Just a note: Most of the stories I write are fiction, with a few exceptions. This is fiction, and it's more a stream of words that came barreling out of my brain than a story. Blame any typos or horrible grammar on me. Thanks for reading!
It pretty much started two different ways. The first was when I told my boss to fuck off. Obviously, that was pretty much the end of my employment with that company, but it was worth it. You put in sixty hour a week, you bust your ass, and you get shafted so that the bosses can kiss political ass? I'm done. So that was part one.
The second part was Mandy. My old love. My first love. Hell, if I was being honest my only love with every woman since her just kind of filling a space but not doing it well. Like trying to fit a round peg into a heart-shaped hole. She and I had reconnected online, and then over the phone, and the old flame still burned. Maybe. I wasn't sure if it burned more on my end than hers, but there was heat on both sides. She lived two states away. I'd burned for her in solitude, and from what I could tell, she burned for me. Both of us had ended up single after a long time, and I had nothing really holding me to where I was. Well, since I was now unemployed, why not find out how she really felt?
I probably should have called her first, but at the time I was so pissed off with my situation that I decided that I was just going to ride. Motorcycles were my life. There's nothing like riding for me. I didn't care if I was rolling through the interstates of the Midwest, or carving the canyons of the Rockies and all the foothills. Hitting the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was freedom. It was experiencing the road in a way that you can never feel if you're in a car. When you're riding the Natchez Trace through Mississippi, you can smell the fields and the magnolias rather than recycled, air-conditioned venting. Trees older than your great-grandparents spread their branches over the road and shade you as you take the soft curves past towns and roads with old, funny names like Lickinghole Creek, Virginia and Smelley, Alabama. If you take the Five and Dime in Virginia, you smell the river air as you roll by peanut farms and feel the history around Jamestown and Yorktown, thick and heavy and full of ghosts and hidden stories. It feels different than when you're cruising through back country highways in Wisconsin, where cows watch you roll past and every town has its own brewery and cheese shop.
You understand why people live where they live, and in your own way you wish you could live there too and experience everything they experience, like eating BBQ in Tennessee and you think "Yeah, here is good." and you feel that way until you take the side-roads down through Tennessee and into Alabama and taste their white BBQ sauce and then you think "Yeah, here is good". And that lasts until you hit Vicksburg, Mississippi and you can watch an entire tree covered in fireflies blinking and flashing and you think "Yeah, here is good." And then you take Highway 61 to Vidalia, Louisiana and roll through field after field of cotton and corn and beans, dodging the occasional armadillo and sometimes even a gator, and you think "Yeah, here is good". Dodging hail storms in Wyoming. Oysters in New Orleans. The red canyons of Utah. The mountain roads of Idaho, the Pacific Coast Highway. "Leaf-peeping" in New England. Every backroad that is a tiny line on a map is a possible adventure.
I rode so much that I had to put a car tire on my rear, "darksiding", because it got to the point where I couldn't afford to buy a new tire every ten-thousand miles as I was buying three tires a year at a minimum. People considered me a little nuts. I couldn't say they were wrong but it was far better than some of the other alternatives to dealing with stress.
Bottom line -- when I needed sanity, I didn't find it in a bottle or a pill or some shrink telling me to talk about my parents. My parents rocked and that quack shrink can kiss my ass. It was the world that made me nuts. I found my sanity in the saddle of a v-twin horse, on any road that had curves and beautiful scenery. If I have to explain it any more than that, I doubt you would understand.
My ride was metric. I know that's going to get me a lot of hate from Harley guys, but when I do maintenance I have one plug and one filter to deal with. Can you say the same? Didn't think so. My last bike was metric and it went for over 50k before I sold it for something bigger, and it rode just as good as it did when I first bought it. My current ride had close to 40k miles, and all I had to do was change the oil, change the tires and put gas in the tank. Well, there was one snapped bolt on a saddle bag, but that was aftermarket and as far as I could tell the bolts were made of Chinesium. A quick trip to Tractor Supply fixed that. The only real knock on my bike was that it was quiet. Guilty as charged. I didn't wake the neighbors when I started it in the morning. So sue me.
I started off heading south. Through the canyons of Utah, Highway 89, and then I took a detour to Monument Valley. You ever see the movie "Forrest Gump"? You remember the scene where he stopped running, and all the people following him lost their shit? That was filmed in Monument Valley. I'd always wanted to ride it, so what the hell, let's do it. Scenic in a way that no photograph could ever really capture. After that I rode back to 89 and turned south again, rode until I came out on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Again, there's no photo that can do it justice, as if man couldn't build a camera to take in all of God's creation. I spent a day there, and then headed to Flagstaff. Most people are shocked when they find out that Flagstaff gets snow, but it's up way high in altitude. It gets cold when you're looking down at the clouds.
From there I hit 40 West, and then turned off on to old Route 66. I had always loved that song, especially when it was sung by Ella Fitzgerald. It was quite a bit slower than taking the interstate, but this wasn't about speed. This was about me clearing my head. If you've heard the song, you know the cities. Flagstaff. Kingman. Barstow. ♪Won't you get hip to this timely tip?♪ Just before Kingman there's a stretch of old 66 that carves through the mountains called the Mojave Rattlesnake. I hadn't ridden that before. No time like the present. Curves, leaning and rolling on the throttle, straighten up just in time to hit the next one, lean, roll on the throttle. Go too fast and you're scraping your floorboards, sparks flying and your foot bouncing from the impact. I scraped my floorboards quite a bit. Every mile cleared my mind just a little bit more. Fell in with a pack of bikers on adventure bikes doing a tour of the USA. We were eating lunch at the same place, and ended up laughing our asses off at the same joke. When you're riding, there's some safety in numbers, and they were a good bunch of riders so I rode with them until they turned north to hit Las Vegas, and I continued west. They informed me that "Las Vegas" means "The Valleys". Huh, never knew that. We waved as we headed separate ways.
I turned off of Route 66 back onto I-40 and headed into Bakersfield. From there, I headed up Highway 99, because I-5 is straight, boring, and full of idiots and jackasses. Rode north until I got to the junction of 99 and I-5, then rode that until I got to a little town nestled in the mountains of Northern California. I pulled into Shasta Lake and thought about where I was going. I had cleared my mind quite a bit with my ride, but Mandy still made me lose what mind I had cleared. I know we'd said some stuff online, sure, but online is different than real life. Hell, a telephone conversation isn't really real until you're face to face. Did she actually want me? Not a clue. I know I wanted her. Badly.
When we first reconnected, it had just made me happy. When we actually started talking though, deep conversations, it was like a little piece of my soul that I though was gone had suddenly came back and I didn't even know it was missing. Was I being stupid? Probably. Nobody ever accused me of being smart when it comes to personal relationships. I could manage multi-million dollar budgets and train people in thirty different states at the same time, but I would piss you off as I did so. That was probably part of the reason I ended up telling people to kiss my ass at the job, right? Let the bridges that I burn today light my way forward. Was I actually reading things right, or was I imposing my emotions and thoughts on what was just playful chat?
Well, I'd come this far. There was only one way to find out.
I gassed up and pulled back onto I-5, turning off where my GPS told me, and slowing rolling through quiet streets until I pulled up in front of a little house with a tree shading the front yard. Didn't wake the neighbors. Nice thing about a quiet bike- you don't get all the lookie-loos that a ride with loud pipes would get. I stopped, put down the kickstand, and took a deep breath. This could go wrong in so many ways. What if she slammed the door in my face? What if she had company? Hell, what if she had a boyfriend? I realized just how stupid I was being. I should have just kept on going. I should have ridden until I hit Forks, Washington, where that stupid movie with sparkly vampires was filmed. Ride through the northern forests and then across the mountains. What the hell was I doing?
