Old Home Week
Old Home Week
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
WHEN NOVELIST THOMAS WOLFE SAID you can't go home again, he didn't mean it literally. You can obviously go home again, but there's always a risk that things might be a little...different.
If enough years have passed, the prom queen may have three chins and five grand-children, while Tony’s Malt Shop where you once heard Gene Vincent on the juke-box might have turned into a tanning salon.
Or it might just be empty, with whitewashed windows and dust mice lurking under the shelf that once held the sacred Hamilton-Beach blender.
It’s that emptiness on Main Street that most afflicts small towns in this era of the big box store, where people drive far from home to discount shop. And the kids who grow up in those homes sometimes look around and notice there’s no malt shop, so they move away and stay gone.
Small towns need imagination to reverse this trend, to bring people back so they can remember life without malls and clogged traffic, and recall what it means to hop on your bike and spend only three minutes getting out of town onto an empty, winding road. To live in a place where children can walk to real woods and creeks.
And so believes Bjorn Sorgen, a recent Swedish immigrant to my old home town of Elroy, Wisconsin (pop. 1533). Bjorn is an artist and restaurateur who was struck by the beauty of the town and the surrounding hills, so he decided to shake things up a bit by holding the innaugural Elroy Bike Meet, which he subtitled “A Rural Hill & Valley Experience!”
Bjorn is not a motorcyclist himself, but somebody had told him there was this native son at Cycle World, so he invited Barb and me to come and participate as guests.
What could I say? We often ride there anyway, because the roads between Elroy and our home in southern Wisconsin are indeed sublime, and it’s a natural terminus for any ride.
Also, my folks are buried in the cemetery, and as Neil Young says, “all my changes were there.” The landscape of this town’s alleys and yards is embedded in my DNA. I still know which trees have climbing branches.
So Barb and I packed the saddlebags on our big black KTM 950 Adventure and headed 120 miles northwest into the hills on a Friday morning.
I was frankly a little worried over the turnout of a first-year bike rally-these events take time to gather steam-but when
we got to the Elroy municipal park in the afternoon, things were already buzzing. Vendors were setting up, Triumph, Harley, Yamaha and Suzuki dealers had tents and demo bikes, beer tents were opening and a band called Billy & The Road Kill (who would turn out to be really, really good) was setting up in the music tent. Rows of tents and bikes were blooming in the camping area.
Lots of Harleys, but also a good mixture of sportbikes, sport-tourers and even a CBX Six cruising by. Eventually, 500plus people would pay for a $10 weekend ticket and come through the gates. Not bad for an opener.
Barb and I cruised the park, then motored out to a B&B called Waarvik’s Century Farm, where we had reservations. The main farm house was occupied by four young couples who’d ridden up from Milwaukee, so we stayed in a beautifully renovated 140-year-old log cabin.
Turned out the B&B is owned by Mary Waarvik, who went to high school with me and is now the librarian in the same beautiful Carnegie Library where I spent many rainy Saturdays reading about airplane combat and venomous reptiles.
We rode back out to the park, where Skynyrd and Stones tunes were emanating from the music tent while campers sipped beer and gathered around two big campfires. It was a beautiful warm summer evening.
Tickets for local microbrews were dispensed by a volunteer named Jessica Basharian, the widow of my favorite dentist in high school. Favorite dentist? Yes. Doc Basharian was the coolest guy in town. He had a Triumph Bonneville and advised me that “the most important thing in life is to find an occupation that will support your motorcycle addiction.”
Now there’s a philosophy you can sink your teeth into.
Saturday was the Big Ride. Bjorn had prepared tour maps of the area and riders could ride off alone or go on one of two group rides. We went on the main 85-mile group ride, led by Robert Ebbers, our erstwhile high-school band instructor, who retired and bought himself an Electra Glide and is presently restoring a Knucklehead. Who knew?
I’m normally leery of big group rides, but this one moved along swiftly and smoothly with Mr. Ebbers (as I still can’t help calling him) leading the 125-bike pack and cops easing the way at intersections. Bjorn had put together a stunningly beautiful route through the greener-than-green summer hills. It was like two hours of riding around inside an emerald, with sunlight refracting through the crystalline structure.
That night, Big Dog Murphy played great blues in the music tent, and we ran into more old friends and made a few new ones. A friendly young Harley rider and sign painter named Karey Bigham told me as we stood around the campfire that he’d moved his family back to Elroy because “this is how kids are supposed to grow up.”
Late in the evening we rode back to our rustic cabin, and as we turned off Highway 80 onto County H, I realized this was the very junction where I’d begun my first motorcycle ride, hitchhiking to a New Lisbon junkyard on the back of a Panhead.
Sunday morning, we took the backroads home. Obliquely, all day.
Last week, Barb and I showed some snapshots of the B&B to three other couples we ride with. Now they all want to go there. Rent the farmhouse for the weekend, then take a ride on Bjorn’s scenic route through the countryside. Maybe have a pizza at his café (Pizzeria Viking) on Main Street and take in a movie at the Elroy Theater-which is still open after all these years.
Bjorn’s plan seems to be working, Mr. Wolfe notwithstanding. □
