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Just Gettin' Started

Eastbound and down with it are we.  New Mehico, Tex-ass; devoured.  Up next: Oklahomie, Arrrrghcansaws, 10-esee, Nawf Cackalakey, an’ Ol’ Virginni – all sittin’ pretty on the menu.  We eat.  We hungry.  Only thing we don’t scarf down is road dust, which gets served to the suckas behind us.  We’re in straight land that does a lot of hot and dirt.  It’s here that 90mph starts to feel like crawling on your hands and knees, the horizon is apt to be eaten by mirage, and your bones jingle-jangle to piston rumble.  Yet not far ago we were laying a right number on all sorts of curves like it was a damn road strip club and oh, boy, we made it rain.

Turnin’ needs talkin’ ‘bout.  It’s like hitting a baseball – it’s all in the hips.  Yet on a bike, throwing your hips means your committing, well, your life.  I was thinking about the moment when you cut it hard and your wheel hits a patch of gravel or tar and slips.  All three of us have experienced it before - that instant when the preciousness with which you hold your life crystallizes in total, lucid fear.  As this trip would have it, I read a passage in perfect stride that articulated my thoughts and then kindly one-upped them.

Peter Matthiesson, in The Snow Leopord, tells, “My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear piece my heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, ice, air, fear, and self are one.”  Is it enough to relate to our journey in only one way? NOOOOO!!  So Matthiesson kindly continues, “What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness to ordinary moments, as in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being.” 

The journey never ends; the implementation has just begun. 

Camp So Hard

We’re loose around the edges.  We’re starting to smell like human beings, not brand names. If I am not mistaken, Whitman himself chanted, “The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer.”  Maybe ol’ Walt could give us some pointers on how to score some cavewomen in rut.   

It's all due to what Dad calls “guerrilla camping.”  There is a method to our crash-spot decisioning, and it could rightly be considered madness.  Yet it leads to places like this:

 I called this one “Motel Mountainsage” (Montana and Wyoming sport more sage bush than a female sadhu - ewww).  Dad lays down the base coat for all money-shot sayage-ings with, “They should pay us to sleep here.” Preach it!  I’ll pour out one more here for my homies - Glacier National Park’s very own crash bandicoot spot…

Someone said that the third times the charms, so here goes....

Yup.  It goes like such: ride one's face off till dark, find choice spot that one probably shouldn’t spend time in, and sleep at said choice spot.  It makes for a spontaneity and awesomeness, but can logistically, and literally, can be a pain in the ass (especially when you opt out of the ground-pad clause, like boy genius here).  It also serves to further our wookie aesthetic; while pulling out a nights worth of forest mange from my hair, Gareth crisply observed, “Dude, it looks like that tree came in your hair.”

Our sun salutations (which consist of eastward facing A.M. kidney-tapping sessions), river ecosystems killing baths, and baked bean-induced farts (which could tear a straight hole in the ozone layer - I guess that’s one way to find us) come across as an excessive celebration of the American spirit.  Yeah, I think that’s it; we’re just acting really American.

Yet there’s more to our vagabond tactics than grunge and guffaws.  Following the intuitive voice can turn a vacation into a journey, a joy-ride into a synchronistic exploration.  You sniffin' what I'm steppin' in?

Never Have I Ever

Never driven a motorcycle before? It kinda feels like....

- Nailing someone in the face with a perfectly aimed snowball.
- Taking a bath in Sex Panther. 
- Luke Skywalker streaking through the Death Star trench - shout out to my nerds.
- This.  On wheels. 
- Raw-doggin' Kim Kardashian... while skydiving. 

Maybe that last one was insensitive.  Maybe not.  Maybe you should just go ride a motorcycle. 

What the Muse Allows

My Uncle recently reminded me that we owe much to perspective.  Keeping that wisdom in mind, riding through straight flat land might be described by most people as "boring."  Schlappy (Pops) prefers the term "mono-culture."  That subtle distinction can make all the difference when a nook and crannying session in your mind lasts for eight hours, maybe more.  Riding can be either self-destructive, or fulfilling and inspiring like few other experiences, and it's completely up to the rider. 

The intensity that travel entails brings me to a quote by Cesare Pavese that Rona recently shared: "Traveling is a brutality... Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."  I tend to dislike over sentimentalized Pico Iyer-ish quotes about how traveling can change your life, but this one nails it.  Sleeping on the ground, dreaming hard, and chasing sunsets as if they were skirts has been our M.O., and it feels as pure as I've even known something to feel.  Then again, that doesn't mean it's easy.

Long cruises require a Zen disposition that my generation hasn't exactly been raised with.  Among other things, I'm a words guy (how articulate, I know).  Yet most lyrical castles I construct - poems, one liners, jokes, digressions - collapse beneath the force of the wind and the weight of the miles.  It's a cool reminder of impermanence - how fleeting our presence is, both on this ride and in the long haul.  Moving through nothing but cornfields on my 21st birthday only added to this sentiment.  Monotonous landscapes makes it easier to day-dream, yet that feels like an utter waste of consciousness. Ultimately, there's not much else you can do but be present and simply appreciate what you're moving through. It calls for a concerted awareness.  Dad's good at it.  I'm getting better.

Schlappy and I have both done this kind of thing before (hackneyed chronicling of my journeys can be found here and here).  In general, motorcycle trips provide the perfect recipe for self-discovery: ample time for introspection, the ecstatic joy of man-handling curves, and scenery that moves the beholder, including, but not limited to, the off-hand chance that you'll catch a glimpse of a cow peeing (which will remain funny until my soul shrivels up and dies).  But this one is different.  We're in this one together, which satisfies any 'happiness is only real when shared with others' needs.  In sum, this journey is very, very real. 

So, as the sun sets and rises, and we push forever West, there's a simple fact that we're happy to be reminded of each time that we lean into it: it's better in the wind.

I Love Lamp

Greetings! Dispatching live, from the unbelievably rank confines of Room 205, Days Inn, Wheeler, OH. Why, you ask, does this broadcast come from bumf&$*ville? Well, mainly because having a smart phone doesn't mean that you're still not an idiot.

This report is dedicated to Momma Herms, who somehow let all of her eggs fall into the same motorcycle road trip basket. All is well, and there's a deep, 'meta' lesson to be learned from this, Mom: dudes will be dudes. 

Two of said triumvirate of dudes (Father Wolfi and I) piggybacked our way toward Chicago, in order to round up a second steed for this gander West. We're pretty much hauling ass. Or at least that's what we were doing until we drove into what looked like a squid thrashing black ink down from the sky, aka West Virginia's dramatic piss festival of rain. Up until that point, we had been laying rock n roll flames on the straight shots and cutting curves like butter. I hate to press pause on the humor, but dammit, it was beautiful. There was this definitive moment at the border of the storm, where the wind had flipped all of the leaves onto their backs, turning all of the tress white. It was like a double rainbow moment, but just to ruin the visual, it could have also been described as 'nature ballin' outrageous.'  


Virginia (and maybe even the entire US) tends to brown paper bag WV with stigmatisms like, “coal,” “litter,” and “just because your cousin is the easiest score you can find, doesn’t mean…” Yet WV was amazing. I witnessed the American gradient begin, as glimpses of Colorado peeped from beneath bridges and between ridges. As we pushed through the final wave of the storm, the darkness a cape in our wake, the setting sun paved a yellow brick road for us to cruise on. I shit you not, the road was actually golden. So, I'll have you know that today I heard Busta Rhymes' "Do My Thing," in which he so eloquently quips, "I will endanger your species like an ostrich / hold you hostage, and crazy feed you swine sausage / HAH!" You hate me, but that's probably what you feel like right now, is all I'm saying. 


Just to completely contradict myself on the whole 'sticking up for WV' thing, I have to anecdotally mention our waiter at this Mexican joint who struggled to keep the massive wad of dip in his lower lip from bubbling up and slurring his words, and also the cashier fellow who, while giving us 'directions,' was barely able to recognize our location on a map because he was so completely shit faced. Not to mention my butt is already sore, and that doesn't even take into consideration future crusty truck stop bathroom escapades did I just type that out loud?

This trip has been pre-emptively titled "So America." I'm still in cheap joke mode, but I assure you that it has been of a revelatory nature thus far. Future ramblings will include what Matt (quick shout out to Gadfly! Everyone go read it now!) has dubbed 'prosaic ball shots.' Yup, that just happened. The realness awaits, as Pops and I, sucking our mental thumbs, hurtle towards it's presence. I'm ready.