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The Meaning of Risk

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By Isabella Rogers

When I became a tenure-track professor I gave up motorcycling because it no longer brought me joy.

Back when I was a graduate student, academe -- with its manicured quads, polite receptions, and rational conclusions -- seemed to be a world that extinguished risk-taking. So I started riding scooters, embracing risk as a mode of rebellion.

Gradually I progressed from scooters to motocycles. My history in academe can be charted through the kind of bike I drove and the way those bikes expressed my difficult adaptation to academic life, a life so different from that my family had imagined for me.

The Motor Scooter and the Preliminary Exams

In graduate school, you learn how to live on a shoestring. Driving a cheap motor scooter became part of my survival strategy.

Everyone in my family drove four-wheel-drive SUVs and pickup trucks, so the scooter became an instrument of rebellion against my family's beliefs about the American Way of Life. Yes, I was a vegetarian; no, vegetarians don't eat chicken; no, they don't eat meatballs either; no, I don't want kids; yes, I am living with that artist guy with the long hair. Those were heady days of freedom from my working-class family's views.

On the scooter, it was still possible to believe that I had special powers, that I could take risks and emerge unscathed. Those feelings of uniqueness did not survive my first scooter accident.

A week before my preliminary exams, I drove home from the library with my backpack resting on the platform beneath my feet. When a car cut me off, my backpack, containing my precious notes, fell onto the street. I pulled the scooter over and, just as I was running toward the backpack, it was sucked up into the undercarriage of a large, gray Buick.

For a moment, I could still see the Buick as it drove away into the sunset, but the license plate was too far away for me to read.

I did get most of my notes back eventually, after the Buick's owner took it to a mechanic wondering what that knocking sound was under the car. In retrospect I wonder if that experience was a message from the universe urging me to understand that it was OK to let go and improvise, to creatively rework what I had learned.

I wasn't yet ready to take real risks with my work or in my everyday life, but I did taste risk by driving the motor scooter. Driving it assured me that, even though I was spending all my time in a library carrel, I was like Pinky Tuscadero, Fonzie's sexy ex-girlfriend on Happy Days. (OK, I was actually more like an academic version of Penny Marshall's character Laverne DeFazio on Laverne & Shirley.)

The Motorcycle and the Dissertation

I managed the terrifying challenge of creating a book-length project from scratch by graduating from a motor scooter to a motorcycle. My scooter was so light that a thief could lift it into a pickup truck and drive away; that happened three times. For all the money I spent on the scooters and on the motorcycle, I could have purchased a car.

Instead, I financed a small motorcycle, a "chick bike." Metallic blue with shiny chrome, it was just the right size, and I was strong enough to pick it up if it tipped (an important consideration). The bike could reach speeds of more than 80 miles per hour as I found out when I took it out on the highway.

One night, I was coming home from the library, where I had been writing my dissertation proposal. Waiting at a red light, I scanned the rear-view mirrors. The driver of the car coming behind me had not seen the red light in time and was skidding toward me, desperately trying to stop her car. I quickly moved into the center lane just as she screeched past. She stopped her car in time to catch the light, and looked over at me to mouth the word, "Sorry."

Such close calls -- and there were many -- left me feeling how vulnerable any motorcycle rider is to the carelessness of other drivers. At the same time, I was feeling how vulnerable I had become to the risks that any graduate student faces: Would I be able to write the dissertation? Would I be able to get a job? Would I be able to pay off the student loan?

I did finish, thanks to a wonderful dissertation adviser and graduate program, and I was hired as an assistant professor at a university in Faraway City. The motorcycle would make the cross-country move with me and my husband.

The Economy Car and the Professorship

From the beginning, accepting the tenure-track job forced me to admit my lack of special powers. My husband and I packed and drove the moving truck ourselves. We rolled the motorcycle up a bookshelf into the back of the truck, tied it with a rope, and moved it along with the lamps and the futons. We would use it for transportation in Faraway City until we could save enough for a downpayment on a car.

The driving culture in Faraway City, where people tailgate and manueuver at high speeds, was distinctly motorcycle-unfriendly. At work I attempted to project an image of security, although each aspect of my life -- including getting to work -- seemed full of risk. The only path to stability was to keep my mouth shut and publish.

One morning I took a break from my research to ride the motorcycle to the grocery store. Just as I pulled out of the store's parking lot into the center lane, a man in an Oldsmobile came out of the driveway across the street and sped toward me, looking the other way.

The steel gray grille of his car came on like a great-white shark that would swallow me whole. I jumped off the bike but didn't make it all the way off. I shouldn't have been thrown clear of that car but I was. I should be dead right now, and I don't understand why I'm not.

Instead, I woke up, lips on pavement in the center lane. An audience had gathered. The ambulance arrived. All my arms, hands, legs, and feet were still attached. My helmet was cracked in two. My beautiful motorcycle was underneath the front wheels of the Oldsmobile, a mangled wad of blue metal and black rubber. I walked away.

The motorcycle collision insurance paid me enough to get an economy car, more appropriate transportation for an assistant professor anyway. I taught with a concussion and covered the massive black and eggplant bruises with long-sleeved sweaters and long pants. I sought to disguise my injuries as well as the fact that I had been traumatized, but my co-workers probably understood more than I gave them credit for.

As a graduate student, the motorcycle gave me a feeling of power at a time when I had none. That illusion was repeatedly deconstructed until I had to think about the nature of risk: What kind of risks can I take in my academic work? In what ways can my very expensive education make a difference in the lives of others? Working within a system that can seem to discourage risk-taking, what kind of real risks can improve my work?

Sometimes it takes a decade of graduate study, thousands of dollars, and a near-death experience to be able to ask honest questions.

Recently I was driving home when I saw a line of motorcycles stretched into the horizon inwhat must have been a funeral procession for a motorcyclist. It had caused gridlock, so I pulled over and got out of the car to watch, flashing the peace sign to the passing riders. As they drove by, I wished -- for just a minute -- that I could go back to being the graduate student "chick biker" who felt the hot wind on her face and the movement under her boots as the gears caught.