The Helmet
Inside is a world of its own. Or, rather, a space separated from this world.
bonneville salt flats, utah - shot by Korey Bartos
Riding a motorcycle is an experience that opposes itself. You feel completely liberated; vulnerable to a world flying by you, gliding through space. Yet, at the same time, completely confined to the space inside a protective shell of plastic polymers and foam.
From the outside, you appear to be completely open, but inside that helmet, you are alone, closed off. As you rush through the air, its deafening roar, deadened by earplugs, drowns out nearly every other noise, and also eventually fades from your sensory perception, until the only sound is the thumping rhythm of your beating heart…and your thoughts. And although its a human necessity to occupy this space; being utterly alone with ourselves, we rarely find ourselves in it anymore. So when we find ourselves unable to escape the sound of our inner voice it’s unsettling.
bonneville salt flats, utah - shot by Korey Bartos
In May 2021 I took my first long motorcycle road trip, from northern Wyoming to southern Utah and back. On that trip I had many hours and thousands of miles of time spent with myself as company inside the confined space of a helmet, and it was uncomfortable, painful even. Not just the physical soreness that come with sitting in the saddle for long hours, arms locked on the handlebars, fighting gusting winds. But the intense inner depths I found my mind wandering towards that were anxiety inducing and quite startling. I have always found long solo roadtrips a source of personal reflection. Going off into the unknown alone forces you to think different, to be confident in yourself and your abilities, but it can also cause self-doubts to creep up. I often find myself thinking, “why am I doing this?”, “am I living the life I want?”, “am I creating purposeful work and meaning with my exhistance?”. But I’ve never experienced the utter depths of destructive self-doubt as I did with this moto trip.
moto camping in Moab, UT
There’s a particular stretch of interstate in Utah leading from Salt Lake city to the Bonneville Salt Flats. I had done it before in a vehicle with a few friends, and wanted to make a quick trip there on my way home at the end of this motorcycle adventure, because I’d wanted to ride a motorcycle over this vast expanse since getting on a motorcycle. But this time, the barren landscape of this lifeless place broke me. Under the 90+ degree heat, on the open road of endlessly flat, unchanging landscape, with the dull vibration of the motorcycle and white noise of 80mph rushing winds, minutes felt like hours, and all my humanly sensations melded into one of complete bodily numbness. After an eternal hour of this, my mind started cracking, just as the salty earth here does. I started to drift, not physically, but there was a feeling of weightlessness. My mind was trying to make sense of the senselessness I was enduring, so it started to float. My mind was leaving my body. It had become unhinged. This wasn’t the type of freedom I was in search of. This more resembled torture, and I felt…crazy, so I did what a crazy person does; I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Deep down I hoped my screams would be heard by the vehicles around me, but my cries for sanity were all but a whisper in the wind. After all, I was alone in this helmet. Trapped. So I had to fix myself. I yelled “no!” to myself, as though I was reprimanding my mind and denying it permission to be lost. I started shaking my head to double down on my denial. And for a moment my mind acquiesced and I realized I needed sensation. I needed to let my mind know that my body was in fact still here. So with my left hand I began punching my leg, and finally, my nerves woke up from their hypnosis. So this is how I continued for another hour, and even stopping for a few minutes would result in a relapse of mental detachment from my numbed body.
floating above the salt flats - shot by Korey Bartos
When I finally reached the salt flats and stepped off the motorcycle, I almost fell over. My legs trembled and I had to lean on the motorcycle as I focused on slowing my breath. I looked over at my friends, who had been a short distance ahead of me in a car and they knew something was wrong. It felt like I had just been in a fist fight; my body ached. And I feebly uttered in a whisper, “I think I went crazy.” They quietly nodded, gave me a hug, and I cried. It was 15-20 minutes before the numbness fully subsided, but that mental brokenness will stay with me a lifetime. I once thought I had a robust mind; I’ve ran marathons, completed 100 mile bike rides, climbed mountains, and worked out until I puked, but the desert didn’t care. To it, I was just another piece of the barren landscape to be dried, cracked, and rendered lifeless.