American Borders: Aren't You Scared?

Aren't you scared?It has been two years since my last major trip and the urge to travel again has been growing like a desire vaguely sexual.

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Underlying the excitement and anticipation are the mundanities of preparation. Instead of jumping on my motorcycle and roaring off, the way the movies would show it, I am buying camping equipment and underwear, stocking up on spark plugs, fiddling with carburetors, and trying to finish the technical manual I contracted to write before I leave.

But it is a hot, sunny Silicon Valley day and the motorcycle is parked one hour away over the hill in the garage of my cottage in Santa Cruz. I swear I can hear it calling me.

And though I want to leave tomorrow, today, now, and though I've traveled enough in my life to know the process, I'm strangely nervous about this particular trip, one that will take me around the edges of the United States. Although I'll also be crossing over the borders to Canada and Mexico, it is the U.S. borders that, up front, seem the most exciting and the most disturbing, and the thought of a journey here is giving me more butterflies than the pre-trip jitters I've had before overseas travel.

I think that in some ways it is easier to travel in a foreign country than in my own. In the remote villages of Guinea-Bissau, for instance, rudimentary communication is secondary to nuance.

When I had to pantomime my most basic needs (food, directions, toilet), or I was trying to figure out what the hell that was on my dinner plate, I was not exactly in the process of delving deeply into the psyche of a people or a place. And neither were these people able to delve deeply into mine. So far away from home, the fact that I was from a different culture, race, and religion allowed them to cheerfully shrug as I knowingly and unknowingly broke the rules.

But during my upcoming tour of "home," I realize that I won't be afforded the same courtesy, though without doubt the rules will differ drastically in different regions of America.

In America we have these raw, ragged edged borders that float within communities and surround great expanses of land. Each tiny place is its own microcosm of unity and separation, with divisions of acceptance and rejection. These borders shift and overlap and settle, then shift again like wounds ripping open and slowly healing.

People ask me if I'm afraid. I tell them immediately, defensively, decisively, No! And then I admit it, Yes. It's the woman traveling alone thing. It's the complications that lie within the simplicity of fulfilling the basic daily needs of food and sleep. And finally, it's the people I may meet; the ones who may not be so nice, who may feel intruded upon by a stranger, a woman.

Even though I am American, and I am assumed to have something in common with every other American, I know we don't really share very much at all. Thinking about it, what does a person who lives in San Francisco have in common with someone in Baton Rouge? Language isn't even a good answer. We've all laughed at conversations between a New Yorker and a Southerner. Even our shared government isn't common ground; our political beliefs are deeply individual and competitive, and further divide us.

So I am afraid, a little, of the inherent complications of us: the non-homogeneous gatherings of people strung across America who came from so many different countries for adventure, or to escape poverty or oppression.

In America we have these raw, ragged edged borders that float within communities and surround great expanses of land. Each tiny place is its own microcosm of unity and separation, with divisions of acceptance and rejection. These borders shift and overlap and settle, then shift again like wounds ripping open and slowly healing. They shift geographically and they shift within each person whose bloodlines can be traced through the endless family trees of the world. We float within our borders, surrounded by water and two countries that affect us more than most of us want to admit, and dig our fingers into the earth and those who have been here the longest say the word "mine!" over and over again until we believe it.

With the alarming accusative bent of our new government (affirmative action is no longer necessary, welfare mothers get pregnant on purpose to collect that hefty check at the end of the month, et al.) I'm a little more concerned than I may have been in earlier years.

Okay... so if affirmative action is really unnecessary, why am I asked the following questions: "Darlin', can you really handle that machine?" and "Don't you have a man to ride you around?" Oh, and let's not leave out, "If you let me ride on the back I promise to hold on real tight." (Finger flexes, lewd grin, wriggling eyebrows.)

Call me sensitive, but I am taken aback, even insulted, by these comments, and ashamed of a society that makes them common.

I'd been waiting for this moment since I'd decided on the Ural motorcycle for my trip. I wanted something different; not Japanese or American. Something unique and a little crazy. Something I could get close to. Something exotic.

PICTURED ABOVE:URAL AMERICA PRESIDENT BOB GEREND, WITH A NEW URAL MOTORCYCLE.

My trip really began last month when I was met in Seattle, Washington, at SeaTac airport by Bob Gerend, the president of Ural America. I might have recognized him from his photos in corporate magazines: silver hair and a confident smile framed by a dark suit and power tie. But these days he's a blue-jeans kind of guy and I recognized him when I saw his black Ural America jacket. He recognized me by the helmet slung through my arm and the laptop computer case I carried.

"We gave it a final check yesterday and it's running great!"

He was talking about my new Ural, a Siberian sidecar motorcycle, a type his company has been importing from Russia for about a year now.

Driving through Seattle we settled into motorcycle talk, punctuated by Russian politics and the various civil wars occurring there, business, and mechanics, including specifics about my particular machine.

He told me about experiencing gunfire in St. Petersburg and his rides through Siberia to finalize some business there. With his fur hat on and his mouth shut he was assumed to be Russian, which saved him some grief. Despite the troubled Soviet government, Bob has managed to continue exporting the motorcycles. "It's the dollars," Bob told me. "They need them so badly that the governments don't mess with us."

Capitalism at work already.

The intransigent nature of Soviet communism prevented the design of the Ural's opposed twin two-cylinder machine from being changed, since they reverse-engineered the 1939 BMW to create the first Ural in 1942. And like those early machines, the new ones need constant attention and a little coddling.

"But they're simple engines to work on," Bob told me, "and strong, too."

I believe him. My friend Allen Noren saw them in eastern Europe and Russia, the sidecars carrying entire families, livestock, firewood, and machinery.

Bob and Tom created Ural America by making deals with Ural Siberia sealed with handshakes over lots of vodka. "They've been working under the communist system for so long that it's difficult for them to get used to the concept of free-enterprise and competition," Bob told me. "But the employees are invested in the company now, and it's in their best interest to build a quality product. What we've done is to make sure that the best of the best parts get assembled in the motorcycles destined for America."

Bob drove us to the warehouse in Bellevue, Washington. It was stacked high with wooden crates and boxes holding spare parts and disassembled motorcycles. It was cool inside and the cement floor echoed with the clang of metal tools and the soft chug of an air compressor. My heart pounded as Bob led me through the stacks of machinery to an area set off by workbenches. I'd been waiting for this moment since I'd decided on the Ural motorcycle for my trip. I wanted something different; not Japanese or American. Something unique and a little crazy. Something I could get close to. Something exotic.

...I just stared at the Ural. She was beautiful in sleek black paint that seemed poured over the curves of the tank, the fairing, the fenders, and the huge lump of the sidecar.

We waited for a forklift to pass. Sunlight streamed through a side door onto a clean section of cement where three men moved around the elegant body of a glistening black sidecar motorcycle like worker bees around a queen. This motorcycle was mine.

She seemed to like 50 mph, the Ural. She'd been a "she" from the beginning when I saw her in the warehouse, and I'd unconsciously started calling her "the queen bee" in my head. I wondered what the Russian translation might sound like.

The engine sounded smoother than I'd thought it might at 50, and felt smoother as well, so I relaxed a little, and began to think about personal issues... another absence from my family and my recent breakup with my boyfriend. Though our relationship hadn't been ideal, it had lasted five years. That is, until a few months ago, when this trip had loomed too large amidst other unresolved problems.

A beat-up blue Chevy pick-up truck passed me on the wet highway. A cowboy drove with one hand, the other slung around a pretty girl. They were smiling. I hunched down behind the windshield and felt more than ever the loss of something precious.

The girl leaned into her cowboy's shoulder and the blue Chevy grew smaller and smaller on the gray asphalt trail, the same color as the churning sea below. The cliffs there are worn away by the constant bashing of water against the earth far below the road. I was just south of Bandon, Oregon, where the soft hills rise green, scattered with wildflowers, interrupted around the next bend by the red, white, and blue of a Chevron station. The Ural and I both needed a drink.

I pulled up and the attendant walked out. He was an unkempt man in his forties, with longish gray hair uncombed under his baseball cap. The sewn-on label of his blue-and-white regulation gas-station attendant's uniform was embroidered with the name Bob, finished off with a Singer sewing-machine flourish. He handed me the nozzle.

"Better you make a mess than me." He grinned, showing the black rotted places between his front teeth.

I bought a soda and pushed the Ural out of the way of the gas pumps to make room for the van that pulled up. The driver popped out and circled around the Ural with a gleam in his eye. I'd noticed that she affects people this way, in the few days I'd been riding her. Men, women, and children all brighten when they see us.

When the van left, Bob walked over. "I saw one of those overseas," he told me, and then proceeded to say he was about to leave Oregon for Paris, again. He'd lived there eleven years. "Can't get good work here," he said. "Hate to leave all this for Paris." He waved his hand at the ocean glittering slate-gray under the clouds, then at the green hills. "It's so peaceful. But my wife is already gone."

We practiced our French and he surprised me with his accent -- a northern, technical French that was fluent, slangy, and easy. He talked about his job as a technician in a big new theater outside of Paris. I followed along in my hesitant, American-accented French. I enjoyed our conversation, but when I left I felt like a jerk. I hate it when people stereotype me, when they don't listen and just sum me up the same way I'd unconsciously summed up Bob: gas-station attendant. No one to take notice of. It slapped my consciousness awake. Maybe that's the way I can look at people as I travel in America. As breakers of stereotypes, as surprises. All of us different, unique, and indefinable.

It's difficult to think of confronting these places in which I should be as comfortable as anywhere else in America. But this depends so much on color, sex, status, and a complicated set of rules that may make a visit relaxed and pleasurable or downright dangerous. I may never figure this out in the short time I stay in any one place. What will I say when I'm asked why I'm doing this trip? I'll babble something about the American travel dream that everyone has thought of -- you know, the retiring-and-traveling-the-country-in-an-RV dream. The motorcycle dream. Something like that. And I know what their faces will look like, a little surprised like mine must have looked when Bob at the gas station started speaking French; a little confused with the complications of what is accepted and what is not; of how to make a judgment, searching for some known paradigm in which no one really fits.

I opened the throttle and tried getting up to 55 mph on a flat stretch. The Ural gasped as more gas and air were sucked into the carburetors, and she lurched forward. The scenery from the highway was fantastic. A white clapboard church on a neat blanket of grass faced the sea at a point where a series of haystack rocks rose from the water. Behemoth spires reached to the drowned sun.

I wonder if the Native Americans had thought of it as a sacred place. If so, the church seemed out of place. Socially, know that the complications go back to the European settlement of native lands where Indians worshipped their gods and the land, giving a soul to every rock, tree, animal, and sliver of sand. The marauding Europeans who shoveled out space here worshipped one mighty god who made and controlled everything. So already there was a problem. Some lived as part of the land, some wanted to take it apart to build cathedrals. It's easy to assign blame and moralize about these problems, which haven't gone away. It's trendy to declare that the Indians are better people because they lived within nature's boundaries, aware of the human impact on land that has wreaked the ecological havoc we're dealing with in the world today. But declarations aren't so simple, really, so who's to say that there isn't a separate soul for every piece of something lying around, or that there isn't a god who likes having cathedrals built for him, or not?

What kind of place is it that contains these two extremes and everything in between? The rest of the world is fascinated with us, and no wonder. When I am in another country, I am questioned without cessation about life in America. But I feel inadequate to answer. "I never traveled very much in America," I say. "I know something about California and the San Francisco Bay Area. I know a lot about Santa Cruz, a town of 50,000 people. And that is very different from anywhere else in the country."

I see "Dallas" and "Baywatch" on foreign TV programming and I want to scream, "That isn't us, NO! THAT ISN'T US!" And sometimes I do.

It has been these people from different countries who have piqued my curiosity, who have motivated me to find out just what is "us." I know it isn't "Dallas" or "Melrose Place" or "Baywatch," or MTV or the O.J. Simpson trial. I know it isn't as pat or simple or insipid or sensationalistic as any of these publicities. I want to know more. I want to know more for myself, and to be able to answer the next time I travel to a foreign country and someone says to me in heavily accented English, "So tell me about your home -- about America.."