The Fourth Demand: The Story of a Father and Son Journey

By Andy Solomon

Soon after Andy Solomon became the single parent of his 2-year-old son Marty he put the toddler on his motorcycle’s gas tank, and they became motorcycle men. This life lasted seven years until a near-fatal accident when Marty was nine made Andy promise he’d never again put his son on a motorcycle. But they missed riding terribly and formed a plan: when Marty graduated college they would get new motorcycles and tour the entire country. When Marty graduated, they did just that: five weeks, 26 states, and over 9000 miles from Florida to the Pacific and back.

This warm, perceptive account of that tour is on its surface a richly informative travel memoir, but at its heart it is the story of a devoted single parent raising his only child to adulthood and now letting him go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483502854

Book preview

Author’s Note:

This account of a five-week, 9112-mile motorcycle odyssey and a 20-year single-parent/only child adventure was written during and immediately after their 1997 motorcycle tour of America.

© 2013 Andy Solomon

Cover design © 2013 Anna Urick

We're curling down the Nantahala St. Petersburg Times © 1988 Marty Solomon

Heaven One Day Fiction Quarterly © 1992 Marty Solomon

After Michael Fiction Quarterly © 1993 Marty Solomon

Some passages in this book have appeared in earlier form in: Boulevard, Creative Non-Fiction, Fiction Quarterly, The St. Petersburg Times, The Tampa Tribune, The Washington Post, and on National Public Radio.

ISBN: 9781483502854

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following people, some for help, some for inspiration, some just for being there: Jan Dargel, Kelley Benham French, Archie Gresham, Juli Herren, Jeff Klepfer, Terry Lacy, Tricia Leedom, Terry Mohn, Motorcycle Heritage Museum, Tim O'Connor, Terry Parssinen, Kris Porto, Fred Punzo, Anne Rimbey, Steve Roe, Joe Rodiero, Susie Walter.

For Gabriel and Anna

God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.

James M. Barrie

Prologue

His mother and I fought about everything by the Spring of 1977, but when we divorced we agreed: she'd get the car and the oil lamp we first made love by. I'd get the motorcycle and Marty, who turned two the month before.

At bedtime I’d sit with my elbow propped by his pillow and hear how the world looked to a two year old. His mother was now a fairy presence, outside his daily life, who glided back for visits and filled his world with glow.

I was the benevolent giant who told him when to brush his teeth, when to take a bath. I cooked a thin variety of meals and sat by his bedside at night. He’d crawl under my covers near dawn. Because single-fathering was rare then, the world saw me as noble but pathetic. Neighbors brought casseroles, proud to save a child from starving.

The motorcycle becomes a symbol. I cook, launder, scrub, even sew. I change diapers and rock a toddler at naptime. The motorcycle keeps me on the beard-stubble side of androgyny. I plop Marty on the gas tank, buy him a denim vest and a helmet sized Extra Small. We are motorcycle men.

After supper, I lift him to the gas tank and head to Clearwater Beach for the sunset, Marty leaning forward, hands on the tank, singing on the way. We sit on the creamy sand and talk, and when the sun slips into the Gulf of Mexico he blows it a kiss and says, Good-night, sun. We ride home and shower together. Most nights, we each go to sleep with a smile.

This life lasts seven years. Marty leans on my support. I lean on his wonder. We have each other and are not alone.

One spring night in 1984 we are in Tampa at a barbecue with faculty and students from the university. I share a lemonade with Marty. In three weeks some of these students will graduate and I will miss them. In another dozen years I will miss Marty.

We say good-night and climb onto our Honda 750. Marty rides behind me now. We cruise through a warm night spangled by shops and cars. I rest my left hand on my thigh, and Marty does the same. Faintly, I can hear the Air Supply song he is singing, Even the Nights Are Better.

Traffic thins as we start onto the causeway toward home. The evening is too pretty to rush through. I stay to the right. The sea air flows under our face shields. I tap Marty's knee and point to where mullet jump through moonlight on Tampa Bay.

A parked car starts, edges toward the road and stops, a small white sedan.

The week before, I'd introduced Marty to Leonard Cohen's songs, and now he begins singing That's No Way to Say Good-Bye.

The white car looks unsteady, too eager. Something tells me it will pull out in front of me. Something else tells me no one could be that stupid.

It does pull out in front of me. I have two seconds to react. There is no time to avoid the crash, only to make the angle of impact oblique instead of direct, no time to warn Marty or pray he'll survive.

I feel pavement against my cheek and see men kneeling through the haze. One says, Don't move, fella. I think your ribs are broke.

Then I hear the other voice, the boy's voice. The crash threw him into tall grass, and he'd flagged down the men around me. Daddy, the voice says, don't die. Please don't die, Dad.

I draw breath against the cracked ribs. The pain is immediate and sharp. I gasp, Don't worry, son. I won’t die. I believe I am probably not lying.

A half-hour later, Marty and I lay holding hands on side-by-side gurneys, waiting for our X-rays. I’m thinking seven years is long enough to be telling him we'll always be together. I should be careful what I promise.

Marty clutches my hand and looks at me with something new in his eyes, sadder and stronger than I've ever seen there, the knowledge that the person he leaned on can wobble, fail him, even disappear.

I look back and see that in his long march toward manhood he has taken his next step.

Week One

Clearwater, Florida to Fort Smith, Arkansas

Where you headed from here?

I don't know.

Cain't get lost then.

William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

The tour began badly.

I met Diane in January, 1980. We married in October, 1981. Antoine de Saint Exupéry, whose The Little Prince was among Marty's favorite books, said, Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. Diane and I spent 1980 gazing at each other like moony teenagers. Marty was five and eager for us to marry Diane and her two children and have a real family. By summer 1981, though, Diane and I could no longer ignore that we viewed many things differently. In politics, religion, even child rearing, we often looked in different directions, and we felt a year of gazing begin to slip away. Desperate to hold on, we married. By the night of the motorcycle accident in 1984, the gazing was now lost under the weight of our differences, and our house was up for sale. When it sold we could go on with our lives separately. But we still lived together. The hospital called and told her of the accident. They told her I had several broken ribs and a concussion and would have to stay a few days but that Marty suffered only abrasions. Diane came and took him home and called Nita, Marty's mother.

The next afternoon, Nita came to the hospital. After our divorce, Nita and I still looked outward in the same direction, though not at each other. By 1984 we had become friends. But now I had almost killed the person we both loved most in the world.

I expected that call for seven years, she said.

No apology could fit what happened.

I'm not mad at you, she continued. "I know how much you love Marty, and I know it was an accident. You may have been careless... No, there's no 'may' about it. You were careless. You were incredibly stupid. But I let it happen, too. I never objected to his being on the bike."

She walked from my bed to the window. Her hair when I met her in 1969 had been waist-length, lemon-colored like Marty's. Now it was short and, as his would, had darkened a shade. Marty's eyes, though, are blue like mine, not her green. She looked out the window and folded her arms across her chest as if to squeeze her complicity in his riding farther from her surface. She turned to me.

I told you that I'd never fight you for custody.

The room grew black. If she wanted custody now, there wasn't a judge in the world who wouldn't take a child away from the idiot who'd put him on a motorcycle since he was two.

And I don't plan to now.

Things in the room grew visible once more.

"But, if he ever gets on a motorcycle again, all bets are off. I'll file for custody that very day."

He won't. I can't believe I ever let him ride in the first place. Look, Nita, the bike was destroyed last night. I won't get another one. Marty stays off motorcycles from now on. Me too. I'm done riding.

She looked at me for a few seconds, then her face softened into that new, friend's smile. Good, she said. Maybe you're not as dumb as I thought. She squeezed the hand that wasn't in bandages. I'll stop by tomorrow. Want chicken soup?

Six years later, Marty and I sat in our living room. His boyish face had vanished, stretched to teenaged gawkiness, and he shaved it every third day. His eyebrows were too dark for his blond hair, his sides were fluted with too much rib. His voice had just finished deepening to baritone. His small group of friends formed a quirky menagerie. One had just dropped by with a boa constrictor draped across his shoulders, and the girl Marty seemed most interested in always had a copy of T. S. Eliot's early poems sticking from the top of her handbag. He kept these friends from me devoutly, as I was now a source of embarrassment, while he assured them that his mother, who'd just moved to South Carolina, was really the cool one. He held my opinions on most things in disdain as obsolete, shallow, or obtuse. I walked on eggshells around his hair-trigger irritability. My entire wardrobe, he believed, should be burned; he said I dressed as if I were looking at the other side of the mirror. One recent evening he'd rendered his judgment on my life. As we drove home from a basketball game, he turned to me and said, "You know, Dad, your life really isn't bad for you. You've got job security. You teach stuff you love. Your schedule's pretty flexible. Now, don't get me wrong: your life would drive me batshit. But for you it's not bad."

Yet, within this teenager pulling away were traces of the boy who loved me, even though he seldom dared say it, who'd still reach out sometimes when no one was looking to take my hand, still ask me to read to him at bedtime, still liked to go places with me or sit by me and watch a movie.

That evening we watched Easy Rider. As Wyatt and Billy rode off into the Southern California desert, Marty said, The night we had the accident, I think that was the first time I saw you weren't perfect.

It took you nine years to learn that?

Don't push it, Dad. I'm fifteen now, and I know just how far from perfect you are.

Spare me this part, son.

The accident, that was the first time anything ever happened that you couldn't make come out all right. I guess that's when I realized you were just a human being, like everyone else.

You had to realize it sometime. Only my head was speaking. My heart was sorry he'd ever had to learn that.

But it doesn't change the plan. When I finish college, we're taking off.

That had been the plan since a month after the accident.

Those first few days after I came home from the hospital in 1984, Marty and I couldn't leave each other's company. In the car, we'd put our hand on the other's knee, just glad to be still alive and together. We'd talk about how dangerous motorcycles are. I told him of the promise I’d made his mother, and he said, I don't want to get on a motorcycle ever again.

Soon, though, the fear and relief and caution began to fade. At bedtime, a month after the accident, just about when I resumed breathing painlessly, he told me the accident had been his fault.

"Your fault? I said. How could it possibly have been your fault?"

Just think logically, he said.

I'll put my whole mind to it. Explain.

At the barbecue I told you I was cold. So you said, 'Then let's get going before it gets any colder.' If I hadn't said I was cold, we wouldn't have left then, and that car would have been gone when we got to the causeway.

I've heard you say any number of bright things over the years, son, but that is not among them. For a guy who doesn’t shave yet, you sure like to nick yourself on Ockham’s razor. So you don't say you're cold, and we leave a half-hour later, and instead of a car we hit a truck. Or how's this: I don't meet your mother in 1969, I meet some other woman, and instead of you I have a different boy, some kid who's less fun maybe but really likes my hamburgers and never gives me an argument about bedtime.

He laughed. Do you miss it, Dad?

Miss what?

The motorcycle.

What I missed was the word Daddy, how recently it had shortened to Dad, and, with it, a little boy was disappearing within a big boy. Yeah, I do miss it.

Me too.

But I made Mom a promise. You always have to keep your promises.

I know. He fiddled with a G.I. Joe figure. "What was the promise exactly?"

That you stay off motorcycles.

Forever?

Until I can't make that kind of decision for you anymore.

When's that?

A lot longer than you'd like.

High school?

Longer.

College?

That sounded reasonable, and far away. "Yep. When you finish college."

Let's make a plan: when I finish college, we'll both get motorcycles and we'll ride across the whole country, just us. Okay?

That was something I'd already dreamed of, many times. Sure. Sounds like a lot of fun.

What about the promise, though?

If your mother wants custody of you when you're twenty-two, she's welcome to it.

For a long time, fun and far away were all it sounded, too far away to be real.

Then came his junior year at New College in Sarasota. Time had speeded up and made him a man. His teenage gawkiness was gone, and once again all his features agreed with each other. I knew little of his daily comings and goings. He paid much of his own way, some with work, some with a full academic scholarship, and he volunteered ten hours a week helping teenage runaways. He had grown into a scholar, cared deeply about those who had less than he, and wanted to make the world better. He stayed free from serious trouble and appeared headed toward a life rich in possibility. I was more proud of him than anyone had patience to hear.

Because his college is only an hour south of Clearwater, I was able to join him for dinner once a week or so. One night as we were eating at Hemingway's on St. Armand's Circle, he said, You remember we have a deal, don't you?

Which deal is that?

When I graduate, a cross-country motorcycle tour.

"You really still want to do that, Marty?"

Hell, yeah. Don't you?

I can't think of anything on earth I'd rather do. I'll have to talk with your mother about it, though.

I've already talked to her.

And?

I'm grown now, Dad. All she said was, 'Please be careful.'

Really? That's all she said?

Well, she said some stuff about me being just like my father, but she meant it in a mostly nice way.

How else could she possibly mean it?

You don't want to know.

Our trip was still more than a year away, but I needed to get on a motorcycle immediately. With my longtime companion away at college, my life had grown less adventurous, less fun. The time I'd spent with him I now let fill with work, and I was growing dull with middle-age. You don’t stop riding motorcycles because you grow old; you grow old because you stop riding motorcycles. In late spring of 1996 I bought a Virago, Yamaha's V-twin cruiser. With their reclined sitting position, cruisers are not ideal bikes for long tours. They are ideal bikes for middle-aged guys growing frightfully conscious that the revving sound they hear at their back is Time. I had only one compelling reason to buy this blue and silver cruiser, then accessorize it with leather saddlebags, a windshield, passing lamp headlights, and a custom leather seat: it looked so damn cool. Riding it, I'd feel cool, no longer an imminent geezer working seven days a week at the university and for various editors around the country, who now lived in an empty nest that freed him yet who took little advantage of the freedom, whose social life had dwindled to a few hours each evening with Suzanne, the woman I'd been seeing for six years, and her son Tom.

Just before I bought the Yamaha, I told a colleague I was getting a new motorcycle. Oh no, Andy, she said. You almost died on one. Didn't you learn your lesson?

I'd learned several lessons. The main one was that while I still had a fear of dying, I was even more afraid of no longer being alive, and it was starting to happen. Inside every middle-aged man is a young man pleading, Let me back in the ball game, and mine was screaming. Atop that gleaming machine with its shiny paint, sparkling chrome, and thick leather, I could start coming back to life. I'd be cool enough to ride beside the young man my son had become and make him proud, swashbuckling enough to plant Suzanne behind me and glide off on lonely country roads for an afternoon season of reawakened splendor in the grass. Even my mail carrier would be impressed, slipping Rider and American Motorcyclist into my box beside Modern Maturity. I rode the Virago infrequently that year, to keep it special. I took Suzanne for night-time rides. I took ten-year-old Tom for jaunts around Tampa Bay that usually ended at Dairy Queen. I bought Tom and me matching doo-rags and had a pair of black t-shirts airbrushed for us; mine had a skull and said BAD TO THE BONE, his had a menacing smiley face and said BAD TO THE SUBCUTANEOUS TISSUE. Tom was already a year older than Marty had been on our last ride. Although I'd expected to, I felt no fear. The more you fear death, the faster it seems to approach.

For Marty, though, I was afraid. I made him take a motorcycle safety course before getting his license. I promised I would buy him the bike of his choice—up to a modest price—but insisted that he sell it when the tour was done. He shopped carefully and came up with a totally impractical selection, a 1991 Kawasaki Zephyr 750, an in-line-four motorcycle I found so uncomfortable, so leaned-forward compared with mine that it quashed our plan to switch bikes frequently as we'd travel. No way I'd ride that thing. But it was fire-engine red and sporty, and he wanted it, and you always have to keep your promises. He didn't care that it had no luggage rack, no saddlebags, so that he'd have to pack a duffel and sleeping bag on the passenger seat and rear bumper. None of this seemed to bother him, until a few days before the trip.

Then everything started to bother both of us.

As we prepared to leave Clearwater on Monday morning, June 2, 1997, my eagerness had become anxiety. I'm always nervous before leaving home for an extended period. I picture burglaries, fires, and hurricanes. I imagine losing notes, letters, marginalia, and memorabilia that can't be replaced. Suzanne would keep her eye on the place and contact me if there were a problem, but that was not the same as being there.

And for all my look-the-Grim-Head-Biker-in-the-eye-and-sneer bravado, I'd grown anxious about our riding motorcycles. Touring the country by motorcycle had seemed adventurous, a recapturing of our early years as child and single dad, the ideal capstone to mark the dawn of Marty's independent life, and concrete proof that I was older now but still not old.

As Departure Day approached, less glamorous realities began setting in.

There are physical disadvantages to motorcycles. Over the past two years I'd tried to get trimmer, healthier. I cut my smoking from a pack to just a couple of cigarettes a day, walked four brisk miles each morning, cut 90% of the fat from my diet and replaced it with vegetables. The new regimen proved effective, so that even though I was 52 I didn't look a day over 51. But in slimming from 170 to 150 pounds, I'd lost some of the cushioning from my butt, and on tour every ounce of cushion helps.

We faced security problems connected to both biking and camping. When your motorcycle is loaded with gear, you don't want to leave it long or far from sight, which affects even where you choose to eat. If you're camping, as we planned to do most nights, you're edgy about wandering from the campsite.

I was less worried about the other two problems connected to motorcycle travel: breakdowns and safety. While I'm a limited mechanic as bikers go, Marty used to work in a bicycle repair shop and is generally more handy than I. Besides, I had joined the American Motorcyclist Association and signed on for their emergency roadside coverage, so if we had a breakdown beyond Marty's skill and tools, we could get help 24 hours a day. As for accidents, injury, and death, they can happen, and motorcyclists are particularly prey to them, but touring on back roads is the least dangerous kind of riding, far safer than riding around town. Back roads were where we planned to be.

What worried me most was Marty.

For two decades, he had been my companion. As a boy, in our nightly bedtime talks he would tell me almost everything, from the game of Doctor the girl upstairs initiated when they were four to how much he loved the fishing and bicycling he shared with his mother on Sundays. When he entered his teens, he grew reticent with me about personal matters. At fourteen, he bought a long black cloak and became something of an isolate Byronic figure often brooding on dark interior enigmas. While his eccentricity amused me, his silence frustrated me. I knew he spoke of his personal life often with his mother—I could hear his muffled voice through his bedroom door during their long phone conversations—but he seldom spoke of private matters anymore with me.

Still, we shared so much. Since age two, we talked a long while at bedtime every night. He often came to the university with me and sat in on my classes, and by thirteen he was on the staff of our campus newspaper, which I advise. Also by thirteen, he subscribed to Harper's and The Atlantic, and we'd discuss their articles as he read them. We read novels and Shakespeare together. We watched movies and t.v. together. We went to University of Tampa basketball games and laughed together and discussed ideas. After he hit thirteen, I never sent an article or story or review to an editor without first asking Marty to look it over. We both loved language and wordplay and had evolved a punning, teasing banter almost as soon as he could talk. The first time I sat him on his training potty, he began to cry and I sang: It's my potty and I'll cry if I want to. A dozen years later, at 14, he was sitting around our campus newspaper office one night, both of us idle at the moment, and we got up and started doing The Twist together to no music, so he began to sing: Dancing with a dork, till the tune ends I'm dancing with a dork.

This often confused and even shocked people who overheard us, especially when we'd spice our insults with Shakespeare, the subject I teach and the greatest artistic passion of my life. Marty had been raised on Shakespeare. If he failed to remove a baseball cap indoors, I might lament, A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick, and he might reply, Peace, good tickle-brain.

This was the benign result of a process set in motion at his birth. While his birth was the happiest event of my life, it made clear that his mother's path and mine had to fork. Nita and I both adored him, but somehow we could not share that love. Only after the marriage counseling that proved prelude to our divorce did we understand that shared parenting was something she'd never seen. We grew competitive, both inclined to spoil rather than be the bad guy by comparison.

With our divorce, the competition ended, and she said she wanted me to raise him. But now, trying to cushion the blow of losing his mother from his daily life, unsteady in the role of single parent, I remained indulgent for several months. I was lucky. He grew spoiled during his terrible twos, but only a bit, and in other ways actually thrived under my timid leniency. He developed an inner sense of freedom, yet obeyed instantly when I was adamant because those moments were rare. Within a few months, we'd grown secure enough in our new life that I could take firmer control. I loved what he did with his freedom, how his spirit and mind seemed to soar. He was a colt with lots of free rein, yet never took advantage in large or harmful ways. And I was always so nuts about him, so thrilled to be with him, that I seldom minded his bolts here and there, even enjoyed his frequent turns to give me a playful nip. When others overheard our teasing, some did not see how much we delighted in it, or the love it rose from. Few people in Clearwater seemed to know that when a teenager turns to his father in line at Arby's and says, If men were to be saved by merit, what hole in hell were hot enough for you? he really means, Let's screw around till we can order our sandwiches.

This tour would be our defining moment. He'd been mostly on his own for four years and, when the tour ended, would leave for good. This trip across America would provide weeks to see what kind of man he had become, and what kind of father I had been. I had my doubts, and the preliminary signs looked grim.

In the days leading up to departure, clouds began covering him. He seldom spoke, never smiled. He grew further from the man I'd planned this trip with, the man I'd joked and discussed sports and Nietzsche and women and DeLillo with over dinners these past years in Sarasota, the adult friend who'd become the most interesting person I knew. He spent the last few nights with old high school friends, and after being in their company he returned to the boy I'd seen so often during his last two years of high school: moody, smug, uncommunicative, teen qualities that had disappeared when he started college. He would come home and go straight to his room and close his door. He seemed self-involved again, as he'd been as a teen when self-involvement is part of the job description. It was a passionate yet playful man I'd expected to travel with, not this boy I thought long-gone, who spoke again in single-word sentences and often scowled like my presence was the last place he wanted to be. I didn't wish to travel with that boy any more than he seemed interested in being with me.

I knew no way to help bring back that happy man.

That man had made only one rule about this trip that he insisted we observe: we plan no destination beyond one day. In fact, each time we'd stop, for gas or a meal or a stretch, we could change our destination. Marty knows how to live in the moment. If you fill each moment with quality, he figures, the past swells with remembered pleasure and the future takes care of itself.

I find his choose-your-destination-each-moment rhythm jarring to my nature. I would go along with it for two reasons. For one, I was so happy that my grown son wanted to travel with me, wanted to spend time with me, that I'd cheerfully do it his way. But also, I knew he was right. I knew I lived my life too rigidly, with too little spontaneity. When we first planned this tour, I expected we'd travel as I had in my youth, and in Marty's childhood. I'd get out my maps. I'd buy a book describing the most scenic spots in America. Then I'd plot on the maps how to hit those places. I'd follow expert recommendations.

But the most expert recommendation was Marty's. My way, we'd follow someone's experience; his, we'd have the experience.

For almost two decades, I'd been an avid student of Buddhism and Zen yet failed to incorporate many of their insights into my life. No matter how much I'd heard about fingers pointing to the moon and how the teaching is not the enlightenment, whenever I meet a Buddha on the road I stop to listen and stay to mull. Marty shakes his hand and keeps moving.

I'd recently heard a woman in Atlanta talk about applying Buddhism to the art of writing. She cited Thich Nhat Hanh's metaphor of how most of us live our lives the way we eat tangerines: we put a section in our mouth, but instead of focusing our senses and attention on savoring that section we spend the time pulling loose the next one. She was certainly describing me much of the time. Not Marty. He's never lost his wonder, that child-like ability to awaken his senses and put his attention and imagination at their service. But he'd seemed these past days to lose this.

Listen. Listen. Listen, wrote Madison Smartt Bell, whose fiction Marty and I both admire, we can never be too attentive to our world. I listen to Bell. Marty listens to the world. On this trip, I hoped to become more like him.

So we made no firm itinerary, just had a vague sense of some places and people we might visit. Marty said he'd like to see New Orleans and Oregon and his godmother Chrissy just outside Los Angeles. I hoped to see the Ozarks and Rockies and my freshman English teacher now retired in Albuquerque. We wanted to visit Jane Hamilton's apple orchard near Milwaukee and a former student of mine and his wife and baby in Kentucky.

We decided to call our trip The Queasy Rider Tour of America.

The name we'd meant as a lark fit the beginning of the tour better than I wished. I hadn't seen a smile on Marty's face in five days. All week he'd been sleeping in his old bedroom, in our small townhouse that I still liked to think of as his home. The night before we left, he'd gone out with friends. When I asked, Where'd you guys go? Did you have a good time? he told me he was too old to be asked his comings and goings. I wondered what I could ask now that we were climbing on for a ride together of several weeks, where his comings and goings would be with me.

Marty, are you sure everything's okay? I asked as I packed gear onto my bike minutes before we set out.

Yes. Stop asking, will you.

You don't act like everything's okay.

I'm just still stressed from school. I've been working my ass off.

I knew that was true. I'd seen the work. You're sure you still want to do this trip?

Yes. Let's go.

We started our motors and let them warm. I'd ride cautiously, watching for speed bumps between us. Maybe soon he'd relax, and I'd learn over the miles just what kind of boy I had raised, what kind of man I now had to let go.

We eased away from Clearwater, no idea where we'd sleep that night. That was the plan: no plans. We'd just head north, toward Ocala, where Florida's flat terrain begins a gentle roll. We rode County Route 1 out of Clearwater and skirted north of Tarpon Springs to avoid U.S. 19 till well beyond the congested frenzy that inspires so many Pinellas County cars to bear bumper stickers: PRAY FOR ME, I DRIVE ON U.S. 19. Just one block west of my home is Pinellas's most dangerous intersection, the corner of U.S. 19 and Drew Street, made more hazardous at Christmas 1996 by the appearance on an office building of a 30-foot-tall water stain bearing a striking likeness to the Virgin Mary. The image draws pilgrims flocking to look, pray, and leave offerings and flowers. We locals avoid that intersection religiously. By the time we coasted onto U.S. 19, we were twenty miles north of home.

We fell into what became our standard riding formation: Marty about fifty feet ahead of me toward the right edge of the lane, me behind and staggered to his left. We began that way so I could make sure his duffel and sleeping bags stayed secure. Also, I wanted to see Marty safe in front of me, where the less experienced rider should be. Most cycle accidents occur shortly after starting out, and more than half happen to people who've been riding less than six months. Soon, though, Marty rode up front because he became our navigator. He had before him a tank bag for extra storage, a map window on its top. He could read a map and keep his eyes on the road. I'd have needed two sets of glasses to manage that.

We passed Weeki Wachee, a natural spring I'd taken little Marty to often. Marty would sit and watch the mermaids dive 150 feet, then we'd walk to his favorite attraction, the bird show. Even by age three he was a devout animal lover and by seven an outspoken animal rights advocate, signing petitions as soon as he could do it in cursive. One of my students, Connie May Fowler, won a deep place in his heart when she gave him two hamsters to start his animal collection.

Stay in the present, I urged myself; don't make this trip a photo album of our past.

We turned east on Fla. 50 and entered Brooksville, where we stopped in a spot of shade under a broad live oak. It was nearing noon and already past 90°F. I took a long swig from my water bottle and offered it to Marty. He drank, handed it back, silent. As I reached for it, I could feel a burn starting on the backs of my hands. I wore leather summer riding gloves with open backs, forgetting how treacherous the Florida sun can be, especially on a motorcycle. As you ride, the wind cools you just enough to mask how the sun is broiling exposed skin. You don't realize the damage until you stop. My damage was slight and confined to only a two-inch patch on each hand. I asked Marty for our sunblock. He handed it to me, looking at me like I was a stranger about whom he was forming an unfavorable impression. When he was little, he loved Brooksville's Christmas Village. Now the town felt ominous. It marks division. It lies on Brooksville Ridge, dividing the northern and southern biomes of Florida. South, the soil contains more clay, more water; plants have shorter roots and broader leaves. North, the sandier, finer soils hold less moisture, and roots grow deep. Maybe, heading north, we'd get back in touch with our own deep roots.

He climbed on the Zephyr and said, I'm not hungry yet. Want to wait till Ocala for lunch?

Sure. I wasn't hungry either.

In Brooksville we picked up U.S. 41. Several routes will get you from Clearwater to Ocala, and the fastest was the only one we'd agreed not to take. That's Interstate 75. From the plan's inception thirteen years earlier, we resolved that ours would be a blue highways trip.

A love for blue highways is coded on the Solomon gene. Marty and I come from travelers. My father's father, who died when I was a baby, fled to London from Russia in the late 1880s to escape its pogroms. But the working-poor East London he settled in allowed his nine children little chance at the life he wanted for them, so, one by one, he sent them to America. My father was nineteen when he settled in Pittsburgh in 1924. He took a job as a traveling salesman for a jewelry company, spending a decade driving America's roadways in old Pontiacs and Chevies when the question drivers asked wasn't whether a highway charged tolls but whether it was paved, gravel or dirt. Back then, and later fixed in America's mind by William Least Heat Moon's road narrative, blue highways meant back roads. As a child, I'd listen for hours as my father told me what it was like to experience his new country by car from the mid-1920s through mid-1930s. My mother, too, loved to drive. In the early 1950s, on those days she wasn't working as a registered nurse she'd sneak off from our apartment in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. and take lessons at Tony Marino's Driving School; I knew where she was going, but my brother and I were sworn to secrecy until the day she held before my father's eyes her first driver's license. We were a driving family. We thought nothing of waking up on a Sunday, eating brunch at home, then taking a four-hour ride for dinner.

By the time I began driving in 1961, though, blue highways no longer meant only back roads but all roads that weren't part of the new interstate system. By then, any highway that wasn't an interstate pretty much was a back road. The qualities that had made a road a main national artery—being the fastest route to a destination, bearing the heavy long-distance traffic, sporting the big truck stops—had moved to the interstates.

To get somewhere quickly, you can't beat interstates. But you won't see much worth seeing between start and stop, not on the road. As Charles Kuralt once observed: Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

Interstates push you to live in the future, where you're going; blue highways invite you to live in the present, where you are. Our trip had little to do with actually getting anywhere. It wasn't about destinations but about traveling together, about the ride itself. On the interstate you're among cars, trucks, and RVs all speeding somewhere, but on blue highways you're among communities, hills and streams and forests, roadside cafés and people. Interstates are the fastest route to Disneyland, but they are not the way to see America. They're the way to see signs telling you how far it is to the next Denny's.

In 1985, Marty and I were on the last leg of our second great automobile trip, heading down I-81 to visit his mother's parents in South Carolina. I said, There's no rush. Let's take blue highways down to your grandparents'.

Blue highways?

You'll see.

Soon we were dipping and twisting at 45 mph along a North Carolina mountain road.

Wow! said Marty, who'd just turned ten. Blue highways are fun.

They're even more fun on a motorcycle. What do you say: when we take our tour when you're grown up, we take blue highways?

Definitely.

Two motorcycles on tour create a far different experience than an automobile. During that 1985 trip, on interstates or back roads in our clunky white Citation, we talked, we invented games, we sang along with tapes. In a car, you share company. On motorcycles, you share privacy.

Marty's girlfriend, Erin, never seemed to grasp that part. I don't get it, she said to us three months before we took off. What's the fun of traveling by motorcycle? In a car you can talk. On motorcycles, you can't say anything to each other.

That's just the point, Marty and I said, almost in unison.

In The Politics of Experience, British psychiatrist R.D. Laing says, in effect, "I can know my experience and I can know my experience of your experience, and even my experience of your experience of my experience, but I can't know your experience." Marty and I were traveling fifty feet apart, northbound on U.S. 41. We would be going the same places on the same days, and our experiences would overlap, but we'd talk only when we'd stop. For weeks, we'd be physically close all day but having separate experiences. On our shared tour, we'd have different trips.

That's the point Erin failed to appreciate, and why she thought the prospect boring. But a motorcycle tour with someone you love is the exact opposite of boring. A bore, according to the best definition I've heard, is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. We'd have both solitude and company.

That had been my expectation. But over sandwiches in Ocala, I no longer felt sure. Marty remained sulky. I surmised some of what might be going on inside him, the demands of the studies he'd been pouring himself into, the prospect of not seeing Erin for several weeks, the responsibilities awaiting him when he'd return: no longer in the dorms and now having to maintain his own apartment while working full-time and completing his senior thesis, the lone but daunting task left before finishing his degree. That advocate of diversity in America, Louis Adamic, once recalled, My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn. Often, so is living with Marty.

Marty, I know you're sick of hearing it, but something's clearly bothering you. Did I do something? Is it me?

It's starting to be.

I mean, we're about to spend weeks in each other's company, and I'm feeling you already need a break from me.

I told you, I'm stressed about stuff. I don't want to talk about it. I'm just thinking a lot. I have a very interior life.

So? Einstein could talk to people. Kant could talk to people. Next to you, Thoreau was a chatterbox. Does having an interior life mean you have to act like a shit?

Maybe.

I ate for a while, chewing an idea that had been cooking since Marty's eyes lost their joy. I knew a way to get a respite separately, then try to begin again in better spirits.

Marty, I know how we can take a short break and start over.

How's that?

We're only a few miles below Gainesville. You said you and Kelley have been talking about getting together. Why don't you call and see if you can visit her now for a day or two. Would you like to do that?

Sure. I'd love to see her. But what about you?

"Don't worry about me. I've got old friends I haven't seen in a long time too. The AP reading is in Daytona Beach this year. It starts tomorrow.