ghost stories

As a rule, highway looks the same at night no matter where you are. Traffic changes, weather changes, the decoration on the fringes changes, but Nebraska is the same as Arizona is as Virginia, is as Texas a decade and a half ago, as Oregon when you were a kid. When it comes time to burn miles- so long as you can accept the possibility of The Inevitable happening- it's difficult to beat settling into that dim, gray tunnel, cranking the 'go' handle to Full Ahead, and watching the odometer sweat trying to keep up. Gone is the novelty, the interest, replaced with a detatchment, the indifference of the universe driven home hard and cold. Night on the road is time to do work, and work can be done at a frantic pace, but at the price of even less forgiveness from the blackness that surroounds you. To consider it otherwise would be foolish.

During the daytime, that's when things are complicated. Scenery. Traffic. Even the sun itself poses a variety of challenges completely absent after dark.

Black-hot and vicious, the Jersey afternoon seeps in through the side vents, up the thick nylon bindings in the sleeves of my jacket, past the collar so recently unsnapped with a flourish of contempt for passing traffic and all things commuter. Taking 1-9 south out of the city is miserable on a good day, and this is no good day, compounded perhaps by the aforementioned leather armor in which I've chosen to ensconce myself and the fuming, spitting, injured but still utterly violent beast- this fundamentally angry thing- that is my motorcycle. Lingering in my gasoline fume cloud, a byproduct of a too-rich mixture, itself a byproduct of the heat and the slow rate of travel- the bike is tuned to run, not idle through traffic- I share its impatience. Miles tick off sporadically, a tenth here, a few tenths there. I won't see a clear three mile stretch until I hit Pennsylvania. Most time is spent sitting though, feet down and bored, traffic like a slug of raw headbust, straight from a deposit bottle repurposed yet again before its return (if in the best way imaginable), pounding in my skull.

And I remind myself, even this is fun.

Three months on the road is, if nothing else, an effective remover of pretense. I see every prior reinvention for what it was: an utter, self-serving sham; an excuse to keep talking instead of doing. A five hundred mile day is again the strong dose of shut-the-fuck-up-and-ride it should be. All of me hurts, and I'm dog tired from the moment I wake up. The only break I've had in this little adventure was a few short weeks of sixteen hour days in the garage, and all I can think about now is going back for more. It's not that I want to be off the bike. It's not that at all. I want the bike to be better. I want all the bikes to be better. Then I want to do this again, only harder and stupider and louder and meaner.

Delivering the ZRex to Denver, I rode a thousand miles in a day, something I expected I'd never do. The irrationality of such a thing is obvious, but seven hundred miles in, feeling strong, I had The Thought, which, once in my head, could not be un-thought. When would I next be in a position to do such a thing? Selling that bike marks the end of long-distance missiles and me for at least a good while, and the recent spate of gray hair on my head signals the fast approach of the age where health concerns will disperse the few remaining tatters of my perceived invincibility. One thousand miles is, after all, quite a long way, and it could be quite some time until I find a circumstance similarly conducive to making it in a one day shot. Still, more than being dangerous and stupid, it's A Thing, and I dislike participating in Things. Achievement for the sake of recognition has never sat well with me; if you want the pat on the back and the award for your desk and/or wall, that's fine, but I prefer to live my life while you're busy being congratulated. Being so critical though, I find myself particularly vulnerable to being drawn into participating, with hope of competing or completing the task and saying, "Oh that? That's easy. That's no big deal."

Not so. Blowing past the last civilization before my goal, I didn't so much resist the temptation to stop and call it a night as simply miss the exit. It was five miles to the next, so ten miles back. Seventy-five miles past that ten was a thousand, and the next major town lie about five miles past that, making eighty. Eighty miles. One hour. Twist throttle. Feel spike dig in between shoulders. Grit teeth and go. One hour of pain, settling a debt I felt I owed the universe on that dark Kansas night.

Night is time to do work, and that night, work was done. Even so, I've already thrown the gauntlet: If I ever do it again, it'll be on a scooter. No sense in regression.

Drawing the summer to a close, I sit in a DC coffee shop, grinding out a caffeine buzz, preparing for The Great What's Next. Two days from now, I'll be in Richmond, beginning the process of ridding myself of a decade's excess baggage, a task I've allotted an entire two weeks, which is a huge amount of time at present. I can rebuild a motorcycle in two weeks. I can traverse the continent twice in two weeks. With some luck and enough work, I should be able to shed this particularly onerous chrysalis in two weeks. With minimal planning and reasonable timing, I should get everything I need in Knoxville in enough time to finish things there shortly thereafter, at which point I can finally cut this tether for good. Free at last.

In the mean time, contemplation poses a constant threat. It's too easy to take the superficial lessons from a stretch of life such as this. Of course I've changed. Of course my perception of the world has changed, and of course I've learned things. Wrapping them up into nice parables seems the next obvious step, but that wipes out any hope of perspective. This is going to take time to shake out, time to digest, lest it turn into another false start, another incomplete transformation. I'm not much one for meaning, but even I think that would be a shame. Through all of this, I can't help but feel some sense of coalescence, as if things are somehow coming together and- perhaps- even flowing in a direction, and for once, I'd like to see where that's going. Surf the waves of the universe, as it were, and find out whether they all break on the same shore.

The sun falling behind tall buildings (well, what passes for tall around here anyway), I keep feeling what has to be the first threat of autumn breeze coming through the wide-open double door. I can't even qualitatively describe what differentiates between it and the summer variety, but there's something that hints at good riding to come, albeit with the faintest overtone of winter's bitter cold, hope and defeat in the same sweet breath. All nights are the same, but all breeze is not. Two more of the infinite things I cannot explain in the world, but still wonder about.

Onward yet, to see what tomorrow holds.

shorelines and islands

"How do I explain what's happened?"

"Very simply. You start typing, and explain it..."

"What if the reasons don't make sense?"

"They never do. Skip 'em and just get on with it."

I'm back in Tennessee.


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I've heard the american heartland compared to a sea many times, and every trip I make through it impresses upon me the aptness of that analogy. Mountain asked me where I was heading from Denver, and upon hearing my response "east", remarked that there was no good way east out of Denver. He had a point. Everything east of Denver is flat and straight for a very long way. It's road that needs burning, and fortunately, equipped with 1164ccs of engine and a heavy throttle hand, I was well set.

Still, even going plaid, Nebraska is a big, long, boring state. Somewhere in the middle is a big ornamental bridge over the interstate. That's how you know you're still in Nebraska and not in hell. Hell doesn't have that bridge.

To be sure, there are less-oblique ways of getting from Los Angeles to Knoxville. Going via Nebraska was down to three things. The first: I wasn't sure whether I was going to Knoxville or continuing the trip in the midwest. Going north left both options open. The second: I needed a tire change, and I could do it for free in Denver. The third: The southern plains in August? No thanks. I prefer my temperatures (and humidity) in the double digits, thank you much.

Going north also yielded a bit of unexpected entertainment. The Black Hills Rally starts tomorrow, so the last couple of days have been filled with trailers full of bikes heading to Sturgis. To be fair, many bikes were actually on the road, their riders not opting to engage in that most-ridiculous-of-activities, hauling a bike to a bike rally, but still, I couldn't help but laugh seeing a broken-down truck that had just previously been pulling what were presumably perfectly serviceable motorcycles. Last I was in that part of the country during the rally, I remember the gas stop a hundred or so miles out where people were unloading bikes from trailers and smearing dirt on their gear. Everyone who rides distance on pavement knows you don't get dirt. You get bugs and grease and diesel sludge. Fucking posers.... at least do it right.

Speaking of which, I just shaved with a real razor for the first time in two months, and peeled off a thick layer of gray disgustingness along with the neck beard. It had apparently been posing as skin, and passing well enough that soap and an aggressive wash-cloth-ing could not remove it. The road is not always the nicest place to be.

From Cortez: Hawg riders at the first gas stop asked where I was coming from. "Tennessee." They meant my last big stop. "Well, I left Los Angeles yesterday..." Silence, and their eyes got big. *Stifled smirk.* It, along with any semblance of boy-racer speed I had were washed away by that afternoon's rain. Second rain day of the trip, and it was utterly miserable, since my tires are not cut out for the wet, and even I avoid flat-tracking mountain passes on a seven-hundred pound bike.

Riding distance for me is like speeding up to slam into a wall even harder. When I have miles to burn, I can't sleep, I can't think, I can't do anything but ride. Pulling into St. Joseph, MO at the end of a long day felt like death, and not just because I was in Missouri. (The interstate at night there is like a game of Frogger that nature keeps losing. ... which is totally disgusting when played in real life, by the way.) Well beyond the near edge of exhaustion, I still lay awake, unable to sleep because my whole body ached and my mind couldn't give up on how far I might make the next day. Gone was that sense of balance I had in the desert, replaced by a mad, greedy rush to put as much tarmac behind me as possible. The next day I awoke in the early dawn hours to a vicious headache and a still-completely-beat body, climbing back on the bike only because no more sleep was coming for at least twelve hours and I had nothing to do otherwise. If I was going to be miserable, I may as well ride. It might even distract me from how terrible riding across Missouri is.

Made Bowling Green that night and booked a nice hotel with the thought that a non-disgusting shower and a decent bed would do me some good. It did. Just knowing that I wasn't going on another absurd push (another 800 mile day would have put me in Tennessee) or engaging in a late-night fleabag hunt improved my mood substantially, and a wad of prime rib and a big beer finished the job. These are simple things, really. Red meat and booze. Easy to do wrong, but equally easy to do right. Fortunately, after a push like that, which it was didn't really matter.

Road in Tennessee is unlike road anywhere else I've seen. Compare Deal's Gap, which may as well be a public raceway with its perfectly smooth, banked and graded turns to State 85, a road I began what's sure to be a love-hate relationship with today. Doesn't look like much:


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Zoom in. Look at the road they drew but didn't highlight. That's the road that's on the ground. The yellow one doesn't exist. That's true of many roads in the Cumberland Plateau.

Just past that, as the road clings to the side of a draw, it's been progressively relined as the edge of the road has fallen down the ridge. I remember road construction on the PCH, where they were rebuilding road that had fallen into the ocean. In Tennessee, they just draw the lines closer together.

But yes, I am again in Tennessee for the very short-term future. In a week or three, I'll be heading up the east coast to finish the unfinished business left there. I may bring the Triumph on this leg. In the mean time, it's back to the grind in the garage, perhaps punctuated with small-scale adventures. I don't want to be off the road yet, but the prospect of putting life on hold seemed equally unattractive. The whole point of the trip was to integrate all of the disparate strands of my life, and now that my head's straight, the next step requires that I be here. To stay out would have just complicated matters and postponed what I'm doing now.

(What that is will doubtless be the subject of future updates.)

I'm finally off to get some earned rest.

desert mind

When you fill your jacket with a convenience store bag of ice, take care not to get frostbite. People will laugh at you if you get frostbite, no matter how mild, when it's more than a hundred degrees out. They will also laugh at you for putting ice in your jacket in the first place, because they're idiots. Nature of the beast. But be careful.

Riding in the desert is doing math. I get 'X' miles to a tank at 'Y' speed, so there will be 'Z' hours between stops. During 'Z', I need to replenish 'Q' liters of water, and 'R' will evaporate from my soaked gear, so I need to carry a spare 4*(Q+R), in case I break down. If my tires are wearing too fast, I need to slow down, so all of that gets re-figured. Once the math is done, riding is just pointing the bike and pulling the trigger. Nothing more.

The usual concentration, the focus on every little thing requisite of riding elsewhere, is easily replaced by a nervous calm. If something goes wrong... if anything goes wrong, it's probably a very long wait in a very hot place. The raised stakes make every noise, every vibration I've never noticed previously come alive, resonating through my spine and skull, a sure portent of eventual doom, but I loathe the idea of stopping. Stopping throws off the math, and when- in a very real sense- you live and die by the math, introducing error is a very bad thing.

Or that's an option, anyway.

Said concentration can also be replaced by an immediacy, a connectedness to everything but the bike. I trust that it will do its job, so I will do mine, which in this case is to keep it pointed in an appropriate direction, keep the throttle cocked, and not think so damn much as to go crazy. If either of us fails, we'll deal with that when the time comes, but barring that, the net result is basically a lot of looking at the horizon and a lot of abstract conjecture.



Gas layovers are always interesting. Cagers don't understand that the suit is zipped up tight against the heat, holding "cold" in, not hot. When ambient temperature is greater than body temperature, insulation keeps you cool, and all that the suit holds in is water, and even that only temporarily. I'm a walking swamp cooler with a foam ice chest as a hat. It's hot, but manageable, and nothing like the killer hot that exists outside it.



They also don't understand that if we each break down, in my space suit, I stand a chance of being able to walk far enough to do something about it, or something more than stand and wait and hope.



Riding solo across the desert is, unsurprisingly, a solitary experience, and once I get over the bullshit and worry, surprisingly also a comfortable one. A hundred five degrees doesn't feel so bad when I'm soaking wet and eating a seventy mile per hour headwind. Sipping electrolyte juice (like Gatorade, but without the sugar and twice as expensive) every few minutes, water bottle at the ready to re-soak when my gear dries out, I can just sit and hammer across the pavement. The ZRX looks like a seam has split somewhere and a string of water bottles has emerged from it, all from the left, out-of-the-sun side. LA traffic is fortunately miles away (in so many senses of that term); the bike was nervous enough with just the tires strapped up top, much less twenty pounds of water contributing to a substantial imbalance. Me in my space suit, it with its water bottle bandoleer, we make our way.



It's pleasant in the desert. And beautiful. The sun is such a massively powerful entity, and that's somehow lost in most other places. Here it beats down on everything equally. The road looks like water at times, oily snakes of heat distortion rising from every surface, and other vehicles disappear, bend, then double in its reflection. At other times, it just looks like road. Long, straight, flat road.



Cages are few and far between, windows rolled tight and A/C cranked against the overwhelming heat, oblivious to the lunacy of riding through the Mojave in a mobile greenhouse, and entirely missing the point. They're locked up tight against the desert, trying to get through and on to wherever else they're going. They miss it because they aren't actually in it. They don't understand what they're doing, or the real value of shade, or water, or any of it.



This sort of riding is low impact. Once the math is set and my mind is right, I can go on indefinitely, even (long) after I run out of desert. Evening sees me in Flagstaff, and the sun sets over Navajo territory in my mirrors. Red rocks, red dust, red sky... symmetry in a way I didn't expect. Passing cars by the score, gas stops stretch from fifty miles to a hundred to a hundred and fifty. Despite the heat and the altitude shifts, the bike is just purring, and I'm feeling good. Two days with no caffeine, no alcohol, good food, lots of water, and enough sleep has paid off, and I'm starting to wonder whether pushing through to Denver might not be worthwhile.



No. At a gas station in the flooded town of Kayenta, I call it. I could probably make Denver, but it would be foolish, and would guarantee I'd lose time on the balance. That's a desperate measure in a non-desperate situation, and one that would need to be followed by multiple short days to recover. Better to stop short, regroup, and take an easy pull into Denver the next day, leaving open the possibility of harder pushes in the future. I settle on Cortez, a hundred twenty miles (most of a tank of gas) away, find a hotel, and rack up for the night. At eight hundred thirty some-odd miles, it's still far and away the longest day of the trip.



Sitting here at the desk in my far-too-nice hotel room a thousand and a half miles from there, I'm still riding that wave. I refuse to play into that stereotype of going on a long trip and coming back somehow changed (in air quotes), but I can't help feeling that my already broad (I think) mindset has somehow been expanded. If southern California is a land of lotus eaters, the desert sings the Sirens' song, and while for that I know I can't stay, I don't doubt that I've brought some part of it back with me.

I'm probably still humming it in my head when I'm not paying attention.




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the long tail

Monday night would mark three full weeks in Los Angeles. That's too much time. Too long for a trip like this. Lost is any vestige of skipping lightly from place to place and the independence of the road, supplanted by the weird daily grind I've taken on in pursuit of goals that, as usual, make little to no sense. The land speed record attempt now seemingly behind me, it's well past time to leave LA.

I also expect that it's time to move onto what's next, or at very least actually finish all of the business I thought I'd finished before departing.

Still, that said, southern California has been a hell of a good time.

Upon return from Encinitas, I was met by Mark, a friend from Knoxville, and Kate, a beautiful Russian girl he had somehow managed to procure and bring to Los Angeles to visit my brother. I took this to be an interesting and thoroughly amusing development. (In retrospect, that may have been a massive underestimation.) Regardless, still tied to the then-looking-viable land speed racing plan, I steeled myself for a few nights camping out on the floor in my brother's now brimming-full apartment.

A few days' or a week's separation from events tends to streamline them in my mind, removing all of the excess drama, the random indecisiveness, and the small-scale absurdities that actually constitute the bulk of life. Even bigger questions, such as, "How was it again that I ended up in at a wax museum, having my picture taken with fake celebrities?" seem less answerable than they were previously. Fortunately, when blasting off photos by the hundreds, pretense somehow lost, in full-bore tourist mode, there's a fairly linear record of basically everything done.

Here's the full Flickr set.

(Which is about 200 of the 2000 or so photos actually taken, which means I've spent little if any time actually fixing most of these.)

Hollywood was the first necessary stop, which was a lot longer walk than it initially seemed. Craige, for all his many skills, may not be the best at estimating distance, but such is life, and now that temps in the 90s were a distant memory, it was actually not too bad. Walk of Fame, Grauman's, etc. May have been hiding a contemptuous smirk the whole time, but in the face of such genuine enthusiasm for sightseeing, tourism, and the cult of celebrity, even that was occasionally punctuated by an actual smile. Not my bag, etc., but it was still a lot of fun.






From there, a quick cool-off, then a trip to Griffith Park to see lights.










The next few days were a mess in the best way possible. Like much of Seattle, like Mexico, time in LA melted away to somewhere. Dignity (or that's what I call it anyway) would usually have prevented me from getting on a roller coaster on the Santa Monica pier, or jumping in the ocean in my clothes, or throwing a full-on sorostitute temper-tantrum over my friends' refusal to have fun while out one night, but all of these things I did, and so many more. I was even at one point called "fun".

As I said last post, all dials turned to 11.

Mark was in a bad mood here, but (under some duress) put on a smile for a few minutes before running off to find some coffee and clear his head. Craige, Kate, and I then ran amok on the beach and pier.






Kate proved very popular with various street performers when she wanted her picture taken with them.




Being a smartass, I had to...




Craige was amused.




Then we ended up on the roller coaster. Practice:




For reals:




Somewhere in there, Craige got all shred-up.




Not so tough now, huh? (To be fair, the water was really cold.)













You may have noticed 1.) a hugely disproportionate number of photos so far, and 2.) that an even more disproportionate amount of them are of Kate. What can I say? When a pretty girl asks to have her picture taken, I'm glad to oblige.




As you can see, Craige has the same problem.




Check the biodiesel sticker on the rear corner and the handicapped tag hanging from the mirror.




Mark was back to his usual self.




About halfway through these next two, Craige pointed out that there was a double-decker tour bus parked across the street. We are in all of their pictures of the Beverly Hills sign.






Somewhere in there, Kate grabbed the camera and took about 400 pictures of random crap in LA. Buildings, signs, etc. This would repeat itself no few times over the course of the following days. I hear she got 600 between LA and Vegas before the battery on Mark's camera gave up. Dedicated to the cause, if nothing else.


Eventually we went out.




And yes, I am rudolph the red-nosed asshole.




I dunno... more of LA...




















Ahh... Philippe's...




















Philippe's was, in all fairness, worth the hype. Meat sandwiches done like none others I've ever seen. If you're there, spring an extra buck for the lamb. And buy two. You'll need them.


Downtown was unexpectedly beautiful at night.












By that point, everything was a blur. Craige/Mark/Kate hit one of the studios, then spent Saturday at Disney while I took care of sundry, important bits of things that I needed to do, such as eating terrifying meat sandwiches with Craige's roommate Andrew while discussing various business opportunities such as a dating service, riding out into the desert to get a rulebook for the land speed racing thing, and sleeping off hangovers. I eventually ended up meeting Greg and Greg at a huge party being held by a couple who had just won a major award for a Tatra T87 they'd just finished restoring. Mmmm... crazy Czech rear-engined V-8 goodness. All told, an excellent set of days, despite having to leave my camera out of a lot of it due to lack of a charged battery.

Somewhere in there, we went to a wax museum and did some other random crap.



(And yes, the Monroe replica really was that horrifying.)


One of these people is taking this more seriously than the other.




We found a hat store?




It's only half-racist.









BATMOBILE!




I'm a real 'merican!







It was a good burger. Again, what can I say...?




Eventually, they had to leave for Vegas en route back to Knoxville.

Craige demonstrates the "LA" finger thing that we all know from middle school:




Adios!




At that moment, everything reverted to life as unusual. Back on full-time bike fettling and LSR scheming, which eventually devolved into waiting to hear about bikes and parts and most of all, the front tire I'll need to replace somewhere between here and wherever's next.

We did make it out to Malibu Creek State Park for an afternoon.

Craige, enjoying "wilderness":




Tree split three ways. I'm amazed the third part is still standing.




So Craige said there was a cool place to check out, but that we'd have to do a little bit of a traverse. Alright. I'm in terrible shape and have a camera, but if he thinks it's cool, fine. About five feet past this, he says, "Cool, we're through the bad part."







Sometime later... "Well, that was the worst of it."







Past that... "So, this is kind of the rough bit, but we're clear after here."





Have I mentioned that I suck at this and have a camera slung over my shoulder, because I do. Eventually, I had to quit taking pictures, then surrender the camera to Craige so as to not bang it into the rocks or dump it in the drink.

My expression of the similarity between Craige's distance-estimating and difficulty-estimating:




Fortunately, it was easy from there...



*rolls eyes*



Regardless, we made it through fine. I suggested to these people that it's generally easier to ride bicycles than to push them. They did not regard it as helpful.




Planet of the Apes Rock. It's very big. (Check scale against the climber in the background.)




We ended up back on the coast, contemplating why neither of us had had the good sense to go to college in a beautiful, warm climate, seeing as we've both done so much with our hard-earned (*cough, cough*) degrees.

Malibu, being itself:




And that's about what I've got. More waiting now. More LA. Running around and rock climbing and food and drink and all of it. A beautiful mess this city is. I'm almost sad to leave in another day or two. Almost. It's fast coming time though, and what's next is waiting.