TWO for the ROAD
The eldest of six siblings, he spent much of his childhood in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he had a paper route on his bicycle and then his scooter—perhaps discovering then his love of two wheels.
I picture him on his two-stroke Vespa, sky blue with bloody clouds of rust, crackling and smoking across the bridges of Pinellas County. It is dusk. The evening papers, hot from the press, are rolled like warm loaves in his leather satchel. His taillight is a red ruby in the falling darkness.
HE WAS BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1947.
The year is 1961; he is fourteen years old. His hair is dark, wind-curled across his forehead. His eyes are squinty, like mine. He is looking across the waterways and canals that crawl inland from Tampa Bay. He is watching the waters glow beneath him, dusk-born, like rivers of flame.
He is Rick Brown, my father.
Fifty-six years later, in the fall of 2017, I left my home in Wilmington, North Carolina, on my 1989 Harley-Davidson Sportster, “Blitzen”—a bike my dad and I had built together—bound for New Orleans. My route would take me down the old coastal highway, US 17, stopping overnight at my parents’ house south of Savannah, where I grew up, before heading west across the Gulf Coast. I was planning to spend Halloween in New Orleans, with a side trip to the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, where I was due to discuss my latest novel.
My longest solo ride yet.
My father and
