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I knew this day would come, a day when my mind would drift back 36 years to a lonely stretch of interstate highway at night, the receding lights of Kingman, Arizona, sparkling like fireflies in the rear view mirrors of my motorcycle, the exhaust fluttering a staccato French horn solo as the bike tilted slightly back and forth in the sidewise gusts of the desert winds. At the time I sensed this would be a milestone moment, and so it is, as I now sit hunched over a keyboard instead of a gas tank, indulging in memories rounded and smoothed by the passage of years.
Never mind the cloud of locusts that peppered me like buckshot when I rode thorough them at 80 miles per hour on the ride east, or the swatches of rubber peeled from recapped tires littering the pavement, any one of which could have tumbled the bike into a twisted wreck and me into a permanent coma if I survived at all. I was still immortal at that age. Accidents happened to other people. Still, just what the hell was I thinking anyway?
The truth is I wasn’t thinking. Well, not in words. I did imagine there were menacing shadowy creatures flying alongside, just out of range of my peripheral vision, waiting to pounce. I also had a tune going through my mind, a ceaseless version of the Ojays singing “I Love Music” repeating itself over and over. It could have been worse, like a chorus of children singing “It’s a small world after alllll…” So both the imaginary flying monsters and the Ojays were not so bad. They kept me from slipping into a motion induced stupor as I sped through the warm desert night.
A pale frightened face and a parked motorcycle appeared in the loom of my headlight as I passed a rest stop by the side of the road. I slowed, turned around and coasted back to the rest stop. The face belonged to a young woman seated cross-legged on the ground next to a chopped Harley-Davidson, a sleeping bag wrapped around her. She looked like a small hill with a head poking out. I stopped a non-threatening distance away and asked if she was okay.
“I’m fine,” she said with a quavering false bravado, “We ran out out of gas. My boyfriend is getting some more. We left that town back there with his tank on reserve. I don’t know what that means."
It means he had about 20 miles or less of fuel in his tank for the run across the Mojave Desert, the nitwit, and now he’d temporarily abandoned this kid to the flying shadows and other terrors while he hitchhiked back to Kingman for a can of gas. I asked if she needed water and was otherwise okay.
“No, really, I’m fine,” she said, adding that she had a gun for protection, which may or not have been true, but which served as a warning in case my intentions were less than helpful. I paused, giving her time to reconsider, then resumed my journey, preferring to take my chances with the flying shadows instead of a frightened kid armed with a gun. Being a Samaritan can be a dangerous trait.
Not always. On a previous trip I’d misjudged the weather and the Arizona geography, stopping at a Denny’s restaurant in Flagstaff, my body shaking from the high altitude chill. I could barely hold a cup of coffee. A man about my age was seated nearby. “Is that your 550F parked out front,” he asked.
It was.
“I’ve got a 450 myself. Good bike. Where you headed?”
I told him, saying I’d hoped to reach Albuquerque that night, but that didn’t seem likely. He thought about that. “Hey, look," he said, "if you’re not in a rush, you can bunk at my place. My wife just left me and we've got a spare room."
We?
"Me and my beagle.”
I accepted his offer, but before heading to his place he led me to a bar called The Widowmaker Lounge, where he said a lot of girls from Northern Arizona State went to dance. But it was a weeknight. Any college girls enrolled for the summer session were probably cocooned in their dorms with their noses in books and eating leftover pizza. The other drinkers looked like morose cowboys as they nursed their beers and listened to Patsy Cline signing about crazy love on the jukebox. We had two beers and retired for the night to his newly wifeless home where the beagle checked me for weapons or maybe a treat, and I slept the sleep of the slightly drunk.
I stopped at the same Denny’s in Flagstaff the following year. A college age boy seated at the counter next to me was talking with a young waitress who seemed to be his girlfriend. I asked them if there was a campground nearby. They gave me appraising looks. The boy asked where I was from and where I was going. I told him, showing my photo ID issued by the governor’s office in Sacramento and stamped with Jerry Brown‘s signature, hoping these kids were Democrats in a state full of cowboy conservatives. The boy glanced up at the girl, who gave a slight nod. “A bunch of us have a house we rent," he said. "You can stay with us if you don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
Not at all. My hosts were students at Northern Arizona State. The boys were musicians with a country and rock repertoire. The girls formed the core of their audience and, I suspected, supplied the bulk of their communal income with clerk and waitressing jobs.
My contribution to dinner that night was doing the dishes, answering questions about Jerry Brown, who was making noises about his presidential ambitions, and letting a bike-savvy lad take a quick spin on my motorcycle when he asked, which I did after thoroughly grilling him about his riding experience, but still feeling like a husband compelled to entrust his wife to the care of a sex offender on parole. I relaxed when he safely returned with my bike intact. That night I unrolled my sleeping bag, bedded down among a cluster of sleeping-bagged forms on the floor, and was back on the road at first light.
I got lucky on my next pass through Flagstaff, stopping again at the Widowmaker Lounge where I met an ample woman seeking company for the night, on the condition that I be out of the house before her 10-year-old daughter awakened early the next morning. She and her former husband were law partners in separate towns and still amicable, a situation she did not want to jeopardize with the 10-year-old carrying tales back to her father. The next morning she fixed me a cup of instant coffee. We chatted quietly in her kitchen, where she sat wearing a yellow terry cloth bathrobe, and then she politely shooed me out the door.
Back on the road, I deeply inhaled the brisk morning air scented with pine from the piñons dotting the lava red hillsides along the highway.
A phone call brings me back to the present. The VA hospital wants me back for some tests. Seems I’ve got emphysema. The doc wants more blood samples, chest x-rays, etc., and I’m reminded anew of a quote by novelist John Barth: “Self knowledge is always bad news.”
Makes me wish I had another motorcycle, one that could take me on a ride back to the little mountain pines of northern Arizona on a crisp summer morning, a thousand miles and 36 years away.
Comments?
I like your writing -- Thea
I like you for liking it. -- MB
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The piece had a late '70s feel. Reminded me of all that, and compared to now, that's a nice feeling, place to be.
Do you have emphysema? I'm curious, I've smoked 40 years and you’re so vital. Anyway, one never knows how autobiographical things are. Although you do say true story at the end. Have you read much John Barth? I used to really like him. Thanks Mike -- Smirks
I read The Sot Weed Factor and John Barleycorn, but it's been over 30 years. Yeah, I've got emphysema. Doc said so and showed me the funky x-rays and grim results of my breath tests from a 50-year tobacco habit. Tain’t pretty. -- MB
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Thanks, Mike. It is lovely to read your work. Every once in a while I think back to road trips with my family (but in a car) and think about what might have been against what was. Nice memories to be sure. -- Peg
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I rode out of Colorado Springs (Ft Carson) in August 1970 with orders for Vietnam. I was on a Triumph 500cc and made it back to Kentucky via Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota etc. Great missive. -- Glo
How much oil did that British iron leak? -- MB
A lot. -- Glo
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Ooh such a good one. I myself was just thinking today about a road trip I took from St. Louis to Denver in a Corvette in 1977 or so. I think a bike like yours would have been a much more comfortable form of transportation, though maybe not in the ice storm that assailed us near Kansas City on the return trip. -- Sum
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Great story. Funny how as we get older we remember the good times, mostly it would be nice to have that good health back. -- Mary Pat
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Lovely, Mike! -- Julisari
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LOL @" the cloud of locusts that peppered me like buckshot when I rode thorough them at 80 miles per hour," and "where the beagle checked me for weapons or maybe a treat.” -- Pirate
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This held my interest to the very end. you're good! As for the emphysema, had a similar (hyper-inflated lungs) diagnosis not long ago, and quit smoking in October. So far, so good, and I really do feel better. So good luck! -- E.O.
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Mike !!! I just bought Amy and I a Pace Arrow, a 40 footer! I’m so excited! I can sleep late, eat what I want and fart without public humiliation wherever I travel and still be home! How great! Amy likes it too. See ya on the highways. -- Nick
Try not to run over any motorcyclists with that beast. -- MB
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That was the BEST Tomatoman Times I have ever read! (Have probably not read them all, but still....) I have never been on a road trip on a motorcycle, but I have been on so many road trips in cars that I cannot count them all (I turned 69 yesterday). I love road trips. I suppose you have read Steinbeck's Travels With Charley and Peter S. Beagle's I See By My Outfit? (motorcycle road trip back in the day). I am a sucker for any road trip movie too. "Road Song" was VERY good and I loved the details. I agree with whoever liked the beagle bit. I liked the bit about the lady sitting in her yellow robe in the morning too. Good detail. I am so sorry to hear about the emphysema diagnosis and will be praying for you. Merry Christmas! -- Eve
Both those books, and Robert Pirsig’s In Praise Of Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, nudged into buying the bike. -- MB
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When I was fifteen I had a boyfriend that rode a Harley. It was a magnificent, huge, rumbling thing covered in chrome and leather, and its rider, named R.R., was a guy my father wanted desperately to punch in the jaw, but restrained himself. I was his baby and I could do no wrong, and Mr. R.R. was someone he couldn't bear to think ever touched me. Dad believed R.R. would spoil my innocence, though little did he know it had been spoiled a year before.
Anyway, R.R. and I traveled one Saturday afternoon to an old fort, refurbished for tourists, and we spent several hours on a blanket. On our trip home, I burned my bare leg on the exhaust. We were miles from any help and we didn't even have any water, so I endured it untreated until we got back.
I had a huge blister on the inside of my leg, and it stung like nothing I had ever felt. R.R.'s mother put butter on it, which did nothing but make it greasy as well as painful. That blister was like an invitation for my father to kill R.R. Dad was furious. R/R. was apologetic, but unrelenting in telling my father he intended to see me again. We did, in fact, see each other several more times.
Time passed and R.R. went down the road with someone else on the back of his Harley. I do recall with a smile though that big, shiny piece of chrome and thunder. I felt like a part of it when I rode on it. It was a fun few months for the most part, tearin' up the countryside and city streets with my thighs wrapped around a black leather seat and my arms around a devil in dark hair and a bushy mustache. There I was, long blonde hair, my peace sign headband, short shorts and long black boots - Queen of the Thundering Hog. Yep. Good times. - Zoey
Queen of the Thundering Hog? I’m going to steal line that for a title. -- MB
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Is that a true story? You are lucky to have such fascinating memories, Mike - that is a life well-lived. Your loyal readers are lucky to get to relive some of your past with you. -- Sandy
Your check is in the mail. -- MB
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Well done, Shorty. Of course, I expect nothing less from you! -- Linda Fields
Shorty? <sigh>
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