by Neil Peart
Exhausted and desolated, I flew back to Toronto, staying there just long enough to organize the house and put it on the market, with more help from family and friends, then got away to the house on the lake, still not knowing what I was going to do. Before she died, Jackie had given me a clue, saying, “Oh, you’ll just go travelling on your motorcycle,” but at that time I couldn’t even imagine doing that. But as the long, empty days and nights of that dark summer slowly passed, it began to seem like the only thing to do.
I didn’t really have a reason to carry on; I had no interest in life, work, or the world beyond, but unlike Jackie, who had surely willed her death, I seemed to be armored with some kind of survival instinct, some inner reflex that held to the conviction that “something will come up.” Because of some strength (or flaw) of character, I never seemed to question “why” I should survive, but only “how” — though that was certainly a big enough question to deal with at the time.
I remember thinking, “How does anyone survive something like this? And if they do, what kind of person comes out the other end?” I didn’t know, but throughout that dark time of grief, sorrow, desolation, and complete despair, something in me seemed determined to carry on. Something would come up.
Or maybe it was more like the Mormon woman’s statement, “The only reason I am alive is because I could not die.”
In any case, I was now setting out on my motorcycle to try to figure out what kind of person I was going to be, and what kind of world I was going to live in. Throughout that first day on the road, as I traced the rain-slick highway north across the rocky face of Quebec, my shaky resolve would be tested a few times. Tense and shivering, peering through the turbulent wash of spray behind a lumber truck for a chance to pass, more than once I thought about packing it in. “Who needs this? I’m really not having fun, and I don’t think I’m strong enough to deal with this right now. Why not turn around and go back to the house by the lake, hide there a little longer?”
But no. That too would be a perilous road.
When I allowed myself to consider turning back, the thought that kept me riding on was, “Then what?” For over a month I had tried living there alone, with occasional visits from friends to help take me out of myself, and I had still felt myself beginning to slip into a deep, dark hole. Various stimulants and depressants could help me get through the days and nights, but as I had recently written to a friend, “That’s okay for a temporary escape hatch, but it’s no kind of a life.”
I had tried the Hermit mode, now it was time to try the Gypsy mode. I tried not to think of what I would do if that didn’t work.
Travelling had always been a more or less normal condition for me, not only as the necessary environment of a touring musician for the past 23 years with Rush, but also as a kind of escape from all that. Between concert tours I had travelled the roads of China, Africa, Europe, and North America, at first by bicycle, and later by motorcycle, and that kind of self-contained journeying had fired my imagination with curiosity and challenge.
From the beginning, I kept daily journals during my travels, and when I returned home I used them to exercise my interest in prose writing, experimenting with different approaches to telling the story of a journey. My interest in writing had begun with composing lyrics for the band, and had grown from a taste for writing letters into a serious love of stringing words together on the page. As I continued to develop the craft through my travel stories, I would print up a few copies of them for friends and fellow travellers, until after learning my way through about five privately printed books, I finally felt ready to publish one in 1996: The Masked Rider, about cycling in West Africa.
Lately, though, I hadn’t been doing much writing of any kind, except for a few letters to distant friends, but during our stay in London the grief counsellor, Dr. Deborah, had encouraged me to start a daily journal of “letters to Selena,” and that had proved to be good therapy. On this tentative beginning to a new kind of travel (purposeful, yet aimless) I doubted I would feel the old urge to document what I saw and felt, or any ambition to make this sad journey into a book, but just in case I had brought one of my little black notebooks with me, and that first day I made an experimental entry:[August 20, ’98]
Ach. Cold and wet. Lunch in Cadillac, Que. Heavy rain last few hours, surprisingly heavy traffic. Trucks roaring in spray plume. Scenery? Dark, wet, gloomy — like me. Much-logged face of Canadian Shield, occasional lake flooded or drained, mines and factories up around here, Val d’Or and Noranda. Barely 10° [50 F] this a.m., not much more now.
As I crossed into Ontario the rain let up at last, but the day remained chilly, and I finally sought refuge at the Northern Lites Motel, in Cochrane. 850 kilometres (531 miles) was plenty for that kind of day. Pouring a measure of The Macallan from my little flask into a plastic cup, I felt its warmth inside as I hung my wet riding gear around the room.
In the shower I thought about Cochrane, isolated at the northern edge of Ontario’s grid, and ghosts came out of the memory of a concert the band had played there back in the mid-’70s. After driving all night from Winnipeg, we’d played our set to a spattering of applause, and at the end we left the stage, figuring that was that. However, when we got to the dressing room, the promoter, a squat and hairy French Canadian, descriptively named “Hunk,” came running in, distressed we hadn’t played an encore. He said the agent had promised him we would.
We protested that an encore was usually a request for another song from the audience, and there had been no response that night to indicate any such desire. Hunk became more distraught, saying, in his thick accent, “I never t’ought Rush would do dis to me!” The three of us looked at each other, shrugged, and went back onstage. The audience was waiting quietly, we played another song, and everyone went home. No one seemed excited, but everyone seemed satisfied. We knew that everyone in town knew how much we were getting paid (probably a thousand dollars), and that the agent had promised Hunk an encore. After the gear was packed up and loaded into the truck, seven of us from the band and crew piled into a rented station wagon and drove all night back to Toronto.
Cochrane. Hunk. Ghosts.
All that seemed so far away and long ago, part of another life. Even after my first terrible loss I had felt no urge to work with the band anymore, and the day of Selena’s funeral I had told my partners in Rush, Geddy and Alex (all of us in tears), that they should “consider me retired.” I hadn’t worried about whether or not I could afford not to work again; it was simply unthinkable. After 23 years together, Geddy and Alex were loyal and caring friends through my sequence of nightmares, and they were, of course, nothing but supportive and understanding of whatever I wanted to do. Now that I was trying to carry the weight of yet another unbearable tragedy, I had even less reason to care about the future — or even if I had a future.
Certainly I had no interest in playing the drums, or writing lyrics for rock songs. Before that night when my world crashed down around me I had been working on a book about my motorcycle adventures with my friend Brutus on the just-finished Rush tour, Test For Echo, and now I couldn’t imagine taking up that project again.
That night in Cochrane, I took refuge in my journal notes once more, as I sat in the Northern Lites dining room after my fried pickerel (usually the tastiest of freshwater fish, but not this specimen). The only other diners were a pair of retired couples, and I heard them marvelling to discover that they hailed from two Ontario towns, Brantford and Peterborough, that were all of a two-hour drive apart. One of the ladies was even moved to remark, “It’s a small world.”
One of the men also tried to be sociable to the solitary diner, and leaned toward me to say, “You’re bein’ awful quiet over there.”
Startled, a dozen possible replies zipped through my answer index, all of them true, but some of them real conversation-enders. In the end I gave a shy chuckle, nodded toward my dinner, and said, “Oh . . . I’m okay.”
Then I wrote in my journal: “
Perils of solitude #1: People talk to you. I’d rather listen.”
The next morning, I continued west across Ontario, on the road from dawn until late afternoon, pausing only for fuel, and an occasional pause at the roadside for a stretch and a cigarette. Just kept moving, afraid to stop for too long, afraid to give myself time to think. Riding a motorcycle with total concentration, devoting infinite attention to the ever-changing road and other traffic; that was sufficient to keep most of my little brain busy.
My mind was also lulled into tranquility by the motion, the trance-like effect of steady vibration, occasional bumps and curves, and the world coming at me mile after mile, hour after hour.
Earlier that summer, contemplating the wreckage of my life, I had determined that my mission now was to protect a certain essence inside me, a sputtering life force, a meager spirit, as though I held my cupped hands around a guttering candle. In letters I had begun calling that remnant spark “my little baby soul,” and the task before me now, I decided, was to nurture that spirit as well as I could.
My little baby soul was not a happy infant, of course, with much to complain about, but as every parent learns, a restless baby often calms down if you take it for a ride. I had learned my squalling spirit could be soothed the same way, by motion, and so I had decided to set off on this journey into the unknown. Take my little baby soul for a ride.
When I had arrived in Quebec from Toronto, after everything else was gone, I didn’t have much interest in the world around me. I didn’t like anything, didn’t care about anything, and didn’t want to do anything. The first hint of a possible upturn came one afternoon when I was sitting on the dock with a glass of The Macallan in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Way down at the far end of the shining lake, near one of the islands, my eyes fastened on two wedge-shaped rocks sticking out of the water. Those two rocks had always reminded me of a pair of ducks facing each other, and somehow that day my little baby soul decided to imbue them with meaning. A voice spoke inside my head, “You know, I still like those two rocks.”
My eyebrows lifted at the realization: I actually liked something; and thus from that pair of rocks I began to build a new world. It would have to be a world my little baby soul could stand to live in, and a world that included the possibility of all that had happened, so it was going to be very different from the world I had lived in before. However, I was starting with first principles, the Earth, and now that I was travelling westward I began to respond to the landscapes around me too, the rugged cliffs and forests around Lake Nipigon and the north shore of Lake Superior.
If I wasn’t exactly finding joy in that scenic splendor the way I used to, I was at least “resonating” again, feeling the beauty around me, and curious about what that next line on the map might look like.
But as I rode toward that line on the map, my serenity, my thoughts, and my internal music were suddenly interrupted by the ugliest of sounds. Even through earplugs, helmet, and wind noise, there was no mistaking that loud electronic whooping and bleating, and my eyes darted to the rear-view mirror, which was filled with the insistent flash of red-and-blue lights behind the grille of a provincial police cruiser. Cursing, I pulled to the side of the road and straddled the bike. The officer walked up beside me, held out his hand and said, “May I have your radar detector please?”
Flustered, I protested, “But it’s supposed to be undetectable!”
He shook his head, “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with saying that. Someone should go after them. I knew it was an ‘undetectable’ one because it gave off a weird signal.”
Damn. Then worse. As he looked over my Ontario driver’s licence, I saw his head give a little jerk upward, then move in closer. He peered into my helmet, smiling now.
“You a musician?”
I mentally rifled through the answer index again, looking for a truthful evasion (not an easy task when you’re answering a man with a uniform and a gun).
Eventually I mumbled, “Um . . . not any more.”
He paused a moment, looking over my insurance and registration.
“You used to be a musician, though?”
“Um . . . years ago.”
He went on talking about some place in Toronto where he used to live that was apparently close by something that was supposed to be meaningful to the person he thought I was, but I was still thinking of alternatives from the answer index.
“I used to be a lot of things.”
Lately I had written to one of my friends, “I don’t know who I am, what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to do.” Time would tell, I could only hope, and if time was supposed to be the great healer, then the best thing I could do was try to “let it pass” as painlessly as possible, try to minimize the self-destructive urges, and stay away from the house on the lake for awhile.
Let time pass. Take my little baby soul for a ride.
The policeman finished writing out my ticket, and I went riding on.
The road unwinds toward me
What was there is gone
The road unwinds before me
And I go riding on
It’s my turn to drive
DRIVEN, 1996
Chapter 2
WESTERING
What a fool I used to be
PRESTO, 1990
Before dawn had reached Thunder Bay and the northern shore of Lake Superior, I was carrying my bags and helmet out to the hotel parking lot. I paused beside the bike to watch a spectacular display of aurora borealis — shimmering veils of greenish light draped across the northern sky. Setting off through the forests of northwestern Ontario, the lonely road cast its hypnotic, soothing effect over my mood. The steady droning of the engine, the constant wind noise, the cool, forest-scented air, and my visual fixation on the road ahead occupied most of my senses, while my mind wandered above its monitoring function into the fields of memory.
The Ghost of Christmas Past carried me back to a snowy December afternoon in 1993, a few days before Christmas. Selena and Jackie and I lived most of the year in Toronto, but we usually spent our summers and holidays at the house by the lake in Quebec, and for our tight little family, Christmas was a special time there.
The snow had been heavy that winter, already laying two feet deep in the woods and over the frozen lake. The house was carefully decorated indoors and out, with lights strung in the snow-covered trees, and the living room dominated by a tall, glittering Christmas tree. Selena was 15 then, and covered a large table with her annual tableau of “Christmas Town,” an array of porcelain houses on snowy cotton hills, miniature trees with tiny colored lights, a toy train puffing real smoke as it circled through the houses, and even little figures skating magnetically on a mirrored pond. Christmas Town was different every year, but even into Selena’s late teens it was an expression of her love for the rituals of Christmas.
She was always so excited to arrive from Toronto and start decorating, the fireplace blazing as we played the Christmas CDs by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, the Harlem Boys Choir, and a special favorite, A Charlie Brown Christmas. That year the house was filled with live music too. Our guests were Jackie’s mother, her sister Deb, and her partner Mark, a musician and recording engineer, and we had made up a little orchestra of Selena on flute and acoustic guitar, Mark on acoustic guitar, and me attempting to play the marimba — a wooden-keyed percussion instrument on which I was only a “dabbler” — and the easier, more familiar time-keeping, with wire brushes on snare drum and high-hat.
That afternoon we were rehearsing our repertoire of five or six Christmas songs, preparing to give a private concert for Jackie, Deb, and Grandma on Christmas Eve. I was struggling over a difficult marimba part while Selena complained that I was “a loser” (her usual style of endearment for those she loved), when I heard the rumble of an engine in the driveway and a door slamming. Jackie called to me from the kitchen, “Neil, it’s for you,” but I was preoccupied with trying to get my mallets to hit the righ
t keys on the marimba, and just grumbled, “How do you know?”
What a fool I used to be. (The truest words I ever wrote, and they get truer every day.)
With an impatient sigh, I walked over to the front door and looked out to see the pickup truck driven by Jackie’s brother, Keith, who worked for us looking after the Quebec house, and perched in the back of it was a red BMW motorcycle. I immediately realized that it was a present to me from Jackie, for I had long claimed that I was going to try motorcycling when I “grew up,” and that my choice of machine would be a BMW. Mouth agape, and still wearing my slippers, I ran into the snowy driveway and climbed into the truck bed, then up to the saddle of the beautiful red R1100-RS. I didn’t know anything about motorcycles then, had never even ridden one, but I just sat on it and looked at the controls and instruments and closed my hands around the grips. A phrase came into my head, full blown, right out of a novel: “And nothing was ever the same again . . .”
During the rest of that winter of 1994 I was away working with Rush on our Counterparts tour, so all I could do was read the motorcycle magazines while I dreamed about riding that beautiful red beast. In April, I attended a riding class at a Toronto college with Rush guitarist Alex, who had been bitten by “the bug” himself that same winter, and had bought a Harley-Davidson.
A strange and ironic part of my physical-mental interface was that although I had made my living playing drums for 20 years, with hands and feet doing this and that and the other thing, more-or-less independently of one another, all my life I had trouble with physical coordination — sports, for example, at which I had always been very poor. I attempted to comfort this wounded self-image by theorizing that while playing the drums I had to divide my limbs in a kind of four-way independence, and thus it was more like “dis-coordination,” but of course that didn’t really wash, for they all had to work together eventually. In any case, even on the small motorcycles provided by the riding school I had difficulty coordinating the balance of clutch and throttle controls, and I struggled rather pathetically for the three days of the program.