and grow any more, you don't have to.

“There's a famous saying,” Lejuez says. “Middle age is when our waists expand and our mind shrinks.”

• • •

Until this point in my life, I never felt a great affinity for motorcycles, never harbored the desire to learn. In fact, when my middle son Neil bought a motorcycle as a college freshman, I was apoplectic, utterly opposed. I railed about the danger of accidents. But when I signed up for that five-day class and found myself sitting on an asphalt training range atop a 492-cc motorcycle, I experienced a kind of giddy delight I had never previously known. Ever.

Add to that the loss of my last surviving parent. Heartrending, but also liberating; all parental expectations were finally buried with my father. Then there's the existential awareness of being the next generation up to bat. No more buffer between me and death. This is it. What I make of my life is in my hands and mine alone. I do not want to die blaming others for what I haven't done. I do not want my final days stained with regrets.

By learning to ride this motorcycle, I am utterly bewitched, all but seduced into an affair with steel and leather and speed, an affair as surprising as if I had fallen for an unlikely man, James Dean with dreamy eyes, slicked-back hair, and an air of defiance.

That is part of the attraction: the fact I never knew I could feel this way.

The experience opened the door to so many life changes I'm glad I had no way to know what was coming. I might have turned back right then. My story of transformation, of skin shedding, is emblematic for many women.

Women in midlife now face a set of issues different than our mothers did, and unlike what our daughters will encounter after us. Our uncertainties are different, too, from those that men face at midlife. Men might question their career choices or take up a new sport; some will buy sports cars and have affairs. Others will turn to hobbies
or activities that give them pleasure and distraction as they settle into a quieting season in life.

Our mothers might have chosen to take on volunteering at a hospital, returning to school, or reviving a neglected career once the nest emptied. My own mother didn't live long enough to face those choices, but I saw friends' mothers grapple with these options. Some were trapped in the rut of their own maternal role; they couldn't seem to envision a life apart from spouses and children. Even as a young child, I couldn't help but believe there was so much more for them to discover. But they aged and in some cases went to their graves with their inimitable, irreplaceable selves still suppressed under a thick layer of estrogen, trapped within societal norms and the need for acceptance.

But for those of us in midlife—both those who have raised children and those who haven't—we might be asking ourselves if we wish to continue on the same path now that our career has been established or the children have embarked on their own lives. Perhaps we're aching to try something new or maybe we're questioning marital choices we made early on—how did I end up here?—weighing the chances of creating a better relationship with someone new, versus working on the relationship we're in. Or simply striking out on our own.

Though the questions assume different guises, ultimately they are the same for all of us: mothers, daughters, friends, partners, women and men alike. Have we done with our lives what we'd hoped to? If not, what can we do about it in the time remaining? Now that the struggling stage of earlier adulthood has passed, how do we place ourselves on the path of authenticity? And how, exactly, do we take the calculated risks that will make us feel absolutely, richly, uniquely ourselves?

• • •

It's delightfully cool this January morning, five months after I bought the motorcycle. It has taken three months for me to hazard a quick
jaunt for an exit or two on the freeway, and a few more months before I can comfortably ride anywhere alone. By now, though, I am starting to feel in command of this brawny machine.

This morning, fog snakes through the streets of our neighborhood. The top of Verdugo Peak half a mile to the south is a ghost image of itself, barely an outline. Mountain lions and bobcats have recently been sighted there. Last fall, a California black bear strolled across our front lawn.

Yet we are part of the urban landscape, too, officially in the city of Los Angeles with skyscrapers visible from this vantage point. I will have to keep my eyes peeled for the coyotes that prowl our streets at dawn and dusk for prey.

We live at the margin of wild and tame.

Into this fog-shrouded morning, I prepare to enter. First, jeans, the ones with the “snake bite” burns on the inner right ankle from getting too close to the tailpipe when I first test-rode this motorcycle and hadn't learned to place my feet wide on the pegs. Then tall, wicking socks designed for backpacking, followed by twelve-inch leather boots with slip-proof soles and a left toe reinforced for shifting. Just walking in the boots gives me attitude. I feel like Wonder Woman or maybe Batgirl. A T-shirt is next, followed by a jacket with body armor.

Dressed like this, helmet in hand, I no longer look like myself. For the hour or so I plan to ride this morning, I will shed that old identity to become only a body with a set of skills, a person in sync with a precision machine, eating up miles and feeling a very distinct version of joy, the closest I can imagine to what it feels like to fly.

I open the garage door and the morning's sleepy trance is broken by the overhead light: harsh, too much. As my eyes adjust, I see her, the object of my love. Izzy. A three-year-old Harley-Davidson 883 Sportster Iron with Thunderheader pipes and a Screamin' Eagle exhaust. Matte black rim to rim, the stock chrome pipes traded out for soot-black tubes. Sleek: a black leopard. No saddlebags or encumbering accessories. Her solo seat gives a clear message: On this
journey, there's no room for anyone but me. She's one retro-looking badass bike.

I speak quietly, asking her to be gentle with me. I run my hand the length of her leather seat, thrilled each time I touch her, each time I remember she's mine.

When I pull on my full-face helmet, my breath circles audibly inside the hermetic bubble covering me. This is the moment when fear gathers itself and reminds me of what I'm doing. I slow my respiration, hearing each exhalation in the sealed space as I wrestle with my body's sympathetic nervous system, that part of the autonomic nervous system that regulates the body's unconscious actions. Every cell in my being is calling out the flee-or-fight command as it recognizes that I am about to take my life in my hands. My preprogrammed instinct for survival wants me to go back into the house, back to where things are safe. My amygdala, that almond-shaped mass of nuclei located deep within the temporal lobe that is part of the limbic system, joins the act. This is the part of the brain that manages many of our emotions and motivations, particularly those related to survival. My amygdala starts screaming for me to do something, anything, other than what I plan to do next.

As a result of this unconscious biological programming, my heart and breathing begin to race. I consciously work to slow them, knowing that I need only to get past the fear to find freedom. Pulling on my leather gloves, adrenaline forces a line of sweat down my side, inching along my rib cage despite the cool morning.

Riding a motorcycle has always been a pleasant experience. But preparing to ride is another thing. My insides rebel. I start coming up with reasons why I shouldn't do this, primary among them the fact that I wish to live. I say a prayer to the god of motorcyclists to watch over me. And I mount Izzy.

The fear doesn't leave; it keeps tickling the back of my skull, making my hands a mite unsteady, my heart a jackhammer. But I know it will quiet. A mile or two in, like the big bad boogieman that
fear is, it will eventually slink back into its corner and wait for another chance to frighten me into a smaller, quieter life.