Break-
downs:
Nervous
and
Other

Get the Motorcycle Misadventures newsletter

These factory towns don't offer much in the way of entertainment, culture, or even the friendliness that I found in the American farmlands. In fact, I was finding the whole Canadian experience somewhat boring. The terrain had already lost its appeal: blue sky, blue water, green trees, white clouds, a small town with a pulp factory. More blue sky, blue water, green trees, white clouds, then another small town with a pulp factory. Then blue sky, blue water green trees, white clouds.

At a place called Thunder Bay, I decided to go scuba diving in the clean, clear waters of Lake Superior. When I arrived, the Thunder Bay dive shop had all but closed for a weekend excursion, which I missed by an hour, so I went on a training dive with a guy who wanted to pre-test his dry suit. The fish there are scared away by movement, so I just poked around the wrecks of boats and tried not to disturb the bottom too much. The fine silt stirred up easily and made the water even more murky. After the dive I enjoyed a quiet afternoon sunning on the rocks away from the city.

East of Thunder Bay, the landscape became a bit more hilly and the beaches wilder and rockier, but it was still blue sky, blue water, green trees, white clouds, and pulp factories.

Then on a road miles from nowhere, something even more boring happened. I had a mechanical problem.

THE BIKE BEGAN to make a jerky movement on the right side. I looked down, and by my right foot the cylinder head was wobbling around and around. It was quite dramatic, really, almost like a hallucination -- something so unusual that it remained outside the realm of rational possibilities.

I hit the kill switch and coasted to a stop before the cylinder could rip itself off of the block. Then I thought, "Why didn't I just let it fall completely to pieces. Then I could go home."

But no. I saved it, looked at the crack an inch into the cylinder, and got out my backpack and my Powerbook. A woman named Colleen picked me up and took me to Marathon, a slightly larger-than-average small town built around a pulp factory on the shores of the blue waters of Lake Superior.

In Marathon, I was told that a man named Rory, a machinist by trade, was definitely the best motorcycle mechanic around. He fixes everyone's Harleys, people said, and recently he'd built a Triumph from a box of parts.

"Lead me to him," I said. I was getting cavalier about all this. Breakdowns had become the rule instead of the exception. But Ural has a one-year, unlimited-mileage, 100 percent guarantee. "And you know you're the Ural test rider," Bob Gerend had told me in Seattle. "You'll be the first one to ride it so far on American roads. They were paying close attention to my progress, and my mishaps, using me as a "test case," really. More than that, they were very nice about sending parts as quickly as possible, and Randy does answer the phone at home -- when he's there.

So I met Rory, my mechanic du jour, and gave him Randy's phone number.

As I talked to Rory, I had to wonder if it was my destiny to meet mechanics who are young and handsome with deep blue eyes. Was it fate, a kind of punishment aimed only at me? Or maybe it was a reward. Yeah, maybe I was just looking at it the wrong way around.

On second thought, after a toothless man named Harold charged me $100 Canadian to tow the motorcycle, I wasn't feeling like I was being rewarded for anything.

When I reached him by phone, Randy just groaned. It was possibly the saddest, most frustrated sound I'd ever heard. I was sure he wasn't enjoying my phone calls any more.

"And you're in Canada, now, aren't you?" I heard him light a cigarette. His chair squeaked and I could almost see him leaning back, putting his hand on his forehead. I hoped I wasn't giving him a migraine.

"What did I tell you about Canada?" he said, patiently. His voice was husky from frustration and smoking.

"You can't send me stuff in Canada," I replied, mechanically. "It takes days. It has to go through customs. But Randy, I wanted to see Canada!"

"Okay, okay." I felt like he was talking to one of his kids. "Give me your address."

I'VE ALWAYS HEARD that Canada is so much nicer than America. That there are beautiful wide-open spaces, that the people are more educated, that Canada is safer, and less polluted. But I was finding so far that unless you're an avid fisher, boater, hunter, or pine tree aficionado, Canada is really boring.

To pass the three days it took for the parts to arrive, I found a beach with smooth, round rocks the size of softballs, but the water was too cold to swim. I made lasagna. I used Rory's stereo to record some of his CDs on my tapes. I helped him spackle a room. I took apart the broken cylinder and head to see how the valves, pistons, and rods fit together. I called customs. Finally my package arrived.

Customs had obviously opened it. Of course they would open a package that contained parts for a Russian motorcycle. (I thought about the paranoid border guard in Portal. Are they all like that?) When they repacked the cylinder they just threw the head gasket on top of it. When it arrived it looked like a piece of used aluminum foil.

Rory cringed and said, "uh-oh." We looked at the old one, but it had a huge crease in it. So he flattened the new one as best he could and we put it on anyway. It was Saturday night, and his friends came over one by one on their Harleys. They sat around drinking beer, smoking joints, and handing me screwdrivers and wrenches while joking about never having seen a girl so greasy.

"Hey," said one. "Why aren't you in Easy Rider?" They all laughed. "No, I'm serious," he said. "I'd love to see you in Easy Rider."

"I mean an article about you," he added, and the others laughed even harder.

I didn't care about their jokes. I was really enjoying myself. I was still finding it amazing that a collection of metal parts could work so well to move a machine. And the Harley guys were nice people, in spite of the crude jokes that confirmed any stereotype anyone might have about bikers. Anyway, they began to leave before long, one by one.

"Why did they go?" I asked Rory. We had finished my repairs and I was ready to party. Rory said they all had gone home to wives and girlfriends.

"What a drag," I thought. Wives and girlfriends -- what a pain. Just when I was ready to have a beer and relax and look at their Harleys and maybe go for a ride.

So now I know how guys feel when they have to go home and they don't want to. When they would rather be sitting around in a garage, greasy, fixing something, riding it around, making jokes, drinking beers -- when girls seem a huge interruption necessary only because of something so tedious as a previous commitment.

Wow. I guess I am needing to be with girlfriends again.

THE NEXT DAY the Ural and I hit the road again, but I decided to take it slow. The new right side needed to be broken in, so I'd have to go no faster than about 40 mph for quite a while. The bent head gasket make the engine pop, but I would have that fixed when I got to the States again. But first I had to get around the lake, which seemed like an ocean, ever blue and never ending.

And then the Queen Bee quit again. She quit the same way she had quit near Langdon, quietly and without any fuss. I pulled over and poked around. Oil dripped from the timing cover.

"I can fix this," I said to myself. I knew exactly what the problem was. That damn gasket again, leaking and cutting off the connection.

Sure enough, the seal had blown and had dripped oil onto the magneto pickup and amplifier. I cleaned it all up and sealed it back with orange silicon, re-timed it, spaced it, dried out the wires and everything, and prayed for spark.

No spark.

During the hour on the side of the road I had gathered three helpers: a retired mechanic on a camping trip, a businessman on a Yamaha crotch rocket, and a Swiss tourist on a BMW who was on his way to Montreal and then home after a five-month tour of Alaska and Canada. He told me he'd had absolutely no problems. I didn't need to hear that.

None of them could do anything, but neither would they leave.

"I can't leave," said Chris, who had ridden up on the Yamaha. "It's a guy thing."

So my three helpers handed me wrenches and tubes of silicon and wiped the grime from gaskets, and then finally, when I still got no spark, Chris offered to give me a ride to White River.

He rode really fast and leaned deep into the corners. The engine worked almost soundlessly, a little click tick, the whir of tires on asphalt.

"Am I going too fast?" he yelled.

"No!" I yelled back. "Go faster!"

Normally I don't like being on the back of a motorcycle, but I realized that I'd almost forgotten what it feels like to be on two wheels. Now I longed for that feeling again, the lightness, the weightlessness, and the freedom.

WHEN WE GOT TO White River, my elation from the ride was flattened by the sight of the same tow truck that had delivered the Ural to Rory's house.

Harold saw me and grinned toothlessly, as if a cash register were ringing in his head.

I can't even get out of one man's tow area in a four-day time frame, I thought, and then realized that I was actually pulling at my hair. Was I going crazy? All of a sudden I hated Canada. I hated the fact it had so few gas stations. I hated the green, green trees and the blue, blue lakes. I hated the new little towns and the pulp factories and all the pristine, boring wilderness.

It was too late in the day to do anything at all, anything but sit grumpily in the White River tavern with a glass of bad Chablis and the local newspaper. In the classified ads there was an old Cadillac with a rebuilt engine for $1500 Canadian. I thought about torching off the top to make it a convertible and driving back to North Dakota.

What is it about North Dakota? The landscape? The farmers? Susan in Portal, Ken in Langdon? All that flatness makes for sturdy souls. Souls you can count on. Swedish faces. Germans. Finns. All those clear blue eyes. And somehow it is not monotonous like this blue lake green tree stuff here in Canada. America the Beautiful has amber waves of grain cut with a strip of yellow sunflower faces drooping heavy with seed. Grain elevators loom like mirages of high-rise office buildings in the distance. Great spirals of green straw lie at regular intervals in stubbled crewcuts of hayfields. Corner stores sit behind rusty red-and-white gas tanks that give leaded gas, and Coca Cola machines eject the small green bottles whose caps clink onto a huge pile of older, rustier caps in the dirt and dandelions.

AT THAT MOMENT, I longed for North Dakota more than I longed for home. I longed for stability, for certainty, for simplicity. I longed for reliability. I would go work in the garage at the Portal gas station. They'd offered me a job. Or I could be a waitress at the cafe. They needed help there. So much for this adventure stuff. I could do without it. So I was the Ural test rider. What did I know? I can deal with mechanical stuff, to a point. But so many people had touched the Ural now that I wondered how much of my problem was the original problem and how much was the problem of so many people working on it. I was sure that somebody, somewhere, had screwed up something. Was it Clarence in Montana? One of the farmers? The guy in Crosby? The one in Bottineau? Was it Ken? Was it Rory? Was it me?

This breaking down stuff was getting very old. What I wanted to be doing was camping out, waking up under the stars, canoeing, hiking, and cooking over a stove. I did not want to be hitchhiking and getting towed, sleeping in noisy roadside motels, eating at A&W and drinking weak coffee and listening to some guy in a gas station saying ain't it a shame every single day.

I had to get the bike fixed.

So I called Randy from a phone booth on the off chance that he'd be home on a Saturday, but a woman answered. It was his ex-wife, Jana. She said Randy had gone on a ride for the weekend with some buddies and would be back, and hey, was I that nutso girl who's driving a Ural around America?

And then I felt a strange ping in my stomach that signaled something I didn't even want to think about, and I didn't... because at that moment a Winnie the Pooh parade went noisily by and I felt as if I had dropped into some bizarre story like Alice in Wonderland.

Maybe I was shrinking into phone lines and appearing in streets where things were going on that I didn't expect at all. I was in a dream, I thought -- at least I was trying to be in a dream where I hung up the phone and walked down the street and someone was talking about Winnie's history, about his being a real bear brought here by a captain in the Canadian Legion during World War I who named it Winnie for Winnipeg where he was from. They made it his company's mascot, and then they got called to the front lines in France. Winnie went along, and before they went off to fight, they gave him to the London Zoo where Christopher Robin was his biggest fan.

In a few minutes the parade had gone by and the streets were almost empty, as if the parade had never happened, and I wondered about nervous breakdowns. What do they feel like, and how do you know if you're having one?

I spent a restless night in the especially mediocre White River Motel, and the next morning Harold loaded the bike again onto his flatbed to take me back to the border of America the Beautiful.

In the process he managed to lower the truck bed onto my PowerBook and my camera, splintering both into useless shards of plastic.

It is  a dream, I was thinking. Yes, it's all become just a really bad dream.

Index | Dispatch 15