Bruiser Tour 2012

FINAL ENTRY

Brent (my son-in-law) wisely chose the Space Needle in Seattle as our meeting place for an escort on this final leg of a very long trip. Given the inherent difficulties I have in managing my way around cities with big freeways, finding a landmark that sticks way up in the air was relatively simple.

We boarded the ferry from downtown Seattle to Bremerton across the Hood Canal and made our way up the east side of the Olympic Peninsula to Port Townsend. We pitched at a State Park and wound up the Pacific Highway to bask in warmth and greenery and sweeping curves for a most pleasant ride home.

Thank you, Brent, for the escort on this final and significant stretch!

The last leg. On my last legs.

And now, I find myself home. 10,300 miles of tarmac have rolled under my wheels in these seven weeks. A great many things are spinning around in my road weary skull, and as I compose my final post for the little blog that has been the outlet for my need for reflection and conversation there are a cascade of memories, sensations and retrospectives to sort through. It has been quite a journey, I must say, and it tested me. It really tested me.

What would be an appropriate title for this trek? “Gone With The Wind” has a truthful ring to it. Or given that I started out on my Mother’s birthday and returned on Mothers’ Day, perhaps “The Mother of all Bike Trips”. I am open to suggestions.

I return to a world where I no longer have to eat standing up, there are more than two recognized food groups, you can’t buy beer at a gas station, seasons progress in a logical and traditional order, and I will meet people during the day that I have met before and who understand hockey. I look forward to windshield wipers, mattresses that don’t change into placemats overnight, adjustable climate control, and readily obtained hot water.

There are far fewer flying insects on the continent than there were at the end of March. To this I can attest. A long and narrow bug-free swath has been cleared to the Mississippi delta and back.

I have learned about creative spelling from signs proclaiming the essential elements of the consumer world as tastee, quik, ezee and delitefull. (I think it is the second ‘l’ that troubles me most).

People have been friendly, gracious, and eager to help. South Texas and Idaho freeways notwithstanding. Warm greetings with a smile, a hello or a wave have been standard. Kids and people in small towns often waved as I passed. Conversations are easily initiated when one is on a fully loaded motorcycle that is not a Harley Davidson and bears license plates from a distant land. Typically these have been restricted to topics of travel, motorcycles, and weather, but occasionally explored issues of the economy, war overseas, the energy crisis, or the need for spare change.

Serendipity, irony and chance events have been recurring themes. Whether a road is followed this way or that, or a choice is made now or moments from now, changes the outcome unpredictably and irreversibly. However, my optimism and faith in the eventual outcomes have never wavered. Never have I been fearful, or felt defeated. Nor, curiously, have I ever felt alone. Someone once said that solitude is the cure for loneliness, and I believe I have come to understand the meaning of that.

This blog and many emails have kept me in touch with people important to me, and I feel that I carried you all in my pocket. I greatly appreciate the support and encouragement that I have received as I embarked on an adventure as ambitious and foolish as this. Thank you for allowing me to share with you my experiences, personal interpretations and quirky perspectives as I think out loud and occasionally pontificate about bigger issues on life, living, suffering and celebration that have stirred within me as I ride and write. “Living out loud” as I have come to think of this, turned out to be surprisingly enriching. Living an experience with an intention of writing about it at the end of the day provokes one to think about the experience differently. What do I think about that? What is the broader meaning of it and how would I put it into words? It forces one to pay attention and to truly live in the moment--features of life and living that I have come to appreciate.

I am grateful for having the health, opportunity and wherewithal (!), and the verve I must have inherited from someone to be able to pull this off. Good fortune, whatever that may mean, has certainly been in my favour as well. Surprises greeted me around every corner, and although some of them were not particularly welcome I survived them and probably grew from them. Evidently my guardian angels were turbocharged, enabling them to keep up with The Bruiser and I as we sped along, and for that we are most thankful. Being completely alone--although as I once pointed out we are never completely independent from the support of others--means that one is reliant upon one’s own decisions and choices and have faith in the soundness of self-counsel, and sometimes the mercy of the gods!

And of course I am intensely grateful to the Suzuki Corporation for their excellence in engineering and craftsmanship, and from whose industrial loins were born The Bruiser. No finer a vehicle or mechanical companion has ever there been, with as much character as could possibly be bestowed upon an assemblage of metal and rubber. Bruiser, you have been magnificent, suffering wind, freeways, deluge, gravel, pot holes, bug storms, bad gas (me too!), heat, cold and pestilence without complaint or hesitation. I thank you.

What more can be said about the things I have seen and experienced! Replaying it all is quite overwhelming. Ever-changing backdrops to my small and mobile world were often astonishing in their beauty and startling in their significance. Geology and biology and history have an ongoing collaboration in all that surround us, commanding our attention and provoking our spirit in both their beauty and tragedy.

All along I have been mindful of the metaphor of Life as a Journey. (Or sometimes a bottle of wine). I will leave it to the Reader to identify or construct the parallels which are particularly relevant or meaningful to them. In the end, they are our own.

Perhaps the pithy observation offered by the waiter/philosopher of the Timber Wolf Restaurant in Fossil, Oregon captures it best:

“The best thing about ridin’ is enjoyin’ where you’re at”.

There you go.