My motorcycle

October 31 (some call it Halloween, but my children know that’s Satanic)

            Our friend Jane, an Australian who we met early after we moved here through a contact of Laura’s, just moved. “We should buy her motorcycle,” Laura told me, a few weeks ago, which struck me as crazy and a little bit stupid. Neither of us have ever driven a motorcycle before, and Laura thinks we should buy one in a country with the craziest traffic (outside of Cairo, maybe) in the world?

            Now, I can’t believe I’ve never owned or driven a motorcycle before. We’ve owned this motorcycle for four days, and I’ve driven over most of the area around our house in those four days, usually with one of my two kids clutching onto me, exploring little side streets, driving up the side of the mountain, cruising through rice fields, past little warungs (roadside shops) and through kampungs (villages) stopping at a soccer game or at a swimming pool or at a hotel to look around a little. Riding my bicycle for two months in traffic prepared for me the rhythm of vehicles here. It’s the most defensively minded driving I’ve ever done, not in terms of my mindset (for the most part, I’ve always been a defensive driver), but in terms of everyone on the road. They are always expecting a motorcycle to pull out of a side-street into moving traffic, or a bus to pull into oncoming traffic around a corner to get around the becak (the bicycle taxi) or for motorcycles to just weave their way, in groups of two or three or four, through and around cars and other motorcycles, and the amazing thing is, everyone does it with this great sort of fluidity. (The driver who brought us from Yogyakarta to Salatiga after our Bali trip, though, was the most insane driver I’ve ever ridden with, so crazy that Laura and I started telling Seamus and Graham stories of their infancy, I think because we were reviewing details of our lives every time he passed a bus – he was fast though, and cheap, and we’ll use him again.)

            I think of my brother Steve as I drive my motorcycle, because I think he’d immediately take to this flow of traffic. It’s intuitive, and everybody watches the vehicle ahead of them, and seems to trust the person behind to do the same. There’s a fair amount of honking, but it’s a sort of cheerful “by the way I’m here” kind of honk politely signaling that you shouldn’t move too much to the right (or the left, depending on where the flow of traffic is taking said vehicle). I still don’t pass on curves, on mountain highways, mostly because the busses do, and I am not really in a hurry, it turns out. It’s not really the speed, it’s just fun to suddenly be moving around the countryside on a motorcycle, seeing some guy herding his geese, or whatever amazing sight pops up at any given moment. My only fear is that I will stop riding my bicycle, because I like riding the motorcycle so much, though I suspect I won’t.

            Reading the blog, one wouldn’t know that my brain is about to explode from the workload I have been given here, no matter what the Fulbright people promised me about the ease of the work, or the purpose of the grant being to travel and see a country and not to recreate the conditions of an academic position. I have almost 80 students, teaching three classes that meet on three separate days for 3 hours each, one of them a writing class. All of the classes are taught in sort of clusters, which means we’re all supposed to be doing the same thing, a pretence I long since abandoned, but which is putting my students in my critical reading course at a disadvantage because they have to take the same tests that all the other students take, most of it over material that I don’t think has much to do with the task of reading critically (like identifying whether a paragraph fits the pattern of “exemplifying” or “cause and effect” or “space/order,” or taking five sentences that form a paragraph and mixing them up and then having students put them in the proper order). My students bombed the first test, as I predicated they would, to the dean, at the beginning of the semester. In the middle of it all I am in class myself six hours a week for Indonesian. I did leave for a week on a trip to Bali, but that had the consequence of making things even worse last week, after my return. School policy is that I am supposed to make those classes up, but there are some tangible benefits about my paycheck not coming from the institution I am working in, and scrapping that requirement is one of them.

            So I’m happy to have a chance to tool around this part of Central Java on a used motorcycle with a kid holding in the back, and next weekend, when Seamus and Laura go on a mission trip with the school (to teach English, thankfully, led by one of the teachers from Indonesia who is more focused on having the kids do something useful for the community they visit and not trying to convert the “non-believer” Muslims) Graham and I will likely pop on the back of the motorcycle and go somewhere we haven’t been, to spend a night and explore a little. And when I come back to Bozeman, I don’t think I will buy a motorcycle, since I can’t ride it year round there. But maybe I’ll sneak into my neighbor’s garage every now and then and “borrow” the Harley.

            Happy Halloween everybody.