Tuck It and F'ck It
I had a dream last night. When I woke up, there was a moment when, if I'd been standing in front of a mirror, I would have looked myself in the eye and delivered the most dramatic, theatrical eye roll I could manage. My subconscious, it seems, still has jokes.
I was somewhere deep in the woods on a small dirt bike, picking my way through a maze of intersecting trails. Some were wide, well-traveled paths. Others were narrow singletrack, deeply rutted and disappearing into the trees. I was vaguely aware that my riding partner—someone I knew—had disappeared ahead. He had found someone faster, more experienced, and the two of them had ridden off together. I was left alone to find my own way through the forest. Oddly, though, the handlebars kept bending. They would twist and fold as if they were made from thin, useless metal, warping into impossible shapes every few minutes. For some reason, it never occurred to me to be frustrated. I would simply stop, bend them back into place, point the front wheel toward another line through the trees, and continue on.
In the distance, I could hear my friend laughing and riding hard somewhere beyond the forest. The engine echoed through the trees as he tore around, while I moved slowly enough that I could have kept pace on foot. Eventually, I reached the top of a steep embankment that dropped toward a busy highway.
My first thought was simple.
No. I don't want to go that way.
Off to one side was a wide gravel road. It looked almost disappointingly ordinary, but it wandered away from the highway, away from the noise, and into the mountains.
So I followed it. It was slow.
Methodical.
Quiet.
Eventually, it opened onto an alpine lake nestled perfectly within a ring of rugged peaks.
There was no one else there. Wildflowers carpeted the shoreline, perfuming the mountain air. Birds moved effortlessly through the trees. The water was impossibly still. I shut off the motorcycle, took off my riding gear, stripped bare, and walked into the lake. Everything felt perfect. Not exciting.
Not triumphant.
Simply... complete.
Like I said, I don't need a psychologist to tell me what the dream meant.
The symbolism wasn't exactly subtle.
Reconnecting to Sprocket
As it happened, it mirrored a conversation I'd been having only a few days earlier with a friend I call Sprocket. She had stopped by for a few days at the beginning of a months-long motorcycle journey across the United States. Like me, she had recently launched a creative venture of her own, and our conversations drifted toward the parts that no one really talks about, the pressure to keep producing, the uncertainty of building something from nothing, and the quiet exhaustion that can creep in before you even realize it's there. Having gone through my own season of creative burnout, I found myself wanting to spare her some of those lessons. Not because I thought I could prevent the hard parts.
You can't.
But maybe I could point out a few guardrails before she found herself driving toward the same cliff I had.
Sprocket and I met almost exactly a year earlier at a motorcycle training camp designed to prepare and evaluate women for adventure expeditions. It was an unusual mix of skills and personalities. We spent our days refining our riding, learning navigation, wilderness medicine, and mechanical repairs before putting everything together on long rides through the backcountry. She happened to be teaching the mechanical portion of the course.
I arrived at that camp with no real idea of what I had signed up for. The week before, I had been at the Touratech Rally in Plain, Washington. From there, I packed up my bike and headed north toward Canada. The organizers wouldn't reveal the exact location of camp until the morning I was supposed to arrive. I only knew the general area, somewhere a few hours beyond the border.
It remains one of the hottest rides I can remember.
The sun was relentless. Even wearing a lightweight mesh jersey at seventy-five miles an hour, I couldn't stay cool. My CamelBak was empty long before I reached camp, and I eventually pulled over beside a river just to climb into the water and let my body cool down.
The organizers had been very clear: do not arrive early. So I waited in the shade, hiding from the afternoon heat until it was finally time to ride the last stretch into camp.
Fortunately, the route climbed steadily into the mountains. With every thousand feet of elevation, the air became cooler. By the time I rolled into camp, the heat, the traffic, and the long highway miles had all fallen away. Looking back, it seems fitting.
The journey into the mountains would end up mirroring a much larger journey I didn't yet know I was beginning.
My First Summer Camp Experience....
Our group that week was an interesting mix. Before arriving, everyone completed a questionnaire about their riding experience so the instructors could divide the ten or twelve participants into two groups. One group spent the morning on the training course while the other sat in the classroom, then we switched after lunch. Later in the day we would then all group up for a large group ride.
The camp itself sat well off the beaten path. There were bunkhouses, communal meals, evening campfires, and just enough isolation that the outside world seemed to disappear.
It felt like an adult summer camp. Most of the women had flown in and were shuttled from the airport. I was the only one who arrived on my own motorcycle. Another rider lived a few hours away and had been dropped off by car, but everyone else had begun their adventure with a boarding pass rather than a throttle.
The group couldn't have been more diverse.
There were women in their early twenties and others well into their sixties. Some had never ridden off pavement before. Others had already completed international expeditions and arrived with thousands of miles of dirt beneath their tires. It was an unlikely collection of strangers.
Growing up, I never really experienced summer camp. There was one on the island where I lived, and every year I watched the campers come and go while I worked alongside my grandparents. When school started each fall, classmates would tell stories about the lifelong friendships they'd made, and I'd read novels where complete strangers became inseparable over the course of a week.
It always felt like something that happened to other people. Not me.
The first evening at camp had the awkwardness you'd expect. Everyone unloaded gear, found their bunks, and wandered toward the communal fire for dinner. Conversations were polite but cautious as we all tried to figure one another out.
Then there was Paula. Paula is from Texas, and she occupies every inch of that identity with unapologetic enthusiasm. She arrived carrying a multi-page glossary of Texas expressions so the rest of us could understand what she was saying. She had embroidered custom bandanas for everyone with our camp number and the date. At some point, she donated a Chewbacca mask that, to the best of my knowledge, still lives at the camp today.
Paula isn't just a person.
She's an event.
Whenever Sprocket and I mention her name now, we both start laughing.
Most people talk about having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Sprocket and I are fairly certain we each have a feral raccoon riding a dirt bike, wielding a crowbar, screaming "YEE-HAW!" at full volume.
Its name is Paula.
You never know what's going to happen when she's around.
That's precisely why we adore her.
One woman was from England. At first glance she seemed impossibly polished—buttoned-up, corporate, and wonderfully proper. By the second evening she was surprised us by reading tarot cards around the campfire. Another was an incredibly well toned muscle mommy looking type, turned out she was a kind hearted medic with a sweet disposition and the classic Canadian humbleness.
That, in many ways, summed up the group.
There were women who carried themselves with the confidence you would expect from seasoned adventurers, and others who spent the first day quietly watching, measuring the room before letting their personalities emerge. Some filled every silence with conversation.
Others barely spoke at all.
It was an eclectic collection of humans.
At first glance, Paula and one of her bunkmates Andrea couldn't have seemed more different. Andrea was quiet, observant, almost invisible until you got to know her.
Paula....Paula was about five-foot-five of pure Texas wildfire. She was a hairdresser who lived in an RV she had painted to resemble a gypsy wagon. Every story she told somehow became stranger than the one before it. You know, as I sit here writing yet another story about Paula, I keep remembering more of them.
It's funny.
We only spent six days together.
And yet the catalog of completely absurd things I know about my feral shoulder raccoon continues to grow every time I think about her.
Take her foot, for example.
Paula had severe bunions, so she affectionately referred to one foot as "the flipper." Naturally, the flipper had its own holiday photo shoots. She would dress it up in tiny seasonal costumes, photograph it for Christmas, Halloween, and who knows what else, and proudly keep an entire album devoted to pictures of her bunion wearing outfits. As though that somehow wasn't the strangest part of the story.
Sometime around the second day of camp, Paula broke the flipper.
She didn't tell anyone.
She simply kept riding.
She rode the obstacle course, bounced over logs, tackled hill climbs, laughed around the campfire every evening, and quietly survived on handfuls of Tylenol until the week was over.
None of us had any idea.
That was Paula.
Some people collect stories. Paula accidentally became one time and time again.
A Tall Glass of.... that isn't water!!!!
Andrea, on the other hand, was impossible to miss. She stood about six feet tall, with long gray hair usually tucked beneath a close-fitting cap or woven into a braid. Quiet by nature, she carried herself with the calm confidence of someone who had already spent a lifetime outdoors.
She had been on a previous expedition with Sprocket, an expedition that, by all accounts, had not gone well. In fact, it had gone poorly enough that the organization decided every future expedition member would first attend this training camp. Andrea had been invited back as both a gesture of goodwill and an opportunity to see how the new format would work.
She arrived carrying more than just riding gear.
She arrived carrying history.
It was obvious she knew how to ride. She was equally comfortable in the mechanical classes. At the first few meals she joined the group, but rarely spoke. She listened far more than she contributed. Then, slowly—and it feels strange to say "slowly" because we only had six days together—she began to unfold.
The quiet woman sitting in the corner somehow became the funniest person at camp.
Who was the one burping into the helmet comms?
Not Paula.
Who coined the phrase, "Tuck it and fuck it," moments before riding over an obstacle?
Andrea.
Who would flip off my camera every time I tried to take a candid photo, and who was the one to be the first woman to strip down to her underwear and sprint into the alpine lake full of leeches without a second thought?
Andrea.
She lived inside her own skin with a kind of unapologetic freedom that was impossible not to admire.
One evening she'd be quietly knitting beside the fire, talking about berry picking, wildflowers, and homemade bug spray. The next she'd casually deliver the most unhinged non sequitur imaginable with a completely straight face.
The last few nights of camp, the bunkhouse she shared with Paula became legendary.
Long after the rest of us had crawled into bed, exhausted from riding all day beneath the lingering light of the summer solstice, laughter would still echo across camp. Those two were absolutely feral together. On the final evening we gathered around the fire one last time. Looking back, it remains one of the most magical nights of my life. Sprocket pulled out her ukulele and began playing. One by one we all joined in singing.
As I looked around the fire, I remember thinking how beautiful these women were.
Not because they were polished.
Not because they were fearless.
But because they embodied every version of womanhood I could imagine.
Strong.
Gentle.
Confident.
Unsure.
Wild.
Tender.
Tested.
Resilient.
Six days earlier we had all been strangers.
Now we were friends.
All Stories Have An Ending....
Just like the stories I used to hear about summer camp when I was a kid and people keeping in touch, only instead of writing letters, we started a group chat. The moment we left camp the messages began. I updated everyone on my ride home. Others shared photos of roadside cafés, random cats they'd met, campsites they'd found, and the little adventures that happen when you wander through the world on two wheels.
We started talking about reunions, future rides, future expeditions.
The messages never really stopped. It is still an active chat now over a year later.
I still feel connected to those women in a way that is difficult to explain. If any one of them called me tomorrow and asked if I wanted to ride anywhere in the world, I would say yes before asking where we were going.
Then, after a few weeks, Andrea stopped responding.
No one thought much of it. It was summer in Canada. Andrea loved disappearing into the woods. She was a feral woodland creature, just like the rest of us.
Then one of us received a message. It wasn't from Andrea. It was from a member of her family. They had her phone.
A few days earlier she had gone berry picking near her home, something she did often. When she finished, she decided to cool off with a swim in the river. The current swept her away and she drowned.
The news hit our group like a fucking stone dropped through the ceiling. I still struggle to explain why it hurt as much as it did.
I don't know Andrea's last name.
I know almost nothing about her life before camp.
I knew her for six days.
Six days and a handful of stories.
I only know the version of Andrea she chose to share with a group of strangers at a dusty motorcycle camp tucked away in the mountains of British Columbia.
And somehow...
That was enough.
Her photograph still hangs on my wall in my living room.
And every now and then, before I commit to riding over something that scares me, I hear her voice in the back of my mind.
"Tuck it and fuck it."
BOOK: Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail This book is the true story of a woman who told her family she was going out for a walk, and she left her small Ohio hometown in 1955 with a change of clothes and $200 in her pocket at the age of 67 and walked part of the Appalachian Trail. She was the first to walk it two and three times. It is because of her speaking up about some of the poorly kept sections of the trail that likely saved the trail from disappearing completely. She set her mind to doing it, and went.
SONG: Go Your Own Way - Fleetwood Mac
This song was on repeat for me after several different breakups, but it also is one of those ballads that most women know, or at least most women of a certain age know. I know the lyrics don't translate to anything about Andrea, and in fact I think she was married, happily even, but I like to think of Andrea going her own f'ing way in her life.
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
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