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.
• • •
What happens when we step out of what’s predictable? Can our lives be enlarged just as our careers are finally on a set path or the kids go off to college, when it feels as if there are no more surprises to come? I have to ask myself: What is happening in my brain, in my psyche, in my personality that compels me to seek out scary, risky experiences?
Certainly I’m learning a few things: First, that the motorcycling is not an end in itself, a risk for risk’s sake, but rather a pathway to a more authentic life, an unearthing of my own power and fortitude. Second, when I try something new, my capacity to learn and grow leaps geometrically; I feel empowered and alive. No material possessions, no amount of money, can buy that; I have to create it. Third, it’s important to let others see me when I’m learning and failing and struggling and scrambling. No one on this planet has it all together. Yet we spend so much time thinking others are somehow better off, understand deeper, have mastered life in a way we never will. When I let others see me try and fail and try and fail better, we all grow. I expand in that I more fully accept myself, and those who witness me are perhaps challenged to do the same. Together we recognize a prickly truth about the human condition.
Today, the risk I undertake is riding a motorcycle. For someone else, it might be exploring a museum for the first time, or reading outside the familiar realm, or sharing honestly with a friend on a deeper level. Learning to cook a new dish presents its own set of risks, as does signing up for a class at the local university, or taking singing lessons.
I toggle the engine kill-switch to its “on” position, waiting for the lights to tell me Izzy’s ready. When I thumb the ignition button, she rumbles deep and throaty. Five hundred and fifty pounds of metal come alive, all but begging me to rev the engine and let her run. Lifting the kickstand with my right foot, I press down on the shifting peg with the ball of my left foot and feel the satisfying clunk of first gear. I twi
st the throttle gently while letting out the clutch and roll at low revs away from the house, a courtesy to my family and neighbors who probably don’t want to be awakened this early on a weekend morning. I nearly asked the dealership to trade out the loud custom pipes on this bike when I bought her, thinking I was more suited to something quieter, more ladylike. But then I was reminded that the exhaust noise is actually a safety feature that would make other motorists aware of me. And besides: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
Within minutes of leaving the hillside subdivision, Izzy and I are carving along La Tuna Canyon Road, paralleling the rise and fall of the San Gabriel foothills. I am en route to Little T (Little Tujunga Canyon), described on Pashnit, a website of California biking routes, as the place God would ride if he had a motorcycle. Its oscillating “twisties” wind through canyons and over summits, presenting one stunning vista after another.
I pass a few other bikers who obviously share the same idea. They gesture to me with a low-down peace sign. Signaling our kinship, I sign back. Were my bike to break down, one of these folks would undoubtedly stop and help. Were I to pass a biker on the side of the road, I would be compelled to do the same by the bond that unites us.
Riding this morning, I feel genderless and ageless, more a point of consciousness than a person. Identity and all the ways it separates me from others flees in the face of swift movement, immense power, and the conviction I am somehow defying the bear-hug of gravity.
People who don’t ride often seem to have trouble getting their head around the idea of a female biker. No, I say, this is not my son’s bike. It’s not my husband’s or my boyfriend’s, either.
Harley and Me Page 3
