My dad is giving me his motorcycle. Or rather, one of his motorcycles, with another going to my brother. At 79, he was riding it and tore a rotator cuff when it tipped over at a stoplight and he didn’t have the strength to hold it up. Instead, he tried to have the strength and his body betrayed him.
About two years earlier, he’d torn his other rotator cuff when my brother’s dog fell off the pontoon boat and, loving the dog more than any of his five children, he dropped to the pontoon deck quicker than a 77 year old should move and yanked the dog back onto the boat, less one rotator cuff.
After a certain age when you’re growing up, or at least when I was growing up, I didn’t want to learn anything from my dad. He’d taught himself to fix cars and to this day I change my own oil — once I even did the brakes — but otherwise, I’m pretty much ignorant of the mechanics of automobiles. Likewise, I’d ride on the back of the motorcycle when I was a kid, but I never learned to ride. (I did take to bicycling, some love of that two-wheeled thrill within me.)
Now at 80, my dad has decided to hang up another thing he loves. Most of those loves involve hunting. He’s given up bow-hunting because he hasn’t the shoulder strength to pull the bowstring. He can’t drag and paddle and balance in the duck boat, and so duck hunting is over with, too. Turkeys and pheasants are relatively safe from him as well, since his vision and speed aren’t what they used to be. Animals everywhere in western South Dakota are pleased with these developments.
And so now his motorcycling days have ended, his body betraying him in yet another indignation of age. The longer you live, the more life seems to be about letting go of the things you love, whether you want to or not.
The truth is, I’m not sure I care about riding a motorcycle. I’ve made it a couple years shy of 50 without, and my mid-life crisis isn’t shaping up to be of the two-wheeled variety. But I want that motorcycle.
It’s a big Yamaha, one designed for cruising in comfort and logging highway miles, a huge beast of a bike that you don’t see anyone shy of crusty old men riding these days; the youth are hunched over smaller, more streamlined bikes, looking to get wherever they believe they’re going as quickly and in as much style as possible. This bike is more of a lounge chair on wheels, for those who understand that wherever you’re going, there’s no hurry, and you might as well be comfortable getting there.
I can tell he wants me to have it. Maybe for him it’s like letting go a little more slowly, to see your sons take over the things that gave you joy, hoping that they find some of what you found in those things as well. For me, it’s an opportunity to have my dad teach me to ride a motorcycle, an opportunity that I passed on when I was younger, when I was in such a hurry to get to wherever it was I believed I was going. And so now here I am. And it might be that I’ll just ride that motorcycle directly into my garage, where it may sit for 30 years, but who can say, for certain, where any road leads.
I meant for this to be a story about how I was cleaning out my garage, selling a few things I haven’t used in years to make space for a motorcycle. Selling things is a great way to meet interesting people.
One guy bought an RV waste tank from me. He was sick of Minnesota’s taxes, he said, “sick of this state’s shit,” and so he and his wife bought a motorhome and sold their house and were hitting the road. He was younger than me.
Another guy bought an old 6-gallon glass beer-brewing carboy. He was buying them up all over town and filling them with natural spring water, convinced that data centers would use up all of Minnesota’s water, possibly by tomorrow.
“Those states like California, Arizona, Nevada… they’re coming for our water when they run out.” I picture his entire basement full of glass jars, and though he may not be entirely wrong (his timeline seems off), I didn’t ask whether he’d thought to instead place a rain barrel at each gutter, bury a 1,000 gallon water tank below ground, install a cheap solar-powered pump and not have to buy so many glass jars. But for both of those guys, my overall thinking was that if the shit ever does hit the fan, not all of us can survive, and it might as well be me that does.
Many roads, many ways to travel them.
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