To Drink the Wild Air- a memoir
One Woman’s Quest to Touch the Horizon
Birgit Soyka
Published by
PARENDUM BOOKS at SMASHWORDS
Copyright © 2010 Birgit Soyka
www.todrinkthewildair.com
Smashwords
Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other
people. If you would like to share this book with another person,
please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re
reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased
for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase
your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Praise to “Drink the Wild Air” - a memoir
A lifetime quest for most of us is that of figuring out who we are, and what our path in life is meant to be. In other words, we are searching for that which will make our lives authentic. This is what this book is all about, the life story of a woman who knew that she was meant to follow a certain path in life – that of adventure. Whatever her life included, there must be adventure. Soyka experiences life to the fullest, and in sharing her experiences (with adventure, work, and relationship), she helps those women that follow her to better understand themselves, and their options. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to really see corporate change, how it affects us as part of a corporation, and how to stay true to following our own dreams.
Bonnie
Cehovet
Tarot Grand Master, Tarot reader, Reiki
Master
www.Bonniecehovet.com
"What I loved most about this book is its courage- the courage to shed false ideas of self, the courage to jump into experience with little more than our breath to support us, the courage to get out on the open road and invite experience to shape our inner lens. Birgit is a warrior of the heart, and her story inspires us to take giant leaps, crafting our landing strip with our own two hands."
Jeff
Brown
Author of Soulshaping: A Journey of
Self-Creation
www.soulshaping.com
“Imbued with a strong and courageous spirit, Birgit Soyka has pursued motorcycle racing–rare in a male dominated field–worked in high ranking positions, obtained a black belt in martial arts, and pursued international adventure. The power of her faith in herself and in the universe has enabled her to realize seemingly impossible dreams.”
Maria
Espinosa
American Book Award Winner
Author of Incognito:
Journey of a Secret Jew, Dark Plums, Longing and
Dying
www.mariaespinosa.com
It's hard to rein in to normal when you've lived on the road. "To Drink the Wild Air" is the memoir of German-born Birgit Soyka who came to America at age 25 and embraced the open road and motorcycle racing. As her life went on, she embraced marriage and never completely settled down. A unique memoir, "To Drink the Wild Air" is a fine and solidly recommended pick, not to be missed.
Carl
Logan
Midwest Book review
www.midwestbookreview.com
Preface: The Year of the "Crash"
Alaskan
Journal, Part 1: The Call of the Wild
Chapter
1: Touching the Horizon
Chapter
2: Freedom, Birds and Motorcycles
Chapter
3: Obsession over Reason
Chapter
4: The Coordinates of the Clouds
Chapter
5: The Essence of Serendipity
Chapter
6: Velocity and Highway Blues
Chapter
7: Passionate Intuition
Chapter
8: Fearless
Chapter
9: The Wingspan of a Free Spirit
Chapter
10: Keeping Birds from Flying
Chapter
11: Irresistible Inner Forces
Chapter
12: The Silent Dialogue of Thoughts
Chapter
13: Falling Upward
Alaskan
Journal, Part 2: The Emergence of Nature's Divinity
Chapter
14: The Invisible Split
Chapter
15: Captive Liberty
Chapter
16: On the Battlefield of Provocation
Chapter
17: Glaring Obscurity
Chapter
18: Lawless and Uprooted
Chapter
19: Tales of Mexico
Chapter
20: Inner Doubts
Alaskan
Journal, Part 3: No Peace without Faith
Chapter
21: The Spiritual (r)Evolution
Chapter
22: The Alchemy of Beautiful Desires
Chapter
23: Fear of Mind
Alaskan
Journal, Part 4: Mystic Revelations
Chapter
24: The Crash
Epilogue: 2010—Forward to the past...
For my dear mom Elisabeth
Thank you for sharing your spirit with
me.
Du musst zuversichtlich sein!
Der Grund, warum Vögel
fliegen können und wir nicht, ist der, dass sie voller Zuversicht
sind. Und wer zuversichtlich ist, dem wachsen Flügel.
– James
M. Barrie
The first spark of the idea to write a book about my life was ignited in my living room in May of 2004. Soon after, that spark turned into a raging brushfire. It wasn't until February of 2010 that the eagerly anticipated final keystroke occurred. Exhausted but happy, I am finally able to look back on the six exciting eventful years I diligently worked on “To Drink the Wild Air,” including events that unfolded along the way. I dedicated my time on weekends and evenings writing the book while still working full-time at my regular day job.
Most importantly, I would like to express my special gratitude and appreciation to my family, still far away. Your long-distance support and encouragement is very important to me.
I want to thank all my friends from around the world that I have met over the years. My life would have been empty without you. True friendship is a beautiful thing.
A special thank-you goes to my co-author, Lisa Taylor Huff, for her relentless and highly professional efforts to beautify my English and for sticking with me on this huge project. Lisa is an author and freelance writer based in Paris, France. Visit her at http://www.lisataylorhuff.com.
Not until several re-writes and many hours of editing did this book come to be in the form that you now hold in your hands. I couldn’t have mastered the editing process without the support of my long-time friend Deborah Haley in Los Angeles and the guidance from my editor Bonnie Vaughan in San Francisco.
In Chapter 6 “Velocity and Highway Blues,” I show part of the original article titled
“Unter Männern” published in motorcycle magazine mo in 1983. Mr. Franz Josef Schermer the editor in chief to that time wrote the article and I would like to thank him for his kind permission and for all the support, he’d given me over those early years.
In any memoir, the writer struggles with how much to say about the others who feature in the story, whether they were major characters or appear only in one short scene. This memoir is not one of those gratuitous "tell-all" celebrity biographies, a whistle-blowing exposé, or a voyeuristic peek into my past. I decided to share this narrative of my life's journey (so far) first and foremost as an ode to the wonders of life itself. It therefore reflects my personal thoughts, opinions, and choices without intending to judge or criticize those of anyone else. The book is not meant to do anything other than to provide inspiration and an interesting perspective with the final goal of entertaining and enlightening the reader, which I certainly hope it does.
With all this in mind, the names of most characters in this book have been changed to protect their privacy, with the exception of my immediate family. In regards to the name of my former long-time employer, I chose simply to refer to it as "the Company" or "the Subsidiary."
This is not a fictitious tale. Every piece of this story is true and accurately reflected as I recall it, and I've done my best to ensure the accuracy of all facts, dates, or information.
The title was inspired by a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Conduct of Life," as it appeared in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume V (MacMillan and Co., London, 1884, p. 197). I also refer to this quote at the end of Chapter 24.
Lastly, if the next half century of my life is even half as interesting and fulfilling as the first has been for me, then I think I can safely say that mine was a life well lived. (back to table of contents)
Preface: The Year of the "Crash"
Fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.
– Dale
Carnegie
In my ever-present adventurer's mind, my idea of a crash was always linked to a combination of motorcycles and physical vengeance, of pushing myself to the ultimate physical limits. In my heyday, I thought of a crash as the experience of temporary awe and disbelief, as my big motorcycle with its roaring 100 horsepower turned the tables on me, and the bike controlled me instead of me controlling the bike. Painful abrasions would develop on whichever extremities were sliding on the pavement, while in mid-slide, I would hope for the best and that gravity and the other elements of physics would work in my favor, allowing my body to come to rest on any random obstacle in my way without too much damage. That kind of crash was always painful but straightforward and honest to me. It was something I understood and could grasp intellectually.
Not so in 2007. The crash I had then had a very different face. This crash was malicious, vicious, and devious. It didn't just knock the wind out of me for a few moments; it knocked the wind out of me for many long and painful months. It was something I did not understand for a very long time, something ruthless to which I had no choice but to surrender. And it didn't even involve a motorcycle.
A relentless string of strange and inexplicable incidents had been pounding down on me with no remorse, presenting me with a number of mental and emotional challenges. My life came crashing down in crackling thunder and blinding lightning, leaving me with only one question, the same one I had asked myself after all my motorcycle crashes in my past: "What the hell happened to me?” But this time, I was searching desperately for the one answer that would bring me the long-needed relief and clarity I seemed to have lost to some invisible force. Instead of the “quick and easy” answer I wanted, however, the Universe brewed together a harsh mix of undeniable messages trying to get my attention in the cruelest manner possible and in ways, I had never before experienced. I was a big believer in the Universe providing messages, so what was the message for me in all this turmoil and chaos?
For over a year, I had felt a stifling discontentment at work, which had reached a crisis point. I was now barely functional in my management role at the Company to which I'd given over nineteen years of my life. I must have been missing some important clues along the way. It dawned on me that I had already missed the optimal point in time where I should have quit my job before it took its toll on my health because now I was suffering to the extent that I was no longer functioning in daily life anymore. Until that year, I'd never not been able to handle whatever life or my job had thrown at me, but now I was at the end of the proverbial rope.
I had always been someone for whom things usually seemed to fall into place without much effort. I used to be someone who could easily make intuitive snap decisions, usually the right ones; and even if they weren't, I had no trouble correcting my course of action and quickly moving on. I used to live life purely on my instincts, doing whatever felt right or the most fun, exciting, thrilling, or challenging at the time.
What was my problem now? Why was I no longer on top of things the way I'd always been? Whether it was taking my first motorcycle trip across Europe as a teenager, breaking into the man's domain of motorcycle road racing, or tackling a huge project at the Company and doing it better than anyone else, I'd never before been so afraid or had so much trouble untangling my thoughts.
It was also in this confused and emotionally fragile state—a state, I might add, completely foreign to me, as I was the last person who wanted to be thought of as fragile—that I was ripe to be pushed into the illusion of romance where there was no romance to be found. Cupid picked me randomly out of the crowd and made me an unlikely target for lovesickness, causing me heartbreak beyond any normal standards of past experiences.
In physical pain, overwhelmed, exhausted and emotionally numb, I finally admitted to myself that I was burned out in every possible sense of the word. It was as if I were zooming along a racetrack heading for the cement barriers, only these were the barriers of a mental breakdown: a crash.
But the "Crash of 2007," as I eventually came to think of it, was many times more painful than any of the physical crashes I had ever had on a bike…and it would prove to be something I wouldn't be able to get over so easily.
Just before I hit the wall, I was a person whose formerly sharp mind had simply stopped working. I was a conscious walking vegetable, for all intents and purposes. It was as if someone had turned off the light switch inside me; I had no more inner glow. I had become someone who couldn't decide what to eat for breakfast, let alone figure out what was wrong with my life or, more importantly, what I should do about it.
I couldn't talk coherently to anyone. When I spoke, I started to ramble on without any idea of what I was saying. I couldn't put two easy concepts together when someone explained them to me; 2 + 2 no longer made 4. At the office, I found myself staring out the window at the lake, utterly fascinated by the careless lifestyle of the ducks paddling by. For six out of eight office hours, I drifted into soggy daydreaming and my mental processes mired down as if in quicksand. For the other two hours, I'd sit at my desk and wonder what it was I was supposed to be doing there. I felt completely and utterly misplaced. Things just didn't want to register in my brain…and it scared the shit out of me. I became a cowardly bystander in my own life, looking with terror at the shell of a woman who was masquerading as me.
The mental effects were taking a physical toll as well. When the brain goes astray, the body goes with it. Physical exhaustion was a constant companion—at night I was unable to sleep, and during the day, I found myself dipping into naps at the edge of unconsciousness.
My thoughts were racing along the same grooves, looping endlessly over and over like an old record skipping its track, producing the repetitive sounds of an echo. Why had all these terrible things happened to me, virtually all at once? What was the message? What had become of my life?
And finally, one day a new question popped into the mix:
"Where did the real Birgit go?”
Ah…there it was. The question at the heart of my pain: what had happened to the real me? Where did she go, that fearless, take-charge, live-life-to-the-fullest girl I had once been? The young and carefree spirit who always danced through life on the wings of adventure, that Birgit who thrived on reckless traveling and raced motorcycles? She was the one who never turned away from a challenge and who lived life by her own rules, the Birgit who had once tackled her corporate career with the same drive and enthusiasm she used to put into life and her racing career. Where was she now?
This person I had become, this corporately conditioned, overly concerned and confused woman in her late forties who felt trapped by a job because of the financial security it brought; this person—although the older and wiser version of me—was left paralyzed by having succumbed to fear and convenience, my personal brand of procrastination! I hadn't even noticed it, not really, but somewhere I had lost—or perhaps had sacrificed—my true self for goals, values, or ideals I didn't respect and that weren't making me happy. Along the way, I had lost my once fearless spirit to conditioned reasoning. I had exchanged my usual unshakable faith for a paycheck. I had traded my courage with existential fears. And I had folded up my metaphorical wings to provide diligently for my future.
I had given up motorcycling—my first passion—many years earlier. Would I be willing to sacrifice the comfort of my Mercedes to savor once more the wind and the open roads on a big bike? Would it be possible now, thirty years older and wiser, to conquer the highways with the passion and enthusiasm I'd had as a younger woman? Was it too late already to change, to explore, and to seek new horizons?
These were the questions I had to answer if I was ever going to make myself whole again. The challenge was to find these core components of the real Birgit again. I felt I owed it to myself to make every effort to merge the spirit of that young and adventurous girl with the older and more experienced woman I had become, perhaps forming a new Birgit, the one I could be with pride and honor for the rest of my life.
One thing was for damn sure; I couldn't live with the Birgit I had become in 2007.
She was a disgrace.
(back to top Preface) (back to toc)
Alaskan Journal, Part 1: The Call of the Wild
Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.
– John
Herschel
I am in Alaska. It is the year 2006, and I find myself searching the database in my brain to find the "files" that will tell me when, exactly, I decided to put this trip on my "to do list" in life…and I now realize that I made that decision twenty-one years ago!
It was in 1985 that I first came up with the idea to ride my motorcycle from California to Alaska for three months, heading through the rough terrain of Canada and into the unlimited wilderness of the high north, and back again.
Now, I have finally made it: I am here! Not in quite the way, I'd originally hoped or imagined, but nevertheless I did it. In '85, I was still the Birgit who thought nothing of riding long distances on a motorcycle purely for the thrill of the experience: to follow the sunshine and feel like the birds in the sky.
Just the way I never gave a second thought to my first-ever motorcycle trip when I was still a teenager. Traveling an excruciating number of miles across Europe in just ten days, heroically neglecting the basic necessities of a tent or even money, completely exposed to the elements. Spending warm nights sleeping right out in nature, observing the millions of twinkling stars projected onto the enormous canvas of the infinite Universe, or feeling raindrops sprinkling my face while shivering under highway overpasses: this was pure freedom and excitement! I didn't have to think twice—I just did it. The word worry never once crossed my mind.
I have now evolved into a mature woman who is dealing with the physical aftermath of all the injuries I have suffered from motorcycle crashes and various accidents over the years. Initially, I really wanted to buy another big bike to ride to Alaska, but I stopped motorcycling years ago and no longer had the equipment necessary to make a three-month road trip—not even a tiny tent! Instead, I put some real effort into recruiting travel partners using a more civilized mode of transportation, but I sensed quickly that my friends had zero enthusiasm for the idea. In addition, instead of the three-month trip I had originally planned, I decided to scale back to four weeks. One by one, circumstances and practicalities forced me to alter the vision of the trip I'd had as a young wild spirit; I am now in my mid-forties, and the explorer in me has apparently been tamed more than I'd realized.
My original plan to come to Alaska was born while I was hospitalized at one of the lowest points of my life, recovering from a freak accident with my bike in Los Angeles where I got badly hurt. While I was forced to deal with the consequences of broken bones and missing joints, my ego had a field day as I pictured myself under the vast Alaskan sky. I might have been physically crushed, but spiritually I felt my adventure in life had just begun. I was still able to dream, and dream big.
Still…I am here now, and it is amazing. When the airplane maneuvered gently into the tiny Juneau airport, nestled into the middle of the snow-capped mountains, surrounded by green meadows and just a few roads along the Gastineau Channel, I was already impressed. What a stunning view! Living in California for so many years and having traveled to so many places in the world and across America, I was always awed by the scope of the open sky in the American West…but the Alaskan sky is incomparably huge.
I like Juneau, the capital of this forty-ninth state. It's small and sleepy for a state capital but has been victimized by the relentless hoards of cruise ship tourists coming through town every summer. I prefer to travel alone. I might have been forced to fly here instead of riding a motorcycle, but I have decided to follow the raven and listen to the wind while avoiding as much of mankind as possible.
Yesterday, I took my first day trip to Tracy Arm Fjords to get up close and personal with a glacier. I had never seen a glacier before and had no idea what to expect. The countryside along the fjords is absolutely breathtaking, with amazing views: fluffy, snow-white clouds floating along in the vivid blue sky; huge waterfalls sluicing off the rough mountain cliffs into the icy waters; rolling hills covered with luscious green meadows, sprinkled with the brilliant colors of the blooming wildflowers; and the deep soul of the Sitka spruce forests facing bare-naked rock cliffs. Yet as beautiful as the landscape is, the gentle motion of the boat caused me to doze off as I drifted into my own world of thoughts.
There is something about being out of California and my everyday life, experiencing the wondrous performance of nature's theater, being immersed in the energy flow of the trees, the animals, and the cold crispy air, that is making me think about things I've been avoiding for a long time. I hate to admit it, but I feel overwhelmingly discontent with my professional life and with whom I seem to have become in the past years. Where has that fearless, unstoppable person gone, the girl I once was, the one who envisioned a trip to Alaska by motorcycle just days after being in a road crash? Where was the girl who declared all rules insignificant, the girl who felt destined to only follow her intuition?
Once so passionate and committed to tackling any and all challenges, my life now has turned into one of purely mechanical action, with none of my former fervor and satisfaction. I have lost faith, I have lost my inner power to follow my spirit, and even worse, I think I have lost my beautifully wild and untamable spirit itself, and the strong sense of conviction I always felt no matter what I did. Is all this the price of growing up and aging? Is this the price of surrendering to the rules and regulations of the system?
Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I barely recognize myself anymore.
The tour boat navigated around the icebergs, slowly crushing through the frozen plates of ice floating in the water. The closer we got to the ice-mountains, the colder and bumpier the ride got, with the temperature dropping to freezing point. I woke up from my drowsy introspection to realize I was looking directly at a huge glacier!
Its shape and blue-white color was of incomprehensible size and beauty, and only the privileged bald eagles with their enormous wings were able to land on the remote heights of the peaks, on top of the world between raw ice and the Universe. This mountain of ice seemed to soar endlessly into the air before my eyes, marrying the colors of the white-tipped crystals with the most beautiful and intense marine blue of this mighty sky, and continuing into the distance until it was stopped by the horizon. Each huge slab of ice breaking off the glacier created a rolling, crashing tidal wave that rocked any boat passing the glacier shore even within the safe distance of a quarter mile; and the bigger the piece of falling ice, the bigger the wave.
It was absolutely stunning to watch nature at work like this. There was no silence in the presence of a glacier. The air was filled with sounds, sounds I had never heard before, quickly turning my initial awe into a deep reverence for nature while I listened to the symphony of the glacier's orchestra playing its own creation of a masterpiece. Moving ice plates pushing against each other with raw force caused loud crackling noises interlaced with screeches and squeaks. The incredibly loud plop when one of the huge pieces slid gracefully into the water was followed seconds later by an immense echo that reverberated many times within the glacier's core, the sound bouncing off the rocks on which the glacier had settled with the deafening volume of a thunderstorm. The glacier spoke to me and reflected, in its perfection, the sound of my own thoughts with the echo of many!
Humbled by these sacred moments in this forsaken untouched wilderness, I spotted many more huge bald eagles perched with majestic magnificence atop nearby floating icebergs. Aware that the glaciers are already disappearing, I couldn't help but feel sad to realize that I could be among the last lucky enough to witness this raw display of nature, the beauty of this frozen evidence of the earth's history, unfortunately now melting bit by bit.
On the trip back, I got lost in my own thoughts once again while I gazed at the shoreline passing by, and I felt as if something deep inside me was melting as well. I think it was my denial that was melting: the denial about my general unhappiness was beginning to thaw and make itself felt.
Even now, I can't stop the truth from resonating inside of me like the echo of the glacier. How long have I been covering up the fact that maybe I have "sold out" my real self, my adventurous self, for a steady paycheck and the financial security it was supposedly giving me? Shit, when did that happen? Oh, bloody hell…I used to make fun of those people I knew, the ones who stayed in a job for twenty, or even thirty years while they waited for retirement or death, whichever came first. I'm not talking about physical death but what if the body is just fine while the spirit has died?
Is it possible I've become one of them? Damn. I suddenly feel like the reality of my life had been encased in ice like a glacier, and now I sense the beginnings of a meltdown. My ego has overruled my spirit, and it has convinced my wiser-yet-wilder self to give up its independence. Was it possible that I had surrendered to the relentless chanting of my own fears? I can see now that something in me has started to rebel against this force that has taken over my very being, and which I have mindlessly neglected over the years…and now that very neglect is going to bite me in the ass. I have to change something in the routine of my life in order to find what I've lost. The waves are forming and rolling towards me. I'm not sure I'm ready to think about this now—I'm on vacation, for God's sake!
On the boat ride back, I was rewarded for waking up from this introspection with the pleasure of seeing a wild grizzly bear looking for food along the shore. It was beautiful to watch him! His coat was shiny, his shoulders powerful, and his shanks absolutely huge. I truly wanted to share all those experiences with someone I knew, but there was nobody…just me.
That night, I sat on the front porch of the youth hostel I've booked as the next best thing to a tent. I looked up into the sky and reran the mental images of the glacier, bald eagle, and bear through my mind. It was nine p.m. and I needed my sunglasses! The midnight sun was the most fascinating natural phenomenon I have ever encountered. I was following the clouds with my eyes as they gently glided across the bright evening sky, watching as they got smaller when pushed by the wind towards the horizon. This made me think about my childhood…and my first desire to follow the horizon.
Did I ever discover what I had envisioned while sitting on that "magic seat" of the swing in the front yard of my grandparents' house? It was on top of a hill, and the view looked down into the little village below…and in a small country like Germany, the horizon was right there, in front of my face.
I used to stare out into the horizon and wonder what was there. This question seemed to be a driving force in my life, even at an early age. I have always sought out excitement and adventure, and the horizon seemed to hold this big secret firmly in its hands but was unwilling to reveal it. Even then, I had a distinct need for freedom and inspiration, and I was hungry for mysticism. The location of the swing at my grandparents' house exposed me for the first time to the horizontal line of the sky that separated me from the unknown. I was five years old.
In that moment, I decided that I would have to follow the sky to discover for myself the secret of the horizon. I was immediately fascinated with this concept. I wanted to touch it, that wonderful skyline. It was huge for me, this horizon thing, because I was so small.
Little did I realize then that the horizon is a variable rather than a fixed line, and that even after reaching one horizon, there is always another one right there behind it.
(back to top Alaskan Journal Part 1) (back to toc)
On the magic swing, my sister Ingrid (left) and I in 1965
Chapter 1: Touching the Horizon
Do not go where the path may lead,
go instead where there is
no path and leave a trail.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Looking back, it seems I had an almost obsessive interest in following the horizon since those earliest memories. There was something inside me that needed to explore what was out there; to discover new territory, experiences, adventures, and the mysterious unknown that was so far outside the everyday normal life that most other people seemed to want.
But I grew up around those other people, and to understand me and the choices I made in my life, it's important to start at the beginning.
***
It was a bitterly cold day on January 3, 1960. Crystal clear frost, looking like flowers of ice, was etched on the outside of the big window, reflecting the orange-yellow glow from the inside light while thousands of thick and fluffy snowflakes fell softly in the pre-morning darkness.
In the southern part of Germany, my mother had just received me, her bundle of joy, on that Sunday winter's morning, where at that time of year four o'clock in the afternoon was as dark as four o'clock in the morning—the time I'd arrived. The world into which I'd come could not have been more normalized.
I was the second daughter born to Elisabeth and Gerd Soyka. They were the children of people who had survived the First World War and all the deprivation that came with it for years afterward. Their childhood experiences informed their choices as adults, and as parents to me and my older sister.
My father was born in December of 1925 in the eastern part of Germany closest to Russia, known at the time as Prussia. When he was twelve, he was sent to the Hitler youth program, which at that time was widely considered to be a good thing. Education and discipline were emphasized and highly valued, as was an understanding of the Fatherland and the necessity of defending it. This conditioning of social nationalistic feelings at an early age made my father an enthusiastic soldier when he was sent to war in 1943 at the age of eighteen. After surviving that long and ugly war, he went back home again, where nothing but political turmoil and economic depression awaited him. Prussia was being split up, with one part of it going to Poland and the other part going to Russia. With good reason, my father decided once again to leave home and his whole family as quickly as possible.
He was part of the post-WWII generation charged with putting the country back together from bits and pieces, all the while living with uncertainty and no bright outlook for the future.
Having spent time in the south during the war, he again headed in that direction, ending up in Stuttgart, located in the southwestern state of Baden Württemberg, where he tried to find work. In that region of the country near Stuttgart, no “High" German was spoken; instead, the local dialect was known as "Swabian," linguistically distinguished by very different grammar and pronunciation from textbook German; you could even call it slang.
Germany is such a small country, divided into many parts, each with its own local customs and dialects. The language of High German, of course, was always considered the more sophisticated and desired mode of communication, with proper grammar and exquisite pronunciation, but was only spoken in the northern parts of the country. For us Swabians, the north began about twenty miles north of Stuttgart, and the absolute borderline was drawn at the river Neckar, which is geographically located deep in the south.
Swabian jokes abound, by the way: the Swabians are said to be tight with money, although good workers and the dialect alone is fodder for the jokes. We Swabians couldn't care less what the other Germans thought of our local mannerisms, customs, and ways of speaking because life in the south was good and definitely more promising than anyplace else in the country during those hard times when my dad arrived.
My father met my mother in Stuttgart. He never learned the Swabian dialect, and she never adapted to High German; but they managed to communicate, fall in love, marry, and start their family. My mother, born in Stuttgart in March of 1932, had been too young to play an active role in the war, but she remembers her school activities being interrupted by bomb attacks and the need to seek shelter during air raids. In 1945, the school finally suspended general education altogether, and the children stayed at home to work for the survival of their families—not an easy task, especially as the end of the war grew nearer and food supplies were all but nonexistent.
Growing up this way, my mother was raised to be very practical. There were no luxuries, and they learned to be happy with the few basics they had and to make the best of it. She grew up to be a woman with lots of common sense, a woman who was modest and realistic and yet still loved life. Her wartime experiences colored her outlook on the world; she knew how evil it could be. She was brought up to be a hard worker, and at the same time she seemed to have an innate free spirit inside of her, a sense of adventure that was kept in check within the limits of her parents' perspective on the world and the difficulties of the times in which she lived.
Dad was a real character with a wheeling and dealing personality. He was an excellent and accurate family bookkeeper, and made sure that we had all the necessary insurance for life, home, car, possessions, and anything else possibly insurable. He kept a close eye on the budget to ensure that my mom had what was necessary to run the household. To supplement his regular income, it seemed he always had some kind of side job as well, usually selling insurance or anything else that could make a quick German mark or two. He became known in the area, as the "insurance man on the moped," since he had to go door-to-door to collect insurance premiums from his customers, and a moped was his only mode of transportation at that time.
My father also had a knack for getting things, useful things, from friends and acquaintances. His motto was everything that is bigger than a mouse—bring it back to the house! And he lived this 100 percent, never wanting to waste anything that might one day be put to a good purpose. You can imagine by this broad definition—"anything bigger than a mouse"—what an assortment of items ended up at our house over the years!
By the time I was born (my older sister having come along in 1957), my dad was working in a retail store selling fresh fish. This was good work for the family because he was always able to bring home a lot of fish to supplement our food supplies. One time, he brought home a live carp that my mom was supposed to kill for a nice dinner, but we kids stopped her from killing it, at least temporarily, and so the carp lived in our bathtub for several days, thus cancelling out the weekly bath day for the family.
After the war, the districts around Stuttgart grew rapidly, with a lot of new development taking place because there was work available and many people were moving into the area. My parents found a small flat on the top floor of a three-family house located approximately twenty-five miles northwest of Stuttgart in a small village created as a suburb of Ludwigsburg, the town where I was born. This little flat was my first memory of home.
The neighborhood was a blend of rural suburbia. We had many trees, creeks, farmland, and poorly paved streets where we played in those days. It was paradise for the development of a free-spirited soul like mine.
In 1962, my father bought a little 50-cc moped, a prestigious "Kreidler Florett." Kreidler was a German manufacturer of sturdy mopeds with engines ranging between 50 and 80 cubic centimeters and famous for their longevity. In those days, everything in Germany from washing machines to radios, cars, and appliances was built to last one hundred years or more…that was the mentality: Deutsche Wertarbeit, or a "German Work of Value,” and the German people were proud of that standard of quality, which was already known worldwide in those years so soon after the war.
This little moped was our only family vehicle at that time, and it's probably the reason I became infected with the motorcycle bug from an early age. At the age of three, I was too young to ride behind my dad, so instead he strapped me down on top of the gas tank in front of him. My arms were hardly long enough to reach the handlebars, but guided by my father’s hand I was reaching for the throttle: Even then I wanted to take over the driving. It was the greatest thing on earth, I thought. In 1963, Dad bought a car, a Ford, which became the car that drove me through my early childhood years, although I still had many rides on the moped with my father after that.
My sister, Ingrid, and I could not have been more different; talk about apples and oranges! She was always more inclined to follow rules and regulations, while from toddlerhood onward I seemed more inclined to find ways to break, or at least bend, the rules to suit myself. She accepted what she was told to do, while I, with my more critical nature, questioned things even as a little girl. Even then, I was on the hunt for the deeper meaning of the big why, always searching rigorously for answers to my many questions. I also got a thrill out of seeing how far I could go before I got into trouble, how far I could push authority. Sometimes "authority" got soft for the sake of parental sanity, because they were dumbfounded by some of the things I did. I think my parents were often so relieved that I was OK after my stunts that they'd often forget about punishment altogether, and as I got older, they finally just let me do whatever I wanted because they realized it was impossible to control me.
Ingrid and I not only had different personalities, we also had different looks. Ingrid was always the nice little girl, her hair combed into a perfect style. In stark contrast, my hair was a tangle of pitch-black coiling curls. No brush, barrette, or hair-band could tame that wild nest of hair; believe me, my mother tried everything. Finally, when I was five or six, she gave up and cut my hair short, making me look more civilized to the point where I could almost have been mistaken for one of those sweet, compliant little girls, just like my sister Ingrid.
My mother described my eyes as being roguish and unpredictable; she always knew that she would have a challenge with me. It became apparent early on that I was a real tomboy. Even though my mother often dressed Ingrid and me alike in those early years, she never tried to force anything on me that did not match with my nature, and I'm grateful for that. She allowed me to grow up and be the way I was; my way of thinking and my free spirit was never forced, by her, to be altered.
These were the days when I played on that magic swing in my grandparents' yard and where I first remember being aware of the horizon, and wondering what was out there waiting for me to discover. My grandparents' house was an enchanted place to me. Not only was it located up in the hills with a beautiful view of the valley below, but also it had a certain untouched wilderness quality to it, with no immediate neighbors and surrounded by a sizable piece of land with many fruit trees. We were a very small family, and besides Grandma and Grandpa, there was also my mother's younger sister, my aunt Elfi, only ten years older than I and nearly more of a sister or peer than an aunt. When I needed someone to look up to, it was Elfi. We didn't necessarily grow up together due to the age difference, but she was my hero.
It was always about the journey of discovery, even when I was a little girl of five. Our apartment had a big backyard with a vegetable garden and free-range chickens. My buddy Gregor, the landlord's son, had a small hut with a sturdy tin roof tucked into a corner were we used to play for hours. The hut was the secret center of all evil we were planning, and all the neighborhood kids used to hang out with us there. Adjacent to the hut was the all-important sandbox where we loved to build our sand castles.
One summer night, we three kids—Ingrid, Gregor, and me—begged our parents to let us spend a night in the hut. It was a very big deal for us and so all preparations were made. The hut was just big enough for the three of us to sleep in. We put a few blankets onto some wooden planks, our bed, to make it cozy, and although we were safe within the fenced-in backyard, for all the difference it made to us our parents could have been miles away.
We started our adventure with ghost stories…naturally! It was dark and eerie. Spiders were crawling around everywhere; our makeshift bed became uncomfortable and itchy. The objective of this night out had been to sleep in the hut, but no sleeping took place. At about four a.m. we decided to go out and walk around our village to see what it was like at that hour. There we were—seven-year-old Ingrid, six-year-old Gregor, and little five-year-old me—roaming around in silence looking at all the houses guarding our peacefully sleeping neighbors and friends, with us in total wonderment that we were out there on the streets and no one knew about it!
The big attraction at that time was the annual music festival, and for this event, a huge tent had been erected. In those days, Germany still had many American army bases, and this event was a co-production with selected American army marching bands. On our four a.m. dawn prowl, we came upon this big tent where both American MPs and local police provided security. We didn't see them…but they certainly noticed us! They called out to us, and of course, we started running. We panicked at the deep, strange voice of the MP who tried to get us to stop. With no plan, we took off at top speed running in all directions, and got separated in the process. I had never been in that part of our village before and had no idea where I was or where I was going. Followed by imaginary shadows, I ran for my life through the dark and deserted streets and alleys, ending up in a dead end with a huge brick wall. Breathless I had to make a quick decision. I climbed the wall… and saw through a huge fir tree the village cemetery spread out peacefully below. More decisions: go through the cemetery to get home, and risk being attacked or haunted by the spirits in the graveyard; or return to the tent, and run the risk of being caught and ultimately haunted by my parents when they found out. The spirits seemed the better option. I climbed down into the cemetery listening to the amplified hooting of the night owls and the cemetery watchdog barking in the distance. I walked quickly, shuddering and petrified, through the dark graves in the predawn light. Old ones, fresh ones, some nicely decorated with flowers, others overgrown and crumbling. The huge branches of old oak trees were hanging low over the gravestones moving in perfect rhythm with the mild morning wind. It was spooky and too quiet there. I managed to cross the graveyard, quickly climbed another wall, and found myself again on a street I knew.
Breathless and sweaty, I was the last to arrive back at the hut. We compared notes on our getaway experiences and realized time had advanced in the cool morning hours to six a.m. We decided to go back into the house, to the comfort and safety of our regular beds with soft mattresses and pillows. I caught a cold from my night out, but it was well worth it, and our parents never found out. We never spent another night out in the hut.
In those days, I preferred the boy’s games over dressing up dolls. The older I got, the more casually I wanted to dress with my primary wardrobe being jeans and sweatshirts rather than dresses. It became a normal occurrence that I was often mistaken for a boy rather than a girl, with my short hair and slim, boyish body. I was as skinny as a beanpole, and my way of walking wasn't especially feminine, so it's easy to see how people would make that mistake, though it never bothered me.
We also had quite a variety of pets at home (all bigger than a mouse!). Our first companion was Maggie the hedgehog. We had four versions of Max the hamster over the years and three generations of Flora the turtle. Then, on one very memorable day, my mom took me to the pet store to let me select my pet bird, Neptun, my beloved cockatiel, with whom I grew up as a soul mate rather than a pet. I admired his colors, his wings, and his ability to fly. We were able to communicate on the same frequency, and as much as I responded to him, he reciprocated his unconditional love to me with the same intensity. Neptun and I became inseparable, and I adored him for many years to come.
Academically, I was never a great student; I did well in courses like physical education, German, English, and history, but in subjects like math and science, I was the pits. If it involved languages, grammar, and writing skills, I could do pretty well, but the world of logic felt too completely illogical for me to be able to put it into real terms. Numbers, formulas, and bookkeeping were an insurmountable jungle of confusion for me, and I regularly drifted into adventurous daydreaming while stuck at my school desk.
I guess I never liked being tied down to a desk, even then…an omen of things to come, of me choosing work that was more physical or experiential rather than being trapped behind a desk all day. At least, that's what I did for the early part of my working life—until the time when I started selling out for a steady paycheck. But I'm getting ahead of myself here; that part of my story comes later.
In 1975 when I was fifteen, a few key things occurred. One was my first trip to the United States, together with my friend Chloe, when we visited Chloe's aunt in North Carolina. I had my first taste of life in America, and it was my first real trip across an entire ocean, though three years earlier I'd gone to the island of Mallorca with my parents; that was my first time in an airplane, soaring like the birds!
Then, my family moved into a bigger apartment to a town called Möglingen close by to where we grew up. I also graduated from high school and took a three-year apprenticeship as a retail specialist at a retail store in Ludwigsburg for fine porcelain, glassware, household appliances, silverware, and cookware. Apprenticeships are programs combining a regular work schedule with school hours, amounting to forty hours a week. In Germany, in order to enter certain professions, it was and still is the common practice for young people to become apprenticed.
Since my academic record wasn't the most stellar one and I probably wasn't destined for university life, it was decided that an apprenticeship was the best way for me to go. It was low pay, but the idea was to get the experience. I continued with this apprenticeship until I was eighteen.
It was also in '75 when I met Pete, who became my first boyfriend. A classmate of mine introduced me to him. Suddenly, my social energy was diverted from my swim club activities to mopeds, parties, and adventures. Pete was a mix of a hippie with long, wild hair and a biker with perpetually greasy hands and an even greasier leather jacket, hard-core…exactly my style. It was through the influence of Pete and his friends that a whole new world of mopeds and motorcycles opened up for me, and I felt I'd found what I had been looking for in my adolescent soul. Oh, not boys; it was the wheels, the adventure, the speed for which I'd been yearning!
And so it was in 1975 that my lifelong love affair with motorcycles began. But first, it started with mopeds, because we were still too young to get our licenses for the big bikes.
Now, in 1973, my sister had turned sixteen, which was the legal age to take a driver's license test for mopeds up to 80 cc; and so my dad handed the old family moped down to her. She knew already how to ride it and how to get around on her own. I was still too young, and I didn't care so much for the old moped anyway, but I had hopes that she would take me along. In those interim years, I got a painfully lame moped with 1.8 horsepower and max speed of 25 km/h, or 15 mph. About a year later, Ingrid got a hot new 80-cc moped with more horsepower, and for me this was the final straw, because she rarely took me out for a ride. Right then and there, I vowed I would have my own big bike, way bigger than her crappy little moped, and that I'd never take her for a ride, either. The two years I trailed Ingrid seemed to be an eternity, especially during this time when she turned eighteen and all her friends already had big motorcycles; and there I was, chugging along with my piece of shit moped, a disgrace to the road. They all would fly past me, waving arrogantly as they headed over the horizon, and oh, it just killed me!
What really surprised me was that even though Ingrid was hanging out with the biker crowd and had her fun with big motorcycles, the day she turned eighteen she bought herself a car, and I thought she was nuts. To my added dismay, she lost interest in bikes pretty rapidly, and I never was able to take my planned revenge of outdoing her with a bigger and better bike. When I finally turned sixteen, I first needed to get a driver's license. Of course, I wanted the same 80-cc moped Ingrid had, or something even better to make her jealous; but things developed differently than I had imagined, and not for the better: I failed the driver's test! I can't even recall now why I failed it, but I was forced to deal with this cruel fact of life and the realization that I was now saddled with a shitty moped for another two years. I couldn't believe my lousy luck, and I was furious.
Through my father's progression of jobs—he was now the manager of the "Lost and Found Office" in Ludwigsburg—and his practice of bringing home anything useful that was bigger than a mouse, he did manage to bring home an almost new and absolutely cool-looking Kreidler moped. This was some consolation at least and now Pete and my new moped friends came in handy. These guys did not fool around. They were true mechanics and well equipped to tinker every 50-cc moped to the extent that the engines literally exploded, eventually, from over-tuning. This idea was absolutely appealing to me, and so I developed my own interest in tuning bikes, learning about two-stroke engines, carburetors, and proper gearing.
All this was something that came naturally to me. I had fun, and I was able to combine my sense of adventure with my new passion for two wheels. By the end, I had the coolest, fastest bad-ass 50-cc moped in the city. It ran well over 50 mph (80 km/h), the engine was screeching at the top of its lungs, the hardware couldn't keep up with the vibrations of the upper revs of the engine, and the brakes had no control anymore: my unique creation of imminent danger. This little bike would have flown if it'd had wings. Now I was happy—at least for the time being.
The next couple of years found me working in my apprenticeship and partying hard with my friends and Pete…with more emphasis on the partying, since the work life was rather on the boring side for me. Pete and I were inseparable, though we were primarily best friends with all the understanding and openness best friends have, and secondarily boyfriend and girlfriend. Somehow, this worked perfectly well for both of us.
One late night coming home from a party, I rode as a passenger on Pete's bike. Clearly, he'd had too much of the substances available there, and his usual safe riding style went straight to hell. He plowed full power into a curb and we both ended up in the gutter. This was my first moped accident. I was in shock when I picked myself up from the ditch I'd landed in, after first sliding along the pavement for a good while in regular jeans and not the best boots. I looked at my right hand, which was dangling leisurely around in my glove, and realized I couldn't really feel it. Police and ambulance arrived quickly, and we were transported both to the hospital. That accident got me good: my right wrist was broken clean through and road rash adorned all my extremities. This was the first time I literally ate dust and gravel—and it was the first time I began an on-again/off-again long-term relationship with road rash. There is nothing like a good skin abrasion to worsen your overall mood!