You found Westing. You are about to set off on a journey across the country on the back of a motorcycle, a 1983 750cc Honda Nighthawk. Along the way, you'll get very deeply into head and heart, you'll fall in love, and you'll meet a succession of American characters on the road. You'll see and smell our continent in the month of July, when plants are blooming, birds are chirping, and people are tracing instinctive paths of migration. You'll feel what it's like to drop everything in your life and journey to the West , hoping you'll find something to put you right again.

In Chapter One, Giles and Kate fulfill their pact to run away together, meeting at a train station in Springfield, MA. It's the 4th of July, over a hundred degrees hot, and neither one of them has ever ridden a motorcycle for more than an hour. They set off, pointed West on the Mass Pike, in search of a big adventure. First stop, an underwear party at the Econolodge in Westfield.

July 4th, 2005, Colrain, MA to Westfield, MA . I was lying in a hammock on Forrest�s apple farm in Colrain, MA, looking down through a cut in the woods at a dairy cow pasture that stretched across the hill opposite me. It was mid-morning on the 4th of July and I felt happy. The sun warmed my face. My skin was still cool from swimming in the creek. I had a good country breakfast to look forward to. All the worries I had built up over three years of graduate school were gone, poof, and in their place I had a piece of paper that said I was a Master of Divinity.

I was loose again, ready to ride or die on the back of the bike. Free at last. The world had gotten its sharp edges back. It was summer. Everything I had to worry about was strapped to the same engine I was wrapped around, and I was bombing my way down a wavy-gravy country road towards a woman who wanted a ride to Chicago.

I looked in the rearview at her face tucked deep in the helmet I’d painted all bright yellows and blues, a sunburst. She shrugged and I saw her nose wrinkle in the little rectangular picture frame of the mirror. The picture window of the rearview is the only means of visual communication between driver and rider on a motorcycle trip. It’s like a video conference.

We pulled into the service area, The Blanford Service Area, to be more precise, caught about twenty miles in between Exit 2 and Exit 3 on the Mass Pike, which is also I-90 West, a road that runs all the way to San Francisco. I topped the gas tank off and Kate went inside the travel center. I pulled the bike over to a parking place so we could combine our luggage and shrink it down some. It was boiling hot on the asphalt. Kate emerged with two bottles of water. Her face was fresh to me. Studying it, I got this giddy feeling that she was all mine until Chicago. She had nowhere to go but back to me and the bike.