Mad Dogs And Irishmen
Mad Dogs and Irishmen
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
HOW HOT WAS IT? Well, it was so hot I actually stopped in the little crossroads village of Flippin, Kentucky, (actual name) to put on sunglasses under my darkly tinted faceshield, just to enhance the illusion of coolness and shade.
Normally, I'm easily fooled by cheap tricks like this, but this time it wasn’t working. All the sunglasses did, with their Polarized coating, was reveal the wavelike imperfections in the plastic of my faceshield and windscreen, superimposing on the outside world a molten curtain of queasy purple light. This only seemed to mimic the motion of heat waves rising from the blacktop, and the sky ahead of me looked almost psychedelic, like outboard motor oil floating on water. Strains of an old Jefferson Airplane song pulsed through my fevered brain, along with vague memories of a light show at the Fillmore.
No good. I stopped and took the sunglasses off. When you view the world through too many layers of plastic, it loses something in the translation. Besides, it was just plain hot, and there was no way to put a good spin on it.
I was on my way back home to Wisconsin from the Honda Hoot in Knoxville, Tennessee (see “Eastern Mountain Time,” this issue, page 68), riding my Beemer on a two-day winding backroad return trip through the small towns of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. It was a positively beautiful route, but at times the immense warmth made it hard to concentrate on the scenery. Flashing bank signs in the towns of Kentucky were unanimous in reporting the outside temperature as exactly 100 degrees Farenheit. I wondered if it might actually be hotter than that, but the signs just didn’t go any higher. In any case, 100 was hot enough.
My luggage, of course, was half-full of stuff I would never wear on this trip— the pants to my street leathers, heavy gloves, sweatshirt, turtleneck, etc. I’d been tricked by the weather on enough trips to suspect the Smoky Mountains might be cool and/or rainy and had packed for all contingencies. As it turned out, the Smokies were merely pleasantly balmy at high elevation, while the valleys below could best be described as stinking hot. Turtlenecks were not needed anywhere.
This is always a problem, of course, in packing for any motorcycle trip. You lay your clothing out on the bed and wish you had a crystal ball or some way to see
into the future so you could eliminate everything superfluous. Is it going to rain? No? Good. I’ll leave behind all this heavy raingear. Hot? Cold? Do I need more Tshirts, or a heated vest?
Whatever you pick, your choices will always come back to mock you. Arrive half-frozen at a mountain lodge in Banf, open your saddlebag and there ’s a Hawaiian shirt with palm trees and a leaping swordfish on it. Unpack at the Furnace Creek Lodge in Death Valley and the first thing to fall out of your luggage will be a pair of wool long johns. You stare at them in disbelief, as if you’ve found alien artifacts from another planet.
“An atomic margarita blender? What’s this doing here?”
And on this last trip, of course, the only truly useful items in my luggage were three long-sleeved cotton shirts-white, tan and light blue (safari colors)-and a pair of perforated summer gloves, basically stuff to keep the hot sun off my delicate Irish hide while letting lots of air waft through. After prattling on a few months ago about the need for street leathers with knee protection, I was unable to even consider wearing my black leather pants and wore thin, faded blue jeans instead.
Even at that, I arrived home on Monday evening somewhat wasted from the heat. I pulled into our driveway after 12 hours in the saddle and felt like someone
who’d spent the entire day trying to light a short cigar with a blowtorch. I climbed off the bike with a splitting headache, probably from dehydration, despite my best efforts to swill Gatorade and water at every stop.
Then last night I went to our weekly meeting of the Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang, and when people asked, “How was your trip to Tennessee?” I replied, “Fun, but very, very hot. I’m still feeling a little burned out.”
Fellow Crud Brother Rob Himmelmann looked at me perplexed and said, “Don’t you have an Aerostich suit?” “Yes,” I said cautiously, sensing a trap.
“When it’s that hot,” Rob said, “you have to soak a T-shirt in water and wear it under your Aerostich suit. The water slowly evaporates through your jacket and actually keeps you cool. Sometimes almost too cool. I rode through Moab, Utah, like this when it was 105, and I felt fine.”
“You wear the pants, too?”
“Yup. They insulate your legs from the heat.”
Hummm.. .the old Bedouin/Lawrence of Arabia trick. Instead of wearing khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirts, like the British Army did, the desert tribes would wear a sort of personal tent to keep the sun off and the heat out. It was one of those theories that sounded good on paper, like drinking hot fluids to encourage your body to cool down, but in practice it’s hard to swath yourself in robes and swill down a cup of hot java when the bank thermometer in Owensboro, Kentucky, says 100 degrees and the heat waves are rising off the blacktop in a mirage of distant water and camel caravans.
Nevertheless, my own strategies for keeping cool hadn’t really worked, so maybe Rob had a point.
“I’ll have to try that wet T-shirt under the Aerostich trick on my next hot weather trip,” I told him.
I didn’t mention that Barb and I were planning a July road trip and had been debating between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Canada’s Gaspe Peninsula, on the northeast Atlantic coast.
Suddenly Canada was looking very good.
Wet T-shirts and extra sunglasses are all very well, but we bog Irish make poor Bedouins.
