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.
