When her husband was diagnosed with mesothelioma cancer, “in our last eleven months together,” she writes, “we grew closer, bonded by our deeply shared mission of his survival and finding ways to enjoy each day.”
She not only felt grief at his passing, but grief about losing her old self. She tried to patch a new self together: “I redecorated parts of my home—more modern, playful, and colorful—reflecting an expression I had modified when we married. Slowly, I developed new interests—knitting scarves, soul-stirring music, and adventure travel. On the one-year anniversary of being alone, I was surprised to find myself more miserable than ever. The grief hadn’t subsided. Instead it had grown and was raw and unending.”
What was needed, she found, was not a patch but whole new way of approaching the world. And it turned out to involve a Harley, a group of three companions, and a road trip of 2500 miles from Vancouver to Mendocino and back. It’s all there in “Blind Curves: A Woman, A Motorcycle, And A Journey To Reinvent Herself” ($16.99 in paperback from Skyhorse Publishing; also in audiobook and Amazon Kindle formats).
Now a Chicoan and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute instructor, Crill’s adventures in learning to ride a Harley, and having one fall over on her, are told with humility and grace. Once she passes the DMV test the real test comes in learning to ride with her companions over rough roads and hairpin turns, always looking Fear in the face. Who knows what lies just past that blind curve?
As Crill becomes more skilled as a rider, clad in her leather gear, her chosen watchword is “VROOM!”; the trip, she writes, “changed something inside me as I processed my fears about surviving with the excitement of riding. A resilient ‘new’ Linda was reinvented by riding through the blind curves of this journey.”
Crill’s journey (including being a cancer survivor) is a beautifully-told travelogue of the outer and inner world, a delight and inspiration.
