The Road Less Traveled

Alabama is a long state north to south. I jumped off the superslab around Greenville and drove county roads the rest of the way. Woods and hills in the north give way to empty fields where cotton once grew, then further south to lumber plantations thinly dotted with corrugated shacks and decaying automobiles, the side ditches empty save the carcasses of sharp-boned roadkill dried and blackened on the rough pavement, eyes wide open, but seeing nothing.

Had to stop for a band of grim-faced men in rusted pickups probing the underbrush with sharpened sticks, and bloodlust. Their truck beds bore packs of caged hounds, red-eyed and ravenous, their slatted ribs showing through thin and scarred hides, eager for the hunt. I drove on.

Around dusk we pulled off into a nondescript hobo jungle. I entered a building marked “Campground Office” ringing one of those little bells on a coiled spring that hung over the doorframe. A man was seated behind the counter watching a fishing show on an old-school television. He was an older man, big-bellied with a mottled complexion, and greasy hair the color of tossed bathwater. He wore thick-lensed glasses with frames made from antelope bones.

 He barely glanced as I entered, but continued to watch his fishing show. A small poodle at his feet, with a coat of dirty lamb’s wool, stared at me with pink and runny eyes. I cleared my throat and asked if he had a site available for the night. He peered out over his glasses at me with a look of vile contempt and turned back to the TV. After a long, awkward pause he finally said, “Twenty-fi’ dollah’s cash.”

I pulled out my wallet and laid my money on the counter like Doc Holliday and waited for him to raise or call. After another pause, and with great effort, he lifted himself from his chair and approached the counter. He quickly folded the cash into his dirty shirt pocket and pulled out a crude printed map of the campground and said, “Site eighteen, checkout at eleven.”

 I quietly thanked him, and as I turned to leave, looked down at the dog who was sniffing my pant leg. He looked up and growled a soft disapproval, but allowed me to pass.

Pullin' South

Sputnik knows long before I do that a journey is imminent with that unearthly canine intuition we mere mortals can never comprehend. Days before our departure she’d leap into the truck’s open door and stubbornly refuse to exit. She must be coerced and cajoled with veiled threats of violence and promises of dog biscuits and cheddar cheese. Hooked up and loaded the Gypsy Pod and was ready for takeoff Saturday morning. The weather was moderate, unlike the poor conditions during last year’s southern migration.
Trailing the Pod on my tiny pickup and traveling at interstate speed is similar to towing an obstinate, tethered parachute like the one used to stop the space shuttle during landing. Doesn’t do well up hills or into a headwind. Maybe a truck cap would help streamline its overall aerodynamic properties, but right now ten mpg is as good as I can get.
The landscape in Kentucky was frosted with a fresh coat of benign snow, but the roads were fine, and we made our way to a cold little campground of I-65 just north of Nashville. They placed me in the back row with the rear of the camper about one-hundred feet from the interstate. I fell asleep to the sound of the nightime highway, which is among the loneliest sounds on earth, and also a favorite of mine.
The siren song of the highway is the sound of restless movement, commerce and flight. Bleary-eyed, high-ballin’ truckers with doctored logbooks trying to avoid the twenty second nap that will end their run, or worse. Desperate families, their meager possessions piled high in the back seat of ancient Chevys, hoping the next town will bring them employment. Undocumented migrants and drug runners crowded into mini-vans and non-descript Buicks flying under the radar and hoping their secrets go unjudged before they make their destination.
After a decent night’s sleep I batten down the hatches, pull up the landing gear and power up the on-ramp as I join the others on Amërïkä’s endless, infrastructural, asphalt bloodstream as I move ever Southward.

The Road

Gay, Michigan 2008

Flamingo, Florida 2004

Naples, Florida 2006

Mitchell, South Dakota 2007

US 52 West Virginia 2008

While others embark on their journeys, I'm reduced to remembering past trips. Maybe September?

Hauling Ass

By mid-Monday morning all the locals had left, leaving me with the place to myself and a few park rangers who wave to me like I’m an inhabitant of the neighborhood.
The area I now inhabit is not the flat, sandy tropical place one might expect of Florida. The terrain is hilly with a mix of tall pines and hardwoods, more like The Smoky Mountains. The park’s only redeeming features are its hiking trails and an old plantation house the CCC dismantled and moved across the Apalachicola River back in the thirties, (as one who’s worked in the construction trade a long time, I find that incredible). With only one radio station, no TV reception and little else to do, I started hiking small sections of the trails at a time walking through the flat bottom land with its palmettos, swamps and standing water, then climbing the steep switchbacks, crawling uphill using tree roots for steps.
Sputnik, with terrier blood coursing through her veins, is a bundle of pent-up energy. She not only requires, but demands she get vigorous exercise every day. I could walk thirty miles with her and it would do her no good, she needs more than that or she drives me nuts. At my last stop I started to let her run beside my bicycle on lead. No matter how fast I rode, she always wanted to go faster, tongue lolling to the side, straining against her collar like a sled dog. I would finally quit pedaling and let her tow me along. She pulls way harder than should be physically possible for her twenty-four pounds. Fearing her neck would become bruised I bought her a harness to fulfill her insatiable need for strenuous activity. Since there are few places to ride the bike at this park, I decided to hook her to my belt with a d-ring and adopt her talent as a beast of burden to the hiking trails.
Yesterday, we walked about seven miles including the western loop of the Torreya trail, up and down steep hills, through longleaf pines and thick wooded jungle, (this place must be hell in the summer with heat and mosquitoes). I ran out of my two quarts of water and the hills kicked my old, flatlander ass. Today my legs and back are sore despite the fact that Sputnik towed me up the steepest hills, fulfilling her role, much like the Sherpa guide who short-ropes rich women up Everest. All in the name of vanity, so they can go home and tell all their rich friends they’ve summited.
Today I pack up once again, and move westward.

Solitude Interruptus

This place ain’t so bad when the sun comes out. Still a little chilly with highs in the sixties, but who am I to complain when the Midwest still suffers through single digits? Had the whole place virtually to myself during the week, some days I didn’t even see a park ranger. I spoke not a word for nearly three days as I find myself withdrawing deeper into my self-imposed exile. When I finally did meet a guy and his wife, come down from Virginia trailing his Russian sidecar rig to escape the cold, my voice cracked from lack of use when I tried to speak to them.
On the weekends however, my sleepy little hideaway transforms itself, filling up with locals. Raucous kids, hillbillies, ill-mannered dogs, hillbillies, loud shitty music screeching out of tinny speakers and hillbillies. I retreated deeper into my little sanctuary and endured. I’ve plenty of time to read and just finished, once again, Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant Border Trilogy. Incredible.
The park is known for its fifteen miles of trails. I’ve hiked a little using a broom handle as an improvised walking stick, may explore them further this week. Today I plan the one-hundred mile round trip to the nearest Wal-Mart. I need supplies, namely a proper hiking stick, beer and some toenail clippers.
The excitement never ends.

Cold and Soggy in Torreya State Park

It was with some sadness I left the riverbank along the coast, but the hounds of discontent were nipping at my heels telling me it's time to move on. So move on I did, in a complete deluge, the little camper hydroplaning its way behind me like a drunken water-skier. Arrived at my desolate campsite near the Georgia / Alabama border. Thirty- eight degrees and in a steady rain, I set up my rig on a pathetic, soggy campsite, crawled inside, soaked and dispirited. Turned the heater up to 11 and shook off the shivers. Times like these I figure this beats the hell out of two wheels and a tent.
My smartphone screen has developed a noticeable wiggle and my toenails have become as the talons of a winged creature from Greek mythology. Sputnik affects a Pavlovian response when she senses the proximity to a state park entrance, sitting up tall in the saddle, ears erect and expectant.

I'm in the absolute center of nowhere. Fifty miles to the nearest Wal-Mart, I'm out of supplies and Central Standard Time is kicking my ass.

Dwelling

Woke this morning to the patter of rain drizzling on the camper top, first grey light of dawn oozing through shaded windowglass. I lay there, warm and fetal. Slowly the sky brightened, sounds of birdcalls and a full bladder prompting me to emerge from my cotton and polyester womb.

I was fortunate enough to duck some ice and snow, leaving the panhandle for a quick sojourn into Southwest Florida, with its sunshine and near-perpetual warmth. That warmth comes with a price, however. Orlando and southward, with Mickey Mouse’s vicious rodent teeth smiling from the balconies of empty condos, and campgrounds filled to capacity with pale-skinned snowbirds, lined up like tin-canned pickled herrings in their $250,000 mega-campers. Come south for the sun, yet living in the white trash squalor in what could pass for a Tennessee trailer park. I lived among them only long enough to move on and visit the Sea Captain and his longsuffering wife who spends her afternoons on the Widow’s Walk waiting for the ancient mariner’s return from the sea.

I’m now back in the Panhandle, laid back and less crowded. Don’t need 80 degree days and I’ll take the 40 degree nights. Feels like home.

The more time I spend “away” the more the lines used to define the concept of “home” become blurred. Is it that place back in Jerkwater with its possessions and complications, property taxes and phone calls? Or is it the space I’m currently occupying? Right now, the sandy soil of the Ochlockonee River feels like “home.”

Modern Man, with our appetite for material things and compulsion to run the pointless hamster wheel of “success” become trapped behind walls of our own construction. Deadlines, bills and commitments are subtle, but cruel masters. Don’t know what it will take to finally shake the deadening life of tedium I’ve chosen for myself back “home,” but I could get used to a life of wandering aimlessly. Like Merle Haggard says, I could “die along the highway and rot away, like some old high wire pole.” Meanwhile I could spend my days feeling the liquidity of Time ebbing and flowing pleasantly behind me as I scatter my coffee grounds into the palmettoes.

Monday Badass, and Why is that Vagrant Sleeping in Your Driveway?

Parking in the driveway of long time friends Chuck and Donna. Chuck is a salty, badass old sea captain, who has made his living, usually on the sea, captaining commercial fishing boats in the Great Northwest and as a Reserve Police SCUBA diver, recovering bodies. Donna is his child bride, whom I figure, he must have won in a card game in some distant port. Chuck's first bike was a '41 Knuck with a bad carb, bought for fifty bucks. He still rides an old Honda, even well into his eighties.

The weather has been a little warmer here in Southwest Florida, but raining pretty much non-stop. Just hanging out on the covered porch eating, drinking beer and lying to each other. We did go out to see Chuck's boat, which he's been working on, docked about five minutes from his place. I know nothing about boats but it's pretty cool. A 44 ft. motor yacht, built in the 1980's. The interior is all teak wood with brass and glass barometers and shit on the main living area and galley. The best part is down in the engine room, bilge pumps and motor oil, where are crammed two 300 gallon fuel tanks, hydraulic pumps and twin 325 HP turbo-diesels. When he fires those bad mother@#kers up, King Neptune trembles and mermaids quiver in delight.

Central Florida

Bailed out of the panhandle with threats of freezng drizzle and headed south, passng through towns with names like "Winter Haven" and "Frostproof." I'm now sequestered in a crowded State Park campground where the couple next door is cooking some foul smelling dish that, may or may not contain Spaghettios, as a main ingredient and argue non-stop, eight feet from my window. Windows I refuse to close because it would require turning on the AC which I refuse to do strictly on philosophical grounds. It's hot now, Sputnik's tongue is lolling and I'm sweating. Not used to this heat, reaffirming what I've always believed; that the human condition is one of constant dissatisfaction.
But the beer's cold and it's great entertainment watching these old farts trying to back their ridiculously gargantuan motor homes into these small campsites.
I've got people around Port Charlotte and I'll head ther in the morning.

Gotta' get my laptop fixed, my thumbs are getting cramps.

"May They Rust in Peace"

Laptop's broke so I'm forced to thumb this out on the smartphone.
Passed this on my way here, but took some pics when I went back into town for supplies.

Florida, it seems, is the place to retire and die for trucks as well as rich Easterners and polite, wealthy Canadians.
This group sat in the quiet semi-circle of a shaded glen watching traffic pass by on the Costal Highway like dignified gentlemen in a State of Oxidizing Grace.

Home Sweet Home?

Think I'm far enough south to stay a while. Florida panhandle, not real warm, (down in the teens tonight) but no crowds and only eighteen bucks a night. Long leaf pines and palmetto. The beer stays cold in the cooler without ice!

Sputnik is My Co-pilot

Sputnik rarely complains and performs her duties as Navigator and Chief Security Officer with aplomb. She does however, look at me during the endless hours spent driving, as if to say, “What the f@#k are we doing, and why?” But hers is not to question why, hers is to take up space and bark at the gas station dogs as we leave The Natchez Trace to cut across the seedy underbelly of rural Alabama.
Pulp plants and paper mills, rundown shacks, satellite dishes and a bass boat in front of every trailer. Far-flung small towns and flooded, kiddie pool catfish farms.

Little sleep the night prior, and exhausted as I pressed on, ever-southward. Was propositioned by a big-boned, freckle-faced mulatto hooker in a Dothan, Alabama MacDonald's parking lot. I politely declined, but later wondered if I should have negotiated a loving embrace for a happy meal and a vanilla shake.


Memo to Garmin:

You produce a fine product, but for the love of God, please install a “Keep me the Hell out of the Hood” mode on your GPS device. “Fastest time” mode is ok, but a nigga’ could get killed in the places it takes you.

Yours Truly,

Hermit

Re-Trace-ing

Last time I'd been on the Natchez Trace Parkway was on my first bike, a KZ750 twin, on my first two-wheeled roadtrip. It was in late March and I got drenched and cold, and had to hole up in a motel for a day due to an incessant deluge. I ended up 24 hours AWOL reporting to Ft. Polk Louisiana to finish out my tour, but a kindly Duty Sargent let me slide when I signed in. Different situation now, just meandering south and west with no schedule nipping at my heels.
The Trace is an awesome drive or ride. Beautiful, smooth road with gentle, wooded curves, ranging from hardwoods to open prairie grass to a canopy of conifers. The sun finally showed itself from behind Winter's dreary clouds, and my spirits soared after some shitty conditions. I hope not to wait thirty-five years to revisit this stretch. Kind of freaky to see nothing but a natural setting, no houses, businesses or billboards, and was surprised to see so many feral dogs patrolling the sides of the road. The pickings must be pretty good on The Trace, the dogs were dirty, but looked well-fed. I stopped once to check one out, Sputnik let out a low growl and the hair stood up on her back as her wilder relative stared back with furtive hateful eyes, before bolting back into the woods.

 

Came upon a portion of The Trace that looked like the Argonne Forest after a WWI artillery battle. Found out later it was the aftermath of a tornado in 2006. Must have been a mean one because this stretch went on for several miles.

 

 

I don't know who Jeff Busby was, but he was definitely a good old boy, because The Jeff Busby Park in central Mississippi is beautiful and you can camp there free for up to fourteen days! Sputnik and I  had the whole place to ourselves as we were the only residents this night. It caused me to contemplate a life spent camping in Wal-Mart parking lots and places like this, only having to come up with fuel and food money.

 The only drawback was no electricity and it was cold as hell that night. I shivered with little sleep, finally relented and turned on the camper's heater. Next morning both truck and camper's batteries were dead. I was screwed until an old southern boy showed up to swamp out the restroom. I approached him in his old truck and saw an old cracked and corroded set of jumper cables in the bed. I asked him if he'd kindly give me a jump me, and he said he would after he finished his duties. We hooked up and after a while the old microtruck fired up. I thanked him profusely, handed him a ten, and was back on the road. Lesson learned: Next time unhook the trailer plug and run down the camper's only. Or, get a generator.

 

 

Sputnik was psyched to be out of the infernal passenger seat and able to run off leash, chasing squirrels and racing me down the hills on my badass, outlaw non-motorbike.

Easy Ridin'

 I tire quickly of The Interstate Highway System's mad rush. Concieved and built by Eisenhower to allow citizens to dodge the Soviet's atomic missiles, but I find myself instead dodging big-bellied transport junkies hopped up on white cross and greasy coffee, piloting diesel-belching juggernauts, hell bent for leather, taking perverse pleasure in pitching the little single axle tin can into a shimmying near-death wobble. They pass at seventy-five mph on a noxious, heavy metal hamster wheel, and I’m briefly sucked into the vortex for a few moments then spewed from its terrible, turbulent slipstream like the unwanted detritus of post-modern material hunger.
 Oh, woe is me, for I am but a simple traveler seeking only peace and the ice-free road less travelled. I jumped off of I-65, battered but not beaten, and headed southwest out of Nashville.

Found sanctuary this day, temperatures finally cracked the freezing mark and smooth sailing on dry pavement. Off the Superslab and on to The Historic Natchez Trace Parkway. Got on at the northern terminus. No commercial vehicles, no strip malls, no billboards hawking firecrackers, truckstop trinkets and Interstate XXX Adult Bookstores.
 Just 444 miles of rolling hills with panoramic vistas. The traffic in January is near nil, just me, with Sputnik as my chief navigator, always ever-vigilant for the occasional cyclist, or the few occasional like-minded soul seeking solitude. Small bands of crows, dark and raucous, flit across the sky scanning the road’s edge for fresh carrion and stale French fries. The salt-encrusted microtruck’s radio plays some forgotten song, Jimmy Morison riding on the storm.

Icicles hang from the rock walls like the beards of a hundred granite-faced sorcerers, peering down with a billion years of compressed sediment and infinite wisdom, passing judgment on the passing motorists, condemning them to a journey fraught with bloated bladders, jostling mini-vans and truck stops filled with aging lot lizards.

Let's Roll!

After saving my nickels and dimes, and a thorough exhaustive search, I finally found a unit small enough to be pulled comfortably. A compact and mobile domicile, lightweight and nimble, yet with all the creature comforts to meet my humble needs. Now, when Winter’s gnarled, arthritic fingers throttle me with its long-suffering frigid tedium, I’ve an escape pod. I shall travel to strange and exotic places such as Bowling Green, Memphis and Jacksonville, an itinerant ambassador, spreading Hope, Joy and holding tank effluence all across the Southeastern United States.

And, any skeptics who think my ride inadequately powered for this type of service, I say you are vastly underestimating its capabilities. For it is not a “Weak Glide” or an “Average Glide” or even a “Pretty Damn Good Glide,” it is after all, a SUPER Glide!

A Fool and His Money....

When ordering a replacement for the pannier lid I lost during my March Madness trip South, I decided to order a Top Case for the Interstellar Japanese Galaxy Traveler. After all, it’s only money and I don’t have near enough European aluminum on the bike. The instructions for the slick, three-piece locking mount were in German only, with no real diagrams so it took several hours and nearly a twelve pack of beer to figure out how to mount it.

I’m doing all I can to help out the faltering EU economy, while I personally go broke. Now I’ll be ready for my next ill-fated assault on Amërïkä’s highways and byways.

All About the Stickers

I’m a fool for stickers. The real reason I take trips is to collect stickers from points of interest along the way and paste them on the bike. Kind of like a gunslinger cutting a notch on his pistol handle, or a Groupie making plaster casts of Rock Star penis’.
My old Electra Glide had stickers from Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Iowa, Indiana, Florida, Michigan’s UP, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and more plastered all over the tour pack. The guy I sold it to didn’t like them, but letting go of those stickers was almost as hard for me as letting go of the bike.
I’ve ridden hundreds of miles out of my way to collect stickers. Florida was a target-rich area and I found several to paste on the panniers.

By the way,one of my pannier lids is lying on the side of the road somewhere in Georgia…….Damn it!

Spearing Mastodons and Self-Inflicted Cutting

Well I made it home, safe and sound and I asked myself, why in the hell would I voluntarily do something like that? These rides, whether it’s around the block or around the world always have their moments of horror ranging from, “Oh shit, I forgot my sunglasses,” to being taken hostage by cruel Columbian rebels, like Glen Haggstad, author of the book, Two Wheels Through Terror.

Do bikers, (along with rock-climbers, base-jumpers and those dudes who get the shit stomped out of them by bulls in Pamplona) punish ourselves, in perverse self-hatred, for some deep, unexpressed guilt? Or, is taking risk a manifestation of something built into our psyche?
The answer may be both and lies at the very root of our existence. Mankind was originally designed to live, half-naked, in unheated mud huts, engaging in bloody, territorial battles with murderous, neighboring tribes and securing dinner by killing large, pissed-off, prehistoric beasts using sticks and sharp stones.

Modern Western Culture has turned us from nomadic, savage, hunter-gatherers into a bunch of pasty, timid, well-groomed sheep. Seat belts, air bags and warning labels all mandated in the name of “Safety.” Hell, we even have Nanny-State assholes trying to tell us how big a soft drink we’re allowed to have! We’ve been programmed to avoid danger while, deep down, in the primal cavities of our selves, in the very depths of our Neanderthalic depravity, we crave it! We lust for the taste of mastodon blood!

I’m no badass, and I’ve never killed a mastodon with a stick, and in the years I’ve been riding I’ve had some scary shit happen, including going down hard on asphalt and even going over the trunk of a Buick that ran a stop sign, and I realize there are guys in hospital beds and wheel chairs who went through far worse shit, but those moments of blind terror while crossing the Ohio River, in heavy traffic and icy rain scared the f@#k out of me worse than anything else ever had.

That said, the worst part of the trip was getting sick and having to come home early. But, now that it’s all over, I have no regrets and I’d do it all again ‘cause I’m a dumb ass and I love this shit.


There is a macabre practice among emotionally troubled teenage girls called “cutting” where they periodically use razors to slice their skin. They often report that, though painful, they feel a sense of euphoria after it’s all over. I guess I can kinda’ relate.

Damn, This is Fun!

Got sick in Fla. Don't know if it's from sleeping in the cold, bad sardines or malaria, but I had a fever, chills and felt like crap. I took off and headed home. No more camping just interstates and motels and trying to get the hell home.
Woke in Cave City, Kentucky 36°, and took off in a drizzle, sick and miserable. I'm now in Scottsburg, Indiana after the worse 117 miles in my life.

The rain increased as I traveled north and by the time I got to Louisville it was pouring. Face shield fogging up and rain-covered windshield, I got be behind an RV that was moving slower than the rest of the traffic. It was raining so hard I could see nothing but the camper's tail lights. While crossing the Ohio River Bridge I could barely even see the tail lights in front of me and thought I was going to die. I wanted to get off the road, traffic was flying all around me sending up spray and I couldn't even see an exit. Now, soaking wet, all I could do was try to keep following the tail lights in front of me.

I finally got past Louisville an heavy traffic, (thank God it's Sunday with lighter traffic) and the rain turned to snow. For a while it seemed better because the visibility improved, that was until my face shield and windshield iced over! Then I had to lift the face shield, look over the windshield, squinting my eyes and try to make it to the next exit.

Now I'm safely in a motel in snowy Scottsburg, thawing out and drying out, just a couple of hours from home. I'm not leaving 'til I see the sun shining.

Yo-Yo Trip

If you ever go to Everglades National Park, you'll have to pass  Robert's Fruit Stand.  Stop in for the kitschy backyard zoo and the best fresh-fruit shakes on earth.

Spent several nights sleeping amongst the mosquitoes and alligators at Flamingo Key, the very southern tip of mainland Florida. Now time to head back north on this yo-yo trip. I'm skeeter-bit and tired, but I got to keep on steady-rollin'.

Pesky twenty to thirty mph winds are making me fight with the top-heavily loaded bike. The wind gusts try their best to blow me into oncoming trucks as I cut across the cotton fields and orange groves on US 27 then jump on to I 70 for a white knuckle blast up the Bradenton/Tampa/St. Pete corridor.

The winds blew the pleasant smell of oranges up under my face shield and the citrus fragrance reminded me of my youth, when I'd free-base fabric softener sheets for cheap thrills and good times.

I think the days on the road, sleeping rough and the NyQuil are all conspiring to affect my central nervous system. I'm starting to speak in short Bulgarian phrasing an I'm seeing visions.