Melissa Holbrook Pierson - The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing: Long-Distance Motorcyclings Endless Road

Also by Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Dark Horses and Black Beauties

The Perfect Vehicle

The Place You Love Is Gone

To Raphael

heart of my heart

Contents

Foreword: Forward

THE RIDE IS OUT THERE waiting, invisible, and goes on (and on) without us. It begins with an ancient idea in the minds of men. They are consumed with the desire to go somewhere. The distances through which they move are measured against the body and the time it takes to get there. The miles begin with the mile.

The word comes from mille passuum , a measure of one thousand paces. (The Romans used the foot pace only because the motorcycle had not yet been invented.) And, since we are who we are, together yet individual, variable yet similar, there is the Scots mile (5,920 feet), the Irish mile (6,720 feet), the old English mile, the metric mile. Also the Danish mil, the German Meile. We are a law-passing animal, though, as well as a movement-desiring one, so in 1592 an Act of Parliament codified the statute mile, and there it rests, at 5,280 feet.

He seems miles away.

Id go a country mile for you.

That was a milestone for me.

Give that kid an inch and shell take a mile.

Necessarily, as distance is indissoluble from time in the vast limits of human experience, the word is also used to refer to a vague measure of time (as put by the Oxford English Dictionary , the compendium housing the words we have devised to express all that experience). I will see you in a few miles, I said, not knowing what I meant. Then I started down a road, away from you.

I missed it by a mile.

IT IS INDEED a vague measure of time. In my case, the pointless wandering comprised an eleven-year sleep of motorcyclelessness. When I woke, I was in a dark hallway, stumbling forward with hopeful hands held out. Then I saw a slice of light. Closer, and I could see the title on the door from under which it spilled: Bikes Here. Enter and Be Saved. Inside was such strangeness: Everything has changed! At least on the surfacethe great increase of riders, numbered in hundreds of thousands; the armored gear; the digitized, the carbon-fibered, the ABSed and GPSed, the piled-up complications of parts and pumps and suspensions; the listservs and forums ever-blossoming to encompass billions of words and countless thousands of clever avatars behind which masks were people who rode faster and braked better and knew more about more minutiae than was ever conceived of a decade earlier. I reeled back. For a moment. Then, in the very center of the swirling din, I saw that what was elemental had not changed. For it never could. The joy. The need. The familial bond of blood. The erotics of risk.

Finally, the realization that this all begins with miles. And the consumption thereof.

A damnably labyrinthine branch

For some men, nothing is written unless they write it themselves.

SHERIF ALI ON T.E. LAWRENCE IN LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Tommy Barban was a ruler, Tommy was a hero.... As a rule, he drank little; courage was his game.... Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by a Warsaw surgeon and was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the caf could have killed him with a flip of a knotted napkin.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, TENDER IS THE NIGHT

DETERMINATION IN THE FORM of a man walks toward you. A metaphor about human transcendence made real and clothed in one hell of a suit. Its a green Roadcrafter. No, a gray one. No, some other color, one the Aerostich company doesnt sell: the color of miles, thousands of them, with their attendant filth built up in layer after layer that could never be washed clean. Nor would he want that; this, along with the scrapes and tiny tears and the shape of the well-made body underneath molded into the Gore-Tex so that now it could probably stand up by itself like a knights full armor in the Mets medieval wing, prove the visible badge of something otherwise hidden, the soul of the long-distance endurance rider.

This particular one, John Charles Ryan, a bit over six foot two and forty-eight years old, has a dry sense of humor, evidenced by something else on the suit, so that together it and the motorcycle he rides display all you need to know, at least initially. Just above the heart is sewn a patch bearing the NASA logo. It both is and is not a joke. Later you will have to wonder if in fact he is not rocket-propelled.

It is January 2008. New York City. The annual commercial motorcycle show. The days temperature is to top out at eight degrees. That is not the only reason the crowd seems to part when he walks through, though it is the primary one: the Javits Center exhibition hall is filled with thousands of motorcyclists, and not one of them has ridden here, except this one. There is also the fact of his presence , a grand, almost otherworldly bearing; his movie-star good looks, ice-blue eyes, and dark hair gone gray at the temples ( I am a variety of experience; I am what I have lived through ); and, oh yeah, the tall and beautiful woman with him, long blonde hair swinging at her waist as she follows excitedly a few steps behind. She is here to be inaugurated into ridership, and she is here to make the overwhelmingly male customer base freeze and pretend with near-desperation not to be rendered witless by what clearly belongs to another man.

He finds you, although you have met only once, and that was four years earlier, in some other life, at a rally when you were barely paying attention. That was in part because you did not know who he was. And also because he had not yet fully become what some small, potent seed in him had long ago foreordained he would be: a rider of singular talent and drive, one of the top long-distance endurance riders in the world. He would soon shatter the record on a frightful, 5, 645-mile journey on some of the most difficult roadways in North America, and he would do it so fast (a blistering 86.5 hours, ten fewer than his predecessor) that no one could name the person who could have kept him in even distant sight ahead. When he finishes this ride, the first thing he does will be to conceive of something harder to do next.

There are other people like him, who live to ride the ever-more-challenging ride. But few of them think they might like to become the first person to ride upwards of two hundred thousand miles in a year; few of them are as truly strange as to think they could sit in the saddle for an average of 550 miles every day of the year, Christmas and New Years not excepted. John Ryan is thus alonefar and away aloneat the head of a small group, the rabid mile-eaters, that is hidden in plain sight near the very heart of motorcycling.

Alone. How central this will reveal itself to be, in every aspect of the truly odd enterprise that is long-distance endurance motorcycling, and in John Ryans even more extreme drive to surmount the achievements of all others. (I simply persist, because it is the best use of my time here on the planet.) It pervades, motivates, defines, makes possible, and curses the rider who has stripped away all else from life in order to do only this. Alone. It is a complicated thing, aloneness. It gave rise to a damnably labyrinthine branch of philosophy, expressed in a few French novels that could only be read during college, when the system both craves and can metabolize extreme depression. Alone. It is what the man walking toward you telegraphs from the moment you take him in. It is all there at once. It will be the beginning and end of the riders story, as it is in the grander story that enfolds him, the one we all enter and leave alone.