by Neil Peart
Alex was already a licensed pilot by then, and something of a natural athlete, so he aced the final test easily, but I failed on that first attempt. I felt humiliated and dismayed, and even more so when I failed on my second try, during the next break in the tour. Before my third attempt I finally engaged an instructor for a private lesson, and he quickly helped me understand my difficulties and correct them. How proud and happy (and relieved) I was when I finally passed that riding test.
It was another quality of my physical-mental interface that any activity in which I developed an interest became a positive obsession. This had been true of playing the drums, reading every great book ever written, writing lyrics, writing prose, cross-country skiing, bicycling, and now, motorcycling. Selena, Jackie, and I spent that whole summer of 1994 at the house on the lake, and several mornings a week I got up before dawn and went riding for a couple of hours on the empty, winding roads of the Laurentians, slowly gaining skill and confidence.
That summer, we had friends renting a cottage on a nearby lake: Jackie’s best friend Georgia, her husband, Brutus, and their son, Sam. At that time Brutus and I were friends in the “my-wife’s-friend’s-husband” sense, but when he saw me having so much fun with my new motorcycle he went out and bought one of his own, a BMW K-1100RS. That September, he joined me on my first motorcycle journey, through Quebec, Newfoundland, and the Maritime provinces, and we met up with Jackie and Georgia in Nova Scotia. They flew into Halifax and rented a car (neither of them seemed to enjoy riding behind us on the motorcycles — at least farther than to the store for a newspaper — they said they didn’t like being cramped, overdressed, uncomfortable, and cold) to follow us for a few days around the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island and back to Halifax, whence they flew home while Brutus and I rode back to Quebec.
Brutus and I discovered two important things on that first trip together: we liked travelling by motorcycle, and we liked travelling together. He gave our two-man gang the name “Scooter Trash,” and we began to spin more dreams and plans for adventures together. In the Spring of ’95 we shipped our bikes to Mexico for a three-week tour (where Brutus crashed and broke a couple of ribs, then later set his luggage cases on fire), and in the early summer of that year we squeezed in another adventure. (We both had the time professionally, for I was between tours and Brutus was a self-employed entrepreneur, but there was some serious bargaining and bribery going on between us and our families.)
That June, we set off across Canada on a two-week blast up to Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories (where both of us fell over in the mud repeatedly, a story published as “Catching Some Midnight Rays” in Cycle Canada magazine), before rejoining our families for the summer in Quebec. My birthday present from Jackie that September was a card reading “Seven days of freedom,” and we took advantage of that, and Georgia’s tacit resignation, to ride east again, to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. After another winter of work and family time, in the spring of 1996 we shipped the bikes across the Atlantic to Munich, where we began another three-week tour through Bavaria and the Austrian Alps (where Brutus crashed), Italy, Sicily, and Tunisia (where Brutus broke down in the middle of the Sahara), then back through Sardinia, France, and Switzerland.
But all of that was just preparation for the Really Big Tour. During the summer of 1996 plans were coming together for Rush’s Test For Echo concert tour, which would eventually span 67 shows in the United States and Canada. I began to think about how I was going to endure yet another rock tour, which I had always perceived as a combination of crushing tedium, constant exhaustion, and circus-like insanity, none of which suited my restless, independent, and private temperament.
Paradoxically, I enjoyed the preparation for a tour, for I liked rehearsing with the band with the shared intensity of working toward “the perfect show,” and the first few shows certainly got the adrenaline pumping when we hit the stage in front of 10 or 12 thousand people in a big arena. However, by about the third show we would get it right, the band and crew and audience locked together in a transcendent performance, and as far as I was concerned, that was it. If my job was to play a good show, then I had done it. Goal achieved, challenge met, case dismissed. Can I go home now?
Nothing is ever that simple, of course, but it felt to me that for the rest of the tour I would only be going up there night after night and trying to repeat that experience, at best. Not to say that was simple, either. When a particular show fell short of that standard I felt deflated and disgusted with myself, while if I played well enough to meet that benchmark, it was only what I expected of myself — nothing to get excited about. So for me, touring could be a long, relentless grind, exhausting and soul-destroying. And that only refers to the onstage time, a small fraction of the chaos of travelling, waiting, and shifting from hotel to bus to arena to hotel for months on end.
For several tours through the ’80s and early ’90s I had carried a bicycle with me on the tour bus, which had provided a great escape and diversion. During the days off between shows I might spend the whole day riding from city to city, if they were within 100 miles or so, and on the afternoons before a show I often pedaled through the various cities to the local art museum, to feed my growing interest in paintings, art history, and African carvings.
This time I was thinking about how the motorcycle would make it possible for me to cover some real distances, and I conceived a plan of using a tour bus with a trailer for the motorcycles, and convinced Brutus to join me on the tour as navigator, machine supervisor, and (most important) riding companion. From the tour’s opening show in Albany, New York, we made our own journey around the band’s itinerary, eventually riding about 40,000 miles, in nearly every state in the lower 48 (excepting only North Dakota, for some reason, which never seemed to cross our path) and several Canadian provinces.
The main logo of that Test For Echo tour was taken from the cover art of the album, which portrayed a humanoid icon of piled stones, a gigantic version of an Inuit inukshuk, which means “in the likeness of a man.” My suggestion that we use this image had been inspired by that long ride up to Yellowknife the previous year, when I had seen one of those mystical-looking cairns of rock overlooking the remote northern town, at the very edge of true wilderness. Knowing that these stone figures traditionally marked travel and hunting routes across the barren Arctic, I had been struck by the power of this human symbol in a hostile land.
Now, just over a year after the final show of the Test For Echo tour, which we played in Ottawa on July 4, 1997, it was the dark summer of 1998, and everything was changed so very much, at least through my eyes. I was riding again, but I was riding alone, motivated partly by my desire to see if solitary travelling might help to soothe the torment of my little baby soul, and partly because Brutus couldn’t get away, and was hoping to meet up with me somewhere later on.
On the first day of my journey westward from Quebec, I saw a small inukshuk placed at the roadside, high on a rocky cut, and then another the second day, and again on the third. Perhaps they had been assembled by another solitary traveller, a hitchhiker passing time until the next ride came along. A good omen, I liked to think, although it gave me a wry smile to think about that definition, “in the likeness of a man.”
For that was surely how I felt, so hollow and dispirited that I could hardly imagine what it had been like to be “the fool I used to be.” Sometimes I tried to steer my mind away from memories of the past, but in other moods they now seemed so remote, so unreal, that I could dare to think about the past without breaking down.
The Ghost of Summer Past took me back to the summer of 1996, probably the most productive time of my life. Test For Echo had just been released, and I considered it to be my masterpiece as a drummer, for I had worked hard on my playing during the two years prior to those sessions. That summer, I was settling the post-production details of an instructional video on drumming, A Work in Progress, and at the same time correcting the proofs for my first published book, T
he Masked Rider. (I had made an agreement with Jackie and Selena that I could work in my office until noon, then stop and spend the afternoons and evenings with them — fair enough.) Just two summers later, all that was ashes, and I felt little connection with any of those accomplishments.
My current struggles weren’t about creating or producing, or planning adventures, only about surviving. When I reflected on that old life I tended to think of the protagonist as “that guy,” for I shared only his memories. And some of those memories I was now trying to hide from, escape from, ride away from.
I could ride — but I couldn’t hide.
On the third morning, I crossed into Manitoba and pulled off the Trans-Canada Highway into a rest area in a grove of evergreens (fir trees, I decided when I rolled the needles in my hand — woodsman’s lore: “fir’s flat, spruce spins”). There, a diner had been converted from an old school bus, and I bought a hot dog, milkshake, and fries (feeding my inner child), and carried them to a picnic table in the shade. A hairy woodpecker probed for his own protein (no empty carbohydrates for him) in a nearby tree, while a flock of cedar waxwings, pearl-gray and crested with natty markings, darted among the branches of the grove.
Birds had attracted me since boyhood, when I used to trace the little illustrations from my grandmother’s bird books, and try to name the species I saw flitting around the suburbs and woodlands of southern Ontario, and it was a youthful enthusiasm that had actually grown in my adulthood. Even on this wretched journey I travelled with a small pair of binoculars and a field guide, as I always had for whatever part of Africa, Europe, North America, or Mexico I was visiting. During our time in Barbados, while I was mostly confined to our rented villa and the lush gardens around it, I could sit with Jackie while she read, scanning the trees with my binoculars, and eventually identifying 22 of Barbados’s 24 native species.
Back on the highway, the forests fell behind like a wall and the roadside fanned open into wide green prairie. The sun warmed the air, carrying the delicious scent of wet hay, and I watched the farmers at work with balers, combines, windrowers, and disc harrows. Part of me envied the straightforward nature of their task, guiding their machines along geometric lines between earth and sky, but part of me envied everybody.
Soon the empty skyline would be regularly punctuated by “prairie skyscrapers,” the tall grain elevators that sprouted like exclamation marks beside the train tracks in every prairie town. Once, I saw an example of the massive scale of modern farming, automobile-sized bales of hay in stacks the size of apartment buildings, with wide lanes between them for flatbed semis. I had so many childhood memories of the farms of relatives and my parents’ friends, for they had only left the farm when I was a year or two old, when my father started his career in the farm equipment business. That too had filled part of my life, working summers and holidays at my father’s International Harvester dealership, and then as his parts manager in my early 20s, right up until the time I joined Rush.
That evening I called my Mom and Dad, and talked to my Dad about what I had been seeing and remembering. He told me that when his Dad and Uncle John were young they used to come west to Manitoba from southern Ontario on the “harvest trains,” which gathered young men from as far east as the Maritimes to help bring in the wheat — especially during wartime, when farm labor was scarce. He also told me how after the war, when the first self-propelled combine harvesters appeared in the United States, the operators would work their way north from Texas to Manitoba, like crop-sprayer pilots or cattle drovers, following the harvest and hiring themselves out all the way.
After Winnipeg, I turned northwest on the Yellowhead Highway, just because I’d never gone west that way, and started to think about where to stop for the night. I’d left Thunder Bay that morning at 6:00, under the shimmering arc of the northern lights (as opposed to the “Northern Lites” in Cochrane), then gained an hour as I crossed my first time zone. So when the bike’s digital clock showed 4:30, I’d been on the road almost twelve hours, and had covered 945 kilometres (590 miles), so it was time to start looking for a place to roost.
On the prairies, as in the desert, a clump of trees in the distance usually means a town, and I decided to stop at the next grove of trees on the horizon. Closer up, Neepawa looked welcoming, and my motel room was a memorable time warp. The screen door squeaked open to reveal three double beds with buttoned naugahyde headboards, “mahogany” paneled walls, with a feed-mill calendar and a religious sampler (“For God so loved the world”), sparkly-tile ceiling, and shag carpeting of an orangybrown hue that used to be called “whisky” (though it didn’t match my plastic cup of The Macallan).
I took my drink outside to the covered walkway and watched the dark clouds looming in from the northwest, trailing ghostly tendrils of rain. Dust swirled beside the highway, whipped along by the wind that heralded the coming storm, and soon the rain swept in, pounding on the roof and bouncing on the shiny pavement. Distant thunder rumbled, and lightning flashed off to the south. I stood and watched for awhile, delighted, then put on my rain jacket and walked up the road to “Mr. Ribs” restaurant.
That morning I had written a hopeful title in the front of my journal, “The Healing Road,” and after a salad and “triple combo” of ribs, souvlaki, and shrimp, I offered these reflections on that theme:Thinking while I stuffed my face that I feel better tonight than I’ve felt in — more than a year. I’ve achieved “immersion” in The Journey, which used to be a necessarily limited state of mind: especially when interrupted by work. Or the end of the journey. Neither applies at this point. 590 miles of healing today, maybe. “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
That closing line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises had acquired a fresh resonance for me lately, in the conscious irony of entertaining a wish without believing in its possibility. I did not really believe in a destination called “healing,” but at least I had begun to believe in the road, and that was enough to keep me riding westward. Through those days and nights I wasn’t always feeling “better,” as the process of grieving oscillated, even through each day, from a little better to a little worse, from total existential despair to those occasional rays of hope and interest, which was definitely a spark of healing.
The next morning carried me into another positive response to worldly beauty, as I left Neepawa at sunrise on a fine prairie morning, cool and cloudy, the road still wet from the night’s showers. The Yellowhead Highway meandered gently with the contours of the land, then ran straight and endless to the horizon, as I kept pace with a long train to the south. The sun peeked through the clouds behind me and flared in my mirrors, turning the shiny pavement to a gold ribbon between the rich green fields. My helmet filled with the fresh, nostalgic scent of damp hay.
And sometimes there was music playing in my helmet, too, as my “mental jukebox” transformed the white noise of the wind passing into a soundtrack in richly detailed high fidelity. Sometimes the same song seemed to repeat all day long; other times the playlist moved through different ones; the only distinction seemed to be that none of them were from the “family soundtrack,” for of course I tried to steer the day’s selections toward the pop hits from my youth or Sinatra standards. Otherwise the choice seemed random, though sometimes triggered by the scenery (“The wheatfields and the clotheslines and the junkyards and the highways come between us”), the weather (“Here’s That Rainy Day”), a road sign (“By the Time I Get to Phoenix”), or my mood (“Everything Happens to Me”). When the riding became demanding, the music receded into the background, but when it was just me and the motorcycle on a pretty stretch of road, my brain would turn up the radio.
So early on a Sunday morning there was almost no traffic, and I cruised with my legs stretched in front of me, resting on the cylinder heads. Occasional ponds and marshes were dotted with waterbirds, and near Yorkton I saw my first magpie, a sure sign of the West.
Breakfast at Russell Inn: nice-looking motel and “family restaurant.” Wasn’t
thinking of stopping yet, but couldn’t resist. Just after 8:00, done over 100 miles very pleasantly. Rheostatics’ “prairie music” in head, occasional sad thoughts, a few tears, but otherwise, couldn’t be better (?).
Obviously I hadn’t lost my sense of irony or humor, and that was a good thing, for after covering a personal record 1,176 kilometres (735 miles) to make it into Edmonton that day, I would be sorely tested the following day. After having a leaky boot repaired, getting an oil change at the BMW dealer, and replenishing my stock of The Macallan, I made a late start out of Edmonton. Riding north now, making my way toward the Alaska Highway, I stopped at a rural gas station and pulled the bike back onto its centerstand in front of the pump. While I fiddled with getting my tankbag out of the way, the young attendant handed me the nozzle, and I started filling the tank. I noticed that the fuel seemed kind of foamy, but didn’t think too much about it until the boy came out again and said, “Your bike runs on diesel?”
I looked down at the nozzle’s handle and noticed it was green, which often (though not always) means diesel, and at the oily fuel foaming up from the filler neck. I shook my head in disbelief and said, “No.”
Then through gritted teeth, “Do you have a siphon?”
We drained the poisonous diesel from the tank and refilled it with gasoline, but when I started the bike and tried to ride away, it died at the edge of the parking lot. On the good side of the balance sheet for this particular obstacle, the owner of the station, a stocky man whose features suggested a Native heritage, was quietly efficient, and his country garage was well equipped with the tools we would employ to try to get the dead machine running again. I started by unloading all the luggage from the bike and pulling out my toolkit, then we went to work.
