‘Storm’ warning

Young Chang

It was not their first trip together. During their seven-year

relationship, Allen Noren and Suzanne Valenzuela had endured political

turmoil in Africa, demonstrations in Czechoslovakia and numbing cold in

the Bavarian Alps.

Each trip brought the couple closer together. Until their last trip.

In 1993, Noren and Valenzuela took a motorcycle ride through Germany,

Denmark and Sweden to the Arctic Circle and other nearby countries.

Hard-hitting rains and harder-hitting winds followed them. But that

was nothing compared to the emotional weather this trip would bring up.

Noren’s first book, “Storm,” details the four-month journey and the

physical, as well as emotional, storms the couple endured. The

biographical work is less of a travel story than a love story, said

Noren, who will sign books at Borders Books, Music & Cafe in Costa Mesa

today.

It is, more accurately, a tragic love story.

The couple left one another immediately after the trip ended. Noren,

38, has since married someone else.

Sitting outside a Diedrich’s Coffee store in Lake Forest, where he is

visiting his mother-in-law, Noren wears a blue button-down shirt and

khakis. It’s difficult to imagine him in a leather biker get-up. The

quiet of the Orange County afternoon is noticeable against his memory of

Europe’s noisy winds and rains.

Valenzuela only read the first of eight drafts, Noren said, and will

probably never read the final version. The biggest challenge in writing

“Storm” was accurately portraying the couple’s connection to one another,

he said. Valenzuela told him long ago he succeeded.

Over its 355 pages, the book portrays the fraying of a relationship.

These are well-used pages, sprinkled with quiet humor, quiet sadness and

the loud echoes of howling winds and revving engines.

For Noren, the storms that constantly raged around the couple on their

springtime ride were only wind and rain. It was the emotional turmoil

unseating his relationship with Valenzuela that caused him the most

trouble.

At the end of the book, after failed attempts at reconciliation, Noren

waits at the train station for a ride to the furthest possible

destination: Budapest. Valenzuela is at a nearby hotel taking a bath,

unaware of Noren’s whereabouts.

It’s a metaphor, he says today. He gets on the train and doesn’t get

off.

Noren likens the relationship to granite -- it only needed one crack

for the water to seep in, freeze, thaw and break the contents apart.

“The trip was the thing that made it all evident,” he said, “The

things that had started the crack in the granite were there.”

Though he said he would be willing to repeat the trip with his wife of

four years, Linda, Noren is not confident the marriage would survive.

He’s not confident of anything anymore.

But hitting the road is something he has to do, something he finds

“intoxicating.”

“Travel is one of the things that is truly transformative,” Noren

said. “You’re leaving everything you know.”

It is his source of renewed perspective, renewed assumptions and an

increased amount of self-awareness. Self-awareness is a gift, he said,

one that can lead to humility, compassion, understanding and, hopefully,

a curiosity for more.

“It’s almost like a hunger and a thirst that needs to be met,” said

Susan Stroh, Linda Noren’s cousin. “Through travel and adventure and

through meeting people in an unplanned way, allowing their lives to touch

yours and change yours.”

The La Crescenta resident said reading “Storm” helped her to gain

insight into her own husband, a lawyer with an adventurous streak.

With 50,000 new books published every year in the United States, Noren

said he is grateful to those who choose to pick up “Storm.”

The Petaluma resident recently finished his second book “Child Labor,”

and is searching for a publisher.

“You set out to write one thing, and something better and more

intelligent jumps off the page,” he said.

Noren and his family talk often about where they should travel next.

Noren’s daughter, 3-year-old Mia, conquered sea kayaking, strapped to her

father, at six weeks of age.

He pats his chest three times.

“She was right here,” he said.

FYI

* WHAT: Allen Noren will sign his book “Storm.”

* WHEN: 7 p.m. today

* WHERE: Borders Books, Music & Cafe, 1890 Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa

* CALL: (949) 631-8661