Twenty three million years ago, Pleistocene glaciers carved out huge v-shaped valleys in the towering Cascade Mountain walls of Oregon and Washington. Now, these great, deep mountain valleys are laced with hardtop roads, wonderful roads winding through some of the best mountain scenery in the world -- roads perfect for a motorcyclist. I am haunted, addicted, and enslaved by the roads veining these valleys, threading around these great peaks. I ride as many of them as I can, as often as I can, some seasons up to 20,000 miles annually, most of the time on an older, well-maintained Honda 1500 Goldwing. I am not a person who rides motorcycles; I am a motorcyclist who will pretends sometimes to be a person.
Every ride to me is a miniature life: a life with a birth, a maturity, and a death. I await the birth of a ride with great joy, and I grieve when the ride ends. I grieve because I know someday I will not be able to ride.... and I will not be, and each ride finished is therefore a tick of some cursed celestial clock.
A ride to me seems very like a fast-lived life. An existence in milliseconds.. Almost every eye blink, I am faced with decisions fraught with mortal consequences: lean here....no, there.....slow here...brake here, easy....brake, here, hard... harder!...accelerate here...... these decisions are made by me instantaneously, in just a tick of time, a nanosecond of eternity. And once that microscopic sliver of time is gone, the decision made " it is truly, irrevocably gone, and the outcome of the decision is as permanent as crystals in granite, and I am diminished.
Sometimes, I even weep behind my face shield. I hear the voices of dead friends in the wind's roar, youthful laughter long hushed, and the moaning of wounded soldiers. I can almost see every decision in my life that was a mistake, every missed turn, every unopened door...but the moment that spawned that decision is now truly, irrevocably gone, the outcome of the decision as permanent as crystals in granite. And I am diminished.
Every ride I make is a life lived, and I am haunted, addicted, and enslaved by roads.
