On the Road Redux
“Nothing behind me,
everything ahead of me
as is ever so on the road.” –Jack Kerouac, On the Road
I wonder if Jackie ever thought the same thing; being on the road can take you through time. Whether or not it’s by way of hitchhiking, car, bus, or in our case, motorcycle; our vehicle was a time machine. Before we leave, Mary Montag and I have to prepare, like with any journey: A few day’s worth of clothes, a raincoat, some tools in a leather saddle bag, and run the final checks on the bike to make sure the engine runs right, the chain is oiled, and the fluids are topped off. We think they will have things at the motel, like toothpaste and everyday things. These are all that you have to think about. Maybe Jackie did or maybe he just, knew . . . the road would be his life, at least for a while. We kind of did too. The road can take you back in time, sometimes to unexpected places, and show you things you didn’t expect to see.
Usually—but not always—we like to start early so that we can get where we are going and don’t have to fight for daylight. We can stop along the way for comfort, like a place we often stopped at when we were kids. How my dad would meet me for lunch for a coffee and one of those pies from McDonald’s that they served up hotter than the planet Mercury. I downshifted the clutch and the engine sounded near the memorial that still stood there after over twenty years; “Never stop learning” I could hear him say. At this point, we had settled into the ride, on that journey where we didn’t quite know where we were going.
We lived out of a backpack for a few days. We rode on this vintage Scrambler motorcycle through the mountains of the east, and went back another twenty years at least. People here did factory work either at steel mills or coal mines left over from industrialism, the big companies giving those who lived in town the opportunity to make millions for them; It was either that or die in Vietnam or work on the farm. But most of the work left town and everyone was just sort of stuck there . . . frozen. We rode through and slowed down just enough to observe, grab a quick bite, and check to make sure the bike was working right. I got grease all over my hands. Maybe it reminded me of how we still needed to rely on ourselves. Maybe when we walked into the gas station, propped up by the grizzled older lady that called everyone “honey” with that thick Midwest southern twang, someone noticed and thought, “Thank God there’s still someone out there that gives a damn about self-reliance.” Working on a machine whose parts were probably forged somewhere near here, where some poor son of a bitch pulled a seventeen-hour shift pouring steel to get his family through a few more days of living. I could almost hear the shift whistle blow, the bell ringing at school, as the speedometer nicked 80 on the interstate, and we crossed over the border. Life was never so regimented and people took it easy more when there wasn’t such a need to get ahead in this whole rat race.
There was a small problem with the chain making noise. Maybe it was a rusted link. It's one of those things where, if it’s okay and still running you just worry about it later when you are safe at home and could work on the thing for at least a few hours.
We left our stuff at the motel and took off for the forest, which was just a short ride from there. Some lady was giving the concierge, who was also the bellman and probably the maid too, the third degree about why the closest casino was over three hours away by the nearest city. All the comforts of modern life were hours away from here and we preferred it that way.
There was a steep drop off as we rode down into the thick forest near the river and we could hear the rushing white water that any kyaker could only dream of. We parked and walked back into the woods and time seemed to slip away even further...
Swimming in a motel pool can be an interesting indicator depending on where you are. In the city, you might have cameras on you all the time and a million rules posted everywhere punishable by this or that, but out here they just expected you to know what you were doing before you got in the water and that it closed at a certain time. If you were in Chicago, you were left alone but probably on camera, and in Poland in Eastern Europe, you could see how people still swam in a pool like the Soviet Union was still there—regimented and strict. All we needed was somewhere to soak after being chilled all day . . . flying down the highway in fifty degree weather.
We found a little bit of culture when we rode into town. In between the burger joints and hometown diners that you’d expect to find there, there was a Thai restaurant, which looked pretty popular. A woman and her family were cooking authentic Thai food and we happened to stop in. Although Thai food is not Vietnamese, I’ll bet a lot of older men around here hesitantly came in and found it to be comforting, or maybe, like with our trip, brought them back to a time when their government sent them over somewhere to kill people and left them mentally damaged afterword, discarding them like a piece of trash. There are good and bad things about going back in time . . . but maybe, mostly good, because you’re given another chance to relive a moment.
The thing about time is that it feels like it goes faster than our motorcycle does. We fell asleep to commercials on a TV that promised free cable. I looked in the drawer and found the bible and the Book of Mormon as if we had been given a choice on how to live our lives.
The woman at the front desk took our key card and checked us out like we were never there and we were on the road yet again. We rode the motorcycle slowly through a row of patriotic pinwheels, the wind kicking up at our heels, and I fell into the trance of the road again, that mesmerizing black-rock asphalt at our feet moving us through time... JW
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