A Miraculous Recovery

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We drove four hours, during which time I was alternately resigned and panicked, realizing how much I had been relying on the Powerbook during this trip. On previous trips, without the possibility of electronic gear, I had been prepared to be disconnected. But not on this one. The computer had been like a crutch. With it, I had never been far from home, from work, or from the people I love.

A Silicon Valley teenager and the daughter of an IBMer, technology has always been a presence in my life, as natural as the telephone or TV set. When I was little, my father sometimes took me and my sister along on service calls on the odd weekend when his beeper went off. In the cool, quiet cavern of an empty lab, we played among banks of CPUs that controlled entire factories. Back then, they were large, impressive panels that blinked, rattled and whirred. Reels of mag tapes spun right, then suddenly left, then right again. One machine spit cards into a neat stack, and groups of printers chattered away, spewing ream after ream of paper into huge piles in large wire baskets.

As dad entered code or fiddled with wires, my little sister and I tossed multicolored mag tape write-lock rings across the lab like Frisbees, and drew patterns around the holes of discarded punch cards. We ripped printer feed strips off reams of paper and used them as long streamers. The tiny rectangular holes punched out of the computer cards were our confetti.

That entire room full of hardware didn't have as much computing power as the Powerbook that Harold had just crunched.

With no computer, it was no longer possible for me to feel the instant gratification that comes from logging in and seeing that list of new mail scrolling down the screen. No more cyberparents, cybersiblings, cyberboyfriend. With it I had kept in touch with my family, furthered a romance, recorded my adventures, did some writing, and made new friends.

I didn't like not being connected. I didn't like it at all.

IN SAULT ST. MARIE, I opened the computer case on the clean white counter of the repair center of the only Mac dealer in town. Shards of plastic popped loose, the hinges broke, and psychedelic liquid oozed from behind the screen. The repairman cringed, and examined the hardware with careful fingers.

Inside, some modules were untouched, some completely destroyed. The modem was trashed, but the hard disk, amazingly, looked okay. They would test it in the morning. Like a doctor, the repairman shook his head sadly. "There's nothing else we can do now," he said.

I left the Powerbook at the Mac store and found a camera shop. The owner sent my crunched Cannon to the manufacturer for an estimated repair cost or a "totaled" verdict. I bought a small camera, and found I was at loose ends.

"Go see the canal," the camera guy said. "Everyone sees the canal."

It turns out that Sault (inexplicably pronounced soo) St. Marie has a canal that handles even more traffic than the Panama Canal, and tours are given. It sounded like a better way to pass an afternoon than to sit sulking in my motel room, so instead I sat sulking in a small tour boat as it rose with the water level inside the concrete walls of a lock. I sulked so much that one of the tour guides came over with a Styrofoam cup of coffee to cheer me up.

Unwilling to relive the complete horror of my current situation, I told Chris, the bearer of the coffee, only that my motorcycle had broken down. He entertained me with stories of his travels to the northern plains of Canada as a geologist, and of his work as a mate on a boat, and he answered all the questions I suddenly had about the locks and the steel plant we passed, which had been closed by the factory owners. In a successful attempt to thwart unemployment, the workers found a way to buy it, and made it work again. It is in almost full operation again today, Chris told me.

I watched the great machinery of the steel plant working and thought of what obstacles those people had to overcome to bring it back to life. I admired the workers' determination, their refusal to give in to circumstance, and I knew I could take a lesson from them. After the tour I thanked Chris for cheering me up and then walked back to my motel, where I found the following phone messages:

• My dad had called to say that the insurance company would reimburse me now for the computer and camera and try to collect from the tow company in White River later.

• The computer repairman had called to tell me that my hard disk was intact, and that they could recover all of my data.

• My brother Jeremy had called to tell me he had found a second-hand Powerbook 520, which he would overnight to me when I got to America.

• Bob Gerend at Ural had called to tell me he was sending a Ural dealer named Denny from Traverse City, Michigan, 200 miles away, to get me and the bike.

AS DENNY DROVE ME and the Ural across the border, my head was still spinning from the speed with which all of this had happened. In 24 hours I had secured a new camera, a new computer, a ride to a Ural dealer, and even done a little unplanned bonus tour of Sault St. Marie. The day before I had felt that my life was over, my trip was over, that I would just crawl back to the Bay Area and chalk it up to experience.

"Thanks for coming to get me," I told Denny, a ruddy-faced blond man somewhere in his forties.

"I was bored," he shrugged. "This is just what I needed to get a little excitement into my life right now."

To further the excitement level, we stopped in at Mackinac Island, a tourist town with a great many very cute shops and an incredibly high per capita ratio of fudge stores. I bought a block of peanut butter chocolate and we consumed it with a beer at the tavern next door.

The next day Denny and I picked up my new Powerbook and drove to the mechanic's workshop, next to the small airport where he services airplane engines. Great, I thought, an airplane mechanic must be good.

When we got there, I saw that Mitch, the mechanic, had a garage full of Harleys and other bikes in various states of repair. Great, I thought again. But Mitch also had a yard full of biker friends in the midst of a barbecue. Not so great. Somehow I didn't think that he was quite ready to talk about Ural problems.

I gave him the rundown on the accumulated difficulties: the new cylinder, the bent head gasket, the mysterious electrical failures. Mitch said he'd look at them tomorrow, before he took off for the weekend, and to please help myself to some ribs. He walked away to start up the dirt bike he'd provided for the kids' entertainment, and I was left standing there, looking at the group sitting around a table next to Mitch's trailer. They all wore biker garb -- jeans, boots, leather vests, tattoos. Well, I thought, looking down at my clothes, I fit right in.

To get to the barbecue grill I had to maneuver past two untrained dogs tied to the front door of the trailer, and a group of women who looked up and said "hi," except for one who pointedly didn't look or speak to me then or the rest of the evening.

"WHO IS SHE?" I later heard the woman ask Mitch's girlfriend.

"I don't know," she replied. "Some journalist who's riding around the country."

I stood around, nibbled on potato salad, and chatted a little, feeling uncomfortable. I wandered over to a group of people sitting on a big Harley with a sidecar. It belonged to a woman nicknamed "Spyke." She told me that her husband had died the year before and that a few months ago she'd learned how to ride the bike.

"It's an old bike," she said, "and always needs fixing."

She turned and studied it silently for a moment in the fading light. Her long gray hair streamed down the back of her leather jacket, and she held up her beer in a silent little toast. I could tell she was never going to give it up.

A moment later she turned back to me and said, laughing, "I'm learning, though. And I'm learning about wiring, I'm learning about carbs, I'm learning about valves...."

"Me, too," I told her.

"It's funny," she said, "how I never bothered before. I guess I'm learning now purely from necessity."

And that's just it, I thought. Necessity. Is it necessary to know mechanics in order to drive? Maybe not, but it sure is empowering. I could see it, even in this women I barely knew, how strong she felt because of her new knowledge. She'd already learned that it really isn't so mysterious after all, that it isn't so scary.

"I'm thinking of taking a cross-county trip, too," she said.

I gave her my address. Then we all went to a karaoke bar where Mitch, the multi-talented Ural and small plane mechanic, stunned the audience with his singing ability.

Despite my worries that Mitch wouldn't have time to fix the bike, he did, and I came to get it the next afternoon. He'd taken the electrical system off the solo Ural he had and put it on mine. I could tell it had been a painful process. He'd wanted to try to modify the solo to drive a sidecar. "It should go faster than yours," he said.

And I wondered, not for the first time, What is this obsession with speed? Everyone agrees that it's great I'm taking back roads and not freeways. That it's great I'm not trying to break time and distance records. But no one else seems to want to do it.

THE BIKE REPAIRED, I headed southeast. Out of sheer nervousness, I skipped going to Quebec and down through New England, as I had planned, and set a course instead for relatives in North Carolina. So I rode through Michigan and Ohio on windy, pleasant roads lined with corn fields and tall grasses blooming with white-green fuzz. In the sunlight it looked like mist surrounding each long caterpillar-like grass bud. The sun hung forever in the western sky, casting my silhouette on the asphalt beside me like a dark, silent companion.

I passed hundreds of aging white clapboard houses, the gingerbread sagging, the paint chipped or gone. Then I'd pass neat Midwestern towns, all boxy with clapboards, white picket fences, clipped green lawns and porches with white wicker furniture.

And I started seeing something that astounded me: Everywhere were those little statues of red-jacketed black servants holding lanterns. The first time it made me laugh. After a while, though, I wondered what century these people thought they were living in.

More modern but just as popular were the painted plywood cutouts of the rear ends of old women bent over to weed the garden, of dogs treeing cats, or silhouettes of little boys peeing in the grass. Some people preferred realistic ceramic statues of animals, like geese and Little-Bo-Peep sheep, and even life-size deer. I hated that. If I hit a deer, I'm dust. I round the corner, and Wham! Dead deer, dead Carla. So with all these life-size statues of deer on people's lawns, I was a nervous wreck. I'm sure the people behind me wondered why I was braking all the time.

But I had to drive slowly through Ohio, anyway, to break in the new cylinder. I'd never expected to pass through Ohio. And it wasn't too bad. Kind of reminded me of North Dakota, with its large empty spaces, friendly people, flat farming country, and small towns.

Then I rode into one small town where they were having a festival. A lot of the men were dressed up in checkered shirts and suspenders, and sported funny, fringy German beards. The women wore little white bonnets and blue cotton dresses, and people were driving around in black horse-drawn carriages. Just as the Queen of the Beasts decided she was going to quit on me again, one of the carriages passed by, and I realized, this isn't a festival -- this is for real.

I'd just broken down in a real live Amish town.

How do I end up in these semi-hallucinations? Last week it was Winnie the Pooh. And now this.

Index | Dispatch 16-