Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

by Neil Peart

  Other customers stopped by in their high-wheeled, mud-spattered pickups, many of them with the same backwoods dress and Native features, and offered useful theories and suggestions. Siphon the tank out again. Remove the spark plugs and clean them, twice. Remove the injectors and spray them clean, twice. Tie a rope around the forks and tow the bike behind a car, like a water-skier, while the terrified rider tries to jump-start it. (Sounded like a good idea . . .) Still the starter cranked impotently.

  As for the teenage boy who had caused all this, he stayed out of sight for awhile, and I hoped his boss hadn’t been too harsh with him. After all, it was his first day on the job, and something inside me could relate to his gangly, scrawny, pimply self-consciousness.

  Call it memory.

  I knew how I would have felt at that age: embarrassed, afraid, and ignorant. I felt the ghost of the fool I used to be.

  But if I didn’t get mad at the boy, I sure got angry at the situation, especially as the hours passed. By 4:30 I decided to call the BMW dealer back in Edmonton, while they were still open, to see about getting a truck sent out to pick up the dead bike. I described the problem to the mechanic, and he agreed that we had tried all the right things, then suggested one last desperate remedy, though he warned me to “be careful.”

  At my request, the taciturn owner produced a can of ether starting fluid, and he sprayed it into the air intake while I cranked the tired starter one more time. A couple of loud explosions had us ready to dive for cover, but suddenly the motor caught in clouds of thick white smoke, and I turned the throttle wide to keep it going.

  While I was frantically reloading the bike and putting on my riding gear, eager to get back on the road and get moving again, one of the more talkative Natives remarked on the height of the bike, and said with a quiet laugh, “Too tall for orientals.”

  With a start I realized that those bush-wise young men who had helped me so willingly and knowledgeably were not “natives” in either sense, but were actually Chinese, probably only a generation or two away from an ancestor who raised millet and spoke Mandarin, or grew rice and spoke Cantonese. Their grandfathers might have worn the long braid of the Mongol emperor; their grandmothers might have woven conical hats to keep off the sun in the paddies. Now these young men had become so “native” that I had actually mistaken them for the “first immigrants,” those who had been there the longest (in this area, probably Cree).

  These rough-and-ready individuals looked and acted so wonderfully unstereotypical in their work boots and bush clothes, their muddy pickups with ATVs in the back, their talk of hunting season and snow machines, and I realized that these Canadians absolutely were “natives” now, in every sense, fully adapted to their environment. For the first time it was clear to me that when we try to classify others by stereotypes of race, what we really mean is culture. The modes of behavior, dress, and habits of “The Other” that we find strange and exotic, or sometimes contemptible, are cultural patterns developed over hundreds of generations in a specific locale, under local influences of weather, livelihood, diet, and daily customs.

  Something I had long felt instinctively, without being able to articulate it, could finally be put into words. I saw that it was plain wrong to evaluate people according to race, for it was clear that culture was the real divider among peoples. Given enough time, a generation or two, we could all become “The Other,” no more different in behavior from our neighbors and peers than they were from each other. Even the cosmetic differences would disappear in the course of a few more generations of “assimilation,” adopting the local diet, mores, and chromosomes, and eventually dissolving into the gene pool.

  The word race comes from the same Latin root as the French word rascin — root. Hence the English word deracinated, “to be uprooted.” Exiled, perhaps. Well, exile is better than imprisonment, after all, and it seems to me that roots are highly overrated anyway. But racemus is Latin for “bunch of grapes,” and perhaps those are sour ones. I no longer had any roots; I only had the road.

  And on the current stretch of that road, I had hoped to make it to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, but that was out of the question now. Still, after such a frustrating setback I was determined to make some distance before dark, and I rode like a demon, passing trucks, RVs, pickups, and cars.

  Behind one long line of traffic I waited tensely for an opportunity to zip into the oncoming lane, when I noticed the driver in front of me stick his hand up through his open sunroof and rotate his index finger. Recognizing the warning of a police car ahead, I backed off, but it was too late. Once again my mirrors were filled with flashing red-and-blue lights, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police car this time, and my adrenaline deflated with a sad little curse as I signalled my turn onto the shoulder of the road.

  I hit the kill switch and stood slumped over the bike, helmeted head hanging down. The Mountie obviously read my body language as he walked up beside me, and with a good-humored note of mock hesitation, he said, “Well, I was going to ask for your licence and registration . . .”

  I slowly lifted my helmet off, removed my sunglasses, and turned to look him in the eyes. “Just this once, you have got to hear my story.” I recounted my three-hour ordeal back at the Cottonwood gas station, and explained that I was trying to make up some time and get to Grande Prairie before dark.

  The mustachioed Mountie was friendly and sympathetic, and this time my Ontario driver’s licence only elicited a story about how he had once lived in Toronto, and had owned a motorcycle, but had given it up as “too dangerous.” His radar unit had clocked me at 140 kilometres-per-hour in a 100-kph zone, which would have been a $174 fine and some serious demerit points, but he gave me a break.

  “I’ve got to give you a ticket, but I’ll cut it down considerably.”

  He wrote it up as a generic “disobeying a sign” infraction, for an even $100. Fair enough, and he was nice about it too, advising me that if I took it slow, steady, and safe, I would get to Grande Prairie just as quickly. I followed his advice, though more out of dispirited resignation — and a heightened fear of further encounters with authority — than any wish to be slow, steady, and safe.

  By 6:30 I’d had enough, and felt a strong desire for a large whisky and a hot shower, so I pulled into the Horizon Motel, in Valleyview. Like many of the motels I’d passed on this journey, the parking lot was full of construction pickups, carrying laborers for road-repair projects. (Given the attrition of brutal weather, Canada is said to have two seasons: Winter and Construction.) Dirty work clothes were sprawled over the railings on the upper walkway, boots and beer cases stood outside the doors, and above my ground-floor room there was much stomping around near the designated “party room.”

  If such rowdy groups of “men on the loose” were common in these backroad motels, solitary women of any age were certainly rare, and as I took a table in the neighboring Chinese restaurant I noticed a middle-aged woman sitting alone, hunched over a wine glass. Her face was puffy and crusted with lurid make-up, hair a too-young shade of red unknown to nature, and I wondered idly if she might be an aging hooker, winding down her career as a camp follower for the construction crews.

  No doubt there was a story there, but I soon realized it wouldn’t be a happy one, for she was grumbling at length to a red-faced young waiter who had apparently forgotten her order. She seemed to take it as a personal insult, and summoned the manager and complained to him indignantly, with boozy repetition. He brought her another glass of wine to mollify her, and explained that it was the boy’s first day on the job. Another rookie having a bad day.

  The boy’s cheeks were burning when he came to my table, and his voice shook when he asked if I’d like something to drink. The woman’s thoughtless cruelty angered me (how had her first day on the job gone?), and I tried to be extra nice to the poor boy. I told him what had happened to me that day, and said “Don’t be upset about her.” He breathed a sincere “thanks,” and I felt better, and hoped he did too.

/>   Back in my room, I flicked through the TV channels looking for the weather and stopped at an old Sinatra special from the late ’60s. Frank was in splendid voice, and his tour-de-force on “Old Man River” played on my overwrought emotions and left me feeling weepy. Because he was so great, and, I suppose, because he was dead. Another ghost.

  I was away before 6:00 on a cold morning, riding past hay farms, scrub forest, and some bald-looking areas of clearcut. (A roadside sign informed me that some of these had been cut to fight against a parasite on the spruce trees, and to eliminate the stands of deadwood left behind.)

  Magpies, crows, a coyote, and a fox kept me company as I covered 250 kilometres (156 miles) before stopping for gas and breakfast in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. The poor violated GS backfired a few times when I downshifted, but seemed to be running smoothly again. I noticed my thumb was sore from working the starter button so much trying to get it started the previous day, and that made me worry about the starter itself; I hoped its brushes and windings hadn’t been worn too badly by all that abuse. We were now officially getting “out there,” for a sign in Dawson Creek announced “Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway,” and there was no BMW dealer until the other end of it, in Fairbanks, over 1,000 miles away.

  The morning remained cold, and a light overcast let through just enough glare to require sunglasses. A steady 120 kph (75 mph) was fast enough to cover the miles, though still moderately legal, but I was soon feeling bone-chilled, even with my heated vest (wired like an electric blanket and plugged into the bike’s electrics), the heated grips under my heavy gloves, and my plastic rainsuit over the leathers.

  In Fort Nelson, I stopped at The Pantry for a bowl of soup and a chance to warm myself, and wrote in my journal,

  The best two-lane highway you can imagine so far — wide, well-paved, lightly travelled. Some nice bits of scenery, but I know the spectacular stuff will just be starting, as I head west into the mountains.

  RV bumper sticker: WHERE ARE WE GOING?

  AND WHY ARE WE IN THIS HANDBASKET?

  Back beside my motorcycle in the parking lot, I dug out my emergency cell phone and called Sheila, the band’s bookkeeper, back at our office in Toronto. Sheila had been part of our family life in past times, for she used to come to our house to update our books every two weeks, on Tuesday evenings, the same night as Selena’s flute lesson, when the house would be filled with the rich chords of the teacher’s piano accompaniment and Selena’s sometimes-halting performances (like her father, she loved to play, but with an impatience more like her mother’s, she hated to practise).

  Sheila had been a dear and supportive friend through all my troubles, and I had taken advantage of her kindness by gradually shifting all my business to her desk, and making her my “central liaison” for messages from friends and family. I might have been a solitary traveller, feeling completely detached from everything around me, but I was never really alone — always there were people thinking of me, worrying about me, and looking after the necessary business of my abandoned life.

  When my whole world was pulled out from under me so completely I was left feeling so flat and weak and helpless that I was unable to cope with the details of everyday life at all, and had to accept the help that was offered so willingly by family and friends. Once I was able to accept the idea, I was amazed how much they would and could do to help me survive those dark days. John Steinbeck once wrote that sometimes the nicest thing you can do for someone is to allow them to do something for you, and I learned the truth of that insight too. For perhaps the first time in my life I surrendered my independence and my proud self-sufficiency, and once I had opened that window to the warm breeze of compassion, my world-view was utterly transformed. I fell into their open arms.

  My brother Danny was one of those caregivers, and he sent me a quote from Thoreau, “At death, our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us, and are found out, or depart farther from us, and are forgotten.” Nearly everyone close to me had drawn nearer through that time, and one day in the House of Mourning I remember saying to my friend Brad, “You know, I used to think, ‘Life is great, but people suck,’ but now I’ve had to learn the opposite, ‘Life sucks, but people are great.’”

  In my former shallow, perhaps callous, world-view, I had enjoyed my life and appreciated my family and my friends, but I had often been annoyed by the feeling that everyone else just wanted something from me. But now life, which I had once idealized as a generous deity offering adventure and delight, had betrayed my faith viciously, and in the after-math it was people who had held me up and held me together with unstinting care and unimagined affection.

  With regard to “unimagined affection,” I confess that I am one of those people who, in a deep and secret place, can never imagine why anyone would actually like them. Respect maybe, or even appreciate, but not really care for. This psychology (or psychosis, or neurosis) is not about self-esteem or pride, for most people seem to possess sufficient reserves of those qualities, or some facsimile thereof, but it is more a sense of one’s ineptitude in the social graces, a perceived “disability” in what seemed to be the normal social routines of being charming, funny, entertaining, and forthcoming with another person.

  This existential discomfort causes more social awkwardness than the contrary self-image (as evinced by one friend of mine who, in that same deep and secret place, can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t like him). And for those of us who feel deficient in such socially valued qualities, it can also be that the effort of opening ourselves up to another is so difficult we’re willing to at least attempt the operation in close relationships, but not for casual encounters.

  That part of me remained the same, it seemed, but I had learned that it could be worthwhile to try to give yourself to others. They had certainly given themselves to me. Even some who had never been that close to me before were moved, and I remembered one former employee of the band’s who I hadn’t seen for years showing up at the House of Mourning and tearfully rambling through a speech that basically expressed what many others must have felt, “I don’t know what to say, but here’s my heart.”

  Also in the spirit of doing others the “favor” of letting them help me, I had taken advantage of Sheila’s boss, and Rush’s manager, Ray, by asking him to look after the selling of the family house in Toronto. During my first meeting with a realtor, barely two weeks after Jackie’s death, I had faced the raw wound of having to tell her why I was selling the house — one of the first times I was forced to tell my sad story in brief, painful words — and after offering a formulaic expression of sympathy, she told me how that might affect a buyer’s response to the house, then went on to argue repeatedly against my objection to holding “open house” showings, when anyone could walk in and take a tour through that haunted house, from serious buyers to the merely curious and the outright ghouls.

  So I was glad to avoid any more realtor-dealings, and the constant reawakening of happy family memories from that house. During our cell phone conversation that day Sheila said, “Ray wants to talk to you; I think he has pretty much got the house sold.” That set my mind reeling. It was what I wanted, of course, but now it seemed so . . . final.

  I tried to call Ray, but couldn’t reach him, so I suited up and got back on the Alaska Highway, thinking about all those things as I rode west, the road narrowing as it twisted through the conifer forests and into the northern reaches of the Rockies. The day remained cold under looming clouds, and sometimes the road was shiny with rain, so the mountains were sensed more often than seen. When they did appear, they were bare of trees, for at this latitude the treeline was very near; at the 4,000-foot elevation of Summit Lake, the trees seemed to end right at the roadside.

  After days of riding across the horizontal plane of the prairies, my journal described this three-dimensional scenery as “monumental” and “glorious,” and after all those straight roads, I described the riding as “way more entertaining.” This late in the season (August
25th) the traffic was light, and most of it gigantic RVs travelling in the other direction, away from Alaska. Rounding one thickly forested bend in the road, I was startled to see a small herd of caribou browsing at the roadside, and I slowed enough to look at them, but not scare them off.

  I was still responding to the landscapes, highways, and wildlife, “creating” the world as I rode. I was even starting to respond to people, it seemed, even strangers. Apparently I could even care about them, like the kid at the gas station, the Oriental “natives,” the hapless waiter, “the fool I used to be.” This empathy had been a rare feeling for me lately, as all of my emotions were bound up in one paradigm (Loss!), and my attitude toward strangers tended more toward bitterness and envy, and could be summed up by the angry accusation, “Why are you alive?” (And not “them,” of course.)

  Now, it seemed, I was beginning to include strangers in my brave new world, and maybe as I travelled down the Healing Road I would start to like them again too. Anything was possible. However, despite these occasional precious moments of Truth and Beauty I was finding on the road, I often felt lost and alone, and each day I was attacked by spells of dark, weepy desolation.

  So it was that cold, wet day on the Alaska Highway, and after 622 miles I was glad to arrive at the Northern Rockies Lodge, on the shore of Muncho Lake. Billed as “the largest log structure in British Columbia,” with a 45-foot-high central dining room, it had been built only two years previously, in 1996, just before my friend Brutus and I happened to make a brief stop there on our motorcycling trip to Yellowknife. Back then I had thought it would be a great place to stay, an outpost of civilization on a pretty little lake cradled among tall trees and rugged gray peaks, and when I set out that morning I remembered it, and hoped to make it that far.