Socotra House Note: The formal re-telling of Marlow’s Detour 1.0 was complete yesterday with a ride back home in Fairfax, VA on the Couty Parkway. The rigors of nearly 10,000 miles on two wheels, coast-to-coast is a prelude to an epic “Four Corners” ride around the corners of the continuous States. It was written in the sense of adventure as it occurred, which only now has an immediacy of a way of life at an apex. Fossil fuel-powered, it was an amalgamation of individual freedom. It was empowered by the American Road across a vast continent optimized for motion at individual discretion. Marlow wrote this morning to say that the following thoughts might be raw and impassioned by the immersion of the “then road” and the current perspective of our times. “Detour 2.0” may integrate them in different manner, but this current-time collection of thoughts focused by the headlights of the American Road are now protected by an “UNSANITIZED” label for which only independent contract personnel can be held accountable.
– Vic
Detour Version 1.0
Random Postscripts
(brain bug-smashings)
04 March 2023
Based on the hunches of utter strangers, they surmised that we Men in Black were voyaging well into our country’s hidden unknown side spaces seeing these places’ phantoms and looming darknesses but not really too afraid of them. So, they approached us.
We became erstwhile pilgrimage route signposts for those who felt too
much of their dreary mortality clinging to them, having wanted desperately to live and still did. At times there was impossible anguish and regret for all the things they had not done, of all the drudge they had to do. Our presence and brief sharings made them feel a window might have been opened for them on life they had not considered before. To this day we hope to God they got a chance at these journeyings to become not so much deeper and wiser but simpler and peaceful when seeing all our country’s strangeness and the glory and the power of its life, places, and people.
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There is an extravagance which expresses itself on the road. So long as our roads were asphalt black and curvy, not endlessly guard railed, and empty and dry, we were rich.
Our tires never wanted air, our engines, save for the periods of my balky battery, had the good habit of starting each morning at the first turn of the ignition switch: a good habit to force these engines over the nine plus atmospheres of their compression.
Skittish looking due to the inability of their two wheels to support their standing upright on their own, motorcycles come with a touch of blood in them — they are better than all the four-legged riding animals on earth, because of their required logical extensions of our senses and faculties, and the hint, no — the provocation, to excess conferred by their unrelenting smooth power.
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Early on as we started out in April and late as this trip’s final days in May in America’s pivotal year 2001 approached, now and then like tiny arrows, insects hit our cheeks. At times a heavier body — a grasshopper or a locust perhaps — would crash into our cheeks, chin, or lips like a spent bullet, snapping our heads back. A glance at the speedometer: eighty-two. Our bikes were warmed up. We threw off the effects of the bug smash to briefly twist our throttles wide open, on the top of the rise in the road, swooping as if flying across the coming dip: our weighty machines launching themselves like projectiles sometimes landing with a small lurch.
Okay, Mother Nature, we got you. Right back atcha.
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X-country road trip to somewhere . . .
We’re on a one-way motorway
We’re just riding and riding away
Then follow a route back home
We’re road lamps shining
Not a wild lights blinding bright
Mostly flickering off and on
Yaaaaah . . . .
Times like these we started to live
Times like these that give and give
Times like these we started to live
We craved times like these over and over
Maybe soon we’ll become a new day rising
A brand new sky
To hang the stars upon the night
No longer are we chopped and divided
About staying or running away
And leave all these times behind?
Naaaaah . . . .
Times like these we started to live again
Times like these that give and give again
Times like these we started to live again
We craved times like these time and time again
——-
Is our trip done? As long as we have breath, dreaming and planning are underway for the next one.
———
As Detour 1.0 came to its concluding segments, our faces showed no sadness. There was great age in them. We felt suddenly the distance we had travelled and the amount we had lived and experienced. We had a moment of cohesion, a moment of affection and union, which drew us together like small flame flickers against all the senseless nihilism of our approaching DC hometown.
Hometown of a nation?
DC is such a cruel city, but it is a lovely one; a savage city, yet it has such southern tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent Armageddon safe catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with unhealthy fluorescent blue light, and roaring, combat centers managing the fighting of constant ceaseless wars of men and of machinery. To the uninitiated innocent, it appears so sweetly and so delicately full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it is full of political intrigue and hateful grasping at rock bottom.
We comfort ourselves by believing when bad things happen in DC that they are due to madness. It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, insane. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychopaths in high places, and we’ve got the problem solved. Oopsies.
We who toiled there or lived on its outskirts have seen it naked, with its guards down. We know, not just sense, how the current hollow pyramid of its false social structure was erected and sustained upon a base of its citizen’s sacrificial blood and sweat and agony. Its privilege and their truth could never lie down together. We know how its brokers get through their days — holding up solid gold coins close enough to their eyes so as to blot out the truth-revealing sun itself. This coinage also blocks the effects of stronger, deeper tides and currents running throughout America. Their glamorous beltway lives course the dark depths we the sun loving people would mistakenly like to sound.
DC, hometown of a nation? The nation’s antithesis, for sure. You can’t go back to your real home, and DC is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. When we think it and its work are sick, they tell us “it’s all in your minds.”
It is without cynicism, that we road riders after a day or two of our voyages’ ends stand upon some metaphorical hill above DC, not saying “The town is near” but turn our eyes towards distant rolling hills that might lead us anew to a homeward bound path.
Yes, it’s an angelic desire of dark romanticism – an unlimited
drunkenness drawing us into the polar and blue sapphire world of an oceanic earth’s ancient mariners.
—————
And in response to my 1950s inner child in the car’s back seat, “No, if we’re lucky, we are never there yet.”
Perhaps this is America’s strange paradox — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to us riders who were never fully assured of purpose when we were headed somewhere on two wheels. We never had the sense of home so much as when we felt that we were going there. It was only when we got there that a restless homelessness might begin once again.
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Ending thought:
Road Revelation #3 (#2 was in Day 4): The unchanging weather of man’s life is not love but loneliness. Love is its rare and precious flower. Sometimes it is a riotously colored flower bed that gives us limitless life and joy, that breaches the dark walls of all our loneliness and restores us to life and companionship. But sometimes our only love is just some cut flowers atop our caskets.
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