Leaving home for college, finding solace on two wheels, slipping into danger, a journey to Alaska, a relationship gone sour, time wasted, dangers avoided, rules broken. Slipping, falling – and getting back up.
On a humid night alongside the beach, riding the A1A, the smell of salty seawater poured into the vents on my helmet. The pitch black expanse was only lit up by dim, faded yellow lights, the occasional storefront display, and the sprinkled starry sky all together creating a silent and calming palette. Waves rose gently and crashed while my engine hummed, and hummed, and hummed, and I shifted up a gear, opening my helmet visor to let the breeze in. The traffic was light towards midnight.
My impending surprise came not from the sound of another motorcycle engine, or rather, the sound from the exhaust, which is the real culprit, and which countless moto enthusiasts had spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get just the right note – mine being entirely stock and boring – no, my surprise came from the headlight that I saw approaching me from the other side of the road. A few moments ago I was deep in cop territory, an area heavily policed due to the nightclubs and riffraff tendencies of Daytona Beach, “The Worlds Most Famous Beach” after all. Out of the darkness, I saw a light bobbing up and down – not exactly a common sight to see in an area where all eyes are on you. The engine’s tune lifted, then died, as the headlight shot towards the sky, returning with a bit less force to the ground. Someone was out here, apparently unaware of the danger – or not caring about such, as a ticket for this behavior is roughly a thousand dollars – with a mission to practice wheelies.
Eighteen-year-old me, now a college sophomore by credit count, decked out in padded moto gear from head to toe, barely cruising by at 30 to 40 miles per hour, blissfully took a pit stop at a beachfront parking lot, and removed my head armor like a knight, shaking out my hair and taking a breath from the steady salt breeze emanating from the ocean – emanating somewhere deep out and above the Atlantic as pressure fronts collide. It was at this moment that I realized I may have made a mistake, since our moto mischief friend apparently felt a little lonely, and began actively moving in my direction, steadily like the breeze, up until he shut off his engine and rolled to a stop a few feet to my right, and the bobbing headlight flicked to darkness.
Our mischief man in question would be the one and only Martin himself, a true icon of the Florida streets, a moto brother with a liter bike – a sports motorcycle with a massive one thousand sized engine – engaging in some southern form of “squidding” – riding without necessary gear, as I noticed he was in flip-flops. His tentacles gripped the bars, his toes flicked the gear controls, and one, or perhaps two, fingers loosely gripped the handlebar brake, just in case. This man was a 90s kid with a BMX bike and not a worry in the world, a raw confidence which may have been misplaced sitting on a 1000cc engine, but a confidence nonetheless that all would work out.
Martin displayed all the amicable traits of a southerner, but his motivation wasn’t entirely friendship, it was the mechanic inside of him, nagging away that something was awry in the world, something mechanical, metal or steel or aluminum, producing a noise most terrible to the trained ear of his field, his passion, his obsession. What was this nails on a chalkboard tune? Producing a small flashlight and bounding off his motorcycle to diagnose the issue, he spoke swiftly and breathed a sigh into the thick humid air. “Your chain is loose”, he said, “it’s not something that’ll stop you from getting home, but you should tighten it soon”. With a thank of appreciation and a few questions about such a “chain”, the conversation continued, and Martin learned that this was my very first motorcycle. In short, I was entirely ignorant to the basic workings of a such a machine, and he offered: “Come to my shop and we can fix this together, I have the right tools. Tomorrow.”
Fixing my third motorcycle in Martin’s garage, alone, after he moved out.
Let’s squeeze the throttle and pull it back. A year passes without incident and I ask Martin all my moto questions and concerns while he teaches me everything. Hours go by as he shows me how to clean the carburetors of the 20-year-old bike I had; I meet his wife (and cats), hang out at the house for a movie here and there – with ice cream, vibrating from the unnecessarily massive subwoofer that Martin had rigged up – and, the following year, I rent a room from them at the house – “the shop”, as Martin would say. I lived with the mischief man himself, who turned out to be kind, understanding, happy to help, and a true icon of the moto world. Time slips by, another set of tires, chain and sprockets, oil changes, a brake fluid flush. I purchase his wife’s old motorcycle after growing out of mine, but no, it’s not a liter bike, I was smart enough to not do that to myself. College hums along – I’m making As and Bs – but my head is on moto mode; my social skills are limited, my anxiety is high with my peers, and frankly, a lot of my college experience was recovering from – and in the wake of – the negative effect that high school had on me. What energy I had to study in 8th grade was crushed by the social, physical, and academic grind of 9th through 12th. My mood dipped and barely came back fully for college, but what I lacked in peer-to-peer social skills I made up for in maturity in the driving domain. My head was cool at a level unheard of for moto riders my age. I rode for hours, I stopped for red lights, I didn’t do wheelies, I let stress pass me. Dark nights on the A1A, with or without bobbing headlights coming the other direction, turn into sunny, steaming asphalt mornings, then brutal, thunderstruck stormy afternoons… and then Thursday comes. Thursday night is moto night in Orlando.
I still have fond memories of discovering the event, in all its asphalt glory and sketchiness of Kissimmee, Florida, not exactly a place to hang out late at night, or “hang out” at any time outside a vehicle, for someone like me, a skinny boy eating a sandwich outside the gas station, after paying ten bucks to fill all of three gallons – but never in the dark – and certainly not near southern Orlando. One late night I took the famous I-4 down to Orlando to see the city lights and relax, instead of going north to Ormond Beach and see the other kind of lights I loved: the stars. Wheels spun and the engine roared as my bike sliced through the night air, and, simply due to sixth-sense moto enthusiast intuition, I took a turn to go south through Orlando, considering I had plenty of time and energy to explore and admire the dimly lit cityscape around me – the buildings and structures of which, of course, made me feel tiny, my engine barely a mosquito’s buzz, eaten by the walls of concrete. At last I had done a circle or two around the blocks, shifting a gear or two and slipping the hot clutch, reached the city limits going south, and stopped at a red light. In front of me lay a squad of moto enthusiasts, perhaps a bit like Martin, but with less care for the rules of the road, quite a bit I would say, and a fork in time lay in front of me.
Self-awareness being my strong suit, I recognized the danger of the option to follow them, knowing full well they would speed beyond my safe threshold limits, and I kept decent pace along a flat, straight, 4-lane wide road with minimal traffic – a critical piece of the story to add. Five minutes passed, I felt OK, ten minutes, I started to wonder the destination, and behold, upon the empty asphalt strip that we were riding along late that night, perhaps sixty to a hundred motorcycles, parked along the sides of the road, came into view out of nowhere, with not a warning of their existence or an apology for their behavior. By all common sense this looked like a planned event, given it was catered by a food truck, but I had no idea who or what it was, and quickly realized that it was a mixed bag: these were part hooligans, part opportunists, part random bikers, part bored Orlando night riders, and that I had stumbled into the most right time, right place discovery of my college life. By luck, I had stumbled upon it, the Thursday night street riders crew, with their official-unofficial drag racing strip in southern Orlando.
In the darkness, out of the dead humid air of midnight, alongside the smell of a Mexican food truck, a line of four to eight bikers formed, revving their engines, and at last one took off, the smell of burning fuel lingering in the air behind the few that followed, some keeping up, some falling behind.
A street rider is a motorcycle first and a person second, hosting a fiery connection between a brain and a machine. Two hands, two feet, two eyes to scan the wheels in front, head on a swivel – no metal to block the view, no metal to save you. One hand throttle, one hand clutch, one hand brake, one foot shifting gears, one foot braking – if the skills to use the rear brake exist. All parts of the body are seized by the machine’s demands. A well-performed clutch slip in a drag race is a painting, the exhaust is a concert, the rising tune and its crescendo broken apart by blips in shifting, recognized a quarter mile away or more by the moto enthusiast. With the rider so busy, so focused on all his appendages working together, his mind is at ease, he is one with the machine and has full control over his fate.
Riding became escapism, a bit, in a way that it locked me into a world where I could focus on a level nothing else would give me. And I am sorry to say that, despite my level headedness, or maybe because of that exact characteristic, I found myself debating whether or not I should continue dawning the saddle of the machine anymore, after only a few years into it. My stresses from the danger started to catch up to me, and I recognized that the night riders didn’t fit the profile of who I wanted to hang around with. This came to a head one Thursday night when a man rolling slowly alongside the group exited his dark SUV, and, producing a weapon, pointed it towards a biker in front of me, only a mere 20 feet away or less, to arrest him for something, something which didn’t matter to me and still doesn’t. There were criminals within the club, and I knew that going into it, but was lured by the raw interest and desire to race.
Counting my “close calls” or near-death moments produces a figure that’s essentially zero. I rode safely yet had fun, but I knew that becoming accustomed to – and comfortable with – high speeds would push this luck. Over time I racked up tens of thousands of riding miles, including from Florida to Montreal and back, and had no worries that I would lose my cool, moreso that the probability of a major incident would increase given my comfortability with using the true power of the engine. That being said, I had never even done a wheelie.
Guys, where even are we?
Surprises during my time in Florida came in different forms, but never quite as large as the shadow cast over our house on one particular spring afternoon. That day I rode home after class and discovered that a massive, fifth-wheel RV camper was parked in the driveway. Naturally my first assumption was this must be the latest project of our resident obsessive mechanic, and that I’d hear about it immediately and at great length concerning what’s wrong with it, what sounds weird, and how we can fix it. Such a conversation did happen, of course, but the real punchline was in the plans for the vehicle which unfolded over the next few months. Martin wanted to move out of Florida and had asked a few friends to help him find a job as an aviation mechanic somewhere. When a friend on the opposite side of the country spoke up and vouched for his mechanical abilities, Martin’s path out of Florida became clear. That friend, in peak chaotic fashion, was not just across the country, but talking to him on the phone from Juneau, Alaska, a four-hour time zone difference and about as far as possible one could get from Daytona Beach that would still be part of the USA.
The next surprise was even better. Getting the camper – and Martin and his wife’s lives – prepared for such a move took the course of many months, and during this time they lived inside the camper on a regular basis while it was parked outside their house, to test the waters and see what would go wrong and what the RV life looked like. I also participated in this, eating ice cream and watching movies with them regularly, now in a house on wheels. When Martin had a project to do with the electrical wiring, or some other component that needed fixing or upgrading, I was there for emotional support and to grab the right tools out of the toolbox. By and large, he did most of the work alone though. The idea was entirely absent from my head until Martin put it in there, that I could come along for the road trip, helping with navigation and with their move in general all the way out to Juneau. With an adventure like this on the table, I spent little time deciding, and before I knew it we were off, all eight wheels spinning north on I-95 towards Connecticut, to visit family first, before crossing into Canada at Niagara Falls for a week-long journey across all of Canada to reach Scagway, Alaska. There, a ferry ticket – or tickets, since we needed eight full spots to accommodate the truck and camper’s size when parked sideways across the parking spaces – was already pre-ordered as the final step in us making it down the channel and into Juneau. The remoteness of the area means that there are no roads connecting to the city; one must fly or boat their way into, and out of, this part of Alaska.
The Mendenhall Glacier from a mountain lookout to the West.
Two weeks on the road will test anybody’s patience, but a month is the situation we found ourselves in for one major reason which deserves little deliberation: our truck broke down. Now, Martin, being a mechanic and all, was gung-ho to fix the engine when it started sputtering violently in the middle of upstate New York, and we were able to drop the camper at a campground and limp the truck to a local mechanic, quite literally being passed by Amish horse and buggies, but unfortunately no luck was to be found in the mechanical realm for this problem – which very well may have been an intermittent electrical issue. Regardless, we found ourselves in a sticky situation, wondering, what options even exist in this scenario? Martin has a job lined up and a start date, multiple hundreds of dollars were spent on ferry tickets, not to mention the camper itself – with two people’s entire lives packed into boxes inside – couldn’t simply be left behind to rot! When push came to shove, and no solution was found for the truck, there was one final option.
Yes, it’s true. In the summer of that year, sitting dead in the water in a campground with a fifth wheel RV with no truck, Martin purchased another truck in Cooperstown, upstate New York, and installed the fifth-wheel attachment so we could continue our journey West. With a haul load this large, only a certain number of trucks were suitable, and Martin asked his parents for some extra money to make the financials work out. How that all worked I have not a clue and frankly don’t want to think about the sheer cost of an extended-bed diesel RAM 3500, but at the very least this was before COVID hit, so things were priced differently. The Alaska journey almost ended with a bang – or maybe a sputter – then with some luck and parental support, steadily continued with a clank from the metal on the fifth wheel mount as the camper connected up and the house settled into place. Now, it was showtime to get to the other side of Canada.
Driving for a week across Canada brought us through some exciting areas, one of which was Jasper national park. Years later, reading John Muir, I thought back to Jasper and realized that I could never give it justice in words like Muir could with Yosemite, and the reality of the moment being in the park was that my base emotion was not necessarily a feeling of serenity, or perhaps spirituality, but instead one of powerful awe and the self-awareness of not giving it justice in real-time; trying to grasp the feeling of that overwhelming beauty and enormous natural structure felt impossible. In some ways it makes one feel guilty to not be able to look harder, to gaze for longer, to be able to store all the details and characteristics of the mountains and mountain goats, hot springs, lakes and the expanse itself of all we saw in Jasper and outside of it too, along the road through Canada. The final stretch of driving through the Yukon to reach Scagway is particularly memorable; the broad mountain pass our truck and camper – now tiny compared to the terrain – traversed was as pretty as it was emotional: we had made it to the opposite side of the country, and now the final ferry ride left us with only hours before we’d be in Juneau.
What a time it was, truly, to be out of the truck and walking about a cold steel ferry, gazing into the abyss of the channel in front of us, and the terrain holding us on both sides like a set of mountainous hands.
My story of Alaska is not just about a location, albeit first and foremost it is an enchanting place to be, but about a mindset, an internal state of being, a complex life story leading up to a certain point about a year after I helped Martin and his wife move out there. You see, I didn’t stay long in Juneau after we arrived from the cross-country drive. I spent a week or so, exploring, meeting Martin’s friend and seeing how his new life would look, and then I went back to Florida, flying back over the mountain range north of Seattle and making my way back to college to finish my studies in science and all the above that I was signed up to do, and dedicated to complete, early, as I felt ready to be done. ‘Most prisons are in the mind’, one might say – I hadn’t found myself able to escape my own head in a while, and despite leaving my hometown behind and hedging my bets that the move might fix some of my problems, the results were mixed, some problems quelled, silenced, others simply went dormant with no solution, others stayed and I tried to weather or ignore them. I still found in myself the same Daniel, too young to be managing a small business again without any support – this time the business of speeding through a degree – yet, flat out just brute-force doing it and performing the actions to succeed, not necessarily on autopilot, but with a nagging feeling that I was getting less and less out of my time, that I wasn’t developing but instead dying from the grind.
I had spent my entire life in school up to this point, and despite my motorcycle adventures and newfound freedom living away from home, I was ready to find a real job and start making money, and be out of this homework and lecture grind, the soft disrespect of yet another worksheet to pick at my brain, to keep me a busy bee, another test, another graded assignment which graded truly nothing about me. Rate my courage, my vitality, my empathy and maturity – grade me on some other metric than academics, which largely boils down to memorization skills – meet me where I am internally and give me a scenario to chew on, to be a part of, to build muscle and tact and acumen for something beyond these papers, and one would have found an incredible person behind the paper – languishing. Perhaps my disillusionment with schooling pushed me to be spontaneous and daring, to assert my reality as a person and not just a work bot, into the world – maybe this is all catharsis, payback for the time spent indoors or a product of the complex emotions involved in academic performance – maybe I knew I was damaged, my perception of the world skewed, and I needed to go out, explore, and heal. But one thing I knew for sure was that I needed a change, and perhaps this came a bit too late along my life journey, as I could have used a switch up sometime in high school, and knowing that the option didn’t exist, I felt imprisoned, both at school and in suburbia, which added to my stresses, but regardless, I was ready for change, and change I made.
Graduation happened, moving to Boston happened, starting the big job happened, a year or so passed – and then COVID happened. The pandemic brought with it the immediate challenge of making a decision early in spring which I was not prepared to make, but knew that it needed to be done: my lease was ending for my studio in Boston, back when studios weren’t priced quite like mansions in Brookline, MA, yet still very pricey, and I opted not to renew it, considering the pandemic had pushed my company’s leadership to let all workers go remote for the foreseeable future. With no reason to be in the city to weather the pandemic, I considered other options where to go. And with that came a brief conversation with a certain mechanically-inclined contact across the country, who invited me to come to Juneau and stay once again, like old times, with the Florida moto man himself, the one and only Martin, and his wife and cats.
That’s half a lie, actually, because it’s his wife who made the final decision, inviting me and saying it’d be cool to have me out there with them – 22 hours of darkness in the winter in Alaska really tests a marriage, and she needed something or someone to break apart their life and day-to-day, from what I understood. Knowing this detail, I took the risk, since I had lived with them before and was compelled by the adventure again to live and play out there, since summer was coming, and the daylight situation flips – 22 hours of sun – which makes all the difference. They had moved out of the RV and into an apartment, which had plenty of room for me to remote work, stay warm and be comfortable. It was a golden opportunity. I always look ahead, and I was ahead of the game, almost jumping the gun on COVID, for it was probably mid-February when I mentally made the decision to take the risk and fly, and at that time the main hub for cases was in Seattle, so I realized that I would want to double-mask up and fly through Minnesota, up to Anchorage, and down to Juneau from there. The final flight was essentially empty, maybe 3 people on the big JetBlue aircraft. I had no plans to leave there until the pandemic was over, and I mentally was prepared to go hiking once it got warmer, explore and be outside the big city of Boston, and enjoy it all, knowing that I was lucky that I could do this, stay employed during COVID, and maybe even forget about it for a moment and enjoy the time as the pandemic ripped through the world.
My absolute favorite Alaska picture, taken from the road up to Eagle Crest.
Just like that, I found myself living in Alaska. Surprises are common with Martin as we’ve learned, and two things would surprise, maybe even shock me a bit, upon my arrival and the events of the first week or so. Upon touching down in Juneau in an empty airplane, the mountainous valley surrounding me, Martin’s wife picked me up and we started driving down the road to the trailer park. This was the destination, as I quickly figured out, because they had apparently moved out of the apartment and back into the trailer park, which was news to me. Surprising, but my fate was sealed and there was no going back. Remote working for a company in Boston out of an RV in Alaska, with a four-hour time zone difference, in a pandemic, was not on my bingo card of life, but I embraced the chaos and dug in my heels.
Martin’s job always seemed interesting to me, I mean, I knew that it became a drag after the uniqueness wore off of fixing airplanes for a living, but the entire concept of mechanically tinkering on a full-sized aircraft was foreign to me, so Martin being himself invited me into the hangar that he worked at, to look at the float planes and whatever and whatnot. Upon arrival, naturally, his boss showed up and yelled at him for this, since I was not authorized to be in the space, and this was a big deal considering the news was ablaze with how COVID was ripping through Seattle, and it was only a matter of time before it made its way in full force into Juneau. Luckily I had arrived safely and was paranoid, double-masked and went the nine yards to make sure I wasn’t spreading the virus, but, this meant nothing to the boss man, as we say, who saw a 21-year old arrive from Boston and show up in the hangar.
Sparing some details, the company essentially fired Martin because of this, laying him off indefinitely at the start of COVID, which was a death sentence for a job. You can imagine my stress, as within a short window of time, I had arrived, moved into a camper – unexpectedly, a camper, with two people and two cats, a space which really didn’t have enough room for all of us – and got Martin fired. Now, me being me, I was accustomed to high stress environments and dug my heels in, immediately working with Martin to find a job, obsessing over Indeed dot com once again in my life, as I knew all the tricks from a few years ago job-searching, and we wrote his resume and started applying. Juneau being Juneau, and in fact Alaska in general, with its isolation from the rest of the country, produces a unique opportunity for workers living in town: companies are desperate for employees and ready to hire. Within a week, Martin was interviewing, and between my writing and application help and his great personality that came across over the phone, he was employed, quite frankly at a much better job than the first one. I can’t help but take a chunk of the credit for this.
Folks, I was so proud to be the catalyst which helped Martin get a job fixing medical evacuation jets – a top tier local job for an aviation maintenance professional like himself, and a huge step up into the world of turbine jet mechanics – about a week or two after I showed up in Alaska. I had no words. Such a thing was not on my bingo card, and I considered how lucky I got that I found him a job immediately, as being unemployed was not an option for our living situation, let alone his marriage. Of course, I felt a bit guilty for being a part of the scenario which got him in hot water at the first job. With his employment in order, the next pressing concern was simply to get out as much as possible as the weather warmed up, and start enjoying my life in Juneau.
Let’s stop for a moment to make sure we are on the same page about Alaska. Romanticizing such a place is easy, and it is enchanting and beautiful and raw and real and stunning, but take a moment to recognize the true effect of the isolation, the cold, the endless darkness then endless light, the raw characteristics of snow, mud, snow, mud, a barren dirt field, a glacier: imagine brown, gray and white in the winter as the palette – physically and emotionally. I entered back into my friend’s lives at a time they needed me most, and did my best to cheer them up, I suppose, albeit I wasn’t thinking directly about that, but my presence and break-up of the monotony of their day-to-day certainly helped. Juneau is so isolated that it has one road going north; when we say “I’m going up the road”, it means the only road that goes “up”. Driving out of Juneau is impossible. The isolation of this and the stark quality of the cold darkness make it tough to stay sane in the winter, and I was lucky that I was arriving at the tail end of this season.
By the time summer came into full swing, I was living two days in each day: I’d wake up at 4 or 5am to catch my 9am meeting remotely out of Boston, work until about noon or so, and then the sun would be in the sky until practically midnight. I could hike, explore, and get out and do whatever for a whole extra day after I was done with work. This exhausted me to no end, but I was happy to be there. Our tiny camper went from a winter cabin, all insulated and closed up, to a summer oasis of fresh air blowing through as the bears sniffed around in the woods, the sun lightly melting the glacier down the road.
Martin’s wife let me ride her bike!
One time during college, I found myself in a unique position over summer where I had the time to make a longer road trip from Florida to go home to New England and potentially ride Mt. Washington after visiting my brother in Montreal. Along a pitch black highway entrance somewhere in Northern Virginia, I found myself accelerating straight forwards to get to highway speeds, and you can imagine my surprise when the highway ramp started to curve, and my small headlight couldn’t quite cut through the darkness to warn me in time. It was the only time I fell off the bike in motion, ever, and as my brain and machine careened off the road into the grass, I fell sideways downwards, with a huge backpack with all my stuff in it, so the bag took most of the blow. I got right up, someone stopped to help me pick the bike up, and I kept riding. All in all, getting to Montreal was a great trip and a fun ride, and I left in high spirits to go south to Mt. Washington.
I left my brother’s place in Montreal, finding a calm Canadian morning waiting for me, and the sun already stretching its way into the sky. My bike was humming along, humming along, humming along – and then a sputter. A sputter again, here and there, nothing major, but something awry. After I crossed the border, I pulled off the highway and found a decent spot to stop. Upon inspecting the bike, it turned out that the fuel filter had a crack in it, or something of the sort, so when I popped the tank up to take a look underneath at the fuel lines, the filter itself cracked right in half, leaving me with no way to move the gas into the engine and keep going. Such a moment is rare, and realizing I had done my due diligence in leaving early so as to have extra time to handle anything odd like this, I simply stopped to think, sitting down in the grass and wondering about what I have at my disposal to fix the bike, and what it would look like to abandon it and come back. Most importantly, I didn’t panic. I tinkered around for a bit and then sat down.
Broken down on the side of the road, in upstate Vermont.
What a beautiful place to be, amongst the rolling hills, on a bright, dry and sunny day, truly the best possible break down weather, and as I hung around thinking and hedging my bets that my brain would spontaneously create a solution to this problem, my mind wandered. I thought about my journey, the hours I had left, Montreal itself, the terrain in front of me, and as I thought about all this time slipped through my fingers. Before I knew it, it had been more a minute. The faint roar of an engine started coming closer, and closer, and I thought I knew what I was hearing but couldn’t quite pinpoint it until I heard the shifting blip: it was a motorcycle. Behold, the savior of my East coast journey, a local Mr. Dan himself who went out for a morning ride and stopped by me to see what’s the matter, and wouldn’t you know it – he was on his way to the hardware store. A smile, an explanation, a how-dee-do and big thank you later, and Dan was off on his way to snag a fuel filter alongside his hardware store run. Within an hour, I was back on the road.
For some situations, it seems that there is just no other option than to wait for a miracle. Otherwise, I would have simply phoned my relatives in Connecticut and asked them to make a five-hour drive north, same-day, I suppose, or hitch a ride to the hardware store myself? I didn’t even think that a hardware store would have such a thing, but surely a piece of the right tubing or pipe that would fit to bypass the filter, or something like this, would do the job. I had barely thought through those options.
One day in Alaska I broke free of the remote work grind early, grabbed a folding chair, and headed to the lake to… well, sit there, honestly, since I had no desire to do much else – it was my choice to be still, unlike breaking down in Vermont that summer, and I brought a book to read and a boonie hat and really that’s all a man can ask for in life sometimes. Carl Sagan accompanied me on a bright Alaskan summer day, and I tried hard to relax and just breathe and think about all that was going on the world, my place in it, and my development as a person over these years. College was gone – I was working part-time on a master’s remotely, one course at a time, but that’s different – I was away from home and my hometown, I had friends who cared about me in Alaska and a good head on my shoulders, yet my stress level was so high. The story of motorcycles, college, and Alaska is really a story of me fighting myself, that I was taking opportunities and being adventurous, yet the microcosm of my head was stuck in a loop of financial stress, miscellaneous anxieties, and boredom. The job wasn’t making me happy or fulfilling anything outside of dollars, and I felt trapped in debt repayments and stressed that the world was on fire with a virus.
There was a low point in my Alaska adventure, where I truly felt like I had broken down on the side of the road and had nowhere to go, that the only way forward was to start walking, and continue trudging along, and if I’m being honest I might even say that I had already passed that point, and that I had trudged for miles mentally through the slog of self-awareness and confusion and endless stress during a complex time inside a chaotic headspace of mine, and in doing so I had simply fallen, or perhaps laid down out of sheer exhaustion, and was waiting for night, so at least the stars would come out while I was laying down helpless like a starfish, looking up at the sky, and a constellation would be my miracle – the miracle that would make me stop, be present, and realize how much I had, and all I needed was right in front of me, yet I couldn’t grasp it, I was waiting for it to come. To take an active part in life was difficult, to not just look ahead in anxiety, but instead to grab a hold of the bars, and say firmly, I can do this, I can find my way and build a life that’s better, seek and find my passions, and yes, it will be a mess, as all things human are, but it’ll be worth it. Yet I found myself not willing to push ahead sometimes, and despite my great adventures – which many people may look up to for inspiration in their spontaneity and dare – I too struggled, as all of us do, to tell myself that everything was OK, and breathe.
The glacier is on right, in the distance.
The mind is an expanse, and a motorcycle can ground it a bit, so in the moment the expanse seems to make sense, and all is right in the world, as the machine takes an input and responds as expected, which is so unlike the inner world of the mind, with all its twists and turns and chaos. A motorcycle, and an unlikely friend, gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to ride, travel, and feel at home – all twists and turns of life after moving out for college. Alaska, after all, was a blast, with all its highs and lows, snow and sunshine, friends and bossy foes – but foes whose energy we harnessed to opened new doors. A place is only so good as the people you know in it, and I knew some great people, and especially a great, caring, and adaptable couple, who unfortunately split apart later that year – another fork in the road for us all. When fall came and it started to get dark, I faced another fork, and I moved south to escape the impending doom of Alaskan winter.
And I find myself wondering late at night sometimes, what’s going on south of Orlando, or how the trailer park is in Juneau, but most importantly, I have never quite wrapped my head around how this all happened, how it is all real and the myriad ways I developed because of all this chaos. I dared to grab ahold of life and found myself so animated by it – by finding solace on two wheels, by traveling, by daring to dare, by grounding myself time and time again – that I nearly lost my footing, carried away on two wheels or eight, in sunshine or snowed out next to a glacier, or simply internally, along the path of making sense of the expanse itself, and, most importantly, in the raw process of learning how to trip, fall, and get back up.
Cheers,
Daniel
