Riding Home
Riding home
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
THERE MUST BE A TEMPERATURE/SUNlight sensor built into the brain of every motorcyclist who lives for the Sunday-morning ride. How else to explain the events of last weekend, when I awoke for no good reason at 6:30 a.m., rather than snoozing on to 8:00 or 9:00, as usual?
Perhaps I sensed warmth and light radiating through the walls of the house. After a long, hard winter, there is probably a biological mechanism that kicks in-the same one that awakens hibernating bears or tells snakes it’s time to crawl out from under a rock and lie in the sun.
Anyway, I awoke as if a switch had been thrown, and was on my feet and making coffee in minutes. The house was empty, Barb gone to Chicago for the weekend to visit her sister. I walked outside and looked at the thermometer on our porch. Sixty-seven degrees.
A perfect morning.
I did not walk down the driveway to get the Sunday paper. Instead, I went back in the house, put on boots and riding gear, and emerged minutes later to wheel my new black ZX-11 out of the garage. Ready to ride, before seven o’clock in the morning. Amazing.
But where to go?
My friend John Jaeger has said that the angels give us only 10 or 11 days like this in a lifetime-days when clear weather intersects with a weekend morning on which we find ourselves with no responsibilities, duties, promises or appointments.
You don’t want to waste a day like this, so I sat down on the porch swing with my Wisconsin state map and considered the options. Some theme was needed, some destination or goal, rather than just a vague meandering.
I looked at the front cover of the map, and there was a picture of our Governor, Tommy Thompson, with his wife. I looked at the picture and thought about it.
Tommy and I grew up together in the same small Wisconsin town of Elroy, population 1503. He was five or six years ahead of me in school-one of the older, cool guys when I was just a wee slip of a nerd-but we often found ourselves in the same anarchic neighborhood football games, or serving mass as altar boys at the same church services. A long time ago. In Elroy.
That’s where I would go: Elroy. I would ride home. Hadn’t been there in several years, my family long since moved away. It was 100 miles northwest, in the beautiful, hilly Wisconsin Uplands; 150 miles if you took the good roads, the empty ones with red barns, one-lane bridges and no cops; roads with names like P or WW.
The map went back in my tankbag. Visor down, ZX warmed up, we were on the road. What a morning. Angels, indeed.
Fast running until the intersection with Highway 14, frequented by the cars with the funny blue and red lights. Slow down. The ZX hardly comprehends the difference between 55 and 95 mph. At any speed under 100 mph, it growls along like a half-sleeping giant and doesn’t know its own strength.
After crossing the Wisconsin River at Sauk City, I turn off the main highway and back onto the intricate gray network of country roads. No motorhomes, no state patrol cars; just the occasional country church to watch for, people spilling out into the bright sunlight, blinking, shaking hands. White shirts, white dresses. White apple blossoms. Spring.
Through Leland, Lime Ridge and Cazenovia, then into Hillsboro. We played these guys in basketball and football. Big Bohemian guys. Tough. Out of town on F and toward Elroy on WW and O.
Suddenly I come over a ridge, and there it is. Church steeple, cemetery, hillside of houses, Main Street. After a stop at the cemetery to visit family graves, I ease down the steepness of Academy Street past the house I grew up in, at 309, and stop for a look. After a decade of falling-down neglect, someone has fixed it up, and there’s a For Sale sign in the yard. But all the trees are gone. The once green-shaded house' is baking in the sun like a bald head.
How about that; I outlived the shade trees my dad and I planted, and the huge elms that were already there.
I ride to the other end of town, where my parents built a small ranchstyle house when I was in high school. New and convenient, but not so much character. Nice neighbors, though, and we had some good times there.
Late afternoon, and time to head home. The shadows are growing long; it’s getting cooler.
Before heading south, I take one last loop over a favorite road. People here call it the Ridge Road, but its official name is County P. It’s 8 miles of wonderful, scenic, convoluted blacktop that follows a topographical spine between Elroy and another small town called Kendall, just to the north.
When I lived here, it was my standard motorcycle and sports-car road. My measuring stick for the way things handled, my own small-town Angeles Crest Highway. I rode Bridgestones, Hondas and Triumphs here-and drove a Triumph sports car, a TR-3. And my dad’s ’66 Mustang. I knew every curve and how fast it could be taken. Still do.
Threading over it with the ZX, I find the road is still as familiar as the lines in my own hand-or, lately, the lines in my own face. Even the tar patches seem to be in the same place. A good old glove of a road.
Downshifting for the familiar city limits of Kendall, I find myself thinking about the famous Thomas Wolfe admonition that you can’t go home again.
True enough, I guess, in some respects.
But when I lived here, home was more than an old house that now has a For Sale sign in the yard and no trees to shade the lawn. It was also a place where I looked out the window and dreamed of having the freedom to ride motorcycles through these ridges and hills, on days just like this one.
On a motorcycle, on these roads, I am always home.
