The Thousand Mile Ride
The Thousand Mile Ride
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
FOR MANY YEARS, OUR LITTLE LOCAL motorcycle club of like-minded sportbike misfits, the Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang, has staged an annual Thousand Mile Ride-of widely varying length.
This event has proved useful as an adjunct to club solidarity and an acid test of saintly tolerance toward those who have a mystical sense of passing time, or can’t program alarm clocks. The foul-ups and misunderstandings have been legendary-mostly thanks to the use of high-quality earplugs-but somehow the Gang has always sallied forth and returned home more or less as a unit, having had good fun.
Most of these rides have been planned around the concept of free housing, the route chosen to include one or two stops at cottages or homes owned either by members themselves or by distant friends and relatives whose memories often need prompting vis-à-vis their relationship to some nearly forgotten Crud. (“Hi, Uncle Bob! Remember me? Little Jimmy? I’m all grown up now, and these are my motorcycle friends!”)
Unfortunately, I have never managed to go on the annual Thousand Mile Ride before, thanks to scheduling errors where I foolishly let work or family responsibilities interfere with the main business of riding. Which, of course, is what we were put on Earth to do, good works notwithstanding.
So this year I kept my calendar clear and was pleased to see that the proposed route would take us from Madison, Wisconsin, all over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) with a dip into the LP to join forces with our Detroit chapter at the weekend getaway farm of Greg Rammel. A nice long ride (1600 miles, actually) on beautiful roads.
But what bike to take?
My 1995 Ducati 900SS-SP would be fun, except for the slightly stiff springing and the lack of hard luggage. The Harley Electra-Glide Standard I acquired last spring (my fourth in a long series of baggers; I can’t seem to stay away from these things) would be pleasant to ride, except for the usual Harley Quandary-the stately, mellow Electra-Glide can keep up only with itself or other Harleys. And the Cruds are a hard-ridin’ bunch, mounted mostly on Ducatis, BMWs, Cagiva Gran Canyons, 1200 Bandits, etc. Fast bikes that like winding roads.
In the end it came down, as it always does, to my silver 1984 BMW R100RS, which had just turned over 100,000 miles and now had an odometer full of zeros. Reborn, as it were. The old Beemer still had everything I needed: hard luggage, good wind protection, 240 miles of fuel range, decent handling and 135 mph of available speed. As an added bonus, fellow Cruds Randy Abendroth and Tom Pirie would also be taking their own RIOORSs, so we could ride in close formation and do our own impression of the Berlin Police Department.
In preparation for the trip, I cleaned and detailed the aging Beemer, beadblasted and repainted the stone-chipped black valve covers, changed the oil and adjusted the valves.
And, bright and early one Wednesday afternoon, we were off. Keeping true to our club motto, “Ride Hard, Ride Short,” we stopped almost immediately for the night in Appleton, Wisconsin, to pick up Tom and eat the requisite huge dinner at a roadside supper club.
Daylight took us through Green Bay, Escanaba and Manistique, across the high and windy Mackinaw Bridge down to the crossroads village of Levering, Michigan, near Greg’s farm. Some of us stayed at the farm, while the overflow took over a nice little motel in Levering, where we sat at picnic tables on a warm summer night and drank a few beers and some excellent cheap wine from a liquor store across the street whose neon signs winked at us seductively all evening, nearly driving us mad with desire.
In the morning, my roommate Tom took a couple of Excedrin and said, “I will never drink that much again as long as I live. Maybe less or maybe more, but never that exact amount.”
On Friday, we explored the Grand Traverse Bay area, then went out to Greg’s farm, where we rode dirtbikes through the hills and had a fine party, with much food. It was already shaping up into what I would later call “The 2002 Health and Fitness Tour.” Ride, eat, drink, sleep, ride. For six days all our exercise came from walking to restaurants.
Saturday, 12 of us rode 320 miles up to Copper Harbor, stopping for lunch at Seney, where Ernest Hemingway famously got off the train to go trout fishing when he returned, wounded, from WWI. We spent a day exploring the great winding roads along the south shore of Lake Superior, then rode across to the Lake of the Clouds and down through the Porcupine Mountains to Mike Puls’ cabin in northwoods Wisconsin.
Most of the guys stayed at Mike’s the next day for fishing and boating, but I had to ride home because we had guests arriving that night. I said my good-byes and rode the last 250 miles solo in a light, misting rain, after five days of perfect weather.
When I got home late in the afternoon, Barb was off at work, and it was cool and silent in the house. I sat in a chair in the living room, my ears still ringing from wind and highway sounds. Looking across the room into my office, I could see a large stack of mail cascading down onto a sprawl of previously unanswered mail. Next to the phone in the living room Barb had left a list of 14 phone messages. And the light on the answer phone was blinking with five new messages. Just outside, the lawn needed mowing.
Back to the world of faxes and phone calls, meetings, e-mails, doctor’s appointments, home repair and work. For a whole week, I’d almost forgotten about all of it, living purely in the present, like one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, or a sailor on an old whaling ship, cut off from land and all its communications.
I sat there and made a private vow not to miss any more Thousand Mile Rides with my friends. They are what all the other stuff is for, and the only way most of us have left to run away to sea. □
