This Is Who They Are

Mostly, I keep my political opinions on another location and, yep, I am a “libtard” as are all of the intelligent people I have ever known in my life. If there were ever going to be a moment where my mission, "Warning: If you're looking for a pleasant conversation about motorcycling from a frozen-north Minnesota Nice perspective, good luck with your search. As Bobby Dylan once said, 'it ain't me, babe,'" might skip a beat, “Keep moving buddy. “Nothing to see here.” Today, like all of this damn month, I’m pissed off.

We all know who “both sides” of this crowd are, don’t we? Motorcyclists have been grouped with “bikers” for at least 70 years, to our huge disadvantage and outright physical hazard. The helmet-less, muffler-free, skill-less biker crowd have made noise on the streets and in our legislatures to the total disadvantage of the actual 1-10% of motorcycle owners who use their vehicle as a goddamn vehicle. Every noisy-ass biker blubbering down a freeway, on a country road, or through neighborhoods is pissing off every cager and homeowner they pass and making enemies for the few of us who believe a motorcycle is a transportation vehicle with the same rights and responsibilities (that is the most unpopular word in the wingnut world) as every other vehicle on the road.

These rioting “protestors” are same people who think being asked to wear a mask to protect themselves and their community from a life-threatening virus pretend that being required to wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle on public roads or paying a health/life insurance premium for the privilege of risking their lives pointlessly is a “freedumb” issue. We know these people. Like the maskless fruitcakes, these butt-ugly jackasses think the rest of us want and need to see their scroungy (male or female) ponytails, weird-assed inbred faces (quoting Larry McMurtry, “One could have laid a rule from forehead to chin without touching either his [or her] lips or his nose.”),  faux-ZZ Top beards (apologies to Frank), and hear their mistuned, unmaintained junk-twin hippobikes for miles around. The rioters were the same arrogant, entitled, lazy-ass incompetents that motorcycle has been plagued with since a pack of misfit WWII “vets” decided to bring home the hell they supposedly opposed in Germany and the Pacific. Based on the number of German helmets, swastika tattoos, and white supremist paraphernalia you see decorating bikers and their rides, it’s pretty obvious that if they fought at all, they were on the wrong side.

Likewise we, unfortunately, know the cops who coddle and cringe from the biker gangsters, their illegal exhaust systems, and their traffic-snarling pirate parades. Those DC cops who were so courageous, when it came to piling on a 120 pound female BLM protestor or charging an unarmed kid with military weapons at a Occupy Wall Street protest, will just watch as a pack of bikers waddle through town making more noise than a Boeing 737 on take-off or attack the United States Capitol Building in an effort to overthrow an election. Worse, they’ll not only ignore the peace-disturbing noise-makers, they’ll direct traffic to accommodate the gangbangers or fascist, racist rioters. In the case of 1/6/2021 (we will remember this date like 9/11/2001), off-duty cops participated in rioting and attacking the police who defended the Capitol Building. Some even had the gall to claim “we’re doing this for you” while they attacked the police defending the Capitol.

There is also the fact that, usually, the biker gangbangers are white and look exactly like the goobers who overran the DC capitol police. Occasionally, the bikers will be Hispanic or black and, oddly, they will get pretty much the same treatment as their inbred white “brethren.” Huh? Imagine that. So, even when the police are not on the same side as the lawbreakers, they are terrified of them and, probably, their fellow collaborating officers. In the meantime, the taxpaying public is screwed coming and going.

As Hudson, Wisconsin residents discovered and I noted in “Running from the Outlaws,” when the biker gangbangers show up, the cops vanish. Like many of the DC rioters, the bikers usually have long criminal records which, for no good reason, never seems to prevent them from possessing firearms, threatening the peace and quiet of cities large and small, and appears to make them immune to the laws of the country. Why is that? Two reasons, the cops are terrified of anyone who might fight back in numbers even close to the force the cops might bring and the cops and the bikers/rioters are on the same side of most political arguments.

Two of Trump’s big support groups were (and are) bikers and cops. In a rational world, you’d think that would be totally impossible relationship. We don’t live in that world and I am fast becoming convinced we aren’t an animal capable of rational thought.

I became painfully aware of this odd cohabitation when I taught an “Experienced Rider Course” somewhere in the 2006 time-period. The “students” were 13 Hennepin County Sheriff’s deputies and I was under the delusion that this might be one of the rare ERC classes that wouldn’t be deafening. Usually, ERC groups were biker “clubs” trying to skate through training to obtain insurance discounts for their gang members. Turns out, that’s the deal for training cops, too. Like the Iron Brotherhood gangbangers I wrote about back in 2013, these badged goobers were all-but-one on geeked-up Hardlys with illegal exhausts and more chrome crap than a 1960’s American car. The one exception was a very competent deputy on a Goldwing. The class was deafening, full of attempts to get on to the range without a helmet (against the state and MSF rules), and there were lots of the usual attempts to skip over or ride through the mildly complicated exercises. Maybe 2 of the 13 cops in the class were competent riders, with the Goldwing rider being more skilled by octaves above the other cops. I learned something in that class too, “Don’t expect cops to enforce laws on other biker gangbangers.”

Human history might be no more on the side of the MAGA goons than it will be on the Trump Republicans or the police who have fermented and inspired the white supremist and domestic terrorists that the biker culture best represents or the historically racist and anti-labor police actions of the recent past. Or not. If Hitler and Nazi Germany had won WWII, history would be on their side and we’d all be hearing and telling stories of how brilliant 1940’s Germany was in exterminating non-white people the world over. History is a story told by the winners and we have no idea who the winners will be, yet. Eventually, of course, it won’t matter. We’ll flip the world’s environment into a climate that won’t support human life or the planet will get clobbered by another asteroid extinction level event and none of this will matter. Humans will be gone and whatever life that comes next might not even know we ever existed.

Right now, honestly, that is a kind of comfort. I am so disgusted with my country, with 74 million American citizens who not only voted for fascism twice in 4 years but who so rabidly worship their “great and fearless leader” that they would rather see the nation’s fragile attempt at democracy fail than see their cult leader waddle off into the disgraced sunset (likely to see jail time and his seventh and final bankruptcy).

A Climate of Anxiety?

French censors sent this ad back to the lab because “discredit[s] the automobile sector [...] while creating a climate of anxiety.” Those snowflake car owners (or dealers and manufacturers?) get nervous seeing the effects of their products on television?

You Can’t Have It Both Ways

Gangsters and cops have similar problems; they both want to have the public’s fear and respect. Fear and respect are, however, not the same thing and you can’t have one and the other.

Fear is easy to generate. You just have to be willing to do things decent people would never do. Shoot a few unarmed minority kids in the back and you have successfully terrified a community. Dress up like Hell’s Angels, Banditos, or the Outlaws and make more noise than a freight train hauling 100 tanker cars while the cops pretend they don’t see or hear you and you’ve sent a pretty powerful message to the public, “Even the cops are scared of us.” That’s fear.
Respect is what cops get when they run toward an “active shooter” when everyone else is running away. Respect is what firemen earn when they go into burning buildings to rescue people. Nobody respects bikers, but bikers aren’t bright enough to know fear from respect or they don’t care as long as they can convince themselves that they’re getting respect from the people they’ve terrorized.

Recently, our city police chief was asked, on Facebook, to explain the law surrounding Minnesota’s idiotic “Road Guard” legislation. Obviously, the questioner was pissed off at being detained by some nitwit pirate waving a pile of even dumber gangbangers through a public intersection. Being at the tailend of my life, between myasthenia gravis and CHF, I’ve pretty much had it with political correctness and fear. So, I commented on how stupid I think that whole law and pirate/gangbanger biker parades are. The response was expected and predictable, including the hilarious claim that pirate parades raise money for charities; as if it is impossible to contribute money to charities without the noise and air pollution of motorcycle exhaust.

Honestly, I didn’t expect any sort of rational response from either the police chief or the bikers. The bikers are flat out fun to fire up because they are consistently a pack of clueless nitwits.I really do hate the "road guard" legislation and our simpering wimp legislature totally bend over and took it up the ass from ABATE and the biker/gangster crowd in passing this total joke of a law. Asking working people to wait while a parade of incompetent jerks on tractors pretends to be doing something important really highlights the decadence in our lawless, irrational Failing Empire. There is NOTHING about a biker parade that is worthwhile and, at the least, a rational society would relegate this sort of silliness to unpaved farm roads. 

And that is exactly what I think.  

The Cell Phone Rule

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day

New road trip rule: Never travel with anyone who carries a multi-function touchscreen phones.

Case One: For a decade or two my brother, Larry, and I have talked about taking a motorcycle trip together. Larry suffers from the classic Kansas "I don't care, what do you want to do?" indecision syndrome and the trip has been on-again, off-again for at least three years; as has been his motorcycle ownership decision. Our 2007-2010 trips were cancelled due to family disasters. In 2011, after a summer of missed schedules and minor miscues we began to "organize" a trip around Lake Superior in July. 

Organize is a misused word when it comes to the two of us; or just me. When I bought my WR250X, I told Larry about my plan to circle Lake Superior this summer and he asked if he could go along on my V-Strom. So, instead of prepping one bike for a trip I laid out the riding and camping gear and did the work and paid the tab for tires, chain and sprockets, and general maintenance for two motorcycles and two riders. I gave him a range of departure dates and waited to hear something for a month. I tried for the 1st week in July, no answer. I could feel the trip slipping away. I tried, again, for the 3rd week. Still quiet. I picked a day and got ready for the trip, solo. Four days before my planned departure day, Larry says it's a go. I had a motorcycle class the weekend before we would leave, so I crammed finishing up the V-Strom chores into 2 days. Larry arrived on Saturday night. We did a brief ERC to refresh his skills on Monday. We were on the road Tuesday at 6AM.

After a good start, we stopped for breakfast and the cell phone routine begins. He checked his text messages and sent a few. Then, he called his girlfriend and that's how we spent breakfast. So it went for each meal and every night's stop for a few days. We quit before dusk every day and he was on the phone until 2AM the first night. I didn't ask about his 2nd night, but I knew it went past midnight. The third day out, he was tired, slow to get moving, took long disorganized and unannounced stops, and finally got lost on the only highway going our direction. I backtracked 50 miles, looking in all the ditches, and couldn't find him. Cell phones are useless in Ontario, outside of two cities, so both of our phones were a waste of radio waves for 150 miles.

About 7PM, three hours after he disappeared, Larry called my wife and they talked about where he was, where I was, and where we could meet. What I got out of that was that he was alive and still in Canada. My wife isn't good with message translation. Luckily, Larry and I tripped over each other in Thunder Bay and got back on the path again.

Case Two: I took a couple of short road trips with a friend a few years ago. He's a proud man who believes he is in charge of all of his habits. But every time his iPhone phone rang he had to stop whatever he was doing and answer the damn thing. If we were riding, he'd pull over, take off his gear, and yak on the phone for a few minutes. All while I was stuck waiting for the phone jones to subside so we could get back on the road. The best I've seen him do is to stop to look at his phone and decide the caller wasn't as important as the task at hand and put the call off for an hour or two. He deludes himself into thinking that is a major improvement. It pains me to see a man enslaved to a crappy piece of technology and the expectations of everyone who knows his phone number.

The last couple of times my friend wanted to go somewhere, I suggested we take my car because we might be able to get there and back in my lifetime by cage. I figured if he just talked on the phone all the way to and from our destination while I drove we could save some time and hassle. Since I'd rather walk than travel by cage when the weather is even half-decent, we quit travelling together during riding season.

As I get older and grumpier, I'm generating lists of "never do that again" items. I've always hated telephones, but cell phones and the constant connection addiction took that to a new level. After the incident with my brother, I tossed my cell phone into the street and I haven't decided if I want to replace it. I might give my residual pay-as-you-go minutes to my daughter and be rid of that infernal technology for the rest of my life. Six months later, I haven't been inspired to replace the thing. This could be significant.

Part of what I love about motorcycling is the solitude, the remoteness of being on a one-person vehicle out of touch with work, responsibility, and my usual life. A mobile phone can defeat all of that, if you're not willing to turn the damn thing off. It appears to me that the fancier the phone, but more addicting the thing becomes. Once you can do more than have an unpleasant conversation on your phone, I suspect smartphoners begin to think the phone is actually more entertaining than the places and people nearby. If I'm who you're with and where we are is some place that took some effort to get to, I admit to being insulted by that slight.

The telephone is one of my least favorite modern "conveniences." I have a simple pay-as-you-go cell phone, but it's only turned on when I want to call someone. I rarely want to fool with my phone. In fact, in 2011 I bought 500 annual minutes and carried over 400 into 2012. The clanging, squawking, beeping, or tinny musical reproduction announcing a telephone call is a rude interruption to the flow of the moment. I'm a huge fan of the "no news is good news" philosophy and I can't remember the last time a telephone call brought good news. Phones are like spoiled children, shrieking "Look at me! Now!" I can decide when to receive and respond to snail mail or email. A telephone call is insistent that I respond when someone else decides to interrupt my day. Carrying a portable telephone is like spending a day with an enemy, nothing good will come from it. If you add more distracting functions to the telephone, I will only dislike it more. There is nothing "smart" that ever comes from a telephone.

So, I'm adding smartphone owning motorcyclists to my list of things to avoid; along with motorcycles previously owned by kids, Falstaff-ian motorcycles and bikers, going into debt for toys, being guilted into taking a trip with someone I don't know well, budget motorcycle riding gear,  vintage motorcycles, scooters, and all motorcycles with "personality," distracted cagers, riding cold or dehydrated, marketing people, panic reactions, and motorcycle hoarders. That list might have missed one or two other irritants I've written about or am about to write about. Call it an unwarranted prejudice, if you like. However, since I would just as soon avoid hearing one end of a two-way conversation that is as entertaining as Dick Cheney's sense of humor, I don't have a dog in this fight. It's not a hard problem to solve, either. I'll keep moving while you settle those trivial problems that come to you by cell phone and we'll talk about the trip when we get home.

Seriously? I'm Supposed to Care?

My editor recently tried to shame me into not using the word "cager" so much in my column and the news. Apparently, cagers think being called "cagers" is insulting. I only have one thing to say about that; who gives a fuck?

They should attend one of my MSF classes where I warn new riders to look out for cagers because their choice of vehicles has clearly marked them for incompetence. "If you need four wheels to balance yourself in your vehicle, you're obviously handicapped, incompetent, and dangerous." A cage is just an oversized Hooveround. If you need one, fine. Just don't ask me to call your crip-mobile a race car. Yeah, I'm specially pissed-off today. Live with it.

More to this Story?

A friend sent me this photo yesterday. Obviously, I'm not a fan of H-D's, but I don't want this picture taken "wrong." I'm not endorsing pissing on the company sign or the company's fans. I'm not much of a fan of any corporation, Honda included. The institution in general is psychopathic and one of the dumbest ideas the Romans ever stuck on humanity. That's saying something. The Romans were practically a waterfall of dumb ideas: slavery, inherited power, endless foreign aggression and never-ending war, overwhelming debt, and cultural moral decay. (Sound familiar?) The fact that the pope was one of the first British corporations says more to me than I need to know to dislike incorporation and, no, Millard, corporations are not people.

I'm assuming this sign is in Milwaukee. I have been to that city a few times, the last on a fruitless attempt to interview Eric Buell. Honestly, the place depresses me. It's a Rust Belt city with special emphasis on rust and poverty, with a few pockets of the filthy rich who are more depressing than poor people. I can't remember any part of the city looking as clean as this picture depicts. My wife's big complaint with the rich and corporations is that they are people who don't "pick up after themselves." I don't think anyone picks up after themselves in Milwaukee. It's like LA, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, or any number of places where people work and sleep, but almost no one lives.

It wouldn't be hard for me to be a Harley hater, but I'm agnostic on the concept (among other things). When Harley partnered with Eric Buell, I really wanted to like the company. When they shut Buell down and played Millard Romney with the future of his company, I very nearly hated HD. I'm sure some Italians feel the same way about how HD mishandled MV Agusta. Italian laws made it impossible for HD to trash the remains of MV, though. We don't have much in the way of law that protects workers from predatory corporations, so HD was free to toss Buell's products and workers into the trash can. I still believe that will come back to haunt HD as the braindead Boomers head into the sunset on their Hoverounds. But, I've been wrong a lot in predicting the future. I don't get Young Republicans and I don't get young people and  primitive, historic, slow machines.

The Hooligan Rides

Sunday morning, Sev sent me a note too look into the Streetfighterz Ride of the Century "event" in St. Louis. He joked, "Do you run the obvious "pirates on hippobikes" angle? Or do you go with the 'cops hassling innocent riders based on vehicle choice' angle?"

My first take was, "Looks more like spoiled children having tantrums on crotchrockets. I'm starting to think there is no such thing as 'innocent riders.'"

Take, for example, me. After plowing through the news, my French class homework, and way too many questions from my wife about her father's idiot (or idiot father's) financial mess, I went riding on the WR on the dirt roads north of White Bear.

About dusk, I managed to discover a rural rich person neighborhood that was a collection of wonderful dirt roads, that looped on themselves, ended up in deadends, and made about as much sense as downtown St. Paul. I was having so much fun tearing around the roads that I got lost and spent even more hooligan time struggling to get back to county road 7. I was a long ways from racing, but I was a good distance from plodding, too. Toward the end, I was getting a little frustrated with the endless loop neighborhood and I admit I was wicking it up a bit beyond my normal pace. I missed the escape turn twice, which cost me a couple of "laps" around the rich folks road and the last lap might have been my record time.

Back on pavement a few miles east of that neighborhood, an HP car came ripping down the road, swung a U-turn and came sailing after me just as I'd turned down another dirt road more-or-less heading toward Taylors Falls. He didn't hit his light, but I stopped when I saw him coming up behind me. He got out, took a look at me, now without my helmet and clawing at my key holder to get at my insurance info, and said, "I had a report that some kid was motocrossing a neighborhood. You probably weren't him."

I kept my mouth shut (Fuck you Sev, I can do it when there is a gun in the mix. And the gun isn't mine.) and waited for him to tag me or leave me alone. He left me alone. I went back to sliding my way to Taylor's Falls and came home back the same way, although a lot slower because it was dusk-to-dark.

The "moral" is, look as old as possible and cops don't take you seriously. I'm getting that trick down pat. Every day, I look older than the last.

On the way out, I was on a short but cool piece of asphalt with several 90 degree, 15mph curves when I about did a Victor (Victor put his BMW down hard coming home from work a couple of years ago. All he remembers about the incident was riding and not-riding. It happened that fast.) I hit a patch of oil or french fry grease or something equally non-traction'y and the bike went totally sideways and when I put my left foot out it slid just as friction-freely as my tires. Ice would have not been slicker. I didn't get a bite of traction until the back tire was in the gravel on the shoulder. A couple more feet and I'd have been slammed into a 3' deep ditch, $50k ass cheek down first.

Two things I learned from that experience: 1) my new leg is stronger than my old leg, because I can now hold up the bike with a foot out and 2) if I crash and die the cops will say "he made no attempt to stop" because there were no skid marks on the way to the ditch. The only sign I left was a couple of grease lines and some torn up grass on the shoulder.

Later, I avoided a group (herd?) of young deer with hard braking and no sliding on loose gravel. (Lots of deer and turkeys on the roads, BTW.) Clearly, I do not know how to lay 'er down. Again, the "evidence" police use to prove or disprove driver/rider attempts to slow or change direction would be absent.

Thank you hundreds of MSF class demos.

Vanishing Point

All Rights Reserved © 2011 Thomas W. Day

We're banned from using the wasted lane-splitting space on roads and freeways. When we are stuck in congested traffic, we aren't allowed to reduce that congestion by filtering to the front of the line. Some states single out motorcycles for DUI and inspection stops. Fuel wasting stop lights are designed to ignore us. Our license fees are way out of line in regard to the damage our vehicles do to roadways and our need for road maintenance. Urban public parking often bans motorcycles. Drivers are encouraged to risk our lives by distracting themselves to lethal incompetence with communication and entertainment centers, food and beverages, and soundproof sleeping accommodations. Someday soon, the highway of the future will be a robot-controlled, wired-in, GPS managed, glorified passenger train with no room for any sort of two-wheeled vehicles.

And what are we up in arms about? The right to be stupid.

Motorcycles are being shoved from the road and all bikers care about is the right to hear the wind whistling between their ears and to irritate as many people as possible with illegal exhaust systems.

The Philip Contos thing still irritates me. A guy kills himself fighting for the freedom to kill himself. If he were trying to damage motorcyclists' already pitiful public image, he couldn't have been more effective. Between the YouTube parade of hairy gangbangers on noisy two-wheeled tractors and Contos' demonstration of suicidal lack-of-skills, he made international news. Seriously. Enter "Philip Contos" into a search engine (put it in quotes, so you're only getting hits for this guy) and watch 17,000 or more articles appear with titles such as "Embrace Your Right to be Stupid' or "Biker Protesting Helmet Laws Dies of Head Injuries from Crash" or "Darwin Award Nominee - Philip Contos" or "Philip Contos Goes Head Over Heels At Anti-Helmet Rally" or any number of sarcastic headlines describing Contos' 15 minutes of infamy that reflect the public's low opinion of motorcyclists. Thanks, Phil. We needed that.

This is a freedom we're willing to fight for? When real freedom is vanishing in all directions, when access to public roads, practical use of the roads we pay for (at least with property and fuel taxes, if not with licensing taxes) is in jeopardy, we want to pretend that baring our heads to the tender mercies of asphalt and concrete is a "basic right?" Not me. If I'm only going to live so long, get into so many battles, and have limited energy for all of it, I'm going to pick my fights. I disagree with the helmet protest and I'm on the other side of the loud exhaust battle, so fighting for these silly issues is one of the many ways "motorcycle organizations" (almost as oxymoronic as "military intelligence") alienate me.

Most likely, the AMA, ABATE, the Motorcycle Industry Council, and the rest of the characters representing every point of motorcycling view but that of the daily commuter and the safety-oriented, law-abiding rider could care less about my nickels and dimes. I not only don't own $30,000 garage candy, I haven 't bought a new motorcycle since 1974. I am more likely to put my time and money into Occupy Wall Street than motorcycle political action for anything less than a movement to legalize lane-splitting or off-street downtown parking. If cagers have to wear seatbelts, motorcyclists should reasonably be expected to wear helmets. If I can't stage a 120dBSPL rock concert in my backyard, the pointless noise made by gangbangers and cager-squids in Honda Accords and rednecks in RAM pickups should be restricted to legal limits.

I am aware of the fact that my opinion doesn't matter. The money is behind the other arguments. Aftermarket companies sell loud pipes, bike manufacturers hustle the gangbanger or the squids-in-wife-beaters image, and even the politically-correct-and-connected AMA is only half-heartedly promoting safety and neighborhood-friendly exhaust systems. Even the MSF is afraid of offending the noisemaker crowd, because you can show up for an "Experienced Rider Course" on a bike that will deafen your instructors who have no way to send away a motorcycle that was, apparently, legal on the public streets.

All that probably makes the proponents of motorcycling's two big issues feel in control. They are fooling themselves. All around the country, local, state, and national politicians, traffic safety engineers, and planners are hearing complaints from communities, medical professionals, urban traffic planners, and insurance companies about the real issues motorcycles present. Very little of what they hear is positive. In fact, the story motorcyclists present is so overwhelmingly negative that we have about as much social clout as a climate scientist at a Tea Party convention. With many (or most) motorcycle "clubs" on the Justice Department's Gang and Terrorist Threat Lists, getting grouped in with "bikers" may be a fast route to Guantanamo for all of us.

So, how do we fix the mess we're in? While it might be too late for motorcycles and motorcyclists to fix a public image that is so wrong we're practically in the gangster category, we've got nothing to lose but energy we're going to burn sooner or later. 

My Alaska Adventure

All Rights Reserved © 2008 Thomas W. Day

When I was a kid, growing up in flat-as-a-pancake and boring as television western Kansas, I led a kind of Walter Mitty life. On the surface, I was a normal kid. I went to school during the week, went to movies and church on Sunday, played sports, threw a paper route and had part-time jobs, and tried to act normal. Under the surface, I read science fiction and adventure books, listened to jazz records, and planned my escape. My two favorite writers were Mark Twain and Jack London. My two favorite escape destinations were California and Alaska. I lived in California for almost a decade and discovered that frontier had been overpopulated long before I got there. Alaska is different.

I read about Twain and London's adventures in the wilderness and among men who risked their lives for a chance at doing something unusual and imagined myself living that kind of life as soon as I ran away from Kansas. I imagined myself saddling up a couple of horses and taking off for some remote part of Canada or Alaska, never to be seen again. The phrase, "this isn't Kansas anymore, Toto" held nothing but positive connotations for me. I couldn't wait to get as far from the Midwest as I could travel. Life didn't turn out the way I'd imagined and I've spent most of my life near the center of this country, including a dozen years in Minnesota. Now that my kids are grown and on their own and I'm in pretty good shape, financially, and in reasonable shape, physically, some of that old wanderlust returned to itch at me.

Three years ago, my 60th birthday was on the horizon and a collection of unrelated events jumpstarted my interest in traveling to Alaska. I began to seriously plan an extended trip to Alaska in the spring and summer of 2007. "Extended," for me, meant more than two weeks. I've been employed since I was 14, so two week vacations have been the limit of my adventures for more than 45 years. I planned to take 30 days to ride to Alaska and back. I mapped a route through northern Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana, up through Alberta, nicking British Columbia, into Alaska. I'd hoped to hit every significant historical and natural high point in the Alaska before I headed back down through British Columbia into Washington. I had a fairly extensive route planned for my return, too. There was a lot of wiggle room in my plan, because I'm usually pretty spontaneous once I get on the road, but I had a specific set of goals in mind for my first real adventure.

Then my wife stepped in and starting maneuvering some "security" into my plans. She, apparently, decided that I'm too old and fragile to do something like this on my own, so she recruited a work friend, Michael, to ride with me. She and I had dozens of conversations about how this wasn't going to happen, but I lost. "Conversation" is the word wives use for "argument" and "agreement" is the word they use for "I won."

For 50-some years, I have done almost every cool thing in my life on my own. I backpack alone, scuba dive alone, bicycle alone, and I dislike riding in a group, even for short distances. A "group" is two or more people. Having someone else along on my first month-long trip was a major concession for me. "Concession" is the word I use for "losing."

Michael and I met once, in January, as part of my wife's plot to get me to take on a co-rider. My wife introduced us. Michael asked when I wanted to leave. I said, "the first of June."

He said, "That's too early, it will be cold."

I said, "That's when I'm going."

He said, "Huh."

He rightly seemed to think I was far too stupid to ride with, if I thought Alaska in June was a good idea. I figured that ended that and went back to planning my trip. In May, my wife mentioned that Michael had put in for his vacation days and had been given the time off from work.

I said, "Huh?"

She had, apparently, continued recruiting him for the trip all through the winter and he'd decided that June was good enough for him. Now I had a co-rider, so I began to rationalize how this might turn out to be a good thing. By mid-May, I'd almost convinced myself a traveling companion would be less uncomfortable than a sharp stick in the eye. I figured we could start off together and, if it didn't work out, we could go our own ways. We'd both been on long solo motorcycle trips and we'd proven we could do it alone. That's the ointment I used on myself to keep from giving up on the trip altogether.

We had one more meeting, a week or so before June 1, and I discovered that Michael had his own route planned and it was a lot different from mine. I assumed we'd be going our own ways a lot sooner than I expected. You know what "assume" means, I assume.

Due to two cases of Midwestern Guilt and both of our well-evolved desire-to-get-along genes, it took us ten days to split up. The first 3,500 miles of my trip plan were scrapped for a route that Michael picked and one that only included a few hundred miles of my plan. I'd waited more than 50 years to make this trip. Some of Michael's plan was better than mine, but I'd have rather gone where I wanted to go. We went north, mid-Montana, into Saskatchewan instead of making the crossing at Glacier National Park where I’d planned to exit the US. We attempted to ride the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, where I crashed, separated a shoulder, cracked a collection of ribs, bruised a kidney, busted a bone in my right hand, and gravel-rash’d my bike and luggage. The Dempster had not been on my route plan, but I'd hoped to make a run at the Dalton Highway to Deadhorse. 

In Glennallen, Alaska after a day of rest and maintenance, I was sort of back on track; although I was off schedule and busted up. Michael and I shook hands and began two different adventures. He needed to get back home for work. I needed to get used to being on my own with my mending injuries. I arrived at the base of the Dalton Highway, just north of Fairbanks, where it took me an hour of staring at the road to accept the fact that I was too beat up to take on 1,000 miles of dirt road. As I turned south to explore more of Alaska and Canada, I also realized that I was completely in charge of where I’d go next. The next 6,500 miles and 18 days were some of the best moments of my life, let alone on a motorcycle. Nothing beats being by yourself, in the middle of nowhere, knowing that you are in control of everything that happens in your life at that moment.

So, if my wife ever tries to recruit you into going on a motorcycle trip with me, she's working on her own agenda, not mine. If she tells you I'm old, feeble, incompetent and suicidal, she's probably right. If she tells you that I need someone to take care of me in the wilderness, she's still probably right. If she says I want someone to ride with, she means she wants someone to ride with me. She is working from the purest of motivations. However, she is also working with poorly socialized material; me.

I'm as likely to want company on the road as I am to want you to slide your foot into my airport bathroom stall. I'll call you if I want company, otherwise, I'll be on the road; alone and enjoying my solitude.

Politically Incorrectness

Ah, political correctness:. saying what shouldn't be said, calling things what they are, expecting common sense in a world that has made sense about as common as unicorns. A friend recently sent me a definition of "political correctness" that included the phrase "a doctrine . . . that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end." (Credited on the WWW to a student from Texas A&M, the University of Melbourne, and several other institutions, including the US Army.) The rest of this definition included the delusion that political correctness is a property of liberals and that a minority is vested in this delusion, so I'm less than impressed with the whole. The part I quoted, however, seems pretty true.

My wife and I are deemed politically incorrect by our daughters and their husbands. One family is largely liberal and the other is very conservative. We're as incorrect to one as the other. Hence comes a portion of my belief that political correctness is one of those perspectives that depends on the viewer. Rush Limbaugh and his cronies have just as many untouchable subjects as do the most radical of the left, those topics are just found in different areas. In other words, both groups display typical "common sense" in their touchiness.

In a discussion about gayness, one of my daughters suggested that "no one" would "choose to be outcast" by a substantial portion of society. I'm not disputing the biological aspects of gayness, but I suspect (and always have) there there is a portion of nurture involved in most human qualities and decisions. Nature, while powerful, doesn't have much more power than does nurture. I know that's politically incorrect, but I'm too old to care.

In my eyes, this politically correct position was particularly funny coming from a woman who shaved her head (when not dying it a variety of florescent colors), spiked her nose, ears, and other body parts with all sorts of odd sharp objects, tattooed herself with a ball point pen, and did everything she could to make herself as strange looking as possible from age 15 until her early 20's. Knowing my own history as a 60's long-haired hippy freak, you'd have thought some aspect of discontinuity might have struck her during this proclamation.

In our speck of American culture, motorcyclists are packed with these sorts of intentional social rejects. The most obvious is the Harley gangbanger crowd. The majority of society looks at these folks as outcasts, even other motorcyclists. Why anyone would want to dress-up like characters out of a 1950's B-movie escapes me, but a substantial portion of the wanna-be crowd is really into looking like society's unwashed and unwanted and unemployed. There must be a strong call to those who can't find acceptance in polite company to make a sincere effort to find a home wherever they can. If that's true for punks and bikers, I can't help suspect it might be true for other outcast micro-cultures.

Once a group finds enough members to create critical mass, that group begins campaigning everyone else to grant their different-ness with proper respect. If respect isn't possible, fear seems to suffice. A group can leverage fear in a variety of ways: threatening legal action, threatening popular condemnation, or with violence. Fear rarely turns into respect, regardless of the tactic, and many of these groups continue to alienate the majority without a thought for the fact that fear is closely related to hate. Generating hate usually backfires.

The gangbanger motorcyclist attitude is creating that sort of back-pressure for motorcycling in general. In promoting their threatening, law-disobeying lifestyle, air and noise polluting "rights," and a lousy safety record on public roads, Harley's corporate image and the company's fans are spilling over into motorcycling in general. We're becoming as easy a bad guy stereotype as the Mob, IRS, FBI, CIA, and Arab terrorists. When an author or screenwriter wants to whip out an easy character to hate, a biker is as likely to come to mind as is any other culturally negative stereotype. I just finished John Stanford's Storm Prey and, for the 4th time in this 20-book series, bikers are among the bad guys. Stanford doesn't even have to work to create believable, crazy-vicious, stupid motorcycle characters. They just flow from the page without a hint of lost credibility. If you know these guys in real life, you know they are just as sociopathic and worthless as Stanford draws them.

In the not-so-long-run, this connection to the majority or motorcyclists is going to cost motorcycling a lot of rights and privileges. Our lame "representative," the AMA, is trying to handle this turd by what it hopes is the clean end. But as long as motorcyclists allow bikers to cling to some corner of "respectable motorcyclists" we're all getting tarred with a black leather brush. I'm starting to think that motorcycle commuters and touring riders need their own organization, one that seperates itself from the cruiser crowd and returns to Honda's successful "you meet the nicest people" sort of image-making. The boys in bandannas and leather can whine about how they are politically incorrectly seen as gangsters and bums, but the rest of us should serious consider what linking our means of transportation to their gangbanger activity does to/for motorcycling.

Think about it.