Eating an elephant

     The only elephants I have ever seen have been in captivity, most recently on my honeymoon, two years ago in Disney's Animal Kingdom.  I suppose I should have known the marriage was doomed the second the honeymoon plans involved anything having to do with  the words "Disney" and " World".  I digress.  In the few times I have been in the presence of elephants I was never afforded the opportunity to eat any of them. Although  I am not really sure that I would want to.  However, on more than one occasion, while describing the scale of my future journey, instead of advice on what the most common part to break on a BMW motorcycle is or how to deal with the native people of Honduras, I have been given advice on how to eat an elephant.  Everyone seems to agree that the best way to consume said pachyderm is to eat it one bite at a time.....confusing.   Another piece of advice that I seem to get most often is regarding my means of travel.  It is widely agreed on that to get from Portland Connecticut to Tierra del Fuego, the best way to move is by taking baby steps.  Again, confusing.  It would take a lifetime to make this journey in such a way.  I tried it yesterday and it took me 30 minutes just to get from one side of my yard to the other.  Not to mention I  now have some very confused neighbors. If I had not spent thousands of my parents hard earned dollars attending prep school, before hastily dropping out and enlisting, I would not understand the use of metaphors.  But I did waste thousands of dollars going to prep school and then I did promptly drop out to enlist in the Marine Corps, therefore,  I am a master of the metaphor and I believe what my friends are trying to say is that great things just don't happen.  Large scale goals require patience and planning.  A collection of small bites or steps towards a large goal, eventually lead to the completion of it.  I had a poster on my wall when I was younger.  One of the work- place propaganda posters that you always see hanging in offices. They have one word written in bold at the top, followed by a Chinese proverb that is meant to motivate the masses.  On the poster was a mountaineer, decked out with climbing gear and standing at the bottom of a giant slab of ice.  The picture was taken at low angle so that the climber was silhouetted against a bright sun and the challenging piece of climbing he was about to take on.   For some strange reason I remembered the proverb but I can't seem to remember the bold word at the top of the poster.  The proverb read, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".  Coming up with this crazy idea and then not letting reason or common sense destroy my resolve to see it through was my first step.  By my precise and scientific methods I have calculated that there are only 52,799,999 steps to go!
Step 1:  The idea
       I completed my first step on a 35 minute drive home from Old Saybrook Connecticut to my hometown of Portland.  My family and I had just buried my grandmother and I was at the end of a incredibly trying week.  In one week I had lost my grandmother to congestive heart failure and lost my wife to figurative heart failure.  I came to terms with my grandmother's death in the hospital after saying goodbye.  I have not yet come to terms with losing my wife's love, and most likely wont for a while.  The burial of my grandmother was one of the first family events that I had gone to alone since meeting my wife.  As everyone stood over the coffin I looked around at my uncles, sisters, cousins, and mother, all being comforted by the person they said vows to.  There I was, standing over my grandmothers open grave, eyes welling up with tears. Not tears for the loss of my grandmother, but tears because I was alone.  On the drive back to Portland I turned the radio off in my truck so I could be alone with my thoughts.  I find when I have painful thoughts throwing themselves against the walls of my skull, a long quite drive can be the best way to emancipate them.  After witnessing the end of my grandmothers life, I found myself pulling my own life apart and wondering where I was headed.  I  have a love/ hate relationship with my job.  I love creating things with my hands, and I hate how little I get paid for doing it.  This was not exactly where I saw myself 8 years after leaving the Marines.  I lived for my wife and for the plans we had together, not for work.  I felt that a happy family would be my success.  My path was to start a beautiful family and live everyday for them.  That path ended with the words "I love you with my head, but not with my heart".  Everything I had worked for was now worthless, I had put all of my faith in a life that was now impossible.  What I realized on my trip home was that this was going to hurt like hell, but I have been granted freedom.  Step one was figuring out what to do with this unwanted freedom.  I don't know how the idea to ride a motorcycle came to me on that ride home, but it did.  Had I been anywhere else, emotionally or physically, I may have immediately dismissed it.  Instead of immediately shooting down my own idea, I embraced it.  I realized that this may be the perfect time to do something foolish.
     Step 2: Making it count
      Step one complete, I now needed to find a way to make this more than just a hip pocket trip, taken by a man struggling to come to terms with loss.  I wanted to make it more than a personal vision quest.   I had decided that I was going to use my trip to raise money for charity.  I flirted with the idea of a few different charities but settled on the one that affected me on the most personal level.  A few years ago, my older brother was almost taken from us because of complications caused by Ulcerative Colitis.  It is his story to tell, so I will not go into detail.  Long story incredibly short, we almost lost him.  When I discuss what happened to my brother with people, it amazes me that almost everyone I talk to knows one or two other people who either suffer with Chohns disease or Ulcerative Colitis.  I decided to ride for the Crohns and Colitis Foundation of America.  It isn't official yet, but I intend to use my trip to raise as much money and awareness as I can for these awful afflictions.
     Step 3: Training
    I have never been on a motorcycle, not even as a passenger.  Common sense tells me to learn to ride before I take on a near 20,000 mile journey into the unknown.  My intention is to find an older version of the bike I am going to ride and familiarize myself with it.  I am going to do this by going on weekend trips to all the places within in a days ride from my home that I want to see, and then writing about them.  Hopefully this bike will breakdown on every trip.  This may seem like an odd thing to hope for, However, I would rather learn to fix the common failures of a motorcycle in Springfield, Massachusetts than on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. I am going to blog about every single adventure that I take so I can  become comfortable writing about my successes and failures as a motorcycle rider.  I can guarantee there will be failures, but I hope they will be vastly outnumbered by successes.
     I have some work ahead of me, steps 4 through 52,799,999.  It is a big elephant that I have decided to eat, and some parts may not taste as good as others, but I have taken the first three bites.  To not finish now would be wasting a perfectly good elephant, and I was raised better than that.