Harley and Me

by Bernadette Murphy

  So what explains my forays into backpacking and mountain-climbing in the High Sierra that began few years ago? Though I still may be found cowering at the top of a twelve-thousand-foot pass, feeling the vertigo of all that distance between me and the ground, the desire to climb those heights somehow supersedes the stomach lurching that comes when I reach their summit. Somewhere along the line, the draw of adventure became stronger than my fear.

  The same was true with running. I am asthmatic and spent most of my childhood incapacitated by bronchitis and pneumonia, restricted from PE and any activity that would make me breathe hard. But after I got in mountain-climbing shape a few years ago, I wanted to maintain my gains over the winter months, so I started slowly trotting around the local high school track. Run half a lap. Walk half a lap. Rebecca often ran with me. And I was the one who always said I hated running! After months of early-morning workouts, we entered our first 5K, a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving, before we headed back home to prepare the family feast. Then we signed up for a 10K. A year later, we’d signed up for half marathons. Within two years, we had trained and completed the full 26.2 miles.

  And now: a motorcycle class.

  I am not a physically imposing person, slender with bird bones and Olive Oyl arms. And yet I find myself drawn to these challenges, all of which raise serious doubts about my abilities. Each requires a kind of risk: to move out of my comfort zone and experiment with activities that scare me.

  Yet, as I master each step along the way—running my first mile without stopping, or carrying a forty-pound backpack for four days over elevation gains of several thousand feet—I feel a rush. Is it endorphins? Adrenaline? Self-esteem? Whatever it is, I am hooked.

  This physical realm seems to be the only one where I can exert some control these days. After years of trying to manage my children, my spouse, my household, and my work, the old control-freak ways no longer work. When I give up trying to control the people and circumstances around me, though, I’m left facing myself, alone.

  I sit quietly as Kitty suggests, and I see it: My life feels deadened. My children are nearly grown and need me less. My marriage has felt empty for years. I thought that when the kids got older, J and I might rekindle the closeness that had originally brought us together. I see now how unlikely that is. My skin feels bruised, chafed with the sadness of it all.

  Oddly, these physical pursuits with their elements of risk seem to ease this discomfort. When I feel unsure of my ability to master a new scenario and yet persevere, new vigor and energy flow, a sense that my life might not be as predictable as I thought. I am still capable of surprising myself, of learning something new about my life. Because, let’s face it: My life is not working out the way I had planned. But maybe there’s a chapter about to open that I didn’t know to anticipate. Maybe there’s a different life to discover, making its way toward me.

  I also feel a little foolish because, at my age, taking these risks makes absolutely no sense. It’s utterly illogical. There is no reason for me to learn to ride a motorcycle, no reason to topple the entire structure of my adult life. Perhaps the fact my father is dying has something to do with it. That, on top of the need to escape the pain of a sad marriage. It’s just a distraction; that’s what it is.

  Why do seemingly normal people like me do risky, difficult, sometimes impulsive things when there’s no real payoff, no financial reward? Nothing tangible is at stake. No reason to put one’s life on the line. No prize, not even a cookie.

  According to evolutionary scientists, risk taking is part of everyone’s DNA—some of us more than others. We take risks because biologically we’re programmed to, because it benefits our species. Sociologists find that risk taking is a common trait across all cultures. One theory focuses on the most evolutionarily ancient part of our brain, known in lay terms as the reptilian brain—that portion of our neural system that controls survival and reproductive instincts. This is the part of the brain that impels us toward risk. That impulse is aided and abetted by brain chemicals, particularly endorphins, those feel-good, naturally produced opiates the brain releases in response to imminent physical danger.

  If we look into our ancient history, the pattern is present from the get-go. Early risk takers were probably the nonconformists. Those likely to explore new trails might have found fresh resources for the tribe, or those who tried to do things differently may have invented original tools or weapons or eaten something no one had ever tried before, thereby discovering a new food source. Because these activities would benefit the whole tribe, those who succeeded with their risks were both lauded as heroes and flooded with pleasant brain chemicals, which produce a high often compared to sex. When we are in danger, certain biological changes occur. Whether that danger is produced by circumstances beyond our control or at own hand doesn’t matter to our bodies; it’s all risky business at the cellular level. The heart speeds up and breathing quickens as the threat looms. When danger passes, we experience deep feelings of release and relaxation. A sense of power, momentary invincibility, a catharsis of sorts.

  It’s a potent brew.

  • • •

  I follow Kitty’s suggestion, sitting silently for twenty minutes. After, I feel revitalized. I’ve made a clear decision: Unless I feel a definite prompt to run out to Dad’s house, or am asked to help, I am going to stick with the class.

  By deciding to take the motorcycle class, I realize I’m after something more than an organic high. I want to remind myself that I am strong and capable. I’ve been taught that I should be afraid of big, muscular things like motorcycles. As a woman, I’ve been programmed to believe I’m too delicate emotionally and physically to handle a machine so demanding. Some part of me knows that’s not true. I can do things that frighten me. In doing so, I hope to discover I am strong enough to survive the approaching loss of my father, the only real parent I’ve ever known.

  • • •

  I drive the fifteen minutes from my home in the suburban foothills into the city, looking for the Costco/Best Buy parking lot. Hidden behind these superstores is an even larger parking lot used by Glendale Harley as its training range. My fellow students gather near a large metal storage building with a rigged-up sunshade. Three lines of four motorcycles each are queued up and waiting. My heart hammers. I’ve spent the past two evenings doing the book-learning part necessary, but somehow I didn’t think about this next step—actually getting on a motorcycle. I’ve got to ride one of those damn things.

  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 ki
nds 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.