Youth Will Be Served

(I didn’t get to ride my motorcycle this holiday because of various family and social commitments, but I thought about it, which is what I do. In particular, I pondered a spin I took up in Northeastern Colorado many years ago, and, as a result, I reworked a story I had written about it. If you don’t ride, maybe it will give you an understanding of people who find joy on two wheels.

As always, I hope you will enjoy this, share with your friends, and subscribe, free or paid. My readership continues to grow and as long as it does, I’ll keep writing. Well, truth is, I won’t stop either way but it feels just that much greater when you know people are reading your work, and that some of them even think it is worth paying for. Thanks again for all your support. - JM)

“Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself.” - Anonymous

The last time I saw the Pawnee National Grasslands I was driving a beat-up old Ford from Burlington to Greeley, Colorado. I was a radio announcer on my way to do the play-by-play of a high school football game on the Western Plains. I think the Panthers were playing the Mustangs of Fort Morgan in a regional affair of some sort, but I hardly cared. The prairie around me was alive even though native blue stem and buffalo grasses had lost much of their summer green. The wind moved across their tops and the sky and road seemed like a single piece of creation, and they gave me memories I still cherish. The big world is open and accessible on the plains and you are misled into thinking your presence has meaning.

Pawnee National Grasslands, Colorado

I daydreamed about buffalo herds and indigenous peoples moving through those flatlands, and how they lived without driving wheels and cities and drug stores and restaurants. I also noticed the road, which had not changed since I had first traveled this section of the national park system on a motorcycle when I had been tempted by the throttle and the highway. The asphalt was straight and fresh and there was not a single curve on the horizon nor a vehicle on the road, and I began to contemplate speed and distance.

My bike was hardly up to any dream of unfettered acceleration. I was riding a Honda 450 in those days and had cleaned the plugs so many times it seemed impossible for them to deliver spark. I was a college student that summer and did not have the money to buy plugs; my first concerns were gas and food and sometimes a paid campground with a shower. I loved my bike, though, because it was dependable and had already taken me to a few dozen states I had never seen and had puttered up over the Rockies and into California as though it was not a challenge.

But I had switched out bikes with my buddy and he had been riding a Kawasaki KZ 1000, which was one of the fastest production bikes on the road when they first came into the marketplace. I did not know where he had got the money to buy such a beautiful machine but I think his dad had made the purchase. He did not mention the bike’s acquisition and had simply shown up riding it one day. On the trip across the High Plains, we had stopped to hear the silence, turned off our engines, listened to them tick, and walked away to where there was no sound but the wind moving through the grasses.

“You wanna try it?” Bobby asked.

“The KZ?”

“I’m offering.”

There is an unspoken rule among motorcyclists, even those with the most modest of machines, that you do not ride the other person’s bike; you especially do not make the request. But an invitation is a different thing, always unexpected and never easily accepted.

“Yeah, I’ll give it a go,” I said. “You sure?”

“I figure you’re staring at the white line and wondering about speed.”

I laughed. Friends understood. I tended to move through the world slowly and with observation of detail, but motorcycles were transformative. If I felt safe, I liked to roll up the power and let the bike perform. The KZ would carry me faster than I had ever ridden, and I was unafraid of its power.

The Dream Machine

We had come down from Nebraska on Highway 71 and the road had been impossibly straight and true. Rocky buttes rose out of the grass and the late afternoon sun turned them white against the sea of green. Our pace was leisurely and slightly burdened with cheap backpacks with metal frames and heavy cotton sleeping bags increasing our drag coefficient. The sun and clear sky and the churn of the little pistons were comforting and made me feel like I never wanted to get off the bike.

But I have always felt that way.

Bobby and I walked back to the bikes and exchanged keys. We had turned onto Highway 14 and were headed west. The road looked like it might not have a single bend before it reached California.

“It’s faster than its reputation,” Bobby said. “Be careful.”

“Yeah, I will. See ya in Greeley.”

I pulled my helmet with the bubble shield over my head and wondered what my Ma might think when she got the news her son had gone down speeding on a motorcycle not his own out in the middle of America’s big empty belly of land. She had taught me to entertain the worst scenarios as if they were certainties and I had decided to spend my youth in defiance of fear.

I had never been on a bike with that big of an engine displacement and compared to my little Honda it felt as though I were driving a car. The gears made a solid clunk like what I had heard when riding next to Harleys and I pushed the RPMs upward before shifting. I was at 80 by third gear and the wind was roaring in the ears of my thrift store helmet. The Kawasaki gave no indication that it was laboring with the acceleration.

I passed the cutoff for Keota and tore down the asphalt toward Briggsdale, and as the speedometer crossed 100 the only disconcerting feeling was the loudness of the rushing air in my ears. The little red dials on the RPM meter and the MPH were bounding and moving to the right but there was still too much roll left on the throttle and I wanted to see where it might take me. I did not pull it back all at once but eased the RPMs higher and felt the bike easily increase speed.

A bit of buffeting began to change the aerodynamics and I realized Bobby’s backpack had loose flaps that were now being torn to bits in the slipstream of 130 plus miles per hour, but I did not want to stop, and I did not. I took what little turn was left on the throttle and spun it until it would not go further. The engine’s response was as if it knew what was being requested and it met the demand of performance. I leaned over the instruments, lowered my head and pointed into the wind.

I lost my nerve on that long, gleaming straight, though, when the speedo crossed 140 mph and was still climbing. Maybe it was the air in my face, or I dreamed the ride getting too fast for control, but when I eased back on the throttle and got back down to 60 mph, I had the sense I could get off the bike and walk next to it as it rolled down the road.

I have never ridden faster since, nor do I expect I ever will. I crossed the Nullarboor in the Australian Outback on a BMW 1200 GSA while staring down the 90-mile straight, which is known as the longest roadbed on the planet without a single curve. I did not speed across Oz. My eyes were out for ‘roos and camels and wombats and sunsets. High-speed riding is not what motorcycling was ever about for me. I understand its allure and the excitement from speed but it has never equaled a horizon made jagged by mountains or a distant squall line of showers darkening a summer sky or a field a wheat bending gently beneath a June sun.

But just one time, I wanted to know about speed, intimately. I would much rather slow down and think about natives riding the plains or spring winds through the gramma or wildflowers tilting before a summer storm off the Rockies, and that’s what I did as I approached Greeley. I never remove motorcycles from my mind, though. They have taken me to all those memories.

And there are always new ones just down the road.