March 2007
Book Review
American Borders: A Motorcycle Misadventures Journey
By Carla King
Motorcycle Misadventures, 2007
ISBN-10: 0-9646445-0-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-9646445-0-2
Suzanne Ferriss
In 1995, Carla King embarked on a solo circumnavigation of America. What made her decision daring was not that she was a woman on a motorcycle. Instead, hers was a doubled adventure, at once rooted in the past and charting the future. She made her trip on a Russian Ural with sidecar—a motorcycle originally designed in 1938 and revived for sale in 1994—while documenting her journey using the then emerging technology of the Internet. Now published in book form, her travelogue takes the reader across many borders—political, social, economic and temporal.
King begins by recalling her first motorcycle touring experience, a 1988 ride through Europe on a rented Honda 750 she had intended to take with her husband. Instead, she found herself riding alone, admitting by the time she arrived in Carcassone that her marriage had failed, but having discovered that two-wheeled travel can transport a rider in ways that transcend the merely physical.
Seven years later she approached the Ural company’s American importers with an idea to combine her technical writing and riding experience. The importers agreed to allow King to test their newly modified Russian bike on America’s highways. At the same time, she would be traveling the Internet highway, filing regular installments on the Global Network Navigator website for editor Allen Noren (who later published Storm, his account of his own trip around the Baltic Sea). Packing her tools, laptop, camera and scuba gear in her sidecar, she set out from California, heading north along the West coast toward Canada.
As other solo female riders, such as Karen Larsen, have written, a woman on a motorcycle traveling alone inevitably hears the same question, “Aren’t you scared?” King, though, “was hard-pressed to think of something to be scared about—apart from the prospect of being alone with my own thoughts for a number of months. Since my first reluctant solo journey, I’d spent a lot of time navigating the world and had managed to avoid trouble.” Even as an experienced rider and an able mechanic, King did, however, find misadventures that had little to do with being a woman.
Most came from her “companion,” the Ural. The bike had been redesigned for sale in America, with electronic ignition and Japanese carburetors, but, as King discovered, the Ural was “meant for life on a different continent . . . to traverse war-torn Europe and Siberian snowfields.” The air-cooled engine overheated in high temperatures and it struggled to attain highway speeds, but the slow pace suited King’s desire to soak in the sites and, as she admits, the “motorcycle’s quirks and breakdowns gave me the opportunity to connect with people and places in a special way.”
Her encounters with people, more than the landscape, form the substance of King’s narrative, from Renata, a young woman on her first motorcycle—a BMW 1100 GS—headed for Alaska, to Jeff, a bicyclist riding from Seattle to New York. The staple characters in her story are mechanics. Atone point King even wonders “if it was my destiny to meet handsome young mechanics with deep blue eyes.”
While she was skilled enough to adjust the Ural’s finicky carburetors and cables, serious defects plague her, often leaving her stranded on roadsides or in desolate small towns. She seeks temporary fixes for dripping gas tanks, electrical problems, and oil leaks across the northern United States and southern Canada. Inevitably, she also experiences moments of despair and frustration: “What I wanted to be doing was camping out, waking up under the stars, hiking, and cooking over a stove. I did not want to be hitchhiking and getting towed, sleeping in noisy roadside motels, eating at the A&W and drinking weak coffee and listening to some guy in a gas station saying ain’t that a shame every single day.” When a tow truck driver smashes her laptop and camera, she nearly quits.
But she persists, perhaps, as she muses, owing to genetics. In 1927, her grandparents spent their honeymoon traveling America’s roads—most unpaved—in a Model T that could reach a top speed of thirty miles per hour, “downhill with a tailwind.” Eventually, mechanics in Ohio solve the majority of the Ural’s problems and King finds that, visiting her family in North Carolina, she has no need to consult her mechanically skilled uncles and cousins.
The second half of her trip passes quickly, partly because circumstances in her personal life make her eager to reach first Arcosanti, Arizona, and then California. But not before the Ural creates another misadventure or two. As she approaches an expensive California hotel, her clutch cable breaks and she must decide between coasting into the hotel or allowing the engine to die and then push it into the parking lot. Traveling too fast to make the right into the entrance, she swings into the exit lane and is about to collide with a limousine:
I jerked the bike up onto two wheels to tilt the sidecar into the air, raising it up over the curb. With a quick turn to the right the rest of the bike followed, clunking up onto the grassy meridian and then back down the other side into the entrance lane.
An admirably unperturbed valet parking attendant watched me carefully but without expression. Unruffled, despite the bug-eyed looks I was getting from everyone else, he waved me into a space nearby. I slowed down and braked, so rattled that I forgot to turn the key to the off position. The engine choked and shuddered to a stop.
King had intended her journey to “dispel the notion that traveling solo through the United States was a dangerous and foolhardy undertaking.” Her accessible and engaging account allows a new audience of readers and riders (and rider-readers) to come along for the ride—though, sadly, not in her sidecar.
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