The Reincarnation of Joe Rocket

By Lance Larson

After losing everything in a nasty divorce, our main character believes that things can’t get worse. And then they do. At the lowest point in his life, his buddy Two Stroke, gives him a wrecked fixer-upper motorcycle to take his mind off his troubles. With nothing more to lose, he agrees to take a cross-country motorcycle trip from Olympia Washington to Machias Maine with Two Stroke. On this adventure they meet a mix of interesting and colorful people; a notorious bank robber, a small town with corrupt cops and a burly seafood cook. During a desperate run from the law that ends a fiery crash, our sad traveler is presumed dead. With no memory of his past, life begins again on a goat farm in Nova Scotia where he learns the art of making gourmet goat cheese. When his memory is regained, by the help of a special woman, he returns home to reclaim his good name and what is rightfully his. You will take an emotional motorcycle roller coaster ride in this story, The Reincarnation of Joe Rocket.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lance Larson
• Release date: Oct 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370675258

Lance Larson

Born in Bend, Oregon, Lance Larson grew up on a small ranch where his father, City of Bend Detective Carl Larson, taught him and his two brothers to appreciate the life of a cowboy. He learned how to train horses, manage livestock, handle firearms, and survive in the wilderness. As a family, the Larson's explored the Cascade Mountains on horseback and helped their neighbors with cattle drives on the high desert of central OregonCurrently, Lance owns his own business and has a small hobby ranch with his wife, Tibby (Spring} Larson, also from Bend, in the Willamette Valley outside of Salem, Oregon

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The Reincarnation of Joe Rocket

By Lance E. Larson

Copyright 2016

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Table of contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

About the author

All books by Lance

The Reincarnation of Joe Rocket

Chapter 1

As I raced on my motorcycle toward the Atlantic Ocean on a dirt road at 60 miles an hour, I could hardly believe how the last year and a half of my life had led me to this. Eighteen months ago, I thought I was living the Great American Dream. How I got from the Great American Dream to hopelessly racing toward a four-foot concrete barrier at the end of a dirt road is a sad and miserable, but probably not an uncommon story of many fathers who are divorced.

I know that many ethnic groups, religious, socio-economic, age groups and groups of certain sexual orientation, believe that they are discriminated against, but until you are a divorced, father in the middle income category, you really don’t know what discrimination is. All afore mention groups have been given many legal rights, but divorced fathers, mostly, have rights taken from them.

In the justice system you are supposedly innocent until proven guilty, but if you’re a father and you are getting divorced, the justice system assumes you are the reason for the divorce, that you will do anything to not pay child support and you‘re not as good of a parent as your ex-wife, period. They give custody of the children to your ex-wife and you lose at least half of everything you have, usually more if she has a better lawyer.

Eighteen months ago I was a successful engineering supervisor for the city with two young children and wife. I thought I was living the great American Dream with a new minivan, a nice used truck, a camper, a nice home, a little money in the bank and lots of friends. Don’t get me wrong, life wasn’t perfect, but I had accepted the bad with the good and had made my peace with what couldn‘t change.

My wife, Mary Susan, and I had been married eight years. When we met, I was twenty-six and had decided that it was time for me to settle down, get married and start a family. In my youth, I had always only really wanted one thing, to have a family.

In college, I was starting running back on the football team and first-string guard on the basketball team. I held four school records, one in football and three in basketball. I had been recruited by three professional teams in both sports and could have gone pro in either one of the two, but playing professional sports would have interfered with my main goal, which was to have a family and a normal family life.

I know that wanting a normal family life is not a very ambitious goal when given the alternative of being a professional athlete, but as I was growing up my family life was far from normal. My mom was a church body and she would insist that I accompany her to church each Sunday. In her mind, going to church each Sunday made her a good Christian no matter what she did the other six days of the week. My dad died when I was three and I didn’t really remember him. Mom never remarried and never recovered from his death. She found solace in a bottle, which made life difficult for me.1

It was from people at church that I learned what a normal family life could be like. There were many families that attended church and on occasion, I was invited to a home of friends where I observed what a loving and caring home life could be like. I knew that if I were to ever have that, I would have to create it myself.

My dating experience and search for a suitable companion had not been productive or successful with younger women. Before Mary Susan and I met, I had promised myself that I wasn’t going date anyone younger than twenty-five. I had decided that if I was going to find someone that was ready to settle down and start a family, I needed to date women that had a few important life experiences and knew who they were as a person. So many of the younger women I had dated were still trying to figure those things out.

I knew that choosing someone to share the rest of my life with was too important of a decision to leave to just happenstance, so I set some guidelines and standards that I was determined to stick to when dating and hopefully finding a suitable companion.

I knew that the heart loves whom it is going to love, despite any standards or guidelines, but I wanted to make sure I covered all bases when it came time for me to choose woman to share my life with, utilizing both my heart and my head.

Age wasn’t the only criteria. I also had decided that I wanted to marry someone that was tall, athletic, blond, had common sense, came from a stable family life, and physically attractive to me. I really wasn’t that particular. If they only met five of the six categories, I would still give them a chance, as long as one of the categories they met was that I found them physically attractive.

I first met Mary Susan at a New Years party. She was there with a couple of friends from her church. When I was introduced to her, I can remember thinking how mature she seemed for her age, she was twenty-three.

I was at the party with my girlfriend, Jodi. Jodi met six of the seven categories. She was a year older than me, five foot eleven, strawberry blond hair, and athletic (PE teacher), had a lot of common sense and was very attractive, but her parents were divorced and she had been, as reported to me by a guy who knew her in college, pretty wild. Pretty wild meaning she might have had some questionable moral standards during her college years. Since college she had found or re-found religion and was then pretty conservative in her life style.

I was a believer in second chances, repentance, and that people could change. Jodi seemed pretty ideal in just about every other way. We shared a love for the out of doors, understood and appreciated each other’s sense of humor, she rode motorcycles, I loved motorcycles, we both wanted children, and we enjoyed each other’s company.

Jodi and I dated for several months and toyed with the idea that maybe we should take our relationship to the next level and get engaged. I think we both knew that we would make each other happy, but I have to admit that her questionable sexual activities during her college years weighed a little heavy on the back of my mind. Not that I was a prude in college, but I may have held myself to a higher morale standard and only slept with a girl if I had some kind of commitment of exclusion with them. I could have had a different girl every night if I had wanted. I was considered handsome, I was smart and when you were a star football and basketball player, you had a lot of women wanting to jump your bones. I’m not trying to brag, those were just the facts.

The truth was that I didn’t consider myself that special and I didn’t have that much confidence when it came to women. I grew up in a situation that didn’t inspire self-confidence. I had overcome a lot of confidence issues in academics and sports, but for some deep physiological reasons, I remained shy when it came to women.

At the end of Jodi’s school year, Jodi left for nine months on a teacher exchange program to the Philippines. I was not happy about it, but I admired the fact that she was committed to her career and had the maturity to realize that if our relationship were solid, I would be here when she returned. Not that she didn’t cry when she left and made me promise that I would write every day, but she didn’t ask for a commitment. That wouldn’t have been her style, asking for a commitment. I knew that she was hoping like hell that our relationship would work out, but she wasn’t going to try and make me feel anything that I didn’t feel or say anything I didn‘t want to say. I loved that about her, she never tried to control me. She had the maturity to know that you couldn’t make people do what they didn’t want to do or feel what they didn’t feel.

Now I wished she had asked me to stay faithful to her. Not that my life would have turned out any better, but there is a real good chance that it would have.

While Jodi and I were dating, I had seen Mary Susan a few times over the winter at different social occasions and talked briefly to her about this or that. I could tell that she was very interested in me, but I was very committed to my relationship with Jodi and Mary Susan didn’t appear to be anything like what I was looking for, but still, there was just something about her that intrigued me.

On the 4th of July, after Jodi had left for the Philippines, I was invited to a barbeque at an old friend’s home. I had known him in college, but hadn’t seen him for sometime. He had gotten married and had kind of disappeared from the single social circles. I had heard that he was married, had a couple of kids and had bought a house on a few acres. I ran into him at the grocery store, we talked for a while and he invited me to the barbeque. I thought it would be fun to hang out with him, meet his family and see what kind of life he had built for himself, so I accepted his invitation.

There were a lot of people there and I didn’t know but three of them. I spent most of my time pretending to enjoy myself and made small talk with anyone that approached me and introduced themselves.

The Fourth was on a Sunday and after church, the church crowd started showing up. Mary Susan came to the barbeque with a Young Adult Group from her church in a big blue church van. I watched her from a distance as she was wandering through the crowd, smiling at everyone and talking to people she knew. When she saw me, she smiled and waved. When I waved back, she took that as an invitation to come over and talk to me.

It made me uncomfortable to talk to her. Not because she wasn’t easy to talk to or unpleasant to look at, I think I was uncomfortable because I was enjoying her company too much and I was feeling like I was being unfaithful to Jodi. I wasn’t being unfaithful, I was just talking. I had talked to lots of women that day, but Mary Susan made me feel unfaithful.

We spent most of the day talking and walking around my friend’s acreage. When it got dark, we sat and watched the fireworks together. After the barbeque, I gave her a ride home and that was that, I had thought.

At the time, I was working for a local contractor, Mark Cougar, framing houses. I liked the work and had a natural aptitude for it. After the first month, Mark had fired his foreman and had put me in charge of the crew until he could find a new foreman. After a week Mark realized that I was doing a better job than any other foreman he had every employed, so he offered me the job.

I missed Jodi and was having a hard time fighting off the loneliness. Work kept me busy ten hours a day, but the evenings were difficult, especially after it was dark and I couldn’t work outside in the yard or ride my dirt bike in the cinder pits at the end of the road.

On the weekends, I was usually invited to hang out with some of my buddies from school. Most of the times we’d trailer our dirt bikes up into the mountains to ride the logging roads and camp out, but the weeknights were long and lonely.

On a Thursday, two weeks after the 4th of July, I got a call from Mary Susan. She invited me to a dance that her Young Adult Group was sponsoring at the VFW hall. I rationalized that it wasn’t really a date since there were going to be a lot of other people there, so I accepted her invitation. That was the beginning of the end of life, as I knew it.

We danced most of the dances together and I ended up giving her a ride home again. One invitation led to another and before I realized it, we were spending most of my free time together. After three months, things were starting to get serious and I knew that if I was going to be able to look at myself in the mirror, I needed to tell Jodi that I was seeing someone else.

Jodi and I talked every Sunday morning on the phone, and I wrote her every Wednesday. Our conversations were getting a little contrived, at least on my part, and I think she suspected our relationship was floundering. I knew she loved me, although she had never said it, and telling her that I was seeing Mary Susan was going to break her heart.

Even as I made the call, I couldn’t help wondering if I was making the biggest mistake of my life. Jodi pleated with me to wait for her return before I made any decision about her and I, but I couldn’t make that promise. I felt like I would be giving her false hope and that would possibly mean that I would have to break her heart again.

Over the next six months Mary Susan did everything right. She led me to believe that she would make the perfect wife and mother. Even though I didn’t ask her to or even expect it, she made me meals, did my laundry, cleaned my house and was ready to jump in the sack at the drop of a hat. She even learned to ride a motorcycle and insisted on camping out with me. After seven months, I was convinced that I had made the right decision about dating her and before a year was up, we were married.

My mom had died three years earlier and she was not close to her parents, so we had a small private wedding with just a couple of friends in attendance.

I had saved a lot of money working as a foreman for Mark Cougar and had enough to get a loan to build us a house. Since I was in construction myself, I got lots of help from the crew at the company and Mark allowed me to use his volume discounts on the building materials as a favor to me. I spent most of my free time working on the house and we were able to move into it on our one-year anniversary.

Within the second year of our marriage Mary Susan started to change and I thought that maybe she was having second thoughts about marrying me. Then one day she came to me and told me she was two months pregnant. I thought that maybe the pregnancy was the reason for the change in her mood and behavior, but I was wrong and it was only the beginning of Mary Susan’s changes.

They say that pregnancy messes up the hormones of a woman and causes her to have mood swings and be more emotional, but that didn’t really describe the personality changes of Mary Susan during pregnancy. Unpredictable and even a little crazy would be a better description of her emotions and mood swings.

Despite it all, I tried to be understanding and supportive. After ten or twelve hours on the job I would come home and try to give her as much help as I could. After our son, Maxwell, was born, I thought things would return to normal, but they didn’t.

Mary Susan broke down one day and told me that she couldn’t go on pretending to be someone she wasn’t. She told me that she wasn’t cut out to be the good little Christian wife and mother that she had lead me to believe she would be when we were dating and that she hated motorcycles.

I was dumb founded and to say the least, disappointed. I thought I had been so careful in choosing the right woman to marry. She seemed so perfect when we were dating. I had asked all the right questions and she had given me all the right answers. When I asked her about it all, she basically told me that she had lied. She said that she had just said the things she thought I wanted to hear and did what was expected of her to be a good Christian girl.

I was devastated. I had never asked her to be something she wasn’t. I had only asked her to be honest to me about who she was. She tried to rationalize her behavior by saying she was too young and didn’t really know who she was or what she wanted.

I should have gone to the closet, got my gun and blew my brains out right then and there. It would have been so much easier. Instead, I tried to be understanding and committed myself to making our marriage work even if she wasn‘t the woman I thought I had married. When she realized I wasn’t going leave her, I think she was relieved, but subconsciously I think she was a little disappointed and maybe she felt a little guilt.

By her confessing to me her deception, she seemed to think that it gave her the licensed to take control of our lives and make it what she wanted, or at least, what she thought she wanted.

Over the next six years, compromise was the rule. She made the rules and I made the compromises. When she wanted another child, we had another child and Alice was born. She decided where we were to live and what house to buy, who our