Allen Noren - Storm. A Motorcycle Journey of Love, Endurance, and Transformation

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Table of Contents

TRAVELERS TALES BOOKS

COUNTRY AND REGIONAL GUIDES

America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America, China, Cuba,
France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain,
Thailand, Tibet, Turkey; Alaska, American Southwest, Grand Canyon,
Hawaii, Hong Kong, Middle East, Paris, Prague, Provence, San
Francisco, South Pacific, Tuscany

WOMENS TRAVEL

100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places Every Woman
Should Go, The Best Womens Travel Writing, A Womans Asia, A
Womans Europe, Her Fork in the Road, A Womans Path, A Womans
Passion for Travel, A Womans World, Women in the Wild, A Mothers
World, Safety and Security for Women Who Travel, Gutsy Women,
Gutsy Mamas, A Womans World Again

BODY & SOUL

Writing Away, You Unstuck, Stories to Live By, Spiritual Gifts of Travel,
The Road Within, A Mile in Her Boots, Love & Romance, Food,
How to Eat Around the World, Adventure of Food,
Ultimate Journey, Pilgrimage

SPECIAL INTEREST

Wild with Child, Mousejunkies!, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?,
Encounters with the Middle East, Not So Funny When It Happened,
Gift of Rivers, How to Shit Around the World, Testosterone Planet,
Danger!, Fearless Shopper, Penny Pinchers Passport to Luxury Travel,
Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, Gift of Birds, Family Travel,
A Dogs World, Theres No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled,
Gift of Travel, 365 Travel, The Thong Also Rises, Adventures in Wine,
The World Is a Kitchen, Sand in My Bra, Hyenas Laughed at Me,
Whose Panties Are These?, More Sand in My Bra

TRAVEL LITERATURE

Cruise Confidential, Marco Polo Didnt Go There, A Rotten Person
Travels the Caribbean, A Sense of Place, The Best Travel Writing, Kite
Strings of the Southern Cross, The Sword of Heaven, Storm, Take Me
With You, Last Trout in Venice, The Way of the Wanderer, One Year
Off, The Fire Never Dies, The Royal Road to Romance, Unbeaten
Tracks in Japan, The Rivers Ran East, Coast to Coast, Trader Horn

To everyone who helped along the way.

Here is the mother hooded seal on an ice floe with her cub. Thirty-mile-an-hour winds, thirty degrees below zero. Look into her eyes, silted, yellow, fierce, crazed, sad and hopeless. End line of a doomed planet. She cant lie to herself, she cant pull any pathetic rags of verbal self-glorification about her. There she is, on this ice floe with her cub. She shifts her five-hundred-pound bulk to make a dug available. Theres a cub with its shoulder ripped open by one of the adult males. Probably wont make it. They all have to swim to Denmark, fifteen hundred miles away. Why? The seals dont know why. They have to get to Denmark. They all have to get to Denmark.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, The Cat Inside

Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure.

CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE

The Baltic Sea

one

Its raining, I said to Suzanne, my face framed by my hands as I looked through the window of the train. The sky was almost dark as we moved north toward Bremen, Germany. The bright lights inside the train reflected off the glass, projecting ghostly images of the passengers around us. Suzanne, I said again. Its raining.

Hmm? she asked, and I watched her reflection in the window as she lowered the book she was reading. She made a mark with a pencil so she wouldnt lose her place and turned her face toward the back of my head. What did you say?

Its raining.

Lets see, she said, and leaned across me. As she moved, the air around my face filled with the perfumy oils of her scalp, and I leaned toward the crown of her head to breathe them in. A middle-aged woman across the aisle lowered her newspaper and stared at us.

A spring shower, Suzanne said. Everything is being washed down and freshened up just for us. She sat up, kissed me, and went back to her book.

Her breath left a cloud on the glass, and I watched the dark world beyond reemerge as the shadow of moisture evaporated. The air around the glass was cool against my forehead and nose. It smelled of rain and metal. Silver rounds of water had pooled on the earth and shone like moons.

As the train entered Bremen, Suzanne and I gathered our things and moved sideways down the narrow aisle toward the door as our helmets, bags, and tent scraped and caught against the seats. We stopped next to the door and watched the citys lights streak past like tracer fire.

Id like to stay in a hotel tonight, Suzanne said. The driver applied the brakes and she leaned into me. Id like it to be a nice one.

We should save it for later on, when we really need it, I said, thinking of all that was before us. We should save our money for the Arctic Circle, Russia, or some place in Estonia or Poland.

Oh, come on, she said and nuzzled my chin with her nose. Lets celebrate the beginning of this trip.

The train braked harder and I grabbed hold of a handrail to keep us from falling. Outside, the lights of Bremen slid like illuminated drops of rain across the glass.

Why not? I thought. What better way to begin a motorcycle trip around the Baltic Sea?

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. Wed 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 clockwise rotation around the Baltic Sea. It began in Denmark, rolled across the flatlands of southern Sweden, up Swedens 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 StatesEstonia, Latvia, and Lithuaniawere 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.

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