Time Travel

Time travel

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

THERE’S AN OLD SAYING IN THE MILItary that war consists of hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. When things happen, they tend to happen all at once, and as our old sergeant once said (after cleaning up his speech for a family magazine), “You don’t know whether to spit or go blind.”

Civilian life seldom produces much terror, but it’s quite common for multiple things to happen all at once.

Last week, for example, I came home from an overseas press trip just in time for two carloads of relatives to come up the driveway for a family reunion in the middle of a crashing thunderstorm. As they got out of the car, our two impeccably trained dogs began flinging themselves against the kitchen door and howling like crazy, and at that moment the phone rang. Maybe our roof was on fire, too; I can’t remember.

Anyway, I answered the phone and it was a man named Mark Sliwa who said he was calling from a rest stop on the Interstate near Madison, Wisconsin. He explained that he was touring the entire U.S. on his 1981 BMW R80G/S and used to work for my old friend Bob Smith at his motorcycle shop in Pennsylvania. Would we mind if he stopped by for a visit?

I looked out the window at our in-laws disembarking in the sudden downpour and for one pivotal second there I almost told Mark, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t a very good time.” But then I quickly remembered Egan’s Second Law of Party Science, which states, “There is virtually no social gathering that isn’t improved by having more guests.”

I can’t remember what the first law is, but I think it involves nacho-cheese-flavored Doritos and a drink blender.

Anyway, I’m quite convinced that when you bring a couple of extra people along to a party or a dinner, things automatically liven up. The most unlikely people will make friends and talk to each other all night long and everybody has a good time.

So I told Mark, “It’s a little crazy around here right now.. .but, sure, why don’t you stop by.”

“Be there in about 20 minutes,” he said cheerfully.

Long story short, he showed up, turned out to be a great guy and we ended up inviting him to stay for our very fancy dinner, which consisted of burgers on the grill. He’d planned to camp in a nearby KOA campground, but it was threatening more rain so I talked him into “camping” in the carpeted garage-band corner of my workshop (what with our guest rooms all full) and putting his bike in the garage. We found him a large air mattress and a real pillow.

Over breakfast the next morning, we learned that Mark had, at the age of 43, quit his job as a Porsche mechanic in the Washington, D.C. area in order to take his BMW on a long-anticipated six-week lap around the United States. He’d ridden down to Key West, across the Deep South and Southwest, up the West Coast and back across the Northern Rockies and Great Plains. And now he was only about two days from home. He had two saddlebags on the G/S and a tidy tent and bedroll in a waterproof duffel across the luggage rack. The bike had the big Dakar tank and no windshield. He’d camped most of the way, or stayed with friends.

When he left our place at mid-morning, I waved goodbye and watched him roll down the driveway with a mixture of fascination and outright envy.

For many years, I’ve wanted to take a long, long motorcycle trip like this but have never found the time. A two-week trip is feasible in my working life, but six weeks or a couple of months is nearly impossible. That’ll have to happen after I’m retired.

Retired, you say? On what?

Good question. Having frittered away most of my “savings” on motorcycles and restoring useless old British sports cars, I am not exactly poised for a life of golden-age leisure by the infinity pool in St. Tropez. But I do allow myself to envision an imaginary distant future with an epic motorcycle journey or two.

As a matter of fact, the two-week, 4000-mile trip Barb and I took to the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada last year was a kind of dress rehearsal (at least in my mind) for the touring life as it might shape up during our Social Security years. And it was an eye-opener, in which we learned one essential lesson: Touring without a tent and cooking gear is very, very expensive. Motels with defective neon now cost about $60 a night, while nice places are often over $100. And unless you eat every meal at McDonald’s, it’s hard to get two people out of a café for less than about $20. Really good dinners in romantic places that look out over the ocean and have wandering waiters with big pepper grinders can cost multiples of that amount. If they serve anything with a balsamic reduction sauce, look out.

Obviously, this is an unsustainable way of traveling for extended periods of time, especially if total indigence is not one of your long-term financial goals.

The answer, of course, is camping and cooking your own food, as Mark did. And staying with friends who live around the country. This is the way I traveled when I was younger, and it was pretty good.

Food tastes better when you cook it in a mess kit over a fire or a Svea stove. Coffee tastes better in the morning when you have to wait for the water to boil while standing in a grove of pine trees. Nights with stars are better than nights with 57 channels of cable TV. And burgers over a grill or spaghetti and cheap Chianti with old friends are better than any restaurant meal, at any price.

I remarked in a column years ago that I’d never forgotten a campsite or remembered a hotel room. The same might be said of home-cooked meals in friendly kitchens versus restaurants.

I thought about all this after Mark rolled down our driveway toward home, and that evening I went upstairs to the storage closet and dug out our giant cardboard box of camping gear.

For some reason, I just wanted to lay my hands on my old Army mess kit. The one with “US” stamped in the handle. □