Do You Accept This Challenge? - Ruff On The Road
After my third crash of the morning my legs turned to jelly. My knees gave out and I dropped into a cross-legged heap beside my motorbike at the edge of the sandy road. My motorbike, Moxie Thumper—a 2013 BMW F650GS, which I’d bought only a few months before—lay where she fell in a deep furrow of sand.
I looked ahead of her and saw that just another meter or two and I would have been through the bad stuff and back on terra-reasonably-firma once again. Then I glanced even further ahead and fixated despairingly on the next patch of sand. “Yeah, just to crash in the next one just like the two times before!” I thought.
Greg had been riding ahead on his F700GS, snaking through the sand and leaving a trail like a flamboyant sidewinder, but somehow—magically it seemed to me—never losing his cool or tread. Now he was hoofing his way back to me in a sort of heavy-booted trot, the sand kicking up in gasping plumes with every foot plant and the sun blazing cruelly off his black helmet and riding jacket.
I lowered my head between my folded legs and kept my gaze down long after he arrived so that he could infer the sort of humor I was in.
“I told you I didn’t want to do sand,” I said finally.
He was antagonizing in his silence. So I continued, “This is not how I wanted to celebrate my thirtieth birthday, you know.”
“I know it’s not easy,” he said infuriatingly.
I frowned.
“The next truck we see,” I demanded, “you have to ask to carry me and my bike to the highway.”
“Okay,” he assented and then, “in the meantime, let’s get her back on her feet.”
He lifted Moxie Thumper, rested her on her kickstand, and looked her over. Those miserable, adjustable, plastic side cases were bashed in again. He worked them back into place; reinforced them on the rack with zip-ties; and, in a genial tone that only annoyed me further, he announced that my Moxie Thumper was “no worse for the wear!”
An eternity of pitiless sunshine passed during which only a solitary motocross biker had broken the silence, appearing at the horizon and in mere seconds screaming passed, cutting through the sand like a warm knife through butter. Greg had stripped his helmet and riding jacket and was sitting beside me in damp shirtsleeves. I rose slowly, pointedly ignoring his quizzical look as I put my gear on and swung a leg over the seat.
“Well there’s no trucks coming, and we can’t exactly stay here forever, can we?” I said in a tone of infinite displeasure.
I started her up and left him to collect his things, shuffle back to his bike, and try to catch up.
* * *
I had begun that eight-month North and South America motorcycle trip as almost a total novice. Greg and I had met two years before as aid workers in Africa. It was a year later that we began going out and a few months in he told me about his plans for a motorcycle trip. “I’d like for you to come if you want,” he suggested improbably, adding, “but you’d need to learn to ride your own bike.”
So, we bought me a 160cc street bike and after a few months and 800 kilometers on the chaotic roads of Liberia, West Africa, we flew to Greg’s home in California to buy our big, brash, new motorbikes and outfit them for the trip.
No part of the trip’s first six weeks through the U.S. and Canada had been easy for me and, I spent most days anxious and desperate for more mouthfuls of rest than I ever seemed able to guzzle. Yet, somehow, I had made it this far to Baja and would make it through the next sand pit, and the one after that, and through six more months as well as 20,000 kilometers of potholes, rocky passes, mud, and sand. Even more amazingly, my relationship with Greg survived and we even decided to get married upon returning home.
There were accolades from friends and family about the accomplishment of such a travel feat, but in my own mind it was quite clear that this trip was not what I’d signed up for. In a way that I couldn’t put my finger on, it was not what I had agreed to. So, the truth is that I never experienced that kind of existential transformation that people so commonly gush about in their blogs and evangelize in moto travel magazines. For me it was a thing I did before moving on.
* * *
A few years later Greg and I rode our motorcycles south to live and work remotely in Guatemala for a couple years. It was during a long weekend moto trip that my Sena communicator conveyed a message that struck like a barbed spear.
“You don’t grow from overcoming challenges unless you first accept those challenges as your own,” the narrator of the audiobook said.
To me it was the Grand Theory of Motorcycling—and of everything else in life for that matter—that explained my experience during that first moto. It made complete sense and it also put the responsibility squarely and gallingly on me. It also reminded me of, and gave clear meaning to an offhanded remark, that Greg had once made. “You’re such a good rider despite yourself.”
It sounds lovely to describe the event like a revelatory bolt of lightning, doesn’t it? The truth is that the transformation was far from immediate or dramatic but the seed for a new outlook was definitely set. So, while our off-road rides were still occasionally blemished by a slide back into that “sandy Baja road self-pity” from a few years previous, now a calm, roadside chat with Greg would go a long way toward defusing my anxiety.
That was no small achievement in itself. But the really dramatic culmination to this tale of motorcycle-travel-leads-to-existential-transformation came when it was time to ride with my 65 lb. German Shepherd, Moxie, perched in a travel carrier atop my motorcycle.
Parenthetically, yes, my dog and my motorbike are both named “Moxie.”
We adopted Moxie (the dog) a few months after arriving in Guatemala. After some initial fretting that we would have to choose between moto travels and Moxie (again, the dog), Greg put himself to sketching, measuring, cutting, and welding. The first couple prototypes were cumbersome and clumsy. Then, one sleepless night, inspiration struck and few days later he brought home an early version of what we now call Moxie’s K9 Moto Cockpit.
Mixed with my pleasure at seeing the creation brought to life was a sharp pang of anxiety that pretty soon there would be no putting it off, and I’d have to saddle up with Moxie or let it be known that I was paralyzed with fear.
“This really looks fantastic!” I said. “But you know it’s going to take quite a long time for Moxie to be comfortable enough to attempt a ride.”
That desperate consolation was dashed after only a couple days of practice. A few dozen sausages had been all the catalyst that fearless Moxie needed to become comfortable leaping up to the sound of “saddle up!” and assuming her position as copilot.
So, on the third day of practicing it was clear that both Greg and Moxie were ready for riding trials to begin. I began to protest, citing one implausible reason after another to delay, knowing that each was a more glaringly transparent excuse than the last. But then quite suddenly, and as a kind of failsafe reboot, I stopped myself. It was as though my screen went black and in white block text one simple question appeared on the screen. It asked:
“Do you accept this challenge?”
__________________
Jessica Stone is a former development aid worker and currently a marketing consultant in the U.S. She resides in Guatemala where, along with her husband, Greg, she also runs a handmade dog apparel business called Ruff on the Road, which aims to equip dogs for adventure with beauty and durability and to support indigenous Guatemalan artisans. She documents her continued motorcycle travels with her German Shepherd Moxie around Mexico and Central America in a video series called “On 2 Wheels + 4 Paws,” which is available at RuffOnTheRoad.com and YouTube. You can follow Jessica, Greg, and Moxie on their adventures by visiting their website or social media:
Facebook.com/ruffontheroad
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Youtube.com/channel/UClvTDcR4Q6UP1p9a9GXaAvg?view_as=subscriber
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