Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road
By Neil Peart, 2002

I couldn’t figure out at first why I enjoyed reading Ghost Rider, the hefty and not-so-sophisticated memoir from Rush drummer Neil Peart, so much, but I think I finally nailed it down. It’s precisely the book’s lack of affect or laborious sophistication, its infectious and somehow soothing naivetÈ, that make it at least as engrossing a travel journal as any I’ve read by many a hardened journalist. In combination with Peart’s surprising and unbounded honesty about himself, the book’s boyish enthusiasm is enough to carry the reader willingly along with the author on a meandering - and often terribly boring -journey.

The book reveals to us 14 months of Peart’s life after he endured a pair of tragedies straight out of a family man’s worst nightmares. First, his 19-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident on her way to college; less than a year later, his wife had died from cancer, and Peart found himself suddenly, heartrendingly alone. In order to save himself from a descent into doom - alcoholism? drug addiction? suicide? he never tells us precisely what he fears might become of him, but anything seems possible - he sets off, shortly after his wife’s death, on an intentionally aimless journey, a motorcycle ride from his home in Quebec to nowhere in particular.

The journey is difficult but thrilling. He rides north through Canada, eventually ending up in Alaska, then wanders back down through the American West before finally running out of steam in Mexico and Belize. He backtracks and retraces his route, changes his mind about his destination from day to day and refuses to plan more than a day or two ahead. In the course of the journey, he engages in endless introspection, attempting to separate his grief from his future and trying to create a new persona for himself, a new guy, who will be able to live without his family. He eventually does just that, although the reader, benefiting from an outside perspective, can see that the guy he becomes was right there all along, not too far beneath the surface.

Peart’s prose is often adolescent, if lively, and one needs patience in order to stick with him through the course of the 400-plus page book. His tendency to hang on tenaciously to precious phrases (such as the “ghost rider” of the title) sometimes becomes cloying, and the lyrics from Rush songs that bracket each chapter seem awfully thin in comparison to the magnitude of events being confronted. Yet, Peart is nothing if not sincere in his writing, and he never takes himself, his revelations or his saccharine metaphors too seriously. The “little baby soul” that is the heart of his post-traumatic self-image is not empty psychobabble, but rather an unexpectedly effective metaphor for the fragile will to live that he protects “as though [he] held [his] cupped hands around a guttering candle.”

More important than any of Peart’s self-conscious introspection, though, is the endearing humility that shines throughout Ghost Rider. We find a man who is an enviably wealthy rock star but who is embarrassed, surprised and quietly thrilled when a passing female stranger smiles at him. He’s a guy who sets off on a powerful red motorcycle into the Arctic, but who is unable to lift the machine by himself when it falls over on a muddy Alaskan road. He’s a guy who has traveled the world a few times over, but who spends much of this journey searching for souvenir stickers at each new destination and collecting National Park Passport Stamps in his journal. He is, undeniably, a nice guy, and one whom we wish well as we follow him along.

Peart’s job in the rock band Rush is not a priority during the journey, and he, in fact, is not sure that he ever again wants to play music. A reluctant rock star even before his life began to fall apart, he is even less driven to perform afterward. He claims to be a different person from “that other guy” who used to play the drums, and Rush fans will, indeed, have difficulty recognizing the fumbling, misanthropic author of Ghost Rider as the idealistic lyricist they thought they knew.

Ghost Rider is, at times, a trying book to read. It is constructed in large part from the letters Peart wrote to his friends - especially his best friend who was imprisoned for drug smuggling shortly after Peart’s journey began, yet another casualty among his circle of loved ones - and some serious editing of his astoundingly prolific output could have been useful. Especially during the winter Peart spent skiing and snow shoeing back home in Quebec, the epistolary narrative is needlessly redundant. Still, it’s the unremitting ordinariness of the letters that are the strength of the book - it’s the same nearly inexplicable attraction that keeps people reading the apparently unexceptional content of weblogs on the internet - and perhaps ruthless paring of the text would obliterate that aura of real life.

Perhaps inevitably, Peart’s story has a happy ending. Anyone possessed of the vitality required to write so much and connect so securely with those he loves is certainly endowed with a irrepressible will to live. The year chronicled in Ghost Rider is not suspenseful; it is merely a difficult journey of grief and self-reflection that Peart needed to take in order to reach a foregone conclusion. Similarly, the book itself contains few surprises for the reader; it is merely a lengthy - and sometimes difficult - trip that is, ultimately, worth taking.

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