You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that
he doesn't have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned
brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell
then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in
position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters
when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice
and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead
things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they're back
and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming
and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of
living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely
different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and
because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window
everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all
moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're
in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is
overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the
real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't
focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the
whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate
consciousness.
Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and
maybe headed farther than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to
travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing. Secondary roads are
preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next.
Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is
measured with emphasis on ``good'' rather than ``time'' and when you make
that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are
long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you
bank into turns and don't get swung from side to side in any compartment.
Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of