Why I Wrote A Magnificent Ride to Nowhere

People ask what the book is about, and I usually say it’s a motorcycle memoir. That’s true enough. There are Yamahas in it, and highways, and a lot of miles across the kind of American landscape most people only see from an airplane window. But that’s not why I wrote it.

I wrote it because I was seventy-three years old and realized I’d been carrying a story around for fifty years without ever telling it straight.

In 1972 I was eighteen, working graveyard shift as an electronic technician at Western Electric in Broomfield, Colorado. Good job. Good life. I had an old white Chevy Caprice I’d inherited from my sister — nothing fancy, but it got me where I was going, which is all any honest vehicle owes you.

Then my roommate John borrowed it to drive to Denver and kept it in low gear the entire way back to Boulder because, as he explained with complete confidence, “it had more power.” He cooked the transmission. Turned internal gears into modern art. The engine would start, would idle contentedly, but the car wasn’t going anywhere ever again.

I had to get to work. John offered me his Suzuki 350. Total riding instruction: about four minutes in a parking lot, one hundred feet of successful forward motion, and I was certified ready for public roads. I rode it to work that night in the dark, every muscle tensed, convinced each moment might be the one where my incompetence met consequence.

A couple weeks later I went car shopping. Test drove a Saab Sonett with a salesman who giggled while taking mountain curves at twice the posted speed. I walked away from that on shaky legs, went to the BMW dealer down the road, and put a down payment on a brand-new 2002. I was all proud, bragging to my friends about my sophisticated European automobile.

Two days later I got my draft notice.

The dealer refunded my deposit. The salesman shook my hand and said

I had four weeks to report. I wanted to see my grandparents in Escondido one last time — to say goodbye, really, though none of us used that word. But I wasn’t about to sink real money into a car I’d only own for a month before the Army claimed me. I could ride a motorcycle now, more or less. So I found a sweet little Yamaha 350 — white with orange highlights, two-stroke, burned oil every time you filled the tank — and I stood there in the dealership gritting my teeth, thinking: By damn, this toy is going to take me to Escondido and back.

It was 1,200 miles each way. I’d barely been on a motorcycle. The Continental Divide stood between me and California. And underneath all of it was a thought I couldn’t shake: I’m going to die in Vietnam anyway.

So I bought it. And I rode it.

That first ride across the country — alone, on a machine I barely understood, pointed toward people I might never see again — turned out to be the beginning of something I’d spend the next five decades trying to understand. The road became the place where everything I couldn’t say out loud had room to exist. Not just then, but for years afterward: through the Army, through a 650 Yamaha on Ozark back roads, through a Kawasaki Z-1 I bought for a hundred dollars after twenty years away from riding, through cross-country trips with women who trusted me enough to climb on the back.

The book covers all of it. But what I didn’t expect when I sat down to write was that the real story wasn’t about the motorcycles at all. It was about the roads I didn’t take — and I don’t mean highways.

There was a woman. There is always, in these stories, a woman. I met her years later in a waiting room in north-central Washington, and the world rearranged itself without asking my permission. I had crossed deserts alone at night and ridden into mountain passes in snow, and none of that required the courage that walking toward her would have required. Physical bravery is easy, in the end. You commit to the line and you ride it through. The other kind is harder. I didn’t know how to do it then. I’m not sure I know even today.

That’s the book. That’s what fifty years of riding taught me — that distance is not an enemy, that the road doesn’t fix anything but it holds it, and that some things stay unfinished no matter how many miles you put on them. The honest move was to write it that way.

A Magnificent Ride to Nowhere is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook, or you can grab a free digital copy right here on the site.