True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am;

I maybe hadn’t buried a man under my floorboards but I was, indeed, very nervous. Despite receiving the proper training, certification and licensing, I was a nervous wreck. Left hand pull, right foot: one-down five-up, right hand roll on slowly, always look where you want to go. All the rules were rapidly repeating through my head. I was so hyped and proud of myself but I was, indeed, very, very dreadfully nervous as I pulled out from the parking lot at Smoky Mountain Harley Davidson and across four lanes of traffic onto Highway 321 going toward Lenoir City. 

As I accelerated out of the median, I was topping out. It was time for me to pull the clutch and shift into second, then into third. At that point, I was in a higher gear than I’d ever been on a motorcycle. Could I get to four? Yep. Should I go to five? Yep. I was now going full speed, maybe even 10 over the speed limit (rebel without a cause, after all), and it felt amazing. There’s nothing quite as freeing as feeling that breeze blow around you as you ride your motorcycle down the highway. There’s no “cage” to protect you and one mishap could be fatal, but we don’t exactly become motorcycle riders because of our affinity for safety. 

I loved how freeing it felt. I was just out in the elements, I didn’t have any Bluetooth connections in my helmet (yet) so if my phone rang, it wasn’t my problem. At the time, I didn’t give anyone permission to see my location so for all intents and purposes, I was off the grid. Despite how badass I felt, I was incredibly grateful that in order for me to get home from where I was on the highway, I’d just have to make one right turn and one left turn. No winding roads, very little traffic, very little pressure. I was proud, excited and terrified.

I parked in a sliver between an actual parking spot and the curb at the townhouse where I lived at the time and breathed a sigh of relief because I had made it home safely – my first full motorcycle ride on my own. They say if you don’t turn around and look every time you get off, you bought the wrong motorcycle – and I can’t stress enough just how HARD I bought the right motorcycle. She was a beauty: A 2013 Harley Davidson XL 1200X Forty-Eight named Rowdy Rhonda. She had stubby chrome pipes that sounded so good when you went under an echoey overpass and had a sexy classic look with a low profile, low bars and no windshield. 

Buying a motorcycle meant much more to me than just becoming a motorcycle owner. By the time I came home with Rhonda, I was a couple of years into a turbulent-and-disordered era of my life. Coming home on such a machine was one of the first times I felt like I had regained some semblance of control over my life. Granted, life still mostly sucked, but when I rode Rhonda, nothing else mattered.

I’d heard seasoned riders talk about how motorcycle rides were therapeutic in nature because all your troubles fade away, and they were right. It’s common knowledge that people often fade out mentally while driving their cars, which is pretty scary when you think about it. How many times have you driven home from work with your mind on something else, only to pull into your driveway with no memory of getting there? Don’t act like you never have, because you have. For many of us, car driving is handed over to our autopilot feature and this simply cannot be done on a motorcycle.

In riding school, they taught us to always be aware of everything all the time. Not only that, but we need to have an exit strategy for any possible scenario. I proceeded to ride with the belief that not only could the other drivers on the road kill me, they were actively trying to do so. If I was stressed about work or about another one of my idiot life situations at the time, I would dwell on it nonstop while driving my car and be even more stressed out and forlorn when I got home. On the bike, however, I wasn’t allowed to think about it because I was too busy avoiding the murderers on the highway, smelling those oh-so-good barbecue smells coming from that roadside smoker on Kingston Pike and basking in that tried-and-true feeling of freedom that comes with being in the saddle. I would always come home level headed and virtually stress-free.

When I finally pulled my head out of my ass and started making positive changes in my life, one of the first things I wanted to do was buy a house. I had a small list of nice-to-haves that included a large yard and fireplace, then I had a list of must-haves that included a fenced-in backyard, possible studio space and a garage so Rhonda wouldn’t have to be outside with her cover and wheel lock. The house I landed on has a garage that’s almost too small to park a vehicle inside but I didn’t care – it was big enough for my girl and that’s all that mattered to me. One of the first photos I posted to share that I had bought a house was Rhonda sitting in the garage. There was also a photo of her sitting in the driveway at night, basking under the light of the driveway light. 

I kept riding as much as I could for the next year or so. I’d take the backroads to the gym, learning the hard way that wearing a muscle shirt while riding by farmland at dusk is a bad idea because your arms will be covered with bugs. If I was ever stressed, I would jump on and hit one of my favorite trails – either taking highway 70 all the way to Kingston and spending some time by the Clinch River or simply doing a large loop around Farragut, stopping for a bench-sit at a local park. 

Rhonda was a fun hobby and a symbol of when I finally took control of my life. My first feeling of true independence and freedom in the new phase of my life (aka: my 30s). Yet, you can’t argue with the fact that for the last year or so I haven’t been riding much. In fact, I haven’t ridden at all. Rhonda has just been chilling in the garage, connected to the battery tender and getting started up every so often just to hear the rumble. I still had monthly payments for financing and insurance. It was kind of like spending my retirement to keep someone on life support.

With that, after months of back-and-forth, I finally decided to part ways with my very loud, 500-pound girlfriend. Rhonda has officially been sold and we have reclaimed the space in our garage that we need for storage and for workshop space. I hope to ride again in the future, maybe on a Softail or a Fat Boy, but for now that part of my life is over.

Truth be told, I think I bought Rhonda when I did because I was metaphorically trying to run away from nearly every aspect of my reality. These days, I have nothing to run from. It’s beautiful, just like Rowdy Rhonda.