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Emily Zebel | Longreads | May 23, 2024 | 3,929 words
At some point, I realize, shivering, that I am in exile. Self-imposed exile. I know the weather report, but I don’t believe it until I’m in it. Trans-Canada Highway rain is miserable and stinging. Opaque. Treacherous. But merely rain, I understand, stopped for a moment on the mainland side of Confederation Bridge, with Prince Edward Island nothing but a dark wink on the horizon. I am a thousand miles from home, on day two of a weeklong solo motorcycle trip. The bridge pilings are dominoes against a horizon made black by storm, a mirror of the storm in my head, the one I brought with me. I don’t know, yet, that the storms will get worse. Or that they will get better. I only know to push forward, to keep moving.
“Well, this isn’t gonna go as planned,” I say inside my helmet. I stomp into gear, lean on the tank, and roll the throttle, veering headlong onto the eight-mile bridge crossing—just as the sky unzips in a thunderclap.
I am 35 when Adam* vanishes.
*Adam is a pseudonym
It’s not your fault, they say. He was sick, they say. Maybe he’s OK, they say. Maybe these are true, or likely true, but they don’t feel true. Adam isn’t OK. I know it but don’t want to know it. I hate the way that knowledge makes me feel. It’s like drinking seawater. The more I gulp, the thirstier I become.
Adam is the first man I love after my failed marriage, or think I do. We meet while planting trees. He shows up, tan as bark, and hands me a glass bowl full of watermelon. “I’m fresh out of caviar,” he says. We ride our motorcycles down back roads, the berry patches blurring like spread jam. I stay over, sleep on his wool-stuffed mattress. I drain black coffee from a pan. In the long shadows of evening, we bend over the dozens of irises in his garden and cross-pollinate them by hand, to yield new colors for the coming years. His calloused fingers gently brush the pollen from the center of one plant to the stigma of the other. On damp mornings, a fire crackles in rhythm with his whistling in the kitchen downstairs, his lean body moving around the house’s only heat source. In my mouth I taste the smoke of a deeper fire, of my heart reassembling itself from the rubble of divorce. It’s a foreign taste, and I don’t know what to do with it.
I hate the way that knowledge makes me feel. It’s like drinking seawater. The more I gulp, the thirstier I become.
August comes with its atomizing heat, and I catch a plane to Leadville, Colorado, to pace a friend in an ultramarathon. It’s the first time away from Adam in months and I find myself nose to nose with uncertainty. I shuffle my feet as I wait in the thin air of a high-elevation aid station, staring out at runners’ headlamps as they bob back into the oceanic darkness of the Rockies. After a suffocating decade of marriage, here I was again in what felt like the same place. I was looking for a new start, but this felt like too much of the same. I was too much the same, retrofitting my life over the frame of someone else’s. Had I learned anything? The smoke of Adam’s woodstove sours. I have no tools, and no map, but I know I’m not ready to hand myself over to another person again.
When I land back on the East Coast, I end things.
Adam takes it hard. He sends letters. He leaves flowers at my stoop when I’m not home, blood moon bearded irises that still drip with dew. Weeks pass with my attempts at volleying explanations and trying to help him understand, until I don’t even understand myself, and I finally lose my temper in the tangle of hurt and confusion. I don’t know how to hear my own heart anymore, I realize. I am just going through it raw. I end a call with a sharp and definitive “I just need you to leave me alone.”
A few days later, I get a letter. His last. It says, simply, “Without you, the flower of life can’t bloom.”
“Will it make it, you think?” I ask my mechanic the day before I leave for Nova Scotia, doing my due diligence before pointing north.
Nick and I stand, hands on hips, surveying the rear tire of my motorcycle. The June sun beats down on us in the parking lot of the Triumph service center. He rubs his stubble-flecked chin and wipes the sweat from his forehead. His eyes are kind but tired, his navy blue shirt a canvas of black grease. He is my favorite mechanic, and I look at him now as if what he says next will unlock a new portal in the universe.
“Well, I think so,” he says. “But get in here as soon as you get back. I’ll put the tire on order for you now.”
That night, I grunt as I stuff my gear into the largest tail bag I can find that will fit on the saddle of my Triumph Thruxton 900. I had recently accepted a new job—leaving an organization I’d been with for over a decade—and had exactly one week to physically demarcate what I deemed as one life from another. I wasn’t looking to carve out a period of rest between jobs. I was looking for a trip that would be tiring, lonely, and expansive enough to hear my own truth. And, if I’m honest with myself, I was looking to outpace the shadow of Adam’s loss that followed me everywhere.
In the months that lead up to the Nova Scotia trip, I wear a three-dimensional kind of grief. Some days it’s sharp, with no visual mercy—I wake from the same unnerving dream again and again of Adam’s tall frame crawling out of my truck, coffee cups spilling out around him, his buoyant laugh filling the air, saying, “Don’t worry, I was here all along.” Some days it’s soft—I round a bend in the trail trying to retrace a route we’d backpacked, and feel a breath of wind land on me like another presence. On the days that my emotions are completely bankrupt, I ride my motorcycle the hour-long route to meet his mom, Sandra*, and we sort through his farmhouse together, trying to understand what happened. I trace my finger along the kitchen counter, once powdered with flour from baking bread and now covered with a film of dust. What truths are here? His bike is gone, and his handgun. I stand over the remnants of a burn pile beside Sandra in the dirt driveway. The mail lady rattles by, puttering to a rubbery stop beside the mailbox. “Any word yet?” We shake our heads. “Aww geez, what a pity. Such a nice man.” And off she goes, rattling down the narrow back road in the white sun, his mailbox left empty, wordless.
* Sandra is a pseudonym
The fall of that year slips through my hands, and the bleakness of winter comes like a fist. The interrogations by police and questions from Adam’s family subside. The organized search parties that combed the area’s state forests fold up their maps and go home. The snow is blowing sideways on a December night when my phone lights up with a message from Adam’s sister. Their mom’s cancer has relapsed.
I can’t reckon with this family’s pain. I can’t even feel mine. I had read once that certain kinds of grief can physically change the shape of your heart, and now I can sense my inner world splintering into a kind of numbness that outstrips my recognition of the world, of myself. I get in my truck, blankly clawing my way through the driving snow to see Sandra one last time. She smiles weakly. I am the most selfish human on the planet, I think. I set off this domino effect of tragedy.
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Day after day, I stomp the same few miles of snowy trail behind my house into a line of compressed longing. Then, she is gone.
I need to summon a new world into being. I have one week before I start my new job. I throw a dart at a map. I mark the calendar and hold the two careers as if they are two separate continents, the seven days on the road the anchor to move outward from.
Fog fills spaces, like water or darkness. Like grief. I am in Souris, a fishing town of a few hundred on the northeastern edge of Prince Edward Island. In my left hand is a paper cup of lukewarm coffee. In my right is a brown bag with a breakfast I no longer want. The paper is stamped with the bright phrase, “bonne journée!” Have a good day!
I’m not having a good day. The tire Nick had cautioned me about is the least of my concerns.
My motorcycle won’t start.
I pace with my coffee and breakfast to the corner of the street. I pace back. The weather hangs low in a gray gauze over the town. I look at my motorcycle sideways. I sit on it tenderly. I jump on it and land my ass square on the seat. I’m an animal at the mercy of another animal whose language I can’t speak. The rain comes down in cold sheets. My motorcycle has turned unreliable. I fear I myself am unreliable. Setback and loss propelled me here, and now they seem to be accruing.
The rain comes down in cold sheets. My motorcycle has turned unreliable. I fear I myself am unreliable.
I phone a local garage. There isn’t a motorcycle shop within a hundred miles, but as long as I can get a jump, at least I can make progress. Keith arrives with a toolbox, the low-bellied grumble of his tow truck belying his gentle smile. His eyes are blue, like remnants of the ocean that surrounds us. I know his name is Keith because his shop shirt says so, just like Nick’s back home. There’s something comforting about the familiar uniform, something about the smell of grease that signals the nervous system that a problem is about to face mechanical knowledge far greater than mine.
We pull the motorcycle seat off, clip the jumper cables to the battery, and she fires right up. I let out a deep exhale. Keith runs a few more diagnostics to determine that the battery is, in fact, fine, but something in the electrical system is draining it. With my new job’s start date looming, I can’t be laid up for days with my bike at a garage. “Thanks but . . . what now?” I explain my original plan to catch a ferry into Nova Scotia and ride the Cabot Trail on the province’s northern reaches. I don’t tell him that I can’t go home until I learn something. What, I don’t know. Nevermind how.
Keith gives me a sideways smile and chuckles as he coils up the jumper cables. “You’ve got long hair and a motorcycle,” he laughs. “You’ll have no trouble finding help if you need it. And you can always bump start if you have to. Go!”
Keith’s encouragement untangles one knot in my belly, although I don’t know how and have never had to bump start—a method of popping the clutch to start an engine.
I run the edge of the PEI coastline toward the Northumberland Strait, wiping the rain from my visor, the clouds sweeping across the landscape with me until all of our details go missing. I’ll figure it out if I have to, I think. I am cold. I am alone. The horizon stretches out in front of my handlebars as if to say, “Bring me your chaos, I’ll meet you halfway.”
“This is how you swear like a good Québecer,” Jean exclaims with thick French Canadian flair as he sits his beer on the pavement. He takes a deep breath and flexes his arm. “Tabarnak!” he howls. I laugh and give it a try, but clearly don’t get it right. Jean and his friend Philippe are amused and continue to coax me toward the right tone and emphasis.
We lean against our motorcycles and banter as we wait for the ferry to Nova Scotia. In a brief hiccup in the weather, the sun comes out from behind a moving boulder of black clouds, and its warmth is regenerative.
Motorcycles are given priority in ferry lines, and so the three of us have been corralled together at the helm of a long line of cars at the Wood Islands terminal. When it’s time to board the boat, I lead—but hold my breath when I go to start my bike. The green “neutral” light flickers, but the engine turns over, albeit with a jerk. I can see Jean glance at Philippe, aware of my mechanical issue. “We’ll give you a push,” they confer with a nod of their helmets.
Entering the giant belly of the ferry is like entering a whale. Every sound becomes a haunting bellow. It’s as embracing as the sea itself, and I am struck dumb. I park my bike and gawk, stupefied, held in the womb of the ship. I can feel the deck below me surge and dip gently with the rhythm of the sea.
I don’t tell him that I can’t go home until I learn something. What, I don’t know. Nevermind how.
“Tie it down, tie it down,” I hear Philippe suddenly say, and then realize it’s directed at me when a rope hits my elbow. “Like this,” he says, gesturing to his process as he straps his motorcycle to the boat deck, looping the rope to D-rings bolted at my feet. I hurry to mirror his movements, and the three of us give my motorcycle a good shove to make sure it’s secure.
There’s something peculiar about traveling solo in this way—the chance encounters, the help from strangers—fellow travelers that connect a journey like pinpricks of light in a constellation. I’m reminded that I’m just another animal simply moving through time, lily padding from one life-sustaining thing to the next.
This is the objectivity I feel when the ferry touches Caribou’s shore, Nova Scotia stepping out from underneath the fog now that our faces are pressed right against it. I turn and nod goodbye to Philippe and Jean. I hit my starter three times. On the fourth strike, the engine finally turns. I shrug and throttle out of the ferry’s mouth. I have to go forward, because there’s nowhere else to go.
Nova Scotia is a thousand greens—a thousand little conversations the landscape is having with the light. I’ve never seen so many facets of the color, reflecting new shades like the faces of a jewel. By some stroke of good fortune, the storms have congregated to the far reaches of the horizon for another beat. I’m heading north, aiming to land in Cape Breton Highlands National Park by nightfall, to camp. Initially I had planned to ride the route clockwise, emulating the path of the sun the way Buddhist pilgrims do. But a wrong turn put me on an interior road and a counterclockwise course. I study the map now at a gas station, refilling my small two-gallon, 100-mile tank for the umpteenth time. I catch sight of myself in a car window’s reflection. I look like I’ve aged decades, eroded by the sandpaper of so many hundreds of miles on the road.
“Hey, what year is that?” comes a voice from behind me. I twist the cap back on my gas tank and turn to a man who has materialized out of nowhere beside me. He used to ride, but doesn’t anymore, he says, wide-eyed. He circles my bike like it’s a wild animal, light catching in his jet black hair like fish turning in a stream. We chat for a few minutes as I pinch my fingers across the map in my Gaia app. I pull up the radar. “I really should get going,” I say.
“Hang on!” he says. He lopes across the parking lot and peels out in a rusty old Lincoln. Perplexed, and a little anxious with another stormhead blooming on the horizon, I watch him go and wonder if I’ll ever see him again. Minutes later he pulls up beside me, muffler clapping, and plucks three eagle feathers from the dash. “I want you to have these, for your safe travels.” he says. “I just harvested them from an island. And here,” he shakily presses a crumpled piece of paper into my hand with them. “If you come back, come find me.” The name “Dodd” is scrawled in blue bubble letters.
Dodd slips out of view as quickly as he slipped in, my eyes still pinned to the feathers in my hand. I roll them tenderly into a bandana as if they are my grandmother’s oldest silver. I hold my breath as I pull in the clutch.
She fires up with a labored gasp on the third try.
Even if I manage to move a little faster, stretch my arms around the map a little tighter, and fuse my body to the tank a little closer, I can still feel what’s left of the engine slipping away. As I merge onto the highway, the sky drops its foot on me again. The kaleidoscope of green blurs into a purgatory of gray. The rain falls colder, harder, in sizes small, medium, and large. Chunks of hail strike the slick asphalt. I’m tired. My thoughts drone out into the monochrome when I should be paying attention, but the fatigue fills all the spaces in my body like river clay, and I half want to forfeit myself to it, to let it render me inanimate. I hydroplane for a millisecond and it jolts me awake. “Keep alive,” I think.
I’m not sure what I’m doing here.
A bolt of lightning flays the horizon, and now I’m not just unsure of what I’m doing, I’m unsure it’s even safe. The entire landscape quivers. I hope the eagle feathers work. I have a brief conversation with God. What if the sky is never blue again? What if my sorrow never transmutes? What if I had said something differently to Adam, or never voiced a change of heart at all and just held out through my uncertainty? “If you come back, I’ll try harder. Just come back,” I had said into his voicemail, again and again until the line was disconnected.
I need to get home, physically and emotionally. I need to get home, metaphorically and actually.
I hang on for another hour and finally pull off the road into a convenience store parking lot to shout over the deluge at someone filling their tank, “Is there a motel around here?!” He can’t hear me—he cups a hand to his ear and signals me to ask again.
I need to get home, physically and emotionally. I need to get home, metaphorically and actually.
“MOTEL!” I yell. I can’t shut the engine off for fear it won’t start again. He points a finger down the road and nods. I head in that direction like I’m reaching in the dark for a doorknob. Lightning flashes across the landscape again. Around the bend, a sign: Fair Isle Motel. I exhale, and ease up the steep entrance road to the motel office and park beside another motorcycle. I don’t even care if the bike doesn’t start again—all I can think about is a hot shower and a warm bed.
Please have a room, please have a room, please have a room, I chant. Not the mantra I’d envisioned myself reciting on this trip, but here we are. Life has a way of doing that, of reorganizing a plan like earth under a spade, turning new realizations and new realities up into the light.
“Ha, another one!” I step through the door and hear the hearty laugh of the motel office lady and see the tired gaze of a fellow motorcyclist, equally drenched. A calico cat peers at us from her warm perch on the desk like she’s looking over a book.
“Here’s your key darling, you go get yourself dry,” the lady says, a kindness sweeping around her face like the second hand of a clock.
Changed, warm, dry, and feeling slightly more human in my motel room, I call my friend Matt, a talented motorcycle mechanic who I had joked I might need on speed dial for this trip, as if in foreshadowing. I pull back the window curtain slightly to stare at my motorcycle, still exposed to the rain that won’t let up. “It’s not gonna start at all in the morning, I know it. What the hell am I gonna do?” I say across the thousand miles between us.
“Well, time to YouTube the bump start, Em!” Matt replies, matter-of-factly.
I’m slightly annoyed at my feeling of helplessness, but he’s right. There’s no dependency here, and no one else who can get me home, but me.
I step out of room 3 at 5:00 a.m. The horizon smolders with the diffused light of another stormy day. I walk over to my motorcycle and strap on the tail bags. I turn the key. Pull the clutch. Hit the starter. Soundless. Lifeless. Thank god for YouTube, I think. I pop it into neutral. I pull the whole machine back toward me like readying a slingshot. “Do the fucking thing,” I mutter to myself. I shift it into second. I run, the bike at my side, hands and arms balancing the weight. Gravity has us now, and at that moment I swing my leg over the saddle and release the clutch while simultaneously rolling the throttle. I don’t expect anything to happen but it does: the engine roars to life. Stunned, I nearly stall it. I turn left onto the main road and, at last, toward the entrance of the Cabot Trail. To any onlooker it might have seemed like I knew what I was doing. I was starting to believe that maybe I did, or at least that I’d always be able to figure it out.
On the trail I can see nothing, save for each bend in the road before it’s vaporized by a procession of gray. The Gulf of St. Lawrence is to my right somewhere. I find enough of a hill to park on, knowing now that I can easily roll my bike down and bump the engine to life with the help of gravity and a running start. I trudge to the lip of the coast and stare blankly at the fog. The sea churns like a washing machine, and I begin to realize the trip won’t give me answers, only cleansing. “That’s it?” I ask no one. That’s it.
“You know, I don’t want to be buried when I die,” Adam had said, rolling the blade of a fern between his fingers. I could barely make out his face in the half dark. We’d been hiking for hours through Tuscarora State Forest and had somehow veered off course trying to connect two trailless ridges, and finally just collapsed in defeat into a soft patch of earth for the night.
“No? What then?” I asked.
“I just want to find a quiet place in the woods somewhere, and let the forest take me back.”
I might never know the truth of what happened to Adam. But I can come to know my own internal landscape, and expand it. I return to my motorcycle and tighten my bags. I swing a tired leg over the saddle, and snap my helmet visor down. In the damp, featureless morning, I drift down the hill until I’ve got enough speed, pop the clutch, and roll the throttle.
Emily Zebel is an artist, adventurer, and can most likely be found on dirt, water or snow, wondering when and why anyone should ever grow up. Her work has been published in Bikepacking Journal, Adirondack, and Women Riders Now.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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