Book Review

Review of Breaking the Limit: One Woman's Motorcycle Journey Through North America by Karen Larsen (New York: Hyperion, 2004. 384 pp. $15.57, ISBN 0786868708)

Suzanne Ferriss

Motorcycle travel books are an established genre, from Robert Edison Fulton, Jr.’s One Man Caravan to Alan Noren’s Storm.  Such books written by women, however, are still relatively rare.  Karen Larsen’s book Breaking the Limit recounts “one woman’s journey” from Princeton, New Jersey to Alaska and back, on “Lucy,” a used Harley-Davidson 1200 Sportster, modified with a larger gas tank and windshield.  While it might be argued that most motorcycle travel books emphasize the adventures and dangers, Larsen does, at least in part, the reverse: she is intent on demystifying motorcycle travel for non-riders while invoking all its pleasures. 

Her solo journey is not an attempt at self-affirmation.  To the contrary, she admits that “at thirty-one, I was already a woman whom most would consider tough and self-assured, and I was certainly independent to a fault” (xi).  She had originally planned her journey as a summer’s exploration of the North American continent following the completion of a master’s degree and before starting a new job in September.  Instead, a breast-cancer scare two months before she had planned to leave propels her to take to the road in search of her family.  (The tumor eventually removed from her chest is happily discovered to be non-malignant.)  An adopted child, Larsen was raised in Massachusetts but born in Ontario.  At eighteen, she had tracked down and met her biological mother Gloria; her search for the family’s medical history leads her to track down her father Dave in Alberta.

While the book’s subtitle suggests a focus on the particular challenges of riding for women, Larsen chafes at stereotypical views of female riders and travelers.  Friends and family—as well as the total strangers she meets on the road—were pessimistic about her chances: “Their pessimism involved the combination of the usual list of hazards supposedly inherent to a woman traveling alone superimposed upon their general horror of motorcycles” (5).  She knows their views are shaped by popular culture which “often portrays a woman on a motorcycle as a sex kitten, dominatrix, lesbian, or whore, and the prevalent image is more about high heels and bikinis and women draped over the backseat of a bike driven by some large—and often hairy—man, than it is about capable women who drive their own bikes wearing sensible boots” (6).  Larsen herself is more than capable.  Well traveled, she has hiked the Adirondack trail, served in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria and Macedonia, and fought off a would-be rapist wielding a knife in Serbia. 

Well aware of the risks of long distance riding, she offers detailed descriptions of the perils and discomforts of long-distance riding, easily recognizable to most riders: unstable surfaces, pummeling winds, construction dust/debris, and rain (though there are perhaps too many accounts of the latter).  “Sometimes, at the end of a long, cold, wet ride, when hands lock in frozen claws around the throttle and every downshift becomes a conscious effort to break and move paralytic muscles in the hands, lower legs, and feet, reaching the immediate destination—getting off the bike, finding food and shelter—becomes an animalistic need.  Vision narrows, the mind slows, and the body assumes whatever position or mechanized function will best achieve speed and the terminus of the day” (169).

She describes the landscape she traversed with equal fidelity and evocative detail.  En route, she also effectively describes the pleasures many of us know so well:

Driving a motorcycle is a sensual, visceral, and immediate experience.  It's the blast of air parting in an almost physical way around your body.  It's the feel of heavy steel machinery between your thighs and knees as you move through turns, running a good road on a clear warm morning.  It's the taste of wet grass, damp woods, damp riverbanks, and freshly cut hay that finds its way to the back of your throat.  You know and experience what is around you and feel the very sensation of motion itself, in a way that you never can behind the wheel of a car. (xiii)

She recounts memorable encounters on this journey with strangers who are mostly helpful and kind, though persistently amazed at a single woman on a motorcycle going so far.  Occasionally, she met other bikers on the road—but only four women riding their own bikes.   One, a student from Japan, inspired her during the remainder of her trip.  Intending to take an English course in Alberta, the Japanese student had arrived six weeks early, purchased a 250cc Honda Savage, and rode off into the Canadian wilderness knowing nothing about the language, the customs, or the people.

Perhaps inevitably Larsen’s return journey takes her through Sturgis, and she gives an accurate and balanced account of the event—the 400,000 or so bikers who make it “a ten-day carnival and bacchanalia of motorcycles, beer, music, tattoos, racing, men dressed in leather—lots of it—and women dressed in as little as possible” (305).  She has beers at the Broken Spoke and rides out to the Buffalo Chip to see Cheap Trick perform, all the while acknowledging the event's increasing commercialization and the masquerade played by many who attend, the predominantly middle-class, white Americans who “can play the parts of renegades”:  “It is a fantasy, a ten-day Halloween Ball, an alternative experimentation with a rebel life that the vast majority of people will never experience in reality” (306). 

This view of the rally positions Larsen as an outsider peering in on motorcycle culture, despite her experiences as a rider.  While this may have been partly strategic, given her evident desire to appeal to an audience of non-riders, other references call into question the extent of her familiarity with motorcycle culture.  She refers to riding “pinion” and describes the infamous (and staged) photo of the “drunken biker” at Hollister as surrounded by “crushed beer cans” rather than bottles. 

By contrast to the accounts of her motorcycle adventures en route, her encounters with her family—her avowed goal—also seemed anticlimactic, even though, for the first time, she learns the true story of her birth parents' relationship and arrives at her father's home soon after the death of a family member from cancer.  Perhaps that's because, as she admits at journey's end, “Rather than looking to find myself, I learned how to lose myself in the road, to take each moment for what it was, and to open my eyes and heart to what surrounded me” (358). 

This is an affirmation familiar to all those who have taken—or dreamed of taking—a trans-continental trip.  The pleasure of the book comes from its emotional directness which ultimately transcends more narrowly defined concerns related to the gender of the rider and writer.

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