Wrapping Up in Alaska

The final morning of my adventure motorcycle trip found me winding my way out of the tiny town of McCarthy, Alaska. On a mud-slicked, gravel road. Dark, gray clouds poured cold rain down on me hard enough that I could hear the drops pinging off the fuel tank and off of my helmet. The water pooled in the crooks of my elbows, and it spread across the dusty thighs of my adventure pants, like silt in a river delta. And it was a cold day for a motorcycle ride — not much above freezing.

My core temperature hadn’t yet normalized when I met my wife at the airport in Anchorage, seven and a half hours later. A lifetime later.

She asked me whether I’d had a good time. Had my 1000 mile trek across the Alaskan expanse been fun?

Adventure motorcycle trips are a lot of things. Rigorous. Stunning. Thrilling. But I wouldn’t call them, FUN. An adventure motorcycle trip ends with the satisfaction of completing a mission, not the sad resignation that accompanies the last day of a beach vacation. 

Look, I’m just like you and most anyone else who lives in capitalist-driven, social democracy. I spend most of my time skittering on autopilot from one reaction to the next, driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Like you, I participate in a complex social system that demands I pretend that certain events and deadlines and status indicators actually matter. Even though very few of them really do.

The adventure motorcycle trip scrapes away some of the bullshit. It introduces unpredictability and discomfort and fear into the equation of one’s existence. 

That’s why I do it. The adventure motorcycle trip forces me to square up to evolutionary instincts and challenges that are largely absent from my day to day life. They’re physical and psychological disruptions which precipitate radical shifts in perspective. They remind me that comfort and security and predictability do not, on their own, provide the deep satisfaction most of us are trying to wring out of our sanitized lives. They remind me that the point of all this isn’t to engineer a pain free existence. The point is to cultivate and exercise equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable challenges.

The lessons of this particular, and grueling adventure motorcycle trip will gradually fade. The same way the ring of a bell fades in the seconds after it’s been struck. And that’s fine. It just means that I’ll have to go back out there and ring the bell again.

Because when I’m out there I feel alive – really alive – and that’s hella addicting.