Someone once said only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window. I find great truth in that statement. That delicious wind whipping by, the road spray from a cold rain, the scent of wood smoke in the hilly Kentucky hollers: these things serve as reminders that life is coming up from the road to greet you minute after minute as you work that magic throttle.
Looking down at my feet as the asphalt roared past it began to truly dawn on me that I was on the road again after a 22-year motorcycle hiatus. There had been other journeys in that time but none via motorcycle. This had been my chosen mode of transportation since I was 16 and it had brought the world to me in great heaping helpings. The motorcycles that had passed through my life in that time brought me to new beginnings and transformed me into a human question mark. I wanted to see and experience everything in the same vein as the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote about life being a journey, not a destination.
Glancing around, I saw my gloved hands in front of me receiving commands from my chilled brain: throttle down, clutch in, turn signal on, left foot drops the gear lever, quick mirror check and I glide into the adjoining lane to pass yet another truck. The buffeting wind again reminded me that there will nothing easy about the day’s ride.
In 1991, the date of my last significant motorcycle journey, I had my 12-year old nephew with me and we were chased all the way home to Ontario from Alaska and the Arctic by cold and snowy conditions. I’m reminded of that trip somewhere outside Cleveland, Ohio when a small, gloved hand pushes it’s way into the frigid wind to my left and flashes a “thumbs up” signal. My daughter. My glorious adventurous 12-year old daughter Holly.
This journey was her idea. I’m merely the conduit through which her dream is passing. At the tender age of 10 she asked if I could take her on a motorcycle adventure like the one I did years ago with her cousin Jason. I thought, “Isn’t that cute. Maybe she wants to go to Montreal for a weekend and we can eat almond-paste croissants together.”
“Where would you like to go?” I asked.
“Costa Rica,” was her immediate reply. I looked at my wife Mary and, bless her adventurous heart, she merely shrugged and said, “Not on your current motorcycle.” Holly was dreaming big and we felt in our hearts that it was our duty as parents to try to make that dream a reality.
Soon there was a new motorcycle in our lives, a red, slightly used 2007 BMW R1200 GS that I knew would get the living hell beat out of it on our journey south.
As we neared Cleveland the sun was long gone and the darkness seemed to deepen the cold. We were layered like champions but I knew we needed to be off the road soon. Our departure from our home in Wasaga Beach two days earlier foreshadowed the cold temperatures that would hound us all the way to Alabama. Cold and rain. Every biker’s least favourite combo pack.
Officially we had departed from our Wasaga Beach driveway but spiritually, this journey began Monday, November 4th from the front entrance of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, better known as SickKids Hospital. November 4th: My 49th birthday. The day of some of the most wonderful memories of my life, celebrating over the years in Los Angeles, Argentina, Costa Rica. It was also the day of the single-worst memory of my life, a soul-cracking event from which I will never truly heal.
It was on this day in 1998 that Mary and I, pregnant with our first child, received the news that our unborn baby had significant health issues and her survival could not be guaranteed. The universe opened and swallowed me entirely that day. We didn’t know what to do, who to turn to, what the procedure called for. We’d spent our lives navigating the planet with highly detailed maps and we now found ourselves mapless. Enter SickKids Hospital and the Children’s Miracle Network. Within 12 hours the wheels were in motion and a new birthplan emerged for our unborn child, one that would see us move temporarily to Toronto to save our baby. When we learned she was a girl we named her on the spot: Alyssa Rae Johnson.
I’d never heard the word omphalocele before. Our doctor described it as an abdominal wall defect in which the intestines, liver, and occasionally other organs protrude outside of the abdomen in a sac because of a defect in the development of the muscles of the abdominal wall. Alyssa had a further complication because her sternum never fully developed and her heart was partially outside her chest cavity, a condition called ectopia cordis.
When the doctors finally let us hold her, our hearts swelled with joy. She loved to be held – her oxygen sat level would soar to near 100% and we willed for time to just STOP and let us be her parents forever.
On November 17th, 1998 Alyssa entered the world with a short, strong bleet like a tiny lamb before the nurses tubed her so she could breathe. It was the only sound she would ever make as the tube robbed her vocal chords of the ability to cry out. She was with us a short but incredible 20 days, dying in our arms in the early evening of December 6th, 1998. 20 days to imprint herself forever on our lives, tuck herself deeply into the crevasses of our hearts. I made her a promise shortly before she passed that we would never forget her, that if we were fortunate enough to have children in the future that they would know her name, her face, her story.
And here we are, riding south on a motorcycle journey in her name, as the Universe quietly whispers the name Alyssa around us.
Happy 15th Birthday my sweet Alyssa Rae…