Author’s note: Writers normally have a moral in mind when penning a story. Not so for most who are simply living life during their Great In-Betweens. During your author’s midlife wanderings on two wheels of American back road wilderness, there was a moral but only in retrospect. These multi week rides with other riders tested instincts and agilities. Some of them were soft, some visionary, some disillusioned, but most if not all of them were comfortably and numbly happy in the perfumed suburban life of our imperial cities.
Long days astride powerful motorcycles slowly transformed them into primitivists. The daily tests and adventures pushed them beyond their city limits, so much so that at times these personal journeys of searching for their outer boundaries served not just as a challenge but as a reproach of their city lives. Successful or not, the extremity of the challenges became what these trips were all about. It was about their personal sufficiency in unsuspected, unforgiving situations, where the thrill hunter portions of them would have the tables turned as they became the hunted when they crossed unseen barriers that cut them off from the predictable comforts of city life’s civilization and order.
What follows is the third attempt over nine years to put this down in some reasonably readable form. It is a lightly fictionalized kluge of recovered rememberings from several of those trips.
A long high view of a narrow two lane, treed road in Northern Virginia revealed that this once sole east-west path since the 18th century between the imperial city and the inland farms and cities that supplied its wants had been bypassed by a recently constructed six lane divided parkway only 60 yards to its north. An endless procession of cars and trucks coursed along the new artery. The old road bed was slowly being covered in debris, since county maintenance crews cleaned it infrequently. The wooded valley around the old road was slowly walling up the road.
At the lowest point of the old road, a narrow, century old, lane and a half, wooden bridge across Accotink Creek still served the few local residents who still lived along this pike’s sharp curves and cliffs. The creek beneath this bridge was rocking and rolling with the previous night rains, made even stronger by the runoff from the new six lane expressway 50 feet above.
Farther on down the creek through secret woods past shale faced cliffs, rapids, deep pools and finally in the far distance old flood control holding ponds now connected in a single huge lifeless lake could be seen. The ruins of a small cluster of homes, where the original owners of the 18th century pike were now in almost in total decay. Closer inspection down the swollen creek’s northern bank revealed a crumbling cemetery dotted with graves dating from the late 18th through late 19th centuries. As this dead lake grew, the cemetery and home ruins would disappear.
Marlow had ridden this road for several decades before this new bypass appeared. He cherished it and mourned its passing that day atop the wooden bridge while getting wet from the storm surge’s mist from below.
His was a sunburned face of a tall crystal city building, desk man in late middle age. He was wearing an orange bandana under a motorcycle helmet festooned with cigar ring wrappers from the stogies he had smoked during the past few years. His leather jacket showed signs of deep weathering from his incessant wearing of it in all kinds of weather unprotected by rain gear.
A well-worn road atlas laid splayed flat before him on his gas tank and headlight. His yellow goggled eyes stared at the orange highlighted circles of places he wanted to visit before they disappeared.
Someday he thought he would see them. His finger traced lines between them, while his suburban face contorted further as he concentrated on the difficult parts of a draft itinerary.
He relaxed and his face fell back into its soft lines as he made penciled notes to include a century-old, forgotten pike in the northeast.
Seven years later
This two-wheeled journey got its kick start at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris that fall. A motorcycle rider (and friend of Marlow), his wife and an 86 year walker-equipped woman were trapped there when the Air France airline unions decided to strike worldwide.
Augustus, his Margaret and her mother’s inadvertent Parisian stay stretched into a week-long sojourn. It was punctuated with daily twelve hour long visits to the airport with all of their luggage to queue up for that day’s hotel and meal vouchers. Mob unrest and solidarity was spiced up by the regular appearance of surly French elites attempting to jump the queue. Augustus’s mid 60ish petite wife would dress down these interlopers with sailor language in several tongues. He smiled broadly every time when the vanquished jumpers would slink back to the end of the line.
Needless to say, Augustus chunked his plans and brochure to return to Europe the following year for a long dreamed, guided Alps motorcycle tour straight into a De Gaulle garbage can.
Marlow knew that Augustus might disagree, but Marlow did not care. Augustus was tied to his electronic maps, GPS and its computer routing system software. Many of the roads and places Marlow was bent on seeing were unknown to these devices. Their calculated route plans had an affinity for the straightest of lines and did not do well accommodating the off-track, let alone the offbeat. These places and paths had to be seen, no, witnessed, by the group before they disappeared. Much like Marlow’s treasured bridge and creek in Northern Virginia.
Augustus was a retired Marine fighter pilot who had finally moved from the most important city on the world down to South Carolina horse country. Marlow, a retired Navy spook, lived now in the Florida Keys. Marlow was thin, loose, slow-eyed , hedonistic, and an inveterate risk taker. Augustus was powerful, tightly wrapped, alert eyed, aesthetic and a risk assessor. Augustus could be manically obsessive, while Marlow could only be so for brief periods under the leadership of someone as equally crazed as himself.
When circumstances demanded, both could be confident, calm and almost mystical. Despite their open differences on just about everything else, they amused each other and were deeply appreciative and affectionate of the other’s strengths and foibles.
Planning this trip had been something like playing four rounds of golf at the US Open. The course was known but its terms, conditions, pin placements and green speeds changed daily. The group was going to traverse a course that was quickly returning to its wilderness state, not like the unchanging municipal par 3 course slab highways and connected cities that dotted the interstates.
Each of the four riders had his targets to visit beyond and between the corners (Key West, Madawaska, Blaine, San Ysidro). Many of them were well offline of the most efficient line of travel. So we laid these targets out and negotiated selected places along two route alternatives.
Once they were done, they presented the two routes via email to the other two riders, Rex and Steve. On a conference call, the competitive route drafters negotiated and sold their own selections while trying to avoid complaining about the other’s choices and recommendations.
“Wait till you see the Cascades in Washington and the volcanic mountains of northern California. I tell you they are beautiful and wild, if not savage.” Marlow was speaking softly almost hypnotically as he could see the roads and vistas in front of him.
Augustus went on with his ideas, “When you see the river waters and forest of the Northeast and Michigan’s upper peninsula, you will change. The city things inside of us all will wash away.”
Stopping briefly, he then said half in jest for Marlow and Rex to hear, “They’ve got deer and elk up there, guys, made of meat instead of that processed jerky you two chew on.”
All of them laughed at that.
In the end, they would visit everything, stretching the trip from its original mostly straight line 11,000 miles to nearly 14,000 miles. This would be no mean feat, since with few exceptions; the average riding day would now be over 500 miles often in crappy weather and rough road conditions in order to get it done in the four weeks they had allotted to it. Their average age was mid-60s.
Marlow was ebullient. Before ringing off the teleconference, he concluded “There’s nothing to it. I’ll leave my southeasternmost corner city first and head up north, pick up y’all along the way to the second corner. We’ll all be back in time to catch the first games of the college football season.”
Steve noted for the record, “Parts of this route look tough – roads of chipseal and frost heaves, not to mention severe weather with below freezing wind chill temps to hail, thunderstorms and extreme dry desert heat.”
“Sounds like we’ll be experiencing the best sensations life has to offer. Well, truthfully speaking, the second best . . . ” Marlow smirkily said.
“Piece of cake. Just pack flexibly.” offered Augustus.
“This vanishing civilization and wilderness is gonna be great!” Rex finally said.
“We night be some of first and last few who will see a lot of this.” Marlow interjected as he thought of his beloved wooden bridge.
With the call finished, Marlow exited his home to be swallowed by his small town’s afternoon rush hour traffic along North Roosevelt Blvd. Flabby sunburnt tourists headed northward back to the mainland, while palefaces drove southward into town for the weekend. The streets were clogged. The thick, slow moving traffic caused yellow tinted exhaust to linger. His fellow journeyers on the mainland had it worse. Much worse. Their trips home would be delayed by bridge raisings, accidents, presidential motorcades and so on. He had fled those horrors years ago.
Augustus with Marlow’s mutual support had sucked the group into this trip and why not? All of them wanted, no actually needed, these escapes. So it was no surprise that Steve and Rex assented to all the changes to the original draft route alternatives.
Four weeks later in the mid-summer heat of July
Marlow, ready for the back country blue highways, stood by his loaded Harley FatBoy, grinning a little crazily. At first it seemed that he was watching his neighbors gathering to bid him goodbye. He was focused inward.
“Sun’s coming up. Snowmelt-fed creek waters are running dry up north. Time to go. Will send you all postcards along the way. See in four weeks, give or take a day or two.”
With that Marlow climbed on his long silver and black bike that filled his condo carport. With a few simple electrical checks complete, he fired it up, cracking the throttle several times to wake the few neighbors who were not yet awake.
The back of his bike was packed and stacked with a variety of bags, rolled clothes and equipment for the trip. He swung the kickstand back and leaned hard into these packs to make them act like a seat back cushion, put the bike into first gear, and blew out of the driveway and onto US 1 north.
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