Nothing Else for Six Hours

There is a dirt road in Oklahoma where, in 2005, I stopped being a person who had survived Hurricane Katrina, briefly, for about six hours.

I did not realize it was happening while it was happening, and that was the part that mattered. I had been carrying the storm and the weeks that followed, and then I was riding a 2005 Triumph Tiger on a road I did not know, picking lines through the kind of terrain the bike had been designed for and that I had not yet asked it to handle. I came back to myself at the end of the ride. Things I had been carrying were still there, but I had not touched them in six hours for the first time in many weeks. The country had taken them from me without asking permission.

This essay is about that, and about what I have come to understand about what adventure motorcycling does to the inside of a person who arrives at the start of a ride with too much in their head.

I had been living and working in New Orleans when the storm hit. I came back afterward to do search and rescue, and I saw things I will not describe here, because they are not the point of this essay and I owe the people I saw something more careful than a paragraph. What is the point is that I was carrying it. All of it.

When the phone call finally came through on the lines that had been down for what seemed like a month, I was uncertain of what to expect. The company was moving me from New Orleans to Dallas because the work could no longer be done from New Orleans, and the HR department had already secured an apartment for me and furnished it. I had a way to keep going, and it remains one of the kinder things a company has ever done for me.

I had bought the Tiger before the storm and had not yet ridden it as the adventure bike it was. Until then it had been the same thing most adventure bikes parked in front of most Starbucks today still are: a beautiful and capable piece of equipment a person had not gotten around to using for its intended or engineered purpose. I took it to Oklahoma. I rode it off the road. About an hour and a half in, somewhere in country I could not now point to on a map, the thing happened that I have been trying to describe.

The mechanism is not complicated, even if the experience of it is hard to name. The brain runs out of cycles for worry.

There is a substantial body of research on the wandering mind, and the shortest summary of it is that the default condition of the modern adult brain is to chew on itself. We loop. We rehearse arguments already lost, catastrophize meetings that have not happened, and carry the people we have lost into the supermarket aisle without realizing they have come along. A team of Harvard psychologists put numbers on this in 2010 and concluded, in roughly so many words, that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, and that the wandering accounts for more of human unhappiness than the activities people are doing while their minds wander. Most modern interventions for that problem try to manage the wandering directly: meditation, therapy, cognitive behavioral exercises, apps that buzz at you in the afternoon to remind you to breathe.

Adventure riding works on the wandering from a different angle. It does not teach the brain to manage the loop; it removes the budget the loop runs on. You cannot worry about an email while picking a line through a rock garden. Worry requires spare attentional bandwidth, and a logging-truck rut reaching up for your front wheel does not leave any. The brain has a finite attentional budget, and when the terrain spends the whole of it on staying alive, there is nothing left for the inventory of regret and rehearsal that ordinarily fills the day. The inventory does not go away. It is offline. It will return. While the ride is happening, it is gone.

The first time this happens to a rider who has been carrying something, the experience is so unfamiliar that there is often no word for it. "Out of my head" is the closest I have found, and I have used it, and most of the students I have worked with use some version of it. None of us is entirely satisfied with the phrase, because it sounds like a slogan and the thing itself is not a slogan. The thing itself is the absence of the loop that had been running for so long that you had forgotten it was running. And then for a few hours it is not running, and at the end of those hours you discover that you are a slightly different person.

Not every kind of country produces the same depth of quiet. The country has preferences, and so do I. And the deepest version, for me, comes from the dense forest opening into a meadow on a switchback climb that lifts you above the tree line. Mountains do it. The desert does it in a different register, with a longer wavelength and a different quality of silence. The view from above the tree line does it in a way nothing else does, and I keep a long list of routes I would rather be on right now than at my desk.

Sand is a different transaction. It takes the same attentional toll without offering the view in return, and the version of the quiet it produces is colder and harder to come back from. The mechanism applies, in the sense that the brain is still spending the whole of the budget on staying alive. But the country is taking and not giving, and whatever this essay is recommending, it is not deep sand.

The quiet does not always end abruptly. On a day ride it does. You take the helmet off, the inbox loop reboots before you have driven a mile out of the lot, and the rider waiting for the loop is not the same rider who left. But the longer ride ends another way. You roll the bike into camp at dusk. You strip your gear. You build a fire because the night will be cold and because there is a meal that has to be cooked. The work of cooking alone, by a fire, is slow. There is no one to talk to and no signal to check. In the space between the strike of the match and the smell of dinner coming up out of the pan, something settles inside you that did not have room to settle while you were riding. You can hear yourself.

What changes is something quieter than armor. I ride out with whatever clarity I had at the time. The country sharpens it, and by the time the fire is going and the food is on the pan, what I have brought back is not a new battle posture but a steadier hand and a clearer eye for what is mine to fight and what is a windmill. I take what the ride has given me into the things that have to be carried, and after a while it dulls, and the only thing I have ever found that reliably restores it is another ride.

Something else happens during those hours, and it took me years to name it. You are carrying your troubles, but you are not inside them. The ride pulls you out of your own head, and what you gain in the space between you and your worries, without realizing it while it is happening, is the critical distance that any real perspective depends on. The problems are still waiting for you at the trailhead. They have not solved themselves. But the shape of them looks different from where you are standing when you come back, and sometimes, when the ride was long enough or the country was right, you come back with an answer you did not have when you left.

This is not escape. I am being equipped.

And I have watched hundreds of students go through a compressed version of this at our clinics. A good many of them arrive at the start of the weekend quiet, closed-off, unsure of themselves. Their hands shake at the first water crossing. They do not laugh easily on the first night. By the second afternoon something has begun to give, and by the morning of the third day they are running their own lines through the technical sections. By the time the clinic ends they are leaving with their faces lighter than they came in, and the partners and friends who were waiting at the truck will sometimes pull me aside and ask quietly what happened to them out there. None of the answers I have fit on a brochure. The closest one I have found is that for three days they were not allowed to be in their own heads, and at the end of those three days they had begun to like the person who appeared in its place.

I want to be clear about the downside, because the upside has been written a thousand times by people who do not know there is a downside.

There is a downside.

After a long ride, especially the multi-week ones, I will go through a period of depression that runs about as long as the ride. A three-week, seven-thousand-mile trip earns me a three-week trough on the other side of it. The numbers are not scientific, but the pattern is. The neurochemistry of riding is generous, and the system on the receiving end of that generosity gets a bill on the way home. The adrenaline runs down. The dopamine returns to baseline, and baseline is now lower than it used to be. You feel, for a while, as equally bad as you felt great.

I am not saying this to talk anyone out of riding. The point is that the people who hand you the gift of adventure motorcycling without telling you about the bill are not the people you want to learn the activity from.

What I would tell a new rider about the trough is to plan for it. Do not schedule the hardest conversation of the year for the week after a big ride. Be in a relationship that can hold you on the way down as well as on the way up. And do not ride when the trough is on you, not angry, not heartbroken, and not while still carrying an emotion you have yet to put down. We have learned, as a community, to tell each other not to ride drunk; we are still learning to tell each other not to ride emotionally, which is a different version of the same conversation.

The road in Oklahoma was twenty-one years ago. I have ridden a great deal of country since, and I have lost the precise location of that road, and I do not need it. I have everything I needed from that ride, which is the knowledge that there is a place a person can go where the loop turns off for a few hours, and that the person who comes back from it is better equipped to carry whatever they brought along.

You cannot rehearse it. You cannot read your way into it. The only way through is to find country that asks more of you than you have been used to giving, and to point a motorcycle into it, and to ride until the inside of your head goes quiet. It will go quiet. You will not notice it happening, but you will notice afterward.