When I was a kid, Dad was selling his Honda Gold Wing. He told me I only had a few hours left to go for a ride before the bike was gone for good.
I had always been afraid of Dad’s bike. It once fell over in a windstorm, crashing into the side of the house. I remember how that broke my Dad’s heart. The bike was large and menacing and I hadn’t gone for a ride on it yet. Until now. Even at such a young age, I must have understood the feeling of regret. I got on the back and off we went around the block… then all through our community. An hour later, I still didn’t want him to stop.
“The feeling of flying along with other vehicles but being outside—instead of confined by a seatbelt in the backseat with the family dog—was my first taste of complete and utter freedom.”— from Riding Full Circle, Pg. 3
As a Father’s Day shout-out to my dad, I thought it might be fun to include a chapter that didn’t quite make the cut into the final version of Riding Full Circle.
(Also, to refer to my last post, “Writing Riding Full Circle: deciding what belonged in the story,” this deletion is 1,400 words long. I turned it into ~100 words in the book — that’s in part how I cut over 50,000 words from my way-too-long manuscript.)
The chapter that didn’t make the cut…
After reasoning Dad probably didn’t want to kill me, and summoning all the courage I’d gleaned from 12 epic years on earth climbing trees and throwing snowballs at cars, I agreed to go for a ride. By the end of our tour around the neighbourhood, I was begging him not to sell the bike. It was better than any carnival ride at Calaway Park, the most exciting place I’d been at that time growing up in a flat Alberta city.
My mom, however, worked in a hospital. Although she liked to ride on the back of Dad’s bike and shared his love for the open road, her visions of peeled-off skin and heads cracked open like watermelons, kept her from encouraging me to buy a motorcycle.
After Dad sold his Gold Wing, he didn’t own another bike until he turned 65, which happened to be two years before I turned 40.
Mom held her own against bikes for years but seemed to relent a little when Dad found a dark blue 2003 Kawasaki Vulcan Classic. She helped him buy it as a gift for his birthday. Either Dad had recently upped his life insurance policy or Mom had enough years between her and working in the emergency room to understand that riding a motorcycle can improve your quality of life.
Mom never got on the Kawasaki, but Dad had a good friend who liked to ride and lived across the street from them. Merv owned a Harley Davidson. It wasn’t long before Dad upgraded to a 2005 Harley Davidson Ultra Classic, which he heroically rode down the infamous (and unpaved) Moki Dugway in Utah.
I took this irresponsible behavior from my parents as a sign to get astride two wheels myself. During a visit home from Vancouver, B.C., where I was living at the time, I announced I was getting a bike too. I’d been making noises about learning to ride for a few years now but had always held off, picturing the look on Mom’s face whenever the subject came up. She was, however, surprisingly supportive.
I was turning 40 the following year, and I wanted to do something epic. I asked Dad if he would ride around the southern USA deserts with me and he immediately started planning the route.
I didn’t have a bike yet, or a motorcycle license. I also hadn’t met Dave yet…
That summer of 2013, I got the name of a motorcycle instructor from a friend and called him for lessons.
I would drive my car an hour from Vancouver to a rented mobile home on a big lot where the instructor lived, and sleep in the back of my Ford Escape overnight. For six weekends, the instructor had me weaving through cones and doing starts-and-stops on slippery grass. I rode a 250CC Kawasaki Super Sherpa during training. I liked the bike so much, I bought a used one from a sturdy lesbian in Victoria, when I got my license.
Now that I was a legit rider, it was time for our father-daughter ride in the Southwest. Only now, it was father, daughter, and some random guy she’d just met on the internet — a meeting that turned into quite the adventure.
I know Dad was probably looking forward to it being just the two of us for that two-week trip, but I also know he’s proud of my travels.
Who could have ever known that the day I took a chance and pushed fear aside to get on my dad’s bike, would eventually lead to a 58,000-mile adventure around the world?
What’s a risk you took that led to a great journey? What’s holding you back from your next one?