Some years ago, Red and I came from the Eastern Mountains on our sweet running old Goldwing. We'd crossed the prairies, and then the Rockies via Lolo Pass, and were now in the wheat fields and scab lands of Eastern Washington, just a couple hours from home. It was hot, so we stopped at Kahlotus, Washington, for a cold drink. Kahlotus is one of those sad little towns that have been decimated by agri-business and the increasing efficiency of farm machinery, and they sit abandoned on the secondary roads of wheat country, forgotten like discarded beer cans. Most of them have a filling station, though, with a convenience store, and we bought a couple of cokes and sat at a picnic table in the shade.


While we sat there, I noticed a woman in obvious distress, gesturing frantically at a teenage boy with a 12 Volt inflating device in his hands. Two willowy, athletic looking, teenage girls stood by, their arms crossed over their chests in the classic "Bored Teen" stance. I sat my soft drink down and walked over to their vehicle. "Problem?" I asked. The woman backed away from me (motorcycle clothing, you see....) and wailed: "We have a flat tire and I can't find anybody in this stupid town to fix it! I've got to get these girls to a soccer clinic at WSU! Do you know how to work that thing he has....."


I stared at her for a moment, and then asked. "Well, let me see....don't you have a spare?"


"A spare what," she cried.


"A spare tire...it's usually in the trunk somewhere."


"Well," she muttered. "Even if I do, I don't know what to do with it."


I sighed. "Tell you what...if you and your young ladies here will unload your trunk, I'll try and find your spare...if you have one, my wife and I will change it for you, but only if you watch and learn how to do it."


Within a couple of minutes, they had unloaded the cavernous trunk of their sedan, and I had found the spare, the lug wrench, and the jack.
My wife walked over with our fast warming soft drinks.....

"First thing," I said. "See those nuts? They hold your wheel on to your wheel hub...they've been put on with power, though, and you can't loosen them by hand...here's the trick." I put the lug wrench on at a parallel angle, and then stood on it, with my hands on the fender for balance, and bounced up and down until the lug broke free, We did all the rest, jacked up the car, spun the nuts the rest of the way off, pulled off the flat tire, installed the emergency wheel, installed the nuts finger tight, dropped the jack, and tightened the lug nuts, standing again on the wrench. "There you go, ladies, as you can see, it ain't rocket science!" The young girls were grinning, and the lady was almost delirious with relief. She tried to hand me three twenty dollar bills. "No, I'm not gonna take any money. Just speak highly of school counselors in the future if you can, because I know most teachers despise us! Just remember that a school counselor changed your wheel today (she had told me she was an elementary school teacher). By the way, don't drive over 50 mph on that wheel ... and once you get to Pullman? Drop the girls off at the clinic and then go to a tire repair shop and get your original wheel fixed....okay?" They thanked us again, piled into the car and drove carefully off.....


We finished our drinks, crawled on to our old bike, and headed in the opposite direction, toward home.... On the bike that we had learned to rebuild the front forks of, installing seals and sliders and progressive springs, and a fork brace made of solid aluminum...on the bike from which we had yanked out the carburetors, and rebuilt them, with Red's slender and supple fingers doing most of the work... on the bike that we tuned with new plugs and new exhausts...on the bike that we changed timing belts on twice... on the bike where we had laminated new ABS plastic on our cracking rear trunk lid, and then reinforced the top with sheet aluminum, which I polished with a grinding disc... on the bike that we had installed an after market spin on oil filter adapter, after we had stripped the filter basket bolt by cross-threading it .....on the bike the tires of which we'd learned to take off and spoon on ourselves.... on the bike that had carried us across the country several times, up to Alaska, and back to Nova Scotia.... for 100,000 miles that bike had carried us...but we always had a grease stained service manual in our sidebags, and as many tools as we could carry in the other....the bike that taught us how to care for it, as well as for ourselves......


I stopped at a side road for a drink of water from the plastic container we carried between us. "What are you thinking," my lovely wife asked. "Oh," I replied. "I'm thinking of a woman who would take a two hundred mile trip through the scab lands of Eastern Washington on a hundred plus degree day....in a car that she didn't know how to change a tire on.... man....that woman is brave, huh?"



Epilogue: Several months later, back on the job, I came into my office after a longish lunch break ride, and my secretary handed me an envelope. "What's this," I asked. "Who's it from?" "Don't know," she replied. "Some lady came in and asked if we had a counselor that rode a motorcycle....I told her 'yes, but you were out on it'" "She then asked if you had a red-headed wife, and I said 'yes,' and then she handed me that and said it was for you.....Oh, and she told me to tell you that she absolutely loves school counselors!' I tore the envelope open... there was no note, just a healthy -- very healthy -- gift certificate to a very pricey local restaurant. Sometimes, good deeds come back.....

Two wheels and an engine have freed me from the earth, and have given me the earth at the same time. With hardly any effort at all, I can cross mountain ranges and prairies and a continent that took men of a century and a half ago weeks and months and years. This simple, uncomplicated, mechanical device is often overlooked for the miracle it is..... It isn't transportation, it's transformation. To ride across this nation in a box, or, even worse, to fly over it in another shinier box, isn't the same thing, not by half. To ride in the open air alongside the Oregon Trail ruts, the explorer rivers leading west, and the great seashores is perhaps the most vibrant way to link the past to the present, and perhaps even to the future .... at least I've found it so. I'll ride until I die. Free range is what the motorcycle gives us, free range..... And for some of us, the blessed, or perhaps the cursed, free range is as necessary as oxygen.

The Miracle Of A Tent.....

“Enlarge the place of your tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of your habitations: spare not, lengthen your cords, and strengthen your stakes.” Isaiah 54:2

Tents. We take them for granted. There are generally four issues of human survival: air, food, water, shelter. The tent was one of the first shelters ever purposely devised by mankind.....no one knows just exactly when the tent was invented, but an ancient shelter unearthed in Russia was carbon dated to 40,000 years ago..... and that was some time ago, my friends, some long time ago. Roman Legionnaires and Mongolian Cavalry and Lakota Buffalo Hunters all sheltered under tents; and it is the shelter of choice and convenience for nomadic peoples up until modern times. Armies since before the Roman empire have carried tents. Tents are established human tools.

And what better shelter for a motorcycle traveler could be imagined? Cheap, portable, durable, the tent can be strapped to almost any motorcycle ever made..... All over the globe, people traveling on motorcycles usually have a tent strapped on behind. When my wife and I were much younger, and even more impoverished than we are now, we decided to see the world anyway we could....and what made it possible for us was the relatively inexpensive motorcycle, and the even more inexpensive tent. With a motorcycle, tent, and sleeping bags, no part of the world was denied us.... You can generally spend 4-5 nights camping for the expense of one night in a motel or hotel. With a tent like the Eureka Timberline 4 (still under $200), a couple of medium quality sleeping bags with pads, nearly all the world is yours, and because of modern materials you will be warm, dry, and comfortable. We've spent certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nights in tents, and we were truly miserable only once or twice -- generally because of high heat and humidity.

We are a bit older now, and have stepped up to a motorcycle tent trailer, and it's a true luxury. But if that tent trailer evaporated tomorrow, I'd go out into my garage and look over my tent collection -- four, five, or so -- choose one, strap it on, wait for my irrepressible partner to climb on, and motorcycle off without fear or regrets. We've traveled far with our wonderful tents, and we could go a bit further with one, a bit further.... If a tent was good enough for Julius Caesar, Ghengiz Khan, or Crazy Horse, it's good enough for us!

The Beemer guy.......

He was clad all in leather and rode a BMW flat twin airhead. He sported a magnificent white, gunfighter mustache, waxed and twirled at the ends, and appeared to be in his mid-seventies. He told me that he had walked out of a corporate boardroom meeting twenty years before (this was in 1992), crossed a street and bought his BMW motorcycle new right off the showroom floor, and had been touring the world ever since. When I expressed my admiration, he gestured toward our old Goldwing with the second hand sidecar, and at our frolicking six year old, and at my lovely redheaded wife. "You're on the right track yourself, son," he said. As we stood there, an Alaskan Highway Tour bus pulled in to the gas stop, and disgorged a score of customers, all of whom immediately shuffled bent-headed into the attached convenience store. He sighed, and said, "Have you ever seen such a collection of half-dead people in one spot before? Beware the tour bus fate at all costs!" After a few minutes more, he mounted his bike and pulled out on the highway, heading north, smoothly climbing his gears.....

Love of country.....

I love my country... sea to sea, border to border, prairie to mountain to prairie. Over the years, as we've ridden our motorcycle across its vast vistas under an unlimited sky, as we've slept in tents in a thousand different fields under a billion stars, the spirit of those who came before us wafted unto our souls and left us changed forever. Native Americans, colonists, settlers, warriors, farmers, poets, cowboys, lumbermen, railroaders, sailors, miners, gamblers, outlaws, thieves, prostitutes, school teachers, preachers, Mormons, Mennonites, Amish, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics.....dreamers...all dreamers. We've rumbled alongside their wagon ruts, their abandoned homesteads, their ancient fields, their shining courthouses, their churches with soaring steeples..... and somehow we heard all their songs above the roar of our engine. Their music is now forever in us, and I love my country... sea to sea, border to border, prairie to mountain to prairie.