The Trip
Suzanne
The Motorcycle
The Weather
Suzanne and I were sitting on the floor of our apartment one evening,
flipping through the pages of our atlas, when the idea for this trip came to
us. We'd just finished a late dinner and a candle dimly lit the pages. It
was spring and the front door was open, letting in the scent of the sweet
peas and jasmine blooming outside. A year had passed since the end of our
last trip, and our savings, though still low, were showing signs of recovery.
For several weeks we had allowed ourselves to begin dreaming of our next
destination. Our atlas lay open and the two of us were leaning over it,
admiring the possibilities as though it were a catalog. We had just flipped
past Mongolia and China when Suzanne stopped.
"Here," she said suddenly. "What do you think of this?"
I watched as her finger described a clock-wise rotation around the Baltic
Sea. It began in Denmark, rolled across the flatlands of Southern Sweden,
up Sweden's east coast, through Stockholm, and continued north to the Arctic
Circle. She then drew a ragged line southeast across the interminable forests
of Finland before sweeping through the mysterious landscapes of Russia and
the Baltic States. Her finger continued across the north coasts of Poland
and Germany and came to a stop again at the Danish border.
I was transfixed. But Russia was still closed to independent travelers in
1990, and the Baltic States-Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania-were still
controlled by Moscow and only vaguely recalled on the pages of our atlas by
pale lines demarcating disputed borders we strained to see with a magnifying
glass. We spent a week making inquiries but were informed that such a trip
by independent travelers was an impossibility. We continued the delightful
task of roaming through our atlas and dreaming as we saved our money.
For two years the idea of traveling around the Baltic Sea remained in the
back of our minds. There was something appealing about traveling in a great
circle, circumnavigating an entire region from beginning to beginning with
thousands of miles in between.
Suzanne and I kept talking about it, and the world began to change in our
favor. Then, in the spring of 1992, the idea surfaced for real. The Iron
Curtain had come down, and the world was under the spell of Gorbachev.
Russia was opening, and, one by one, the Baltic States declared their
independence. Suzanne and I decided to try again and found we could get
visas. Night after night we opened our atlas to page sixty-eight and hovered
there as we plotted a route and talked about how we would make the trip.
Read our
Interview with Allen Noren
in which he talks about writing, traveling as a couple, and commitment to a
life on the road.
At one time she hadn't been afraid. At one time the enormity of our trips
had inspired her. She'd led the way plenty of times. As I sat against the
bike and waited for her to come out of the tent, I thought of a time in
South Africa. We'd rented a cheap, broken-down car that had to be
push-started from a wrecking yard in Pretoria, and we were making our way
south across the Great Karroo towards Cape Town. It was six months after
Nelson Mandela's release from prison, and every day the country was on the
cusp of euphoria and extreme violence. It was also the middle of winter,
and one particular morning it was so cold that we could not sleep and
decided to begin driving.
We had only gone a mile when a man stepped from the tall grass on the side
of the road and stood in the lights of our car. I swerved around him and
kept going. We'd heard and read plenty of stories about hijackings and
murders on the road, so I was surprised when Suzanne told me to stop. I
asked her if she was crazy, but she insisted and said it would be fine.
By that point in the trip I knew she was right. She'd become almost
clairvoyant when it came to the people we met and the places we went there.
I backed the car up and the man, a small black man dressed in rags and
covered with weeds, timidly approached us and motioned to the empty seat.
Though we had no language in common, and though the man could not read a
map, we discovered that he was trying to get home, which he pointed to
vaguely across the empty plateau. And so we drove.
We drove for almost three hours on a combination of small roads and dirt
tracks, guided only by his hand signals. In that time we assembled his
story. He had been traveling for more than two weeks to attend the funeral
of an aunt in the north. He could not afford a bus ticket and had walked
most of the way at night and slept during the day in the bush. He said the
roads were very dangerous, that they were patrolled by rival tribal and
political mobs that killed many people. He said he'd been chased several
times before we picked him up. At one point I asked him why he let us pick
him up. It had been dark and he couldn't tell who we were. He smiled then
and pointed to Suzanne, as if to suggest that he'd sensed her.
After three hours we drove to the end of a dirt track where a number of
dumpster-sized brick houses stood on the cold, wind-swept plateau. Tufts of
snow clung to the low-lying scrub like cotton. We pulled up in front of one
of the houses and a young woman's face, and then a child's, filled the only
window in the house. The man waved, and the look of relief and happiness on
the woman's face was plain to see, and then her tears.
We all got out to say good-bye. As we were standing there, the man did what
I thought was an extraordinary thing. He took Suzanne's hands in his, then
he hugged her and kissed her cheek. They both cried and I felt as though I
was intruding. They looked into each other's eyes for a long time, and only
parted reluctantly.
If you're thinking of traveling as a couple, be sure to read Allen's
Ten Travel Tips for
Couples.
To ride a bike is to be part of the machine. You're essentially sitting on
top of an engine and a raw steering mechanism, and your arms and legs are the
linkages that make it all work. To ride well every part of my body had to
work together in minute ways. With the fingers of my right hand I controlled
the starter, the front brakes, right turn signal, and throttle. The fingers
of my left hand controlled the horn, the left turn signal, and the clutch.
My right foot controlled the rear brake, and with my left I moved up and down
through the gears. My whole body was involved in steering the bike. By
shifting my arms, hips, legs, or even my head, the bike moved in subtle ways.
Every aspect of riding required preparation, thought, and coordination.
To negotiate a turn I had to think about where I was in the lane, when to
begin leaning and how far, how fast I was going, whether there were obstacles
like gravel or oil I had to avoid. If I had to stop I could not just stomp
on the brakes as I would in a car. I had to set the bike up before applying
them so the bike wouldn't begin sliding. I applied the front brakes a little
harden than the rear. At the same time, I carefully worked the clutch and
shifted down through the gears, steered and balanced, and kept an eye on the
traffic in front of me and behind.
To drive a car is to remove yourself from the surrounding environment with
sheets of steel and glass, with soundproofing and lounge-like seats, with
heating and cooling and audio, and with so many springs and cushioned parts
that you may as well be sitting in a movie theater.
To ride was to place myself in the environments I rode through. I felt every
bump and dimple in the road through my hands and arms. I was aware of subtle
temperature changes and smells. I tracked cars like an air traffic controller
tracks planes. It was as if my mind expanded and I was super-aware of all
that was around me. At times it seemed as if I could see without really
seeing, as if my mind could peer around turns and over hills. Best of all, my
view of the world was only limited by how far I could turn my head.
We found the storm trapped in the next valley. The hills were too steep for
it to continue any further, and the storm appeared to be trying to pry the
valley walls apart. The road wound along the right side of the valley floor,
just beyond the storm. I admired the swirling perimeter of the cloud bank. I
admired its density, the way the black core seemed to absorb color, the way
thick cords of rain fell onto the earth. I admired, too, the contrast with
the calm, infinite blue of the sky above the road, and the way the sun healed
the storm's wake. Then, the road made a broad, sweeping turn to the left, into
the storm.
It began simply enough: drops of rain against the windscreen, a slight
buffeting of the bike as the wind increased. Then the sky darkened appreciably
and the temperature dropped. An explosion of light flashed inside of the
clouds. It began to hail. And then the storm swallowed us. I hung onto the
bike, and Suzanne onto me.
It reminded me of a movie I'd seen about storms in the second grade. There
was a segment on hurricanes that showed a U.S. Air Force plane flying through
one to measure its incredible force. The camera was positioned in the cockpit,
behind the pilot and copilot's helmeted heads, so it was easy to imagine
myself there, too. The plane began to shake as it entered the hurricane and
the windshield appeared to melt. The pilot said, "Hang on!" and he hunkered
down and took hold of the steering yoke as if the survival of the plane
depended on how firm he gripped it. The sound of a thousand hammers beating
against the metal skin of the plane filled my ears, and I thought the plane
would surely come apart, as I thought the bike would come apart beneath
Suzanne and me.
The road turned back towards the right side of the valley, and I saw a
wafer-thin section of light that looked like a way out. I remembered how the
pilot of the Air Force plane had seen a similar crack of light, and I
remembered his staccato voice above the noise and confusion of the cockpit.
"I see light!" he said with the conviction of a true believer. I accelerated
the bike, and as we approached the edge of the storm, it opened like a mouth,
and we seemed to speed off the tip of its tongue.
