Dawna H. doesn´t come across as a hard-drinking, motorcycle racing, closing-the-bars-in Dublin international commuter, but she´s been all those things and more in her years on this earth.

How many years is only a guess ´cause Dawna says "I´m in denial" when the age question comes up. But never mind. She´s young by a lot of measures, and especially when you consider all she´s done in her life.

She no longer competes in the hair-raising sport of three-wheel motorcycle racing. She quit in 2001 after she was named No. 1 female in her sport, and ranked 10th in the world. "I was obsessed with the sport for years, but when I got 10th in the world, I decided to find other things in life." She´s still in the record books, though. A cursory Google search turns up Dawna entries in American, English, German, Polish and Dutch.

Here´s what she gave up, as described in an article in the Seattle Stranger in 1999:

"Her face hovers two inches above the pavement that is moving beneath her at over 100 mph…Smack! The front end scrapes the lead car´s rear fender. Dawna´s laughter fills her helmet, as it often does after a close call. Her padded shoulder brushes the pavement…You push it and push it and then you crash—that´s where your limit is…" And so on through a crash, a broken collarbone, two Ibuprofin and back to the track the same day.

Dawna backed into sobriety on Jan. 16, 1998. She´d begun her drinking career as a little kid cadging a sip from her dad´s glass. But it didn´t get serious until she was in her Kennebunk, Maine high school. Booze was easier to get in high school than in middle school, so by the time she was in the ninth grade, she was getting suspended for coming into class with a buzz on.

"The school nurse was a raging alcoholic, so she could spot the drinkers easily. She was generous with excuse slips, but only up to a point. She finally turned me in and got me grounded at home for six months. Six months was a long time, too long, so pretty soon I was sneaking out to go to the beach and drink. Yes, year round. We dealt with the Maine winters by drinking in the car."

Dawna pushed her mother and stepfather too far when she was the ripe old age of 14. She and a girl friend swapped lies to the effect that they were going to spend the night at each other´s houses. Instead, they hitchhiked to Connecticut to see the Grateful Dead.

"When I got home, my mother threw me out of the house and sent me to live with my dad in Arkansas. Conway, Arkansas. That was a very different place from Kennebunk. It was a dry town, with the closest liquor store 17 miles in one direction and 23 the other way. No problem. Dad and I would drive to Newport, the nearest wet town, and stay with my grandma. We´d get drunk together in the bars there. They always gave me moonshine for some reason.

"I was maybe 15 or 16 by then. Dad would let me drive it he was a little bit drunk, but never if he was really drunk. He was stubborn that way.

"I loved and love Dad, but I didn´t love Arkansas. I was allowed to return to Kennebunk at the end of 9th grade, on condition I relearn to pronounce my ´g´s.´ I´d developed an Arkansas accent down there."

Things didn´t change much, though. Dawna was back and forth between Maine and Arkansas all the way through high school, and finally spent her senior year living with a friend and her mother in Kennebunk. That´s where she managed to graduate from high school, in 1987, and to get her diploma from then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, her sometime neighbor.

Ever the rebel, Dawna was planning a political statement for her Republican family as she crossed the graduation stage. "I was going to kick Bush in the shin and refuse to accept my diploma from him," she said, but family loyalty prevented a headline making incident. Her critically ill grandfather had left his bed to attend the ceremony, partly because he and Bush and served together in World War II.

"The last thing I could do was give my granddad a heart attack, so I shook the Veep´s hand and accepted my diploma," she said.

That summer, she left Kennebunk behind for good. She and her sister drove to Olympia, where Dawna enrolled at Evergreen State College. For the first two years she was there, she worked and went to school, and controlled her drinking. But then she found a boyfriend who had older friends and get liquor legally. Dawna, now 19, was right there with the crowd, drinking in bars with no I.D. ever required.

"By now, I was drinking anything I could get my hands on, but I wasn´t too blasted to look at those guys off in the corner who looked like they´d been there too long and thinking ´How pathetic. They have no life but this dump.´ It took me 10 years, though, to realize I was that person in the back of the bar, with the same boring stories and saying futilely, ´I´m gonna do something about this.´"

But she had a lot of fun in that decade too. She and her boyfriend traveled frequently to Europe, especially to Dublin. "Ireland´s a great country," Dawna said. "You can go out and get drunk and nobody tells you about it the next day." But in Dublin, where she and her Irish boyfriend lived several times, she began a serious trip down the boozing hill. "Yeah, I got really rowdy, getting in fights, smashing windows. Once, a woman called me a ´damn Yank´ and they had to hold me back from punching her out.

"I didn´t work. I´d drink ´til late, sleep ´til noon, then when it was getting dark I´d start over. I was waking up depressed, so I had to drink to deal with that."

But through all this, she went to college often enough to get her degree in 1997 in Middle Eastern Studies and art at Evergreen. Gradually, gradually, she was becoming aware of her drinking problem, and made one effort to quit on a last trip to Ireland. "It was white knuckles for a few days, but then I decided I´d only drink when I wanted to. I was a mess-belligerent, waking up mortified at my behavior the night before, all that remorse and horror that the Big Book talks about. I came back here convinced I couldn´t drink, but I was still going to bars and hanging out with my motorcycle buddies.

"One time, I was having a Coke when my resolve slipped and I picked up a beer. One sip, though, and for once I remembered I wasn´t going to drink. I called an A.A. friend and told him I had to go to a meeting. I couldn´t wait. I was desperate. A woman who became a good friend took me to ByThe Book that Sunday night, and I went to Drunks ´R´ Us the next night. That was Jan. 16, 1998. I´ve been sober since."

The year before, Dawna had discovered motorcycles in Ireland, and it´s a love affair that has never ended. Back in Olympia, she decided she´d build her own bike and moved to Seattle to be closer to her mechanic. "That first bike was an Italian Harley, a can of worms. I found parts from all over the world. I was tenacious, but I never rode it. I just loved working on it."

After that, it was a Moto Guzzi (always the Italian bikes) that she rode for years. She even worked as a motorcycle messenger at one point. It was in her last year in 1997 at Evergreen that she became a fan of sidecar (three-wheel) motorcycle racing. When she began racing herself the next year, she said it reinforced her campaign for sobriety. From then until 2001, she was all over the map on the race circuit-Coeur d´Alene, Wisconsin, California, Washington, and Europe including the Isle of Man and Rotterdam, Holland.

Since giving up racing, Dawna has turned her energies to A.A., where she´s been area CPC (Cooperation with the Professional Community) chairman, and, most recently, to building a business. She owns a studio in Georgetown in south Seattle where she makes lamps for wholesale to high end stores, so far principally in Colorado and California. She has ambitions to develop a national market. She also has a painting studio upstairs, and does electrical work on the side. Busy woman! She and her husband live next door to the shop, the ideal energy-saving location.

Thanks to A.A., a full and productive life.

Interviewed and written by Dick S.