GHOST RIDER
I knew about Neil Peart listening and reading about Rush, the Canadian band in which he’s the drummer. In each new information I gave more and more value to this guy: he’s not only considered the best drummer, he’s the lyricist of the band too, and he’s an excellent writer, and he loves cycling and motorcycling.
In the late 90’s, during about three years the band didn’t appear, something was happening. At that time, we didn’t heard news from them here in Brazil. In fact, Neil Peart passed through hard troubles; more precisely family troubles that he wouldn’t comment in the press. His 19-year-old daughter died in a car crash and one year later his wife died with cancer, obtained from the disgust of losing the daughter.
Interested in his story I bought the book “Ghost Rider- Travels On The Healing Road”, where he tells about these hard years and the searching for healing of his “little baby soul”. He lives in Quebec, Canada, and after the tragic facts that happened, although having good support of relatives and friends, he was completely lost in his life. So he decided to keep riding his motorcycle occupying his mind, avoid thinking about life and trying to minimize the self-destructive urges.
Neil travelled alone through Canada until Alaska, reaching about 800km per day, and some days more than 1.000. In the book he tells about details of the travel, his feelings about life, his letters to friends, the freedom of riding motorcycles, his hobby of watching birds and his time with Jackie, his wife, and Selena, his daughter.
Neil and Jackie agreed to put on Selena’s memorial (not knowing at the time it would be Jackie’s memorial too) the W. H. Auden poem that ends with “Pour away the ocean/ And sweep up the woods/ For nothing now can ever/ Come to any good”. In the last days of Jackie, Neil asked what would he do without her and she answered he could travel with his motorcycle, the one that she herself gave as a gift to him a few years earlier.
After the travel to Alaska he stayed some little days at home to update things and went to the road again, at this time through the United States until Los Angeles and Mexico. He did a lot of comments of his impressions about people and nature during the trips. And so he rode about one and a half year.
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Even after so many miles on the Healing Road, he still believed that “nothing now can ever come to any good”, but slowly, slowly, he was becoming interested in the health of the oceans and the woods again.
At the beginning and at the end of each chapter Neil always extract some poems of the lyrics of Rush music, linked with what is going on in the chapter. They composed 16 studio albums in 30 years’ career, and there are a lot of poems to many situations. The first passage he cites is “We’re only immortal for a limited time” from the work Dreamline of 1991; the last is “And if the music stops/ There’s only the sound of the rain/ All the hope and glory/ All the sacrifice in vain/ If love remains/ Though everything is lost/ We will pay the price/ But we will not count the cost” from Bravado of 1991 too.
Suddenly he knew Carrie, as he says, his “angel of redemption”, and in less than a year they were married. According Neil she is a friend, a soulmate, a lover, a wife and a new journey to embark upon.
Although the book is a little big, 460 pages, it took my complete attention and I wouldn’t want it to end.
Bruno Carlos Wagner
01/12/2003
