Editorial

EDITORIAL

Rain, rain, don't go away

An alternative to building an ark

THE LADY IN THE BLUE DODGE FELT more than sorry for me; she was feeling sheer, absolute pity. I could see it in her eyes as we rode side-by-side, she in comfort in a station wagon, me in apparent misery on a motorcycle.

It’s easy to understand why she felt that way. Because to say that it was raining hard at the time would be a gross understatement, like calling Mt. Everest a “big hill.” Nossir, this was your basic deluge, a raging torrent that was hosing us down like we were riding through God’s very own fiftycent spraywash. And when that compassionate woman, warm and dry in one of Lee Iacocca’s finest, wiped the fog off her window and saw me stuck out in that monsoon without so much as a windshield for protection, she seemed to utter something like, “Oh, you poor, poor man.”

But there were three things she didn’t know; 1 ) I was as snug as a bug in a Baggie, for I had appropriately wrapped myself in some of motorcycling’s best wet-weather riding

gear; 2) I was in the nucleus of that storm by choice, having seen the dark, angry, water-heavy clouds off in the distance and ridden furiously just to

get beneath them; and 3) I was having one helluva good time.

No, I’m not masochistic, but I do get great enjoyment from riding in the rain with the proviso that I can dress for the occasion. But, because in the past year there hadn’t been sufficient rainfall in the L.A. area to make one good puddle, I hadn’t been rain-riding in quite some time. It even had been a while since I had gotten rained-on when riding outside of the SoCal area. So when I saw those

thunderheads looming just over the horizon, all black and sinister and doomsday-looking, I got a sadistic grin on my face and headed right for

them, hell-bent for inundation.

Ah, except that “right for them” wasn’t where the road headed. The highway I was on ran North-South, but the storm was to the East and moving even farther in that direction.

And my map said that there were no main roads between me and the storm. So I had no choice but to find the nearest East-West secondary road and hope it would lead me to the rain.

It did. Eventually. The “secondary road” I found was more like a narrow, bumpy, asphalt cow-path that snaked its way up one side of a mountain and down the other. I hit pea-soup fog before I had been on the road 10 miles, and about 15 miles after that I rolled into the cold, ugly, nasty part of the storm, which dumped rain on me like I was the second coming of Noah.

It was great. I really liked it.

But the fun was too short-lived. The road came to an end at a fourlaner, the same one where, minutes later, the lady in the Dodge would exhaust a month's supply of pity on me. And a few miles later, the downpour slacked off to a feeble drizzle. Obviously, I simply had to find another East-West road, no matter how narrow or winding or secondary or thirdendary, that would get me over the next mountain and back into the thick of the downpour.

I succeeded. In more ways than one. Because catching up to my precious rain led me onto a road that gives new meaning to words like “desolate” and “unimproved.” It was 50 miles of narrow, winding torture-test that I doubt any four-wheel-drive vehicle could have traversed. Landslides had blocked the road in places, leaving barely enough room for me to tiptoe my two-wheeler between giant piles of rocks and sheer drop-offs so high that, well, had I fallen over the edge, I'd have starved to death before hitting bottom. The road surface sometimes was remnants of what had once been concrete, sometimes chunked and broken asphalt, but mostly mud and rocks and ruts and steep climbs and descents. And there wasn’t a hint of life anywhere; no people, no buildings, no signs, no nothing.

It also was getting darker, colder and foggier by the minute, and the rain would occasionally come down in sheets. I still was warm and dry inside my cocoon of plastic, but I had used 145 miles of the gas tank's 165-mile approximate range as I crested the mountain, and my best guess was that anything resembling civilization was at least 20 miles farther ahead.

I won’t keep you in suspense; I made it without incident. An hour later I rolled into a gas station on a main road, with 173 miles on the odometer and the engine running on fumes; I dumped exactly 3.5 gallons of ethyl into a tank that holds . . . 3.5 gallons. Three hours later I was home.

While this ride either would have been a disaster or altogether impossible with any other kind of wheeled device, on a motorcycle it was a rousing good adventure. And that reinforces my belief that some of the best rides come when you act on sheer impulse and take off in a different direction whenever the spirit, or the lure of an interesting-looking road stretching off into the horizon, moves you. Exploring, it’s called.

In my case, exploration was a sideeffect of my run for the rain, but it doesn't have to be that way. And neither must you have a special bike to be a proper explorer. Obviously, some machines, such as dual-purpose bikes, allow a lot more latitude in the terrain they can handle than, say, full-dress tourers, but they’re not a necessity. As evidence, consider the bike I used for my adventure; the Kawasaki Vulcan cruiser that appears on the cover. Cruisers aren't known for their prowess on remote backroads and irregular surfaces, but they're not bad at it and miles better than anything with more wheels.

I don’t do enough exploring these days. I get caught up in the discipline of testing, and I forget how much fun it can be to pick a direction at random and then ride off in it. Don’t let that happen to you. Maybe if it would rain more often around here, it wouldn’t happen to me.—Paul Dean