• CHAPTER FOURTEEN •
It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture.
It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.
—SENECA
Day Ten: Sunday, September 1
Brookfield, Wisconsin, to Atlantic, Iowa: 446 miles
Rebecca and I get away early, leaving the interstate for a route through miles and miles of cornfields and farmlands. The smell is terrible. Manure and fertilizer, I guess. Ugly Vern has given us a route into Iowa that leaves the interstate after Madison. “It’s much prettier than the main highway,” he’d assured us.
He was right. Corn and agriculture and corn and agriculture, but lovely rolling hills and lots of green.
I know it’s unreasonable, but I have held a grudge against Iowa my entire life, and yet this is the first time I’ve visited the state. When I was a child, my friend from across the street, Denyse, used to visit her older sister in Iowa every summer. I learned later that Denyse was being sexually abused by her father, our neighborhood mailman. To escape her home situation, the summer she was eighteen, she abruptly married an AWOL marine and stayed in Iowa. Her life there did not improve. One pregnancy was immediately followed by a second. Her husband was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job. Denyse ended up working the graveyard shift at a chicken-processing plant to support their family. One morning her husband picked her up after her shift, still drunk from the night before. He ran the car off the road, and Denyse was killed. But he lived. Misdirected anger, I know, but I have held a grudge ever since.
Now the state has a brief chance to change my opinion.
“Think we can make it to Nebraska?” I ask Rebecca when we stop at a gas station some five hours into the day’s miles.
“Not likely,” she replies. “Not if we want to stay alert.”
Using my smartphone, I randomly pick Atlantic, Iowa, another two hours further on, and I book a motel.
We arrive at our motel and within minutes realize the mistake. The motel is indeed right off the highway as we’d hoped. But all the shops and restaurants that once flanked it are shuttered. The place is a ghost town with this one nearly abandoned motel still standing. We might be the only guests in the joint. But we’ve already paid for the room and are exhausted. We want to strip off our riding clothes, shower, and get something to eat before we crash. At the check-in desk, there’s a small, refrigerated case. The sign tells us that we can buy Swanson frozen potpies for only $1.75 and that Hungry-Man frozen dinners are also available. A complimentary microwave sits on the counter for guest use.
“Is there a restaurant within walking distance?” I ask the clerk.
“No, ma’am.”
“Nothing?”
“No, ma’am. That’s why we offer these frozen entrées.” Entrées. That’s the actual word she used.
“Thank you. But where is the nearest place to get a cooked meal?”
“Ten miles,” she points in the opposite direction of the highway. “In town.”
Showering and changing will have to wait. Everything hurts when we again mount the bikes we thought we had parked for the night. In “town” we find a Burger King. The only other option is Oinkers, and though the restaurant has closed its main dining room for the season, they offer to serve us in the bar. We opt to share an Iowan steak, touted as some of the best beef in the country. The steak is only fair and barely an improvement on the frozen entrées back at the motel.
But the joy we feel when we can finally peel off our riding gear and fall into bed is unspeakable. Though I’m sorry to say, my opinion of Iowa has not improved.
Day Eleven: Monday, September 2
Atlantic, Iowa, to Ft. Morgan, Colorado: 513 miles
Nebraska is a uniform plane of grassland, cornfields, and more of the smothering of late summer. When we stop for gas and cautiously ask for a restaurant suggestion, we are directed for the second time on this trip to a local airport, this one in North Platte. We order the lunch special: something like chicken noodle soup poured over mashed potatoes and a side of canned green beans. For two days we have been riding through cornfields. I ask for corn on the cob, a seemingly reasonable request.
“Sorry,” the waitress tells me. “We don’t have corn.”
“What fresh vegetables do you have?”
“There’s a nice salad bar,” she says, gesturing to the counter with trays of iceberg lettuce, canned vegetables, and goopy blue cheese dressing. Here we are, in the agricultural epicenter of the continent, and it’s impossible to find anything to eat that hasn’t arrived by way of a processing plant.
Our plan is to stop at a hotel in Sterling, Colorado, which we are careful not to book in advance after our last motel experience. When we turn off the interstate at the motel exit, we don’t like the look of it. Parked beneath a tree—the only shade as far as the eye can see—it’s at least one hundred degrees. We guesstimate out how much further we think we can make it.
“Forty-five miles. Fort Morgan,” Rebecca taps the map. I say we go for it.
Day Twelve: Tuesday, September 3
Ft. Morgan Colorado, to Rocky Mountain National Park to Silverthorne, Colorado: 486 Miles
We opt for a proper breakfast and start the day later than normal. The news on the dining room TV reports on the latest attempt by long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad to swim the 110-mile distance between Cuba and Key West, Florida. I have been following for two years her repeated attempts to complete the marathon swim, a feat she’d initially attempted at age twenty-eight at her absolute physical prime. And now, the newscaster says, Diana has just completed the swim at age sixty-four on her fifth attempt, thirty-three years after her first attempt in 1978.
After thirty-three years.
On her fifth attempt.
At age sixty-four.
Over the course of fifty-three hours, without the protection of a shark cage, at times singing to herself, or counting numbers, remembering the books of Stephen Hawking, or experiencing vivid hallucinations of The Wizard of Oz and the yellow brick road. I am awed. How many people tried to talk her out of attempting yet again what she had failed to complete so many times? That’s what stuns me the most—not so much the swimming, but the failure and then the fortitude to sustain belief in yourself even when others have begun to lose faith in you.
I have never undertaken an ordeal like that, but I do know what it’s like to keep myself going, to quiet the brain when it begs the body to quit, to stifle the voices that remind me of earlier failures and imply they’re indicators of pending disappointment. The task I’ve chosen is undoubtedly easier than the one Diana chose. But then I correct myself. At a core level, there is no hierarchy when it comes to risk. Every challenge requires the same persistence and faith. Climbing a mountain. Getting a divorce. Starting a business. Going back to school. Healing a trauma. Swimming an ocean.
I’m filled with possibility today, knowing Diana Nyad finally made it to Florida.
We wind into Estes Park, Colorado, and then enter Rocky Mountain National Park. We ride along Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous paved road in the United States, reaching an elevation of 12,183 feet, and following a path used by Ute and other Native American peoples for thousands of years. Forty-eight miles long, the path gives us vistas of Wyoming to the north, the Great Plains to the east, and the Rockies to the south and west. After days of riding though the furnace of the plains states, it feels odd now to have to bundle up against the cool temperatures and strong winds.
From Rocky Mountains National Park, we descend to the Glory Hole Café in Hot Sulphur Springs. At lunch, we meet three county commissioners, men who seem to wield power and know it.
“Those your bikes?” they ask.
“Nice ride,” one commissioner says.
“I bought one myself recently,” another one adds. The third one keeps flirting with us. As they leave the café, we overhear the female cook heckle the flirty one: “What would your wife say, talking to two pretty girls like that?”
We smile. I’m fifty years old; Rebecca’s in her early forties. We are most definitely not above being called pretty girls. A lot has been written about how women, after a certain age, become invisible. It’s nice to see that’s not altogether true.
Our plan is to make it to Silverthorne, Colorado, where, oddly enough, both Rebecca and I have friends who have invited us to visit. Our first stop is to see Susan and Tom, fellow writers who are building a house there. Then we cross town to visit Amy, like Sue in Milwaukee, another of Rebecca’s college roommates. We enjoy the savory, unprocessed delight of homemade fish tacos with Amy, her husband Jim, and daughters Abby and Hannah. After a brief rainstorm, the girls take turns sitting on our bikes. We snap pictures of them, posing as mini biker chicks, just as a double rainbow arcs across the twilight.
Day Thirteen: Wednesday, September 4
Silverthorne, Colorado, to Madrid, New Mexico: 336 miles
When I wake early the next morning and can’t fall back to sleep, I’m again in thrall to my new obsession with Ben Wa balls. I Google for sex shops along our route. I know this much about myself: If I don’t fully pursue this idea now, while I’m away from home and the usual inhibitions, I may never play out this hand. Besides, this also feels like a form of risk taking. By now I should be brave enough to broach the topic with Rebecca.
I find a website for a store in Albuquerque characterized as “a guilt-free, shame-free environment for women and men to learn about enhancing relationships and sexual happiness.” The sexual happiness part sounds right.
Before we leave the area, we visit with Susan and Tom again to visit their adorable café, Inxpot, in the nearby ski resort town of Keystone. We eat our second breakfast of the day together. By the time we pack the bikes and finally hit the road, it’s past one in the afternoon, the latest we’ve ever started. But we’re traveling only three hundred or so miles today. It should be easy.
When we stop for gas, I finally screw up my courage.
“So, there’s this place in Albuquerque,” I say. “I’d like to stop if we have time.”
“Of course. What is it?”
I lay out the whole story: the orgasm on the Mississippi (which, disappointingly, has not occurred since), plus what I’ve learned on the Internet.
She laughs. “This could be interesting.”
An hour further down the road, we hit a rainstorm. Soon every layer is soaked down to the skin. Each time we consider stopping to put on rainsuits, the storm looks as if it’s about to clear, so we keep riding. Then another downpour begins.
Darkness is coming on long before we’re close to Santa Fe. We should never have socialized and stayed so late when we had such a distance to go. My right turn signal has burned out but I don’t know it. I’m leading and Rebecca is trying to follow but she’s confused by my lane changes and at one point we almost collide.
By the time we approach Santa Fe, it’s seriously dark and we still have to cover the final twenty-nine miles to Madrid along a rugged two-lane highway. I lead but worry I won’t see the signs for the turnoff to my friend Emily’s home. Ever since that night when I hit the old man, I’ve been worried about my night vision. My optometrist assured me my vision is fine, but still I fear I can’t see well enough to find the street I’m looking for.
Little rocks strike my knees. I open my face shield to see better. I wish I wasn’t so tired. I wish we’d left earlier. Why is it taking so long? Why do I think I’m indestructible? When will we ever arrive?
We eventually find the street, but it’s a dirt road corrugated with potholes and rocks—great for a dirt bike but a nightmare for a street cruiser. We inch our way down. There are no streetlights and I can see only the narrow cone illuminated by my headlamp. Emily lives with Kent in an old church he’s converted into their home. I stop but can’t tell which vague shape in the darkness is a house and which is a church. Every crevice and bump we ride over jolts me. I feel as if I’m going to drop the bike at any moment.
But Emily has heard our bikes and comes outside to meet us. She gestures to where we should park: up a slight gravel hill, just inside the property’s gate. I try to crest the hill repeatedly, but roll back down again and again. My tires spin. I’m too tired. I’m going to put the bike down. I give up and park my bike in the dirt street. When Rebecca tries to park her own bike, the exhaustion and lateness of the night take over. The motorcycle’s weight pulls to the right and she crashes to the ground. Kent comes out and helps right the motorcycle.
We get to the restaurant just minutes before the kitchen closes.
I first met Emily when we taught together at Antioch University in Los Angeles. We quickly became friends. When she went on maternity leave in March of 2010, the university hired me to take over her position full-time during her leave. She found another job, though, right after her son Ronan was born, and relocated to Santa Fe. Ronan was diagnosed at nine months of age with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare disorder that progressively destroys nerve cells, usually resulting in early childhood death. Her essays and book about this experience have comforted parents, family, and caregivers dealing with fatally ill children. She wrote with such mettle, facing the worst possible narrative, and did not sugarcoat a thing. She inspired and emboldened me to begin to take the first steps to live the life I truly wanted. During the first few months after my separation, I was trying to write with the kind of boldness and courage that Emily brought to the page. But almost every night I had nightmares about her. That’s how dangerous it all felt to me. And yet she inspired me to go deeper, to write more, to dig in.
Ronan was a child I knit for, a child I loved to hold and carry and sing to. I loved him. And though in many ways Emily was devastated by that loss, she was not destroyed by it. She gave me new courage in the way she was rebuilding her life. During Ronan’s last days, after the ordeal had shattered her marriage, she met Kent. He stepped up at the worst moment of her life and stood by her throughout. He was with her when Ronan passed and invited her to live with him in the church he’d converted into a home.
“Kent wants to get married,” she confides to me, “but I don’t think I will. Not unless we end up having a child together.”
“Are you thinking of that?”
Emily is in her late thirties and, like many, feeling the mainspring of her biological clock winding down, fears the opportunity for motherhood will slip past. “Everyone tells me it’s too soon, that I need to finish mourning Ronan. But I will mourn him the rest of my life. If I’m going to ever get pregnant again, it will have to be pretty soon.”
She asks about my life and tells me how proud she is of me for following my heart.
“Yeah,” I agree, “but being fifty and divorced kind of sucks.”
“I know. But lots of things suck. What are we going to do: Go back to a life that no longer fits? We can’t go backward.”
I marvel at her tenacity and optimism. She knows the cost of love. She’s paid it. Yet she’s willing to try again.
If she can start again, I know I can, too.
Day Fourteen: Thursday, September 5
Madrid, New Mexico, to Tempe, AZ: 457 miles
We’re ready to ride out of Madrid early, before eight, when Emily and Kent’s neighbor, out walking a dog, admires our bikes. “Where you headed?” he asks.
“Arizona for today. Eventually Los Angeles.”
“There’s a wonderful small highway that runs along the New Mexico–Arizona border. It’s a bit longer than the main interstate, but worth the miles.”
We write down the directions and thank him. First stop, though, is Albuquerque.
• • •
We find the sex shop midday, a florid storefront in a sketchy neighborhood. I had been hoping it might be more inviting. Once inside, though, the young woman working there is friendly and helpful. I explain my mission: to experience Ben Wa balls on a motorcycle. She goes through the various options and convinces me that the best approach is a single silicone ball the size of a jawbreaker. She says it’s a good introductory option. “If nothing else, you’ll improve your pelvic floor muscles by doing Kegel contractions.” Gynecologists and obstetricians recommend Ben-Wa balls in conjunction with Kegel exercises and vaginal weights to improve the elasticity of the vagina and to increase bladder control. So really, she rationalizes, this is an exercise in improved female health.
When she puts it that way, I feel less weird about the whole experience.
I step into the bathroom at the shop and put the ball inside. At my insistence, Rebecca also buys one but decides to wait to try hers out.
We head west on the interstate—homeward. In about an hour, we’ll stop for gas and start on the smaller roads Kent’s neighbor told us about. As I ride, I keep waiting to feel the first vibrations of that distinctive tingle. Nothing. This is a complete letdown. Eventually, I figure I may as well do some Kegel exercises. At least some good will come of all this.
When we stop for gas, Rebecca is curious. “Well?” she asks.
“Utterly underwhelming,” I report.
The next leg of the journey becomes exceptionally memorable for two reasons. The first is the remarkable scenery as we parallel the New Mexico–Arizona border. It’s desertlike, but rolling hills approach and recede, filling my eyes with subtle desert hues against a brilliant sky. The second is that all those Kegels perhaps jump-started the Ben-Wa ball because something amazing starts to happen. Over a distance of about one hundred miles, I experience a dozen gentle, rolling orgasms and am kept in a state of heightened arousal. They’re not the slam-bang magnitude of orgasm that leaves you limp and speechless, but subtle and delicious and send shivers up my back.
We eventually stop for gas and I grab Rebecca by the arm. “You. Must. Try. This.”
She laughs. “I knew something must have been going on!” she says. “You kept speeding up, then for no reason, slowing way down. It’s a good thing we’re out here in the boonies. I don’t think trying that in L.A. would be such a great idea.”
“But really, Rebecca, you’ve got to try this!”
“Not this time,” she says. “One of us needs to be the designated driver.”
Day Fifteen: Friday, September 6
Shelter in place, Tempe, AZ
We sleep in and, still in pajamas, lounge the morning away. My friend Tara pleads for more specifics about the Ben Wa ball. We’ll be back in L.A. tomorrow, so we proclaim today Recuperation Day. Massage. Manicure and pedicure. Rebecca talks me into a bikini wax, which I’ve never done. Out of our leathers, armored pants, and smelly T-shirts, we enjoy the sheer and gauzy freedom of girly-girl clothing. When I return to L.A. tomorrow, I have no idea what my life will hold. Will I ever meet someone who might be a companion like Kent and Emily found in each other? Will the Kegels ever translate into a shared sexual experience again? Where will my life head next? I do know one thing, though. Whatever’s next, I’m ready for it. Undertaking this motorcycle journey has given me more courage than I ever knew I possessed.
We have plans to go out to dinner tonight as a final hurrah. But a haboob dust storm is threatening and from what I hear, best practice is to shelter in place. We cancel the reservations and settle for home cooking and some Netflix. Later, Laura, a mutual friend from L.A., calls Tara.
“I’m here with Bernadette and Rebecca. They’re on their way back home after riding their motorcycles to Milwaukee,” I overhear Tara say. “I’ve got two big-ole Harleys in my driveway.”
There’s laughter and conversation, but I’m mostly watching the movie. I don’t know what’s said on the phone next, but Tara’s face drops and she hangs up abruptly.
I look at her, eyebrows raised. “What happened?”
“I don’t know how to say this,” Tara starts. “But, ah, Laura asked if you were gang-raped on your trip.”
“She was kidding, right?”
“I’m not so sure.”
“I hope you told her we were fine.”
“Yes. It’s just that she said it so casually. As if it was the kind of thing that was expected when you take off on a Harley.”
I think back to what I learned earlier about the dearth of female road trips. If we’ve created a culture in which it’s sensible to assume that two women crossing the country on motorcycles are setting themselves up to get gang-raped, wow. It’s more than just television and film portrayals that will have to change.