It was hot as hell yesterday, but I still went for a 400 mile ride. Coming down from the mountains, I used the new air temp feature on the 2006 instrument panel to watch the temperature creep back up with every mile. Pretty soon, I was wincing with the heat, the sweat in the eyes, and the reflected sun. Pretty much like a switch got thrown, I decided I needed to get a big-ass soda with lots of ice, and I mean right now.
I pulled into the first gas station/mini mart I came upon. Inside was the fountain of youth - any Pepsi product you want in sizes up to the truly ridiculous and a fount labeled "ICE" that almost promised to provide the cooling that can only come from phase change way down in your belly. I grabbed the truly ridiculous size cup and stabbed at the "ICE" button. There was lots of commotion, but dammit, no frosty cubes were issuing. My sweaty head started to boil over. Nooooooo! Oh, uh, I mean yes - here it comes. I filled my cup to the brim with ice, then used Pepsi to fill up all the voids between the cubes.
I paid my buck-twenty-nine and headed outside. This establishment sat about 20 vertical feet below the road surface, which happened to wind along the top of a low hill. It looked like there was a nice grassy spot up by the road in the shade where I could take a load off, and there were tell-tale signs of an actual breeze up there. So off I went.
As I sat there in the slight breeze, crunching and swallowing ice in huge, lumpy gulps, I began to feel a lot better. I watched cage after cage pull in to get some gas, or a snack or drink. Most seemed not to notice me. After a while, a mid-size Chrysler pulled up to the store. Out comes a mom from the driver's seat. It was clear from the way she walked that she probably looked pretty good 20 years and 50 pounds ago. It was also clear, from that very same walk, that she didn't think she looked very good anymore. Neither of us did, and I think we were both a little sad about that. Then followed 2.3 kids, and, lo, a dude in a do-rag, old , saggy jeans tucked into even older and saggier boots, and a faded black T-shirt festooned with the unmistakable, but faint, 2 foot by 3 foot Harley regalia all over the back. As he walked into the store, oppressed by the heat and the facts of married life that no one ever warns you about, he had to walk past the FJR. I could see the high-voltage jolt pass through him at his first glance, as his whole body seemed to flinch for just an instant and he took a short step, almost, but not quite, tripping. Something about the look of the bike elicited an almost involuntary response.
After what seemed like forever, the family comes out, he bringing up the rear. He risks a longer look at the bike, the kind that, if anyone were watching, would be undeniable as a painful plaintive glance. When he gets back into the car, I've got a very good view of the inside. His wife is going on about something, perhaps whatever took so long in the store. He has his head turned to the left as far as it will go, past his wife, right at the bike. She keeps talking at him and talking at him, and he hears nothing. He just keeps staring at the bike. As they pull out to leave, his neck completes truly remarkable feats while keeping the bike in view. I didn't realize it until today, but right then, with the wife going on about something distantly related to an all but forgotten youth and not insignificant string of disappointments, with 2.3 kids sweltering in the back seat of that tattered american iron, covered in a sticky slurry of sweat and sugar that can only be tolerated by the youngest of the young, that dude checked out on my bike. In an instant he was accelerating at maximum rate on a fantastic blue machine on the perfect crushed-graphite roads that twist and whirl in the impossible ways that only the imagination can engineer. In the eternity that the mind can make of a single moment, he had left us all, riding like a bat out of hell, faster than I would ever take my machine, accelerating past a buck-twenty-nine, to a place a lot cooler than where we all met.
I'm glad I was invisible on that hot, breezy hill. I wouldn't have wanted to miss that.
An original essay by Mike O'Neill, Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
Validate this page.