Big Day Out

I had the itch Friday morning, but they were still talking hail...by noon, I'd got sick of walking out into the garden and trying to stare down the clouds so I figured I'd just head in the general direction of the coast and see how far I could get before this unnatural Northern Hemisphere weather turned me around...I had some friends heading out to the clamming shack, which was 125 miles away according to Mapquest...one of the disadvantages of moving to a country where they use a different measurement system is that after a while, you forget to convert the numbers and end up thinking 125 'things' isn't all that far....by the time I got to the clamming shack, after what one of my associates in Australia would have called "an enthusiast's ride" - I'm told the bridge across the Columbia at Astoria, Oregon is 4 miles long, and when the temperature is below 50f and falling, it feels like it - I took my time to warm up and accept a gracious demand to join the crew for dinner...by 9pm the first two were asleep, and by 10 o'clock my reprobate friend and I were home from the bar and I was buried into a recliner rocker, covered in blankets and dreaming of tropical beaches where long bridges over cold rivers are merely tales to frighten small children...

I woke at 0530, I often don't sleep well when I'm travelling and I've been travelling for a while...I laid out all my riding gear near the front door the night before, and managed to haul it all out onto the front step without making too much noise...the downside of having parked the bike right next to the sliding door behind which everyone else was still sleeping was having to push it further than I'd ordinarily be happy to push 700 pounds of greasy metal across patchy sand and dead grass before I could start the thing. With hindsight this, coupled with only having had one meal and several beers since dinnertime on Thursday, was probably responsible for me deciding to sit down for a while to let the spinning stop, then remove the numerous layers of animal hide and go back to bed for an hour....by 7:30am, I'm motoring south, back towards the river, and feeling as good as I always do when I do this, even in the wind, the dark and the rain...

They get deer around here, and by the time I reach the bridge I decide that being paranoid about deer is preferable, even if only marginally, to being paranoid about elk so I decide to meander home on 'the Washington side'....plus, I really can't seem to generate a lot of interest for riding back across that bridge, given that it's around 10 degrees colder than it was when I rode over it heading this way....the Washington side is longer in time and miles but pretty and with less traffic....I pass two other bikes heading back the way I came and we wave...I wave at everyone, it's an inclusive pursuit, or at least it is for me...and if some other crazy bastard is out there in the post-dawn dreariness that most people, including me, would generally prefer to sleep through, then we have more than enough in common to wave at each other...

Twenty miles from the Interstate, I realise my boots are slowly filling with water...the jacket and pants are holding up reasonably well, but it's been too long a while since the boots saw enough polish...add it to next week's list...leather is great for preventing road rash and pretty damn good at keeping out the cold, and it's Old School which is good enough for me in the absence of a better alternative - but it's crap in the rain after any more than about half an hour...at this point I'm two hours into it, and now it's just a matter of reeling in the miles until the home stretch...

Stanley and I hit I-5 liked a raped ape on rails...whatever the hell one of them looks like, it's quick...this is a 'Sport model', and like 'Sport models' across every motorcycle brand across the planet, they are designed, in the words of the old Moto-Guzzi owner's manual, "to be ridden in a sportsmanlike manner"....which is the major part of why I bought this particular model bike, a Harley FXDX T-Sport, known by some, apparently, as the D-T....the rain is still on and off and there's still enough water on the road to make it worth staying switched-on for, but the Saturday morning traffic has dried out the highway a lot more than the backroads, and in no time we're up to 90 without even thinking about it, and then a sudden volley of red lights half a mile ahead means the lanes are diverging and I drop back under 70 and stay there while the cages jockey for position...

Once thick cowhide gets wet it pretty much stays wet, sometimes literally for days, and after a while the wicking of moisture by the wind is enough to start tapping at your core temperature...it's the same dilemma of whether or not to run to shelter in a rainstorm...for the record, I walk through rain at a casual pace and have no idea whether or not it helps or hinders getting rained on - it's that running away from water just seems so....undignified....it's a different dilemma when the wind has successfully located every existing pinhole in your clothing, and riding faster gets you there sooner but you get colder a lot more quickly...I realise that I forgot to stop for coffee or something to eat, and I've now had one small meal in almost 48 hours, 5 hours sleep sitting up in a chair, and it seems to be getting colder...when you're tired, hungry and alone it always feels like it's getting colder....I'm less than an hour from home now, so it's not much more than an inconvenience unless I break down, and it's good to learn where the gaps in my clothing are, this close to home...

It's always a guessing game, what to wear to go riding, and everyone regularly gets it wrong and ends up sweating buckets in black leather jackets on Fall days that turn into Indian Summer and just as often, like me, are dressed fine for the cold, and maybe a few 15 or 20 minute showers, but not for hours of steady rain...check and test, check and test....I'll be better prepared next week when I've got a couple of longer trips in mind, and getting too cold can mean the abrupt end of a ride or, worse I guess, a long horrible slow end to the ride. As it is, I'm cold but I'm further from misery than I am from home.

And then as I'm leaning hard into a long left hander sweeping through the Washington firs, The Sun comes out and suddenly God is in Heaven and all's right with the world again...the sun on one's face is one of hte biggest morale boosters in history, and it is all I can do to restrain myself from bursting into song...I burst into song anyway...I often think of Wagner when I'm riding (Da dudda da dah dah, dudder da dah dah, DUDDER DA DAHH DAH, dutter da daaaahhhh...who says German lyrics are difficult to learn?)...especially on the big six- and eight-laners with the 75mph speed limits, where you can open up a little, get creative, and you make that last lane change and suddenly you're in that big open space between the herds....flying along with the nearest other vehicle hundreds of yards ahead or behind, with the sun beating down....it's about as close as I get to prayer....

I hit the driveway just after 10:30, and there's no negatives to be told other than "I realised I need a flannel shirt"...the coffee's hot, the toast is brown and after a hot shower and a pair of dry socks it's already time to start sharpening the story of the day I rode for three hours in the rain to have breakfast...bon appetit.