© 1996, Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois
Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of the Iron Butt Association or Bob Higdon.
Written by Robert Higdon.
U.S. 50 in West Virginia may be on a lot of Top Ten lists --- the insane Greg Frazier likes it, as does my estimable friend Mr. Kneebone --- but it will never be on mine. I think it's dirty, dark, dank, and dangerous, especially at 0300 the other night when I was on it. The curves are abrupt and unannounced. Local traffic moves glacially, as if it knows something you don't. Every large animal in the state, including Moldor, destroyer of worlds, goes there to spawn and try to jump into oncoming headlights. If you weren't hinky when you headed west out of Winchester, you will be when you hit Romney.
At 0130 on Saturday morning I dropped an OTL story off at Dr. Hellman's Georgetown bunker. I was heading for the Rubber City rally west of Akron. The straight line distance from D.C. is about 325 miles; I managed to turn that into more than 500 big ones by taking the great southern arc. Adding 50% to a trip's mileage is worth it if the swinish Pennsylvania turnpike, the spiritual mother of ugly roads everywhere, can be avoided.
I hate riding at night. My vision, rotten to begin with, is not even a bad memory when the sun goes down. Worse, I'm terrified to use the high beam because I don't know whether the bulb is the stock 55/60 watt or the blistering 80/100. BMW electric guru Rick Jones and I had that headlight cluster apart in February and I forgot to check it. If the bulb is the long ball hitter, it could fry the headlight wiring. Or it might not. It's a fair downside risk; damned near every wire in that bike sooner or later makes a pass through the headlight region.
Then there's the "what happens if this bike breaks?" scenario. A flat is a 45 minute job to fix if I can see what I'm doing. But at night on the side of the road with Moldor ready to climb up my back? Sure. I can't think of any problem I could handle at night, except maybe sticking some gas in the gas hole.
Nothing happened. By Romney at 0500 it was graying up in the east. I took Rt. 28 to Cumberland, then I-68 over to Morgantown. It may be an interstate on the maps, but to me it will always be old U.S. 40 with a facelift. It's the prettiest part of Maryland. Riding this stretch at night would be a sin, second class. Eventually I wound onto 250 in Ohio and found the campground rally site without difficulty. A ratty HoJo was right across the street. I camped there.
The rally was low pressure. Paul Glaves was there, the last person I expected to see. He is taking his MOA ambassadorship seriously. The ride from Lawrence KS to Akron goes over about 1.5 hills, 3.0 if you include the return ride. I'm sure there's a corner along the way. I just don't remember where it could be.
By 0045 I had been up for about 40 of the previous 43 hours, had ridden 513 miles, had once again outwitted Mondor, and had drunk about 56 glasses of beer. I made it the thousand yards back to HoJo's in one piece and hit the sack without a backward glance.
Someone at dinner asked me where I was heading. I thought of the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tse. He said that a good traveller does not know where he is going. I may be getting good, because I'm really not sure where I'm going. This is a one day at a time ride. God knows I need one of those. The last one almost put me in a happy room with rubber walls.
Well, one day a good traveller. Some day perhaps even a perfect one. He's the guy, Lao Tse says, who does not know where he has been.
This is a flat place, a flat land with flat buildings, dogs with flat faces, flatness all around. Some of the people have flat heads. Their king, the Neanderthal leader of the state's semi-pro basketball team, lives not far away. He's Bobby Knight. They pay him an obscene amount of money to coach the university's basketball team, to win, and to make people believe that the seven foot pituitary giants who appear on the court are student-athletes. Knight does those things well, and throws chairs and tantrums when things turn sour. The game of roundball is supreme in this flat land.
I made it here on the western side of the city after a grossly late start from Akron. I awoke at 1115. The last time I had had ten straight hours of uninterrupted sleep was back in the 1980s. At noon I was underway without a clue where I'd wind up.
The original plan had been to go to Chicago and spend the night with Mike Kneebone. But I knew before I left the campground last night that I wasn't going to make 500 miles two days in a row. Southwest seemed a decent direction, giving me a good tailwind. I rode some miles west, some miles south, and repeated the pattern all afternoon. I must have looked at a map once or twice but even that wasn't necessary. If you can get lost in the midwest, you have to work at it.
After six hours I saw a sign for Indianapolis. OK. That's close enough to the central time zone for government work. I knocked my watch back an hour, thus improving my average speed for the day from mediocre to pretty good. The Motel 6 beckoned, bringing a less than ordinary day to a quick halt.
I sent out a couple of e-mails and ate a dirtball sandwich from the gas station. I repacked the saddlebags and tankbag. Things were reverting to normal. It takes a couple of days on the road before the nomadic itinerary finds the correct brain circuitry. From that point it's just the give-and-go drill, terminating with a layup to win the game at the buzzer.
I don't know how many times I've done this ride across the country, but it must be fifteen or twenty at least. It hasn't been a big deal for a long, long time, but it's never boring. This is the easiest kind of road trip, where there is one language, money, and electric supply. I know where the beer is and the banks, the good roads and the leper colonies. They lay it out for you, east/west and north/south, except for the occasional road that follows a diagonal river. There aren't many paved roads in North America I haven't run down now and some of the original challenge and excitement has taken a predictable dive. I think that is what inspired me originally to bolt around the world.
But Louie Lubliner, all-world frame guy, still has my sub-frame in a jig and I'll get it back when Louie has pronounced it finis and not a moment before. He is an artist, Louie is, and dictatorial to boot, so I wait and renew my carnet and revise my visas and get more shots and wait for Louie to revolutionize chromium alloy steel sub-frame design for R80s. It will be in my lifetime, I know that to a moral certainty. Well, I don't actually know it, but I hope a lot.
In the meantime I turn the sheets down in the Motel 6, leave a wake up call that, when the ride is right, I will beat to the punch by an hour, and already I know that this is the right ride on the right road. I'll be asleep before my head hits the non-allergenic pillow.
What a country.
Bears were on my mind today. I told Jim Shaw at the rally that when he and Rick Landi go to Alaska in a couple of weeks that they shouldn't camp on the Cassiar highway. The grizzly bear census is high there, sky high, and there's a good, reasonably cheap motel at Dease Lake. People like Jim come to me for solutions to problems of a moto-touring nature. I don't know everything, but I know enough not to camp on the Cassiar.
A human being isn't the meanest, most dangerous animal on the planet. A grizzly bear is. They run faster than a horse and swim. While they can't climb trees, they simply knock them down and eat what was quivering in the branches. You don't deal rationally with animals like that because they're not rational. They're big and they're nuts, crazier than elk and Charles Manson and Hillary Clinton's marital counsellor combined. I used to think we should kill every one that had the temerity to raise its head. Today I revised my view. Now I think we ought to draft them into the army.
If B. F. Skinner can train a pigeon to walk without bobbing its filthy little pointed head, someone ought to be able to train a grizzly bear to make a low-level parachute drop with an M16. Can you imagine how this could revolutionize rapid deployment maneuvers? "Boris," commander-in-chief Willie says, "we're tired of you guys screwing around in Chechnya. You have ten days to wind that up or we're sending in our bears. They're in a carrier in the Med now, we haven't been feeding them a lot, and they're pissed."
You've got no morale problems with grizzlies, there's no "don't ask don't tell" worries, and civil rights don't mean a thing. If one acts up, you whack it with a tranquilizer dart, stick it in a box, and ship it to the San Diego zoo. The other bears will get the message. They don't give a damn about medals or ribbons or making money. All they want to do is take the next hill and eat the defenders. In that sense they're just like Marines, but five times bigger and they don't drink or whore around. They won't be much good in the winter, I admit that.
I did U.S. 36 today at 4,000 rpm. Ten hours, 500 miles. No muss, no fuss. This is flat land too, like Indiana, though now and then a 150' hill will appear out of nowhere. If you want an easy day to do nothing but think about platoons of bears, U.S. 36 is the place to be. The road is needle-straight for miles on end. You can see a bear charge from a thousand yards, but there's nothing you can do about it.
St. Jo is an historic spot. The Pony Express, for all its brevity leaving a disproportionate mark on the history of the west, left from here. Bob Ford, a coward more loathed than Iago by decent thinking people, plugged Jesse James in the back in a small house not far from my motel room. The Missouri river is the western border of the town and of Missouri itself. It is one of the world's great waterways. Just being near it gives me chills. And I crossed the Mississippi in the early afternoon for the four millionth time. It never fails to take my breath away. On the western side of that water is a different land. My blood pressure dropped twenty points, as usual.
At the hopelessly touristy Hannibal I stopped for a chocolate eclair and settled for a doughnut at a gas station. The generic man came over and said, "I didn't know BMW made motorcycles." I live for this sort of encounter. There might as well be a script. Just swear in the jury, judge, sit back, and let me work.
It's always a man who comments, never a woman, and he's almost always a gentleman of a certain age. Whatever I'm doing, I stop and fix the questioner with my look of extreme Bill Clinton pre-sentencing sincerity.
"BMW not only makes motorcycles, I say, "but they've been making them longer than they've been making cars."
"No," he will say.
"Yes," I say. "Since 1923. It was an airplane engine originally. That's what the logo is, a propeller. But the punitive Treaty of Versailles prevented the Germans from producing military equipment. So they stuck the airplane engine into a bicycle frame, did a few mods, and came up with a design that has survived intact in principal to this very day."
"You don't say!"
"I do say," I say. "Baron von Richthofen had the distinctly recognizable ancestor of this twin cylinder block in his plane." I don't know that this is true, but it could be and I hope it is and it's a wonderful story irrespective of the truth. The Red Baron, thanks to Snoopy, has name recognition at the Santa Claus level.
"I'll be damned," he will say.
"Five kills qualifies a pilot as an ace. The baron knocked more than 80 men out of the sky. Not even Babe Ruth or Secretariat dominated their competition the way von Richthofen did. If an allied pilot saw that red triplane in the clouds above him, he could measure the remaining minutes of his life on the fingers of one hand."
"Wow!" he will say.
"And that engine did it," I say quietly, pointing an accusing finger at the guilty R80G/S block. If a motor could try to repent, mine would be doing it in the Amoco parking lot.
This is a five minute seminar. No matter how late I'm running, I will always have time for the proselytizing. It's my duty and I fulfill it with happiness. For miles down the road I can see the look on the student's face. BMW has become for him that day more than just a yuppie car. It has become a piece of memorable history.
I just wonder how much more deadly still Manfred von Richthofen would have been if he'd had a grizzly bear as a co-pilot.
On days like this psychiatrists should pay me for consultations. I have the answers to all care, sorrow, and deep-fried angst. I knew this trip was blessed within minutes of leaving Robert Hellman's house last Saturday morning. I didn't hit a single red light in Georgetown. Nobody, not even the pope, gets through Georgetown at 0145 on Saturday without hitting five red lights and six dazed punks. I missed them all.
I've heard that there is a pair of dice on a velvet cushion under a bell jar in the casino in Monaco. Nineteen straight passes those dice made, either seven or eleven out of the box or a point made. Nineteen in a row. That amounts to odds of approximately two to the nineteenth power. There aren't that many stars in the sky. And I will be on this ride for about nineteen days. I've hit four sevens so far. The crowd is bunching up behind me at the rail. I don't blame them. Something weird is going on.
I recovered U.S. 36 from the motel in about three minutes this morning. It stretches west across the width of northern Kansas like a concrete rod. For much of its length it is called the Pony Express Highway. On even a cool day the road sweats pure history. I would be on it, soaking it in, for more than 300 miles.
You won't find many motorcyclists who like riding in Kansas. What they don't like is the wind. It never stops. Somewhere in the Sonoran desert in Mexico it winds up, gets a running start, and heads for the border. By the time it reaches Kansas, it is red-eyed and meaner than a programmer trying to trace a recursive loop. It is a southwester. Anyone heading west is going to get it in the left eyeball. And a port bow wind for a biker is as bad as it gets. It means that oncoming trucks are going to throw a wad of steaming, turbulent, high-speed air at your left shoulder, rendering your windshield useless. If you're not hunkered down and hanging on, the next oncoming bus will try to pitch your sagging butt right off the back end of your scooter.
Twenty different weather fronts were playing king of the hill thousands of feet above the plains this morning. One of them backdoored me in a clockwise direction, providing a rare southeast wind that resulted in 50+ mpg tank when I stopped in Marysville. I am in your basic upper percentiles of R-bike tuners, but not even Armen Amirian can wring numbers like that out of an R80. Magic was in the swirling air.
The plains south of the Platte river are rolling, easy hills. It's 110' up, 100' down, and a quarter mile of flat. Repeat until you see the "Welcome to Colorado" sign 400 miles to the west. It sounds monotonous, but U.S. 36 is a special kind of road. Heroes have been here. If you listen, you can hear them.
In April 1860, to facilitate more rapid communication between the east and west, the Pony Express was born. Riders, young men barely out of childhood, rode from St. Jo to Sacramento in a spectacular relay. Way stations were established in fifteen mile increments. A rider would storm in. Within two minutes the mail pouch would be transferred to a fresh horse and a new rider would disappear in a literal cloud of dust.
The route followed the Oregon Trail through South Pass in Wyoming, the lowest elevation in the Rockies. There they took the Mormon Trail to Salt Lake, crossed the interminable emptiness of the high deserts of Utah and Nevada, and dropped out of the Sierra Nevada into gold rush country. Then they turned around and went back.
I have ridden that route in a car and on a bike several times. It is a hard trip today. Then it must have been terrifying. Indians --- Kiowa, Pawnee, and the fearful Blackfoot --- already knew what the Great White Father was capable of. But in 650,000 miles of riding just one delivery was lost and one rider killed. It provided a nation always in a hurry with a tool, an incredibly expensive one, to move information. But just eighteen months after it began, the Pony Express expired with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph. In its death was born a true and legitimate legend of the west.
I slid up and down these gentle hills all day, stopping at every historical marker, and absorbed what I could of this magnificent road. In every direction something is growing, despite floods and seasons that make grown men tremble. By itself the plains can feed the planet and six more like it. If a rider can come through here without awe, he has the imagination of a troglodyte. Chevrolet isn't the heartbeat of America; the Great Plains are. You can feel the pulse in every small town.
The geographical center of the contiguous states is just north and west of Lebanon KS. A topologist figured that out. They are the smartest people around, but often insane. Ted Kaczynsky was a topologist before he heard a different drummer. I went to the marker. Not many people have bothered. There is grass growing in the cracks of the tiny road.
One mile behind another at 4,000 rpm, the suck-squeeze-bang-blow drill repeating 67 times a second, and the scenery fixed and unvarying. For a while I tried to sequence the mechanism of a four-stroke engine, the exquisite timing and firing and exploding of tiny, aerated bursts of gasoline and the reduction gears and the structure of tires and carburetor vacuums and air box filters and starter motors and before a quarter mile had passed I stopped before I went mad. This 1981 motorcycle belongs in a museum, not seventeen miles from Colorado, but it is working like a Clydesdale and has never run better in its life.
I hooked into the ugly I-70 at Colby. Some of the trip's karma refused to get onto the entrance ramp. I understand that. A few years ago I nominated I-70 in Kansas as one of America's ten worst roads. It isn't much better now but Goodland wasn't far. Thirty ratty miles weren't going to take away the 400 monumental ones behind me. The late afternoon storms at the Colorado border that Tim Moffitt had warned me about were taking a vacation. There were a few clouds but they seemed just as languid and relaxed as I was.
God was good to me today, and I thank Her for it.
The effect of gaining ten feet in altitude with the crossing of every hill in Kansas is that by the time you reach the Colorado border you have risen from sea level at St. Joseph to over 4,000 feet. It is imperceptible. Kansas is nothing but an enormous pool table that falls ever so slightly to the east. All of the states in the plains do the same thing. One day you feel fine; the next day your ears are bleeding.
I had barely 200 miles to do today so I dogged it this morning, not leaving the motel until 0845. It would be I-70 to Limon, then the gorgeous CO 86 to Franktown. Take a right there on CO 83 and in twelve minutes I am in Tim and Coral Moffitt's driveway. That's a total of three turns for the day.
Somehow I expected eastern Colorado to be its usual drab, dry, boring self. It wasn't. Instead of being a firestorm waiting to happen, it was blindingly green and yellow. Above the wind noise at my normal 88'/second speed, I could almost hear things growing in the rolling fields.
Nine miles east of Limon there is The View, one so spellbinding you'd get out of bed to see it. The road has been gently rising all morning. Then it crests. The highway drops away, revealing a valley of gargantuan width. And on the western horizon, nearly 100 miles distant, is the spectacular Pike's Peak massif. Even if you don't know what you're looking at, you will say, "Wow! That is one BIG mountain.
After telling myself repeatedly not to stop at the predatory, thieving gas stations in Limon, I did anyway. $1.38/gallon for gruel, the bastards. Then I decided to have breakfast at one of the truck stops. It was the first real restaurant meal I'd had on the trip. Food isn't a big ticket item with me. If I knew I wouldn't get sick, I'd skip eating altogether, except maybe for some dry roasted peanuts and, of course, the life-sustaining diet Dr. Pepper.
Terry Turnbeaugh and Chris Lawson came over to the house for a few hours of war stories. Mike Kneebone flies in from Chicago tonight at midnight. Mike, Tim, and I leave at dawn for Salt Lake City, though with these guys dawn sometimes happens at 0930. It's the weekend of the Utah 1088, a function that requires Mike's presence. It sure doesn't require mine. I am persona non grata in that region these days.
I am thinking of heading to Montana, God's chosen state, but one that hammers me senseless every time I come near it. I need to buy a couple of things and Montana doesn't have a state sales tax. I could come up with a better reason, but it isn't necessary. If you really need a reason to visit that sublime country, your karma is twisted. These days mine is straighter than a Mormon pin.
Q & A:
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1. Am I carrying a laptop? No. I have the HP200LX. From the center of the Q key to the center of the P key on the QWERTY keyboard is 3.75 inches. And yes, typing on such an instrument has been proven to cause bulimia and an erosion of the carapace in laboratory animals. It runs Automap, though, and that helps when you're not really sure where you might be from one day to the next.
2. What am I wearing? Capilene lightweight thermal bottoms, a black T-shirt, gym socks, Darien coat and pants, Orina light gloves, BMW Goretex boots, earplugs, and an Arai open-face helmet. I have an extra pair of socks and a shirt with a collar for formal occasions. Every five days I wash clothes. I have a windbreaker and electric stuff because I know what the high plains can do on a bad day. I don't carry a rainsuit.
3. Who lived the longest: Mozart, Beethoven, or Machine Gun Kelly? Beethoven.
High on the list of things I didn't expect on this ride was to come into Vernal at 1545 during the last week of June sopping wet and glaring at a bank thermometer that read 59F. Vernal specializes in dinosaurs and hot dust in the summer, not cold, driving rain.
We pulled into a gas station. I raised my dripping visor and said to Mike, "Go to Salt Lake, if you will. For myself, I shall pass no more beyond this point today forever."
"Let's stop for dinner and talk about it," he said. Mike and Tim are trenchermen. For them dinner begins to loom when the waitress takes away the breakfast plates.
They went into the restaurant. I called a motel we'd passed a few blocks earlier and made a reservation for a single. I could see the handwriting on the wall.
We were all operating on five hours' sleep, thanks to Mike's midnight arrival at The Frederico Pena Memorial Scandal that masquerades as Denver's airport. Instead of ending his career in a federal prison, Pena became the head of the Department of Transportation, where he spends these days telling the public what a good deal Value Jet airline tickets are.
My karma was fraying at the edges before my feet hit the ground at 0630. Ugly clouds covered the dawn sky, blackest in the Rockies to the west. That was our route --- I-70 to Rifle, backroads to U.S. 40, and the final sprint to Salt Lake. Mike had to be there by 2000 for an Iron Butt banquet. I didn't have to be anywhere.
We made 50 miles before stopping for breakfast. I put on the fleece jacket under the Darien coat. Mike did the same. We were heading up and it was already cold in Idaho Springs.
The drizzle started at the 11,000' Eisenhower tunnel but backed off quickly. By Glenwood Springs rain to the west became a certainty. We'd been running with a fierce tailwind. Now it turned on a dime and let loose in our teeth. Oddly, it was brief, a mere bucket or two. Turning north out of Rifle, Mike took the lead over from me and began to stretch out. This is the part I hate: Wet, curvy, beaten-to-crap state roads in open range, and Kneebone wants to pick up some time.
Mike and I have ridden the equivalent of 1.5 times around the earth at the equator together. Our roles are as immutable as the stars. He is the psychiatrist; I am the neurotic patient, gnawing on the edges of the map. As Mike begins to disappear, I will slow down, sulk, and pout. If Mike doesn't want to be caught, he won't be, so I don't try. After a while, he will pull up and wait for me.
I roll up beside him. "You know I just hate it when you ride 88 mph on these wet, stinking roads," I say. Tim stares at me. He knows that Mike has been doing no more than 70. After a few thousand miles with us, Tim knows what's happening. He doesn't say a word.
"You lead," Mike says. So I go 68. Variants of this game have been played for countless miles in the last seven years. In all that time dealing with my childish pranks, I can recall him becoming angry only once. The following day I had a bad crash. I'm sure I was trying to make him feel sorry for me, but he's the psychiatrist and he counselled me only to stop bleeding on his shoe.
When we paused at Rangely, it was clear we were really going to be smacked. An enormous wall of scary, black rain blocked out the entire northwest quadrant of the sky, our path to Dinosaur. It hit from the west with a fury five minutes later. I was terrified that it would be hail. It wasn't, but the drops were large and hard enough that Mike took his left hand off the handlebar and put it on his knee.
"Both were being pounded," he said later. "I figured I'd cover up one."
We ducked for cover in Dinosaur and waited for it to pass. Northwest Colorado is an arid land. What little rain it gets during the year we were observing. Thirty minutes later we limped into Vernal.
Mike decided that he really had to make Salt Lake. When presented a choice, Tim always opts for the one that will hurt. He decided to go with Mike. We made plans to meet for breakfast tomorrow in Heber City.
I rode back to the motel. At a traffic light I could hear the bike blubbing. It's a sign of richness in the carburetion. Too many gasoline molecules are trying to mix with too few air molecules in this thin, high desert air. It's not as serious as the opposite condition, leanness. With a rich mixture you get black, fouled spark plugs and carbon building up on the pistons. So change the plugs and bead blast the pistons every 100,000 miles or so. Run too lean, though, and your engine goes non-linear and starts heaving connecting rods into your neighbor's yard.
The rodent Robert Pirsig discussed this in his book, "Sophomoric Zen and the Art of Really Bad Motorcycle Maintenance." He sat on a curb and wondered why his clean plugs in Chicago were so crummy looking in Miles City MT. It took a couple of pages before he realized he'd gained about 5,000' in altitude, duh. A few pages later he decided that the proper solution was to change the carb jets, reducing the gasoline flow with smaller diameter screws.
It wasn't the proper solution --- dropping the jet needle is simpler and cheaper --- but that might not have occurred to the rodent Pirsig because he was too busy taking gratuitous potshots at his riding companion, a fellow (almost certainly on a BMW) who preferred to let actual mechanics instead of morons like Pirsig work on his bike. Aside from the general bad taste of Pirsig's comments about his buddy, the jibes violated the Fourth Commandment of motorcycling: Thou shalt not badmouth thy buddy's bike, nor thy buddy's toolkit, nor his wife, nor his brand of beer, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy buddy's. And for these 300 pages of self-absorbed, whining, error-riddled pap, the rodent Pirsig winds up with a Swiss bank account and an inexhaustible supply of college freshmen waiting to touch the bunioned toes of the master.
I think I'll get up twenty minutes early tomorrow and drop my jet needles. If I'm lucky, maybe someone will pay me three million bucks for my trouble. Maybe not. My karma bent a bit today, but it didn't break.
Nevada is America's answer to Australia, a wild, bawdy place where everything is for sale including, legally, things that are mentioned only as footnotes in the Kama Sutra. There are slot machines in church vestibules; I like that in a church. It tends to blur the distinction, never clear to begin with, between the hereafter and the now-or-never.
Everyone likes Nevada. Half of California rolls in to Las Vegas or Reno on the weekends to throw money down storm sewers. The military seems to own half the territory and bombs its real estate to bits with boyish glee. Motorcyclists flock here for Jan Cutler's insane rallies. Oddly, in this most Libertarian of states, bikers are required to wear helmets. Of all the things not to worry about in Carson City, I would think a waxed rider on one of these deserted roads would be at the bottom of the list. The poor guy might not be found for weeks.
I rode in from Vernal to Heber City to meet Mike and Tim for breakfast, 140 miles through some rain and lots of cold such that I finally put Pat Widder's electric gloves on. I was five minutes early. They rode thirty minutes from Salt Lake and were twelve minutes late. Mike was bubbling excuses before the sidestand hit the ground.
Iron Butt legend Dave McQueeney joined us. Mike and I spent some time arguing with him about whether Dave had once ridden 16,000 miles in 15 days or 15,000 miles in 16 days on the Four Corners Tour. Dave was sure it was the lighter ride. Mike and I looked at each other. Only McQueeney would downplay a ride that no one will ever duplicate. Long riders are famous for stupendous lies that are delivered with eye- popping sincerity.
"Whichever," Mike finally said. "If Dave says he did it, he did it, period." McQueeney looked at his omelet with embarrassment.
The three of them were headed out to ride some back roads in the Wasatch mountains, including a couple of 10,000' passes.
"Not me," I said. "I've got to get away from this cold weather." I told them I was going to take U.S. 89 down to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. I've never been there.
"I want to see where Thelma and Louise tried to launch themselves," I said. We shook hands and said goodbye. I headed south to Provo, idly wondering if it was still maintaining its surgical cleanliness (it is). Then I was forced onto I-15 south. The junction with U.S. 89 was some miles to the south at Spanish Fork.
When the exit ramp for 89 appeared, I turned onto it, then just as quickly snapped the bike back onto I-15. In a period of half a second, I decided to ride to Nevada instead of Arizona. This is how I plan a good trip; a rotten ride is ordained to the millimeter and microsecond months in advance and never involves a near-miss at an off-ramp.
I rode a small, lonely road south to Delta. It is a town on the edge of absolutely nothing. From there the conjoined U.S. 6 and U.S. 50 highways run west into The Void. Look at a map. If you can find a more isolated area in the contiguous United States, please tell me. I love this road like a brother.
Eight miles west of Delta is the last tree. You won't find another until the west side of Sacramento pass in Nevada, 100 miles to the west. It is a spectacularly empty land, with a needle-straight highway running through a moonscape. Ever so slowly you ease toward the first range of mountains, the western border of the Salt Lake valley. Cresting that reveals a view of an enormous valley between the next mountain range to the west. It is the Great Basin, a national park, though I cannot distinguish it from a hundred other valleys of similar configuration in the southwest. Midway through the basin you cross into Nevada and begin the slow climb to Sacramento pass. Another valley appears, with Connor's pass on the far side. Here I stop. I always stop here.
A magical land lies in front of me. I can't describe it, but I have ridden it in weather so cold that ice crystals were suspended in the air and in summers so hot that I knew my brain would explode. I have been through here at night and at dusk and at dawn. There is no "best" time; if I'm here, it is the best time. I don't know what the magic is. I hope I never learn.
Beyond Connor's the highway slowly climbs again toward Ely at 6,500'. There U.S. 6 splits to the south and 50 continues to the west, across countless ranges of the blindingly beautiful Toiyabe national forest, through Reno, through the Sierra Nevada, and to Sacramento. There it stops, having begun its journey at the Atlantic Ocean boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. For me the Delta-Reno section of U.S. 50 takes a back seat, and just barely, only to the Cisco-Moab-Blanding-Torrey- Panguitch-Hurricane roads in Utah.
But merely writing that reminds me of the pointlessness of sorting out degrees of splendor. Pick a Rembrandt, pick a Vermeer. One is better? Really? I am at the center of roads that I live for. Of my ten favorite highways in North America, nine of them are within a day's ride of Ely. That might explain why I am here tonight instead of at the North Rim.
Or it might be that I decided I needed to knock my watch back an hour for some sleep in Pacific time. Who knows? It'd take a psychiatrist to figure out why I do what I do, and he's back in Salt Lake City tonight.
On the western outskirts of Ely NV a road marker says, "U.S. 50 - The Loneliest Road in America." The sobriquet comes from a Life magazine story of some years ago. The lust for fame in the human breast is such that any mention by national media, even a sarcastic or defamatory comment, is taken as a badge of pride.
The truth is that there are a dozen or more far lonelier roads in Nevada alone --- not to mention the road that leads to the office of Marion Barry's drug counsellor --- than U.S. 50, but that has long ceased to matter. If the New York Times proclaimed Newark NJ to be the festering sewer of North America, it would take only a few days for the city fathers to erect an historical marker to memorialize the remark, and then just a few days after that for the sign to be stolen.
But the sensory deprivation on U.S. 50 is extreme. Nothing abounds but knee-high mesquite, sagebrush, and dirt. Only the topography changes. The highway runs through valleys and north-south mountain ranges without number. They are all the indistinguishable same. I imagine myself to be a microbe maneuvering across a boundless piece of corduroy.
In a note I received from Dean Klein this morning, he recalled that this is why he loves Antarctica: The sameness is so profound that he often cannot tell where his being stops and the landscape begins. That's well put. It describes much of the high desert, a land of existential nothingness that seductively overwhelms the traveller. The entirety of the Australian bush is like this, except that its immensity is almost incomprehensible, an area 75% of the size of the United States. It may not be Everyman's idea of paradise, but it's mine.
There is a price to be paid for such emptiness. In Austin it was $1.799/gallon.
I turned south to Luning. There I would have to make a choice: West toward Lee Vining/Yosemite/Fresno or south toward Bishop/Los Angeles. Possibly I didn't want to spend all day tomorrow plowing through the San Joaquin valley. On a good day that area is an inferno. Possibly I wanted to see Manzanar on U.S. 395 again, though to do so would certainly put a dagger into the Midas touch my ride has possessed. In the end at a T intersection on the outskirts of Luning, I chose the southern route to Manzanar, but it wasn't really a choice.
In Bishop CA I picked up U.S. 395 south. This road runs SSW in a narrow valley bordered by old, bald hills to the east and the impenetrable wall of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the west. If you do not cross these mountains at Lee Vining, your next chance to do so is 200 miles to the south. It is movie-making country. If you need mountains and deserts, perpetual sunshine, radioactive spiders, and 100' worms that burrow through the ground at 30 mph, Inyo County is the place to be. Here barely 100 miles separates both the highest and lowest spots in the continental U.S.
The only stain in this majestic land is Manzanar. It is just north of Lone Pine. The historical marker refers to it as a "relocation camp." That is euphemistic government bullshit for "concentration camp." For four years 10,000 people were imprisoned here. Their crime was that they were of Japanese ancestry, though the overwhelming number of prisoners were American citizens. Nine similar camps in the west held an additional 100,000 people. I am aware of no greater desecration of civil rights, perpetuated under color of law in this century by the United States government, than this hideous example of insane fear run amok.
The conductor of this horror show, a lawyer of course, was the attorney-general of California. Under his guidance the homes and personal property of the detainees --- not one of whom had ever been convicted of any crime --- were forfeit and sold. The state reaped billions from the mass theft. In gratitude California voters made him governor. As a public school student in San Francisco, I said prayers for his good health, immediately after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I was praying to Earl Warren, the patron saint of racist apparatchiks.
For actions not nearly so grotesque as Warren's, Nazi Albert Speer took twenty years in the chops at Nuremberg. Warren became chief justice of the Supreme Court. Guilt obviously overcame him. He decided to find meanings in the Constitution that had escaped the understanding of those who had sat in the court during the previous 150 years. He became the left-wing poster boy, headed a presidential assassination commission that stumbled upon the right answer for the wrong reasons, and then died. I hope Japanese beetles are eating his face off as he rots in his monstrous grave. The son-of-a-bitch should have been fed to the giant worms that burrow quietly in the hot sands of Inyo County.
Mike Kneebone says I don't like the curly roads because I have to work too hard. He says that I like the needle highways because they let me think. I think he thinks I think too much. I think he may be right. What I ought to do is stay away from Manzanar and its tear-stained earth and endless wind and tortured memories. But I can't. I lived in Japan for a while. I don't say "Jap" bikes. And I don't pray for Earl Warren's health any longer.
Well, the hate mail on the Warren slam has been light so far ---just a blip from an earnest fellow who's apparently a recent graduate of some Marxist law school in California and wants to give me lessons on jurisprudence. It was one of the few courses in law school that I went through like Patton in the Rhineland. I thought I went pretty easy on old Earl --- not a word about his family or his sex-change operation.
I've been wondering where the heat was. It was waiting for me when I came out of the motel room at 0715. The valley through which U.S. 395 runs slowly widens out to the south, at which point you are unceremoniously dumped into the Mojave desert. They are going to make this a national sand dune or something. It's a mistake.
The government doesn't do much right, but when it comes to laying out boundaries for national parks, those guys can't be touched. The Badlands and Capitol Reef are good examples. One minute you're riding along and thinking, "This is really pretty country." Then you round a corner and say, "Wow! This is GREAT!" To your right will be the park boundary sign.
They can't do that with the Mojave. It goes everywhere, to Mexico, to Arizona and Nevada and Utah even. I can make a good case that the western boundary of the Mojave is at the pier in Santa Monica. Cut the water off in Los Angeles and sand will be blowing up Wilshire Boulevard the next day. And when it's ugly, which is often, the Mojave isn't worth a hot, sweaty damn.
So what are people doing? They're moving out here, turning it into a Daly City of tract houses that could step back even Potter ("I don't know what obscenity is, but I know it when I see it") Stewart. Palmdale. Victorville. Adelanto. Lancaster. It's just like a second marriage, the triumph of hope over experience. When the water runs out, and it will in my lifetime, what will happen out in this desolate place will make Hiroshima seem like a Girl Scout picnic.
I had a noon breakfast at Cajon Junction with GEnie moto co-sysop Bill Muhr. I tend to avoid meeting people when I'm roading, but Bill's in a different league. While I waited for him at a Texaco station --- he was waiting for me across the street at the Unocal --- the Fullerton Harley club rolled in. A 350-pound bearded whale of a man slid up next to my bike and glanced at it contemptuously. He popped out his sidestand and leaned back against the sissy bar. Then he reached into a saddlebag and pulled out a bottle of Perrier. Welcome to southern California.
I continued south on I-15 until the heat started bubbling my blood. Then I cut over the mountains to the coast and San Clemente. I-5 was twenty degrees cooler. I almost felt mentally stable enough to try to find Nixon's grave and see if there really were occasional puffs of steam coming up out of the ground, as has been reported. In the end I decided against it. The risk was too great.
Now that I've run out of highways that head west, I'm not sure what to do next. Probably I'll at least go see the monkeys at the zoo. I'll bet they'll be drinking Perrier too.
I went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park today. It was hot. Norman Mailer described it best: It was like being in bed with a 300-pound woman, and she wants to be on top. To make matters worse, I had just read an article about what really happens to a person physiologically in a place like Death Valley. You don't want to know; neither did I. The animals ---at least the ones who hadn't already died from heatstroke --- were waving "Help!" banners at the tourists in the monorail. It was heartbreaking.
I haven't seen a true cloud in four days. People are walking around dressed in handkerchiefs, waiting for their melanomas to bloom. I'll never forgive my father, a dermatologist, for staying in the army. If he'd bailed out after WWII, set up a practice in southern California, and done nothing but treat skin cancers, I'd be richer than an entire herd of Kennedys now.
I've been here for almost forty hours. It's time to go but to where has not yet been revealed. I've been waiting for a sign. So far the only one I've seen that meant anything was being carried by a rhinoceros.
I went to the real San Diego zoo today. Zoos have changed since I was a kid. They used to pack the poor bastards in cheek-by-jowl and let the best man win. Now you look at a deer, walk 500 yards, and stare at a dog. I admit the prisoners look a little less crazy than they used to. I wish I could say the same thing about myself.
It was just a question of time. Someone is hammering me on the GS list because I'm posting malformed politico-historical opinions and not R80 valve clearance data. He's right. What I've been pasting on the GS list belongs in a psychiatrist's notebook. Maybe what I was trying to say was that you can take one of these weird bikes, stick it in your garage for fifteen years, drag it out, put some air in the tires, and ride across 1/8th of the circumference of the earth and not breathe hard. Then turn around and ride back. YMMV.
I don't want to go across Imogene pass on the bike. Mike Kneebone and Greg Frazier do things like that. I'd even say that Mike once went over Imogene two-up on a Yamaha Venture, but that would belong on the Venture-GS list. My idea of stretching an R80G/S to the max is riding across twenty yards of gravel to look at an historical marker that by just reading it will guarantee I'll be pissed off or exhilarated for the next 250 miles.
What can I say? I yam what I yam.
I travelled through four states today: California, Arizona, Nevada, and Hyperthermia. I've been in all of them before. They are distinctive.
The sign I'd been looking for arrived this morning at 0550 on The Weather Channel. It said, "Don't go to Death Valley." There is a massive heat wave hovering around me, approximately fourteen times the size of the earth. In such a case, one hugs water or heads to the mountains faster than a Busch beer commercial. I have to go home, so I can't hug any water. I went east into the coastal mountains.
The BMW club of San Diego runs there on small roads above and below I- 8. Those boys and girls are fast, scary fast. A few years ago Mike Kneebone and I hooked up with them on a Sunday morning. I innocently suggested that we could ride with them after breakfast.
"Ride with the San Diego club?" Mike said. "You have to be kidding."
The sound of that voice remains with me still. At that point the club was apparently in the midst of a civil war about what constituted an acceptable mortality rate for a Sunday ride.
I turned north onto 79. It was pure San Diego club territory, third and fourth gears all the way to Santa Ysabela. The chalk outlines of bikers were clearly visible on the rocks of almost every corner. What was saving my quivering butt were the clouds. I was running at 3,000- 4,000 feet. When I came down to earth in Palm Desert, I was certain that the clouds would be shredded by the scalding sun and that the honeymoon would be over.
And it was. The temperature went from 80 -> 95 in ten minutes. I stopped at McD's, grabbed a couple of anthrax burgers, and went to the john for the snake and wet T-shirt drill. Washing the spit and hairs out of the basin as best I could, I dropped the chemical rope into the basin and jammed it into the drain. It is an 18" tie that contains a chemical that swells wonderfully when watered down. The T-shirt, from Chuy's in Van Horn, is extra heavy cotton. When the tools were fully soaked, I tied the snake around my neck and donned the shirt. One of these days that shirt is going to seize my left ventricle in cardiac arrest, but I lucked out this time.
I'd originally planned to do the Joshua Tree/29 Palms/Amboy route --- an area so desolate that, truly, the California Highway Patrol doesn't even go there --- but I have already broken down in that stark desert and was hoping to find someplace that might scare even more shit out of me. So I went to east to Desert Center on I-10. The temperature had gone up to 101. I stuck a trivial amount of gas in the tank, bought another Gatorade --- I don't even think about the esteemed Dr. Pepper on days like this --- and turned north to Needles.
It is hell on earth here. I was carrying a two-liter Pepsi bottle of water, two half-liter Gatorade bottles, and a big prayer. The clouds were long gone and the heat of mid-day was fiery. The road temperature had to be 150F or more. And I had a tailwind. Good, you say? Not good. Any wind but a tailwind will dissipate the engine heat. With a tailwind the heat collects and tries to climb up under your visor. The Darien jacket's vents were zippered to the top to contain the moisture of the T-shirt. It's an evaporative sump system that, irrespective of the ambient heat, is good for at least ninety minutes. But the bad signs were there.
By the time I made Needles it was 110F and my resting pulse was 112. This was nearing the dangerous zone. I won't ride when the combination of heat and pulse reach 230. I can't do anything about the ambient air, but my internal temperature is partially controllable. The problem at Needles was that my body temperature was slipping out of my control, and quickly.
I redoused the shirt and snake. U.S. 95 would dump me into Las Vegas, 120 miles due north. I called the Motel 6 on Tropicana and made a reservation. And then I made my first real mistake of the day. I took the business route to Bullhead City instead of the parallel route to the west. It is the kind of mistake that is made when the thought processes are not processing clearly. After nearly 30 miles of blue hairs in Volvos, 40 mph speed limits, and increasing heat, I pulled over to the side of the road.
A cigarette was unthinkable. In the words of people who know real heat, I was taking "mouse breaths," little things that would minimize searing the lungs. My throat was constricted; I attributed that to a screwed up biofeedback system that was whacking the thyroid gland. A frontal lobe headache had begun, pulsing with every speeding heart beat.
My sump system requires that I make a decent speed, particularly since I'm zippered to the gills. I wasn't making it. The solution to all my cares finally appeared when I crossed into Nevada and recovered the real U.S. 95. Almost immediately the road stormed into barren, arid hills, but at least it was altitude. Every 1,000 foot gain normally represents about a two degree drop in air temperature. I took every foot I could find.
The last miles into Las Vegas --- Boulder City and Henderson --- were bad, but not as bad as it could have been. I-515 now cuts out the horrible array of traffic lights without end. When the motel came into view, I felt delivered.
Sure, it's a gaudy, horrid, plastic town, Las Vegas is. It throws L.A.-sized traffic at you, all the worse for the searing heat off the asphalt. Kitsch galore, garish triumphant, all constructed on the shifting sands of utterly false hope. But it has lights, the likes of which cannot even be imagined. It changes every day, bigger and grander and more spectacular than the day before. I have watched it evolve for almost fifty years and I never tire of its infinite audacity. If you want to find an oasis that can take some of the sting out of a hard desert day, there are worse places to be than The Strip.
Of all the days I needed to hit the road at dawn, I picked this one to sleep until 0930. I think it was leg cramps. I was awakened three times that I can remember with muscles in tonic-clonic seizure. They were bitching about electrolytes, or the lack of them. I must have left a river of potassium ions in the Mojave. No matter how much Gatorade I was sucking down, in a bad desert it's never enough.
When I was young and stupid, I used to ride through the heat like the Gold Wing admirals on their battlewagons: No shirt, cut-off jeans, and a smile. It was a miracle I didn't kill myself. Just sitting still I was losing as much as a gallon of water an hour in places like west Texas. The air was so dry it was taking perspiration out of me before it could even reach the surface of the skin. And I thought it was funny that I could ride all day, drink 100 ounces of Dr. Pepper, and never pee once.
It wasn't funny. People tried to tell me. I kept laughing until the day I hit Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley and it was 124 degrees. How I crossed the hellish floor of the valley that day I will never know. Somehow I made the Burro Inn in Beatty and collapsed. My guess is that I'd lost about 10% of my body weight in water. My face was fiery red, not from the sun but from surface capillaries dilating in an agonized effort to expel heat from boiling blood.
That was the last day I toyed with the desert. I read what T. E. Lawrence had done, where the pioneers went wrong, and then tried to adapt. Now I'm covered up completely, I study the signs of incipient bad news with razor concentration, and never, ever am arrogant enough to think I can outmaneuver heat. As a result, I'm almost always pretty comfortable on even seriously hot days.
Unless I sleep in and it's already in the low 100s when I crank up the bike and there are 500 miles in front of me and I can't ride at night with a smoked face shield. Ack. Forget the steady ka-whack-et-ta of the 4,000 rpm four-stroke. Until I reach the mountains in Utah, I'm steaming at 5,500.
I made the 116 miles to St. George in 90 minutes. I felt good. The bike was muttering. One of these days I'm going to come through here at night. I bet the place has a subtle glow from the above-ground nuclear firecrackers that were triggered over the years in Nevada. The prevailing winds doused southwest Utah with dust from two-thirds of the atoms in the periodic table of the elements, including some that the physicists didn't even know existed. The feds didn't tell anyone what was really happening, apparently under the theory that if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. I ate part of a seven-legged cow at a fast food joint and continued to Cedar City at an unseemly speed.
I'm not going to try to describe what happened next. It would take a pre-Raphaelite poet to do that. Just memorize the following names:
Grand Junction
Cisco
Moab
Blanding
Hanksville
Torrey
Escalante
Hurricane
Start at the top and work your way to the bottom. When you get to Hurricane, you can tell your friends that you have just ridden the greatest, most spectacularly beautiful set of roads in North America. You can't spit without defacing a national park or monument. Your mouth will be dry because it is hanging open from the unspeakable grandeur through which you pass, mile after unbelievably gorgeous mile. There may be somewhere on earth that could equal southern Utah, but I doubt it. I know nothing can beat it. I just know it.
Unfortunately, I had to take the route in reverse and cut out some of the highlights as a concession to the holiday and the shortness of human life. Still, my heart was feather light for the last 350 miles of the day and I didn't ride so much as float. North of Escalante I stopped at The Turnout. It is a 180 degree vista of stunning beauty. You can see sixty miles. I sat down in the dirt and for ten minutes simply stared at the horizon.
This is what it is all about, the scooter trash life. This is the moment of purest tranquility, the eye of all the meta-hurricanes that have knocked me flatter than day-old beer for 415,000 miles. It doesn't matter what happened yesterday or what wretchedness lies in wait tomorrow. I rode hard to sit in this dirt. Harder miles are ahead because my butt hurts and I'm sick of Gatorade. There is rain, maybe hail, in the northeast. Maybe it will bite me. Maybe not.
I don't care. I want to sit in this dirt until I commit this scene to perfect, ineradicable, read-only memory. A camera won't help. No lens can take this in. I stare, but as soon as I glance away a new scene overwrites the old.
There's only one thing to do. I have to come back.
This promised to be a reasonably boring day, 400 straight-line miles on the I-70 slab, and it lived up to expectations. The interstate in Utah is a beautiful road, but the prettiest part is west of Green River. I was heading the other way.
It was cool. Rain had come through earlier in the morning. An enormous storm was pasting the Moab/Arches area thirty miles to the south. As I neared Grand Junction, I could see another hummer, complete with sheet lightning, that entirely blocked I-70 for twenty miles above and below the highway. I stuck my wallet and HP into a plastic bag; there was no way I was scooting around this guy, unless I wanted to make a 100+ mile detour north to Rangely.
At a McD's on the west side of Grand Junction I stopped for an early lunch. As I gnawed on a hamburger, I thought, "What am I doing here? There is no way I'm going to get wet. My trip is blessed." And of course that was true. In the 20 minutes I was in the restaurant, the storm abated to the north and began to collect on the top of the gargantuan mesa to the south and east of town. The highway was barely wet. I knew it.
I gassed up in Glenwood Springs, soaked the neck snake, and decided to skip a visit to Doc Holliday's grave. The day remained cool, especially at Vail pass and Eisenhower tunnel. The heat began to pick up in earnest at Idaho Springs. The rest of the ride to Tim and Coral Moffitt's house was all downhill on automatic pilot.
Seven hours, 56 mph, and a Tex-Mex dinner at Dora's restaurant with a pitcher of margueritas as the reward. If you have to be somewhere at the end of the day, and nearly everyone does, the patio at Dora's on a summer evening is far from the worst choice you could make. It did look a little iffy for an outdoor meal, what with a rack of storms swirling around the Denver area. There was, of course, no chance that it would rain on us because I'm bles... Well, you know.
If Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry can take a couple of weeks off for "rejuvenation" --- read: get the blood-crack level down to the merely lethal range --- I can take off a day. And today I did. Additionally, the fan mail was beginning to outrun the hate mail, so it was obvious I was doing something wrong. I needed to sit back for a day and figure out something to get pissed off about.
That turned out not to be easy. I trotted down to Castle Rock for brunch with Jim Bensberg, AMA's former Washington hatchet man. Jim and I had worked closely on some moto/political issues for several years and had become good friends. He's now associated with the Pike's Peak hillclimb organization.
We reminisced about our tag-team forays on Capitol Hill in the old days. It was a giggle, really. I played the bad cop, coming into meetings with my hair on fire, frothing liberally at the mouth, and threatening to sue anyone who tried to stop me from bouncing randomly off walls. After my dance was finished, it was startling to see how eager the bureaucrats were to meet privately with Jim and work out whatever we needed.
In the afternoon Tim and I ran a few errands. Reg Jackson, with Tim a former president of BMW/BMW, rolled in from Texas just before the traditional lasagna dinner that Coral Moffitt dishes out for visiting firemen. Their house sits on a hill about 18 miles from the base of the Rockies. The view on summer evenings is spectacular. By 2230 everyone was fairly blown away. I walked outside and tried to get worked up about something. I couldn't. Scorpio was hanging about 30 degrees above Pike's Peak. That was an eerily favorable omen, I'm afraid, because it's like, you know, well --- it's like my sign, you know?
Tomorrow I charge back into the Plains. Reg could get wound up about that; he hates Kansas. I tell him it's pointless to hate something that big. You might as well hate the Pacific Ocean or Jupiter or Oprah. It's becoming clear that on a blessed trip, it is next to impossible to get honked at anything.
Dammit.
Road Rule #6 says never change any part on a motorcycle, whether it moves or not, in the middle of a trip. I violated that rule yesterday when I switched from a cheap, plastic fuel filter to a spiffy, machined metal one. Actually I bought two of these things from Clem at BMW of Denver. When Tim and I returned to his place, we pulled the old ones off and stuck them on my two R80s (I keep a spare bike at Tim's place). The filter on the bike Tim was playing with immediately began to leak. I chuckled snidely.
The filter I changed on my trip bike waited until this morning before it began to leak. I went onto reserve at 147 miles. Something was wrong. Reserve doesn't hit until 185-195 mile range usually. I pulled into a gas station in Fort Morgan. Gas was dripping heartily onto the ground on the left side of the bike near the carb.
Rule 4(b) of motorcycle mechanic repair says that when a problem develops, ask the customer what was the last thing he touched on the bike before the machine went south. As I am the customer here, I asked myself that question. "Fuel filter," I said. And sure enough --- it was bleeding more vigorously than the neck of the bride of Dracula.
Murphy's Law #7 of Motorcycles states that if a bike breaks, it will do so on Sunday when the dealers are closed. But this was a low-rent breakdown and the filter evidently didn't know that it was trying to bring down a blessed bike on a blessed ride. I found an auto parts store within eight blocks on U.S. 34. Ten minutes later I was jamming a new filter on the line and storing 8" of spare fuel line in my bag, just in case of extreme bad luck.
I did back roads to North Platte. Nothing exciting happened until I was typing the second paragraph of this note. That was at 2033. The skies opened up with some of the worst rain I have ever seen. It was coming down almost sideways. Somehow the bike kept standing. At 2039 a siren went off somewhere in town.
"I don't believe this," I muttered. I called the front desk.
"Was that a tornado siren?" I asked in pure East coast innocence.
"Yes," the clerk replied. "Please go into your bathroom and close the door or walk into the central corridor."
If I'm going to eat it on this ride, it won't be in a bathroom like a bloated Elvis, I hope. I walked out into the hall. Most of the guests were from the midwest. They seemed nonchalant. Hail began whacking the motel's glass entrance doors. After half an hour, things died down. It was just another summer evening storm in the plains.
Tomorrow morning it will be gorgeous, the temperature will be cool, and there will be a decent tailwind for whatever direction I may ride. Until then, tonight promises to be a real test of the waterproofing claims of Givi saddlebags.
It has been almost 90 minutes since the storm cracked open; I swear it's raining an inch every five minutes. There's something for everyone out here in the Great, Wide Middle, the land where anything can happen and usually does.
I fell asleep before last night's storm stopped. Before it quit, most of the town was without power. My hope was that when the wind stopped using the bike for a basketball, it would still be in the same county the next morning. When I woke up, I squinted slowly through the curtains. The G/S was standing upright. And the Givis hadn't leaked. Too weird.
As I thought, the morning was clear to the east, it was cool (in the mid-60s), and there was a small ripper of a tailwind. The problem was that the wind was out of the north; to the south was a massive rain wall that ran from horizon to horizon. It wasn't clear whether I could make McCook, some 65 miles to the south, before I ran into the storm, but with the insane luck I've had on this ride, I thought it was worth a shot.
It was raining on the south side of McCook. I was on the north side of town, high and dry, steaming east on U.S. 34 straight into a warm sun. Somehow to pay for this trip I must have sold my soul to the devil, but I swear I don't remember when I made the bargain or when the red-tailed bastard intends to collect.
Route 34 is the parallel twin sister of U.S. 36 that I had fallen in love with in Kansas on the way west. The scenery is almost identical. When I wearied of the north crosswind, I'd turn south for a few miles. As soon as I did, the rain correspondingly dropped a few more miles to the south. I just laughed. When is this madness going to stop?
The general plan was to try to make Paul and Voni Glaves' place in Lawrence KS. They are a strange pair, even for Kansas. Everyone in the BMW community knows them, yet in years of trying I have been unable to find a single person who would badmouth them, even for money. I'm going to keep looking. Nobody can be that clean.
It didn't work out. I could have made better time but I refused to go anywhere near the interstates. I hate them. They're crowded, noisy, and turbulent. A VW microbus makes better speed than I do, especially downhill. The interstate system was Eisenhower's idea. In 1919 as a young Army captain, he was on a convoy that went from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. It took 62 days. Even I make better time than that. When Ike became president, he proposed the system that has now been completed. He can have it. When I feeb out and buy a Gold Wing LuxoSofa, maybe I'll change my mind.
So I stayed on the state and county roads all day, pointing generally ESE, until I came into Manhattan. A Motel 6 loomed ahead. So much for plans. I could have kept going, but I just stopped. I'm not sure why. I guess the devil made me do it.
A grumpy day dawned with ominous D minor chords coming from the shower in the room next door. Rotten, blue-gray clouds were everywhere. I'd overslept, mispacked, and was doing my best to screw up a day that wasn't ten minutes old. I was trying to meet Paul Glaves for breakfast. At the rate I was going, it was looking more like a late lunch.
I called Paul from the restaurant when I reached Lawrence. While I waited outside, a fellow commented on my bike. He was a Beemer owner with a failing electrical system.
"Are you in luck," I said. I told him that the best shade tree wrench on the Great Plains would be arriving in five minutes.
The man I was speaking to was the restaurant manager. I was confident my huevos rancheros would be on the house. They weren't. I blame the waitress for not getting the message. She was moving more slowly than I was.
Meeting a Glaves is always stressful. After 31 years of marriage --- this surpasses the median duration of marital bliss in California by 29 years --- they seem almost fungible: They have two kids with not a single felony conviction between them, contentment in their jobs, and a obvious internal happiness that is so glowing that it makes you want to hit something with a hammer.
But even being with Paul for an hour didn't dispel the bad mood I felt in the air. As I turned east out of town, the bad mood took a physical form and clipped the edge of my windscreen. It was a dove. For a few miles I tried to convince myself it had been a stinking pigeon, but I knew. A split second earlier I had narrowly missed its mate. Now there was a dead bird on U.S. 24 and another bird flying around, wondering why its own life had changed so dramatically.
They mate for life, I think.
On the small roads south of I-70 I couldn't get the bird out of my mind. Even the peculiar names of towns like . . . well, Peculiar, didn't cheer me up. Nor did Tightwad, nor Racket, nor Climax Springs ("We Pull Together to Help"), nor Hurricane Deck.
The clouds never broke, nor did the memory of the bird. In southern Missouri I was on the prettiest roads in the midwest and I felt awful. I can't stand hitting an animal with the bike. It unhinges me. I stop to pick up turtles and carry them to the side of the road where their weird little faces were pointing. Once I even tried to move a tarantula off the road, but a truck hit it before I could turn around.
When people who ride motorcycles speak to those who do not, the image they attempt to convey is that of a freedom-starved rebel seeking to be unleashed from earthly bonds. The biker thinks of wind and stars and the smell of hot rain on a macadam road; the listener thinks of intensive care units and interminable months of rehabilitation. Without ever having ridden a motorcycle, the listener understands intuitively that the natural resting place of a motorcycle is on its side and that of a motorcyclist is in the Trendelenburg position in a neurosurgical ward.
The listener is right. In a microsecond a bird goes down through the operation of luckless chance. A moment later I can be whacked because my number is the next to be called after the dove's. There's no malice in it. It's just the way things are. Millions of dollars changed hands when potential buyers began to believe that you meet the nicest people on a Honda. You can meet a lot of nice people in an emergency room too. Even the best riders wind up there. Some of them, like Wayne Rainey, come out in battery-powered wheelchairs.
A hurricane is bearing down on Florida. Its true destination is Morganton, N.C., the site of the BMW MOA national rally that begins in a couple of days. I won't be there. I'm going home to feed Bud, my cat. She has lived for almost 16 years on a cul-de-sac where the chance of being hit by a car is minimal. Two doves live in my back yard. Bud would have killed both of them happily in her prime. But she's slowing down some. We all do.
This long ride ended metaphysically, if not physically, at 1245 today when I visited my psychiatrist. His office overlooks the Mississippi River in Chester IL. He's everything you'd want in a shrink: Dependable, strong, non-judgmental, and dirt cheap. He is also of the non-directive school. That means he doesn't talk much.
He looks perpetually upriver, as if the slow waters of the Big Muddy hold the answers to riddles that elude even him. He smokes a pipe. A cap perches jauntily on his head. His massive forearms seem ready for any task, the more formidable the better. I have not seen him since the eve of the DuQuoin rally in 1992 when my political enemies had me cornered and my troubles were many. In the ensuing years he seems not to have changed much, except for the accumulation of pigeon shit on his face.
The statue of Popeye is in tribute to his creator, Elzie Segar, a resident of Chester. Popeye was born in the Thimble Theatre in 1929 and will live until evil is eradicated from the earth. Since that will probably not happen until Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry is whacked in a miswired crack purchase, it is all the better for me. I like continuity in the delivery of medical services.
I really did need the appointment. All morning long I had ridden through the gorgeous Ozark roads of southern Missouri in weather that was identical to the first day of spring, but Sigmund Romberg's inexpressibly sad and haunting song, Golden Days, would not leave me. Eventually I bumped into the river. I wasn't sure where I should cross. Then I remembered my doctor. He is one physician whose office is always open, but he won't make house calls.
At the last gas stop in Missouri before the river, I stopped. A couple of Beemers were there. I never introduce myself anymore, but one of the riders knew me. This is always touchy. I immediately went into sentry mode.
"Who goes?" I say. "Friend or foe?"
"Friend!" he says happily.
I spray the parking lot with my Uzi, killing everything in sight, and mumble sardonically, "I have no friends."
They were en route to Morganton. I told them to see Popeye across the river. Later, as I was leaving the doctor's office, they rolled in. Two more patients and two more cures. For every ten neurotics I send to Popeye, I get a free hamburger from Wimpy. One day, when I'm exceptionally sane, I hope to meet Olive Oyl and Sweetpea. Bluto I already know too well.
Until mid-afternoon I wandered through the back roads of southern Illinois mostly by compass headings. My average speed was worse than usual. I finally decided that if I didn't want to do a 600 mile day tomorrow, the terminal day, I'd have to crank up. I found I-64, closed my eyes, and aimed east at a nosebleed 65 mph. With luck, I might have a decent dinner before dark, and a side order of spinach.
I don't know how to finish this. Most of the time my stories end when the word processor runs out of ink or there's no more Bud Lite in the motel's bathroom sink. Tonight I have lots of ink and beer, but I don't hear any doors closing. In a good story a door always slams shut at the end with a satisfying "whonk."
It was a strange morning, cool as usual, but with stringy tentacles of high clouds in a battleship-gray sky. At first I thought it might be Bertha the hurricane, probing for a weak spot among the isobars. Then I concluded that it was just another odd morning on the oddest ride I have ever had. I'll never have another like it.
Mostly today it was interstates I slogged down, but then I'd find myself on roads not much bigger than a pig path. Unless I concentrated almost to the point of pain, I couldn't recall how I had come to be where I was. Sometimes I wasn't even sure which state I was in. Lao Tse's words came bouncing back to me: The good traveller does not know where he is going; the perfect traveller does not know where he has been.
Early on I knew that this ride had a different set of fingerprints on it. Normally I have a laser memory of roads. I can recite not only where I was but the time, temperature, and yards to go for a first down. Now, and for the better part of the last couple of weeks, I have been riding in a twilight zone of amnesia, in real danger of becoming a mislaid, minor character in a Joycean soap opera. For an anal-retentive, Type A, control junkie, there might be worse fates, but I can't think of one.
Eventually I wandered into Moorefield, then Wardensville. Years ago my brother and I used to rip through the back roads around here at insane speeds on an annual springtime automobile rally, sliding through dirt corners, screaming at each other over the roar of a holed-out muffler, and struggling to stay on time to the hundredth of a minute. I have never felt more alive.
The rally died some ten years ago. I bought a K bike and began to crunch out miles almost angrily. Mileage contests, thousand-mile days, endurance runs, the works. If there was something I could do to punish a motorcycle and myself, I'd do it, all the while thinking of my grandmother's manic-depression. She sent those bi-polar genes down the pipe to me, her idea of a mirthful inheritance, I just know. It isn't diagnosed; it doesn't have to be.
Four years ago the yin picked the yang off second base. I stopped working, stopped snapping off miles like BBs, and stopped appearing in traffic court with yet another speeding ticket. Things change, the moon comes and goes, and the yin and yang perpetually chase themselves around the infield. Maybe what hair I have left will soon turn blue, and I could once again own a car, a nice Volvo.
Wait a damned minute. A Volvo? I pulled into the driveway, 7,260 miles after leaving it. A Volvo, my ass. I want my sub-frame back from Louie Lubliner. Bud, my cat, was on the front porch, disinterested to see me as usual. I scratched her hard little head and opened the door. Where's Louie's number?
The front door closed behind me. Whonk.
Bob Higdon
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