Riding a motorcycle is prime PTSD/C-PTSD therapy. Or maybe I am wrong and it is terrible therapy because it keeps me in the state that broke me down to begin with. I just know that when the sun and wind burn my face and the shadows of the tree leaves start making me a little blind as I head into a double switchback that I am going in hot on… I know I can trust ALL THE VARIABLES TO BE WHAT THEY ARE. That doesn’t exist elsewhere in the civilian world. Or at least nowhere else I have looked.
There is a story the riding world tells about how some of the oldest clubs came to be. The men came home from the war and the country had gone soft and quiet and small. They had been up in the air with flak coming through the fuselage, or down in the mud with the safety off, and then one day it was over and they were supposed to punch a clock and mow a lawn and be grateful. The lawn did not do it. Nothing did it. So they bought surplus machines cheap and they found each other, because the only people who could stand to be around them were the ones who had been in it too.
The legend says they needed the speed and they needed the brotherhood. The rush and the pack. True enough, far as it goes. But from my point of view the legend gets the symptom right and the cause dead wrong. The thrill was the cover story. The corner was the thing they were really after — the one place that felt like the inside of their own skin, and a motorcycle was the only throttle that opened the door to it.
Here is the mechanic of it, best I can lay it out. You spend enough time with the fear turned all the way up — months, years, however long it took — and your body stops treating it as an emergency and starts treating it as the floor. The rush stops being a rush. It becomes the baseline. It becomes ordinary. And the trouble is what happens when it goes away. Calm does not read as calm anymore. Calm reads as exposure. You sit in a quiet room with nothing coming at you and your back feels uncovered, like you are standing in the open and something is about to step out of the treeline. Peace feels like the moment before. Nobody taught the body to want danger. It learned exactly once what relaxing costs, and it will not pay that twice.
And this is where I turn on my own doubt. I said maybe the ride keeps me in the state that broke me. I do not think that anymore. The state that broke me was the fear with no control over it. The thing was happening to me, the outcome was not mine, and worst of all the world had quit being honest — the ground moved, somebody lied, the rules changed while I was standing on them. And it kept happening over and over. The switchback is the fear with both hands on it. Every part of it is mine. The speed is mine, the line is mine, the brake is mine, and not one of the variables will lie to me. THE ROAD DOES NOT DECEIVE. Physics does not have an angle. I give it the right input, it gives me the corner. I give it the wrong one, it tells me right then, and it tells me fair.
That is the difference nobody put a name to. Same racing heart. Opposite everything else. What hurt me was chaos I could not touch. What heals me, if it heals me, is chaos I can hold in both fists — chaos that runs by rules that never once cheat, that has a start and a finish.
That is what I meant up top. I can trust all the variables to be what they are. Trauma, stripped all the way down, is finding out the variables will not hold still — that the floor was never a floor. Give me one place where the floor stays put, where the stakes are life and death and the rules are clean as glass, and I will take it over every soft quiet safe room you can build for me.
Maybe that is good therapy. Maybe it is the worst thing I do, and I am only a man who found a way to feel at home inside the exact thing that wrecked him. I go back and forth. I go back and forth right up until the sun and the wind are burning my face and the leaf-shadow starts to blind me and the double switchback comes up hot — and then I quit going back and forth. There is a corner to make. It is the only argument that has ever answered me.
- Road Therapy
- Following a River Access Road
- A nice road to ride.
- Cruising on a Two Lane Highway.
- Before It Changes: A Walk Through Johnstown’s Central Park
- An Ode to Todd Snider
- Twists and Turns of Jackson County
- Riding in and out of town
- Circles and bridges
- Exploring Kentucky
- A dose of Summer!
- Riding in the deep backcountry
- Peace on Wheels
- Open Road in the Hills of Kentucky
- Open Road Sweepers
- Stalking a ’66 Suburban- the finale
- Where am I going?
- 5 minutes of pure joy
- Another relaxing motorcycle ride.
- Riding Down This Road Tee
- Fun with Hills and Curves MC AMSR
- Stalking a 66 Suburban (part 1 of 2)
- Motorcycle Ride AMSR
- From Bean Blossom to Nashville
