Spirit Traffic: A Mother's Journey of Self-Discovery and Letting Go

By C. Jane Taylor

Spirit Traffic recounts how, at the age of 50, the author learned to ride a motorcycle, overcame the terror of navigating her steep dirt driveway in Vermont, and, three days after her son’s college graduation, set off with him and her yoga-teacher husband (his stepdad) on a 10,000-mile two-wheel adventure that took them all into uncharted territory—both as novice riders, and as a family. As if in the saddle of her dual-sport BMW, the reader will experience the good, the bad, and the heartbreak of her journey as a soon-to-be-empty-nester grappling with impermanence, sexuality, hot flashes, high winds, and tailgating tour buses.

Spirit Traffic is at once a colorful travelogue of a bucket-list bikers’ route across America and an unflinching memoir of a middle-aged mom conquering her fears (on and off the bike), unpacking a complicated childhood with an addict father and stoic mother, and ultimately, learning to let go of her only child. (Think Blue Highways meets Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets Operating Instructions meets Wild.)

With its first-person accounts of legendary rides such as the Burr Trail, Hell’s Backbone Road, and the Pacific Coast Highway, Spirit Traffic will find a ready audience among bikers. But as a midlife memoir, Spirit Traffic will also resonate for anyone who is navigating the departure of a child, negotiating the dynamic tensions of family, or simply yearning for life’s next adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. Jane Taylor
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781735505053

C. Jane Taylor

When C. Jane Taylor was a little girl, her mother owned the motorcycle shop, Honda of Ann Arbor. Motorcycles colored her childhood until she and her family moved to Northern Michigan and later to Vermont. At the age of 16, she went to Bard College at Simon’s Rock where she earned a BA in Literature and Music History.She’s been a cook for a baroque orchestra, a sculptor’s assistant, a resume writer, and a yoga teacher. She started (and stopped) her own welding shop. She has repaired farm equipment under the blazing sun on the Fourth of July and decorated cakes resembling the Palace of Versailles on Bastille Day. Writing has always been her foundation.After a forty-year hiatus, she started motorcycling again when her son graduated from college. To celebrate his achievement and fill her impending empty nest, Jane, her husband, and son took a 10,000-mile motorcycle trek across the United States; this adventure is the subject of “Spirit Traffic: A Mother’s Journey of Self-Discovery and Letting Go.” She lives, writes, and rides in Hinesburg, Vermont with her husband John, a yoga teacher.

Book preview

Prologue

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Radiant one, inquire:

Before desire arises in me, who am I?

Before I know anything, who am I?

Seek always the intimate joy

Of your original self,

And move through this world in freedom.

~ Lorin Roche,

The Radiance Sutras, Sutra #74

W

hen I was a little girl, my mother had long blonde hair, vertical-striped bell-bottom jeans, and a team of guys who jumped at her bidding. She ran a motorcycle shop, Honda of Ann Arbor. The guys were the motorcycle-loving, sometimes (maybe often) stoned college students from the University of Michigan who were her mechanics: Sandy, Donald, Fred, Mick.

To me, they were babysitters. Mick rode his bike off the Mackinac Bridge—he lived. Fred hated children. Donald rode a chopper and had a pet bat. Sandy had the evil eye—If you don’t believe me, let’s ride down to Lansing. I’ll show you pumpkins that were once children, he often threatened.

Though contemplating this group might seem to discourage motorcycling of any sort (or even proximity) my big sister, Ann, and I fought one another for the opportunity to hang around them. We fought over who got to sweep the motorcycle showroom floor, polish the glass case displaying motorcycle key fobs, or dust the face shields on shiny Bell helmets behind the counter. Anything to seem important at the shop. At home, we wore a path around the backyard on our Honda minibike.

The shop was open late on Friday nights. We’d go there directly from school with our empty lunch boxes and construction-paper art projects. Ann would sit across from me on the other side of the big desk. I remember coloring pictures in the wood-paneled office, ensconced in a metal-and-leather chair.

Like most things in the shop, the chair was on wheels.

From my seat, the desk was about chin level, its green-shaded lamp looming over me. It was organized, but full of bizarre, important, business things. At one edge perched a giant metal adding machine with rows of light- and dark-green number buttons and a metal handle you had to pull down to make the machine spit out your numbers on a strip of paper that spooled out the back.

At the other end of the desk was a black rotary telephone with a line of clear buttons along the bottom, one for each of the phone lines in the shop: Parts, Service, Showroom. There was a blotter, a ledger, and a notebook-style checkbook. On the far corner of the desk sat an ashtray.

A big gray safe stood in the corner of the office. The walls were decorated with motorcycle posters: From Mighty to Mini, Honda has it all, YOU MEET THE NICEST PEOPLE ON A HONDA.

The shop also sold Ducatis, Moto Guzzis, Velocettes, Montesas, Ossas, and Nortons (my favorite). And a wide variety of Bell helmets. Mine was red with metallic sparkles; Ann’s was blue.

On Friday nights we’d have takeout dinner together with Mom and her mechanics in the office, usually pizza or Chinese. On one Friday, Sandy and Donald went to pick up the food and came back with arms full of little white Chinese take-out boxes: lo mein, chop suey, egg rolls.... When Mom opened one of the boxes, a white mouse poked its pink nose out.

I thought you said ‘white mice,’ Sandy snickered.

The guys intended to scare Mom, but she didn’t miss a beat. We kept the mouse as a pet and named him Thruxton V. Motormouse. One of my favorite books at the time, The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary, featured Ralph S. Mouse, so of course Thruxton had to have a middle initial.

Ralph’s S in the book stood for Smart. Thruxton’s V stood for Velocette, after the Thruxton Velocette, a popular motorcycle model in the late 1960s.

Sandy also had a middle initial: Sanford H. Alper. I never learned what Sandy’s H stood for.

When Ann had entered kindergarten, Mom went back to college and took me with her. We lived twenty miles outside of Ann Arbor, where she took courses in Spanish at the University of Michigan. Mom rode her Honda Cub C50 Step-Thru all the way there and back with me sitting on the seat behind her. One of the rules of riding was that I always had to have my hands clasped tightly around her waist. I could not let go.

Sometimes I was lulled to sleep by the drone of the bike. I felt completely safe there, hands clasped, my body pressed up against Mom’s warm strong back, the wind washing over us as one. I never did let go.

Mom sold the shop when I was just finishing the fourth grade, and she moved us to the country to get out of the rat race. As we had pet mice that were definitely not rats, this phrase did not make much sense to me, but off we went to live rat-free, abandoning both bikes and babysitters.

I would not ride again for forty years.

1.

Mister Hopkins

T

he country we escaped to was northern Michigan, nearly the Upper Peninsula. Mom became a field advisor for the Big Waters Girl Scout Council. Not a biker. She trained scout leaders and took scouts on primitive camping and backpacking trips.

On one such adventure, she loaded twelve girls into her red Ford Econoline van and headed for the wilderness of Grayling in the upper half of Michigan’s mitten, where we backpacked down miles of dirt track in a soaking late spring downpour. By the second night, all of us were cold and shivering, on our way to hypothermia. Leaving Ann and me in charge (we were in seventh and fifth grade, respectively), Mom decided to hike out and retrieve the van that was parked several miles away. She was gone for hours. Ann and I feared she’d gotten lost, and worried about when we should tell the other girls. But finally, we saw the van’s headlights. Rescue!

Mom packed twelve shuddering girls and our soggy backpacking gear into the van, and we drove away from our camping fiasco up dark dirt roads back toward civilization, and possibly hot chocolate. After we’d driven for a half hour, Mom pulled over. There was a guy standing in the dark next to a motorcycle at the side of the road. Hands on his hips, he kicked at the gravel near his dead bike.

Mom left the van idling with the heater on, hopped out, and grabbed some tools from the back. It was dark, and I couldn’t see what she did, but after a few minutes, the bike roared back to life. I remember the amazed look on the guy’s face as he watched a soaking-wet blonde woman in hiking boots and a Peter Storm wool sweater drive away in a van full of little girls.

My next bike experience was more than four decades later, on a yellow Yamaha Zuma 125 scooter. When my dog Shems died of bone cancer, my heart broke and was mending poorly. My friend Chiuho, a chef and restaurateur, bought the scooter to cheer me up. She’d grown up in Taiwan and was used to the fun of riding six-up with six people on a bike, or even eight-up. As we shopped together for the scooter, she’d test drive each one right in the showroom as aghast salesmen chased after her, begging her to stop. She pretended that we would share the bike, but she let me ride it home and never asked to use it.

That yellow scooter served its purpose. My heart started to mend. A side effect of that healing was the renaissance of my childhood motorcycle lust. Now I had to get a real bike.

My twenty-one-year-old son, Emmett, had motorcycle lust, too. His was perhaps more typical of a young man’s fascination with the internal combustion engine. Emmett was in college and would soon graduate. Whenever we were in the car together and a bike passed us, he’d say, CBR, you guys.

The CBR was his dream bike. A Honda sport bike, a crotch rocket, the CBR was the kind of bike young, irresponsible, testosterone-driven boys rode too fast.

For us, CBR, you guys was a kind of mantra of hope for future adventure. My husband, John, thought of it as more than a mantra. One day, he suggested privately to me that we buy motorcycles and ride across the country to celebrate Emmett’s forthcoming graduation from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

When I first met John, Emmett was not quite two years old and just learning to walk. John was terrified of him. A single vegetarian from a beef-eating, moose-hunting Wyoming family of six brothers—one of whom now has nine or maybe eleven children—John had a vasectomy at age twenty-two for environmental reasons. He does not believe in overpopulating the Earth. (The operating physician at the time was trying for a procedural speed record of two country songs. The vasectomy apparently took, and my husband has fathered no children.) When he met us, John said he had no love of nor plans for children, and yet he took Emmett on as his own and became the very best dad.

John also rode a Zuma 125 for environmental reasons. The Zuma got seventy-five miles per gallon of gas. John rode it daily, including in bad weather ten months out of the year in Vermont. As long as there was no ice or snow on the road, he rode the scooter. I was not so intrepid.

As a fair-weather scooter rider, I was both scared and delighted by the notion of a real motorcycle. Like the lust I had for that cool guy in high school who had facial hair, smoked roll-your-own cigarettes, and skipped class but still got all A’s, a bike was both forbidden and irresistible. The wantonness of my attraction to the two-wheeled version of that guy in school thrilled me as much as the physical reality of motorcycles themselves.

Loud, dangerous, fast, sexy, cool, free. A real bike represented everything I wasn’t but wanted to be. I was just starting to examine the romanticized notion I had created of my mom and her role at the shop. I wanted to be that version of her, with all the confidence and cool, but without the sarcasm.

I was scared of the loud, dangerous, fast, sexy, cool, free of a real bike. A scooter was exciting and scary enough, but the prospect of giving Emmett the gift of a huge motorcycle adventure on legit motorcycles captivated me. I wanted to be a good mom, but was I ready for such a big step? Up to a real motorcycle? Was I ready to become the person I always dreamed I could be? The possible answers to these questions both thrilled and terrified me.

Then AARP sent me an invitation to join their organization. It was just after my fiftieth birthday. I shredded the letter into tiny pieces and tossed it into the recycle bin. Yes, John, let’s do it!

I did not know it then, but he already had started saving for the bikes. He’d made a spreadsheet and had been tithing. He had joined a few online newsgroups and was researching used bikes online on Cycletrader.com. He wanted to find the very best bikes for our purposes. We had to have three bikes, one for each of us. They had to be rugged, dependable, and comfortable for long days in the saddle. They had to be something we could fix ourselves. They had to be BMWs. We were already on our way.

My bike is tall and black. A 2006 BMW F 650 GS. The GS in the bike’s model name stands for Gelände/Straße (German for off-road/road). My bike eats dirt for breakfast, asphalt for lunch. I bought it used from a nerdy engineer-type in Pennsylvania.

The first time I sat on it was electrifying.

Checking it out in a gas station parking lot next to the Interstate, I immediately felt badass, invincible, and proud. But that fleeting moment of glory was immediately supplanted by fear, when the engineer suggested I start it up and ride around the parking lot. I demurred, admitting I did not know how to ride. I asked him to do it for me, so I could hear and see the bike in action—from a safe distance.

The bike sounded like my childhood. But without Mom or my babysitters, I felt like I was standing on loose shale at the edge of a cliff. Noticing my fear, John stepped up and patted me on the shoulder. He and the engineer loaded the bike onto the U-Haul trailer hooked behind our Toyota and strapped it down. We drove home.

The first time I started the bike up wasn’t until months later—again, terrifying and exhilarating. The bike felt huge and uncontrollable, a German juggernaut that would push me off that cliff. Having ridden the yellow Zuma for a season, I was thrilled at the prospect of something bigger, but the reality of the BMW’s 650cc felt too much bigger.

CC stands for cubic centimeters of engine displacement. Cubic centimeters measure the volume of fuel mixed with air that powers a bike’s internal combustion engine. Displacement refers to the number of CCs moving through the engine in a series of explosions. More CCs, more explosions. To me, six-hundred-fifty seemed like too many explosions.

To mollify the machine, I named it after Mr. Hopkins, the band director at Thunder Bay Junior High School in Alpena, Michigan. Mr. Hopkins believed I could do anything I set my mind to. When I was in sixth grade, he gave me a double bass, a Mel Bay Fun with the String Bass book, a practice room, and encouragement. That bass was huge and intimidating. Loud and unwieldy, it took up most of the practice room we occupied together. But I gradually assumed a small measure of control over it. As the blisters on my fingers slowly became calluses and actual music started to vibrate out of the instrument’s giant f-holes, my confidence grew, along with my spirit. By ninth grade, I’d moved to Vermont and was first chair of ten basses in the All New England Festival Orchestra.

Once I started to ride the bike, though, its name morphed to Chace. I’d read that the reason we give one another nicknames harkens back to early childhood bonding with Mommy. My bike needed a nickname to help us build a bonded relationship.

Fifteen years before, I had my own welding shop in the basement of the Chace Mill, a huge, beautiful brick building built in the 1880s in Burlington, Vermont. Learning to weld started as a series of failed experiments, but eventually, I did a lot of brass brazing for an artist who made whimsical painted steel furniture and menorahs.

I made the two-hour drive to her shop near the Canadian border in Hardwick, Vermont, each week to cut dozens of dancing rabbis from 4x8 sheets of twelve-gauge steel. I wrangled each sheet of steel up onto the worktable of a plasma cutter at her shop, donned my goggles and ear plugs, and hit the red button. An arc of electricity shot from the nozzle of the cutter in a loud hiss, creating a spray of sparks as it sliced through the metal.

It was heavy, loud, dirty, and cold work (the shop was not heated). Maybe it was dangerous, too.

I took the rabbis back to my own shop to braze brass shtreimel hats onto their steel heads. Steel is ferrous (it contains iron); brass is non-ferrous. These two metals do not want to merge. Coaxing them to do so takes patience, the right amount of heat, and flux. It took a lot of time and many tears to learn the right mix of these elements, but I did.

It was there at the Chace Mill, along the Winooski River, that I started to imagine that Mr. Hopkins might have been on to something.

2.

Corbin Saddle

M

y bike is a dual-sport, designed for two sports. It is street legal with headlights, turn signals, a horn, and other niceties you’ll find on most bikes on the highway, but it has knobby tires, hand guards, a skid plate to help you over the rough spots, and engine crash bars when that doesn’t go so well. The standard issue saddle on this BMW is exactly what you might expect: water resistant, sturdy, and designed for rugged use. It has some padding, but not much. It is not elegant, but utilitarian. It is comfortable enough.

When I picked up my bike in Pennsylvania, I was surprised to find that it came with an extra saddle. A black leather Corbin saddle. Corbin Motorcycle Saddles are the top of the line. The leather of this manufacturer’s saddle is as smooth and supple as David Bowie’s pants. The seat is wide, firm, and well padded. It cups my ass in leather luxury and feels amazing.

The Corbin company describes its saddles this way: Generous, ergonomically developed seating platforms provide excellent weight distribution and long-range comfort. Our high-density Comfort Cell® foam stays resilient indefinitely for lasting support. Corbin foam won’t let you fall through to the base pan like stock foam does!

Though the generous seating platform is wider, thus making it more difficult for my feet to reach the ground when I sit astride the bike, the richness of the leather is almost worth the sacrificed standing stability. This Corbin saddle just feels like it was designed for a woman. Indeed, it was, but for a woman riding behind the rider who controls the bike. The back part of the saddle is elevated a bit, to give the presumed shorter passenger in back a better view of the road ahead.

I do not want to think of myself as a passenger. A passenger is someone who sits around waiting for others to make things happen. A passenger is someone