Day 14: What Happened
Back at the motel in Sandpoint, Idaho, the flirty, late-thirtysomething lady checking me in was obviously a story. We’d met a minute and a half before, and already I knew this much: formerly coastal, formerly big-city, but a divorce somehow meant that she had to be here, “trapped” behind the desk of the mom-and-pop motor inn turned no-tell/Section 8 motel, wasting that strung-out-chic BMI and hacked haircut on nobody.
Maybe she was lonely; I know I hadn’t talked to anybody for about 72 hours, and here it was the end of a 98-degree, 281-mountain-mile, bug-clouded day. So we were yakking it up, swapping stories, when she asked for my driver’s license. I dug it out from an inner-inner cargo-shorts pocket, beneath fly-spattered motorcycle overpants. She looked at the license’s nine-year-old picture and her face made quick swerves from pleasure to concern. “Handsome!” she blurted, and then, unable to stop herself, “What happened?”
So I figure it was time for a new license anyway.
Which does not excuse or explain my losing my wallet one week later, yesterday, on Highway 2 somewhere between Devils Lake and Church’s Ferry, North Dakota.
But does raise the subject of pockets, the great many pockets involved in motorcycle travel, which is (among many other things) a process of wearing your car inside out.
Instead of being inside your car, you’re wrapped around your motorcycle. You’re not protected by bumpers, a steel frame and air bags forcing the world to keep its distance. You’re wearing such armor as fabric, foam and plastic can effect, from your helmet to your padded shoulders, elbows, back, hips and knees. Sturdy boots and gloves do their best to protect your fingers and toes.
And whatever comforts and necessities you carry aren’t inside the car with you. They’re not stowed in the trunk or strewn in back. Your laptop bag isn’t tossed on the empty passenger seat; your coffee can’t be snugged in the cup holder. No sunglasses in the door pocket or over the visor. No out-of-sight, out-of-mind glove-compartment hoard of pens, plastic cutlery, Advil and phone-charging cords. No such extravagant space.
We put things in our cars with us and drive away, windows up, doors locked, A/C on, and neither we nor our stuff need feel the wind or touch the world until we stop and open our doors.
In motorcycle travel, whatever you need is with you out there in the weather, strapped to the bike in boxes or bags or else velcroed and zipped into something you’re wearing. You need it. It needs to be someplace where you can find it. It needs to be secured against wind, rain, gravity and vibration. You need it not to fall off.
Motorcycle stowage is ceaseless discipline.
Laziness is consequence. So is inattention.
Rather than stow the sunglasses in their proper pocket on the tank bag while I check the oil, I decide to hang them from the duffel bag strap. I don’t want to pull on the armored jacket and the CamelBak bag for the 50-yard trip from my campsite to the lakeshore, so I pile them on the top case, snugged by a bungee. Rather than return my passport to its home in the laptop bag’s inner zipped pocket, I have a sudden better idea and stow it in the jacket’s “secret” waterproof compartment. Rather than wonder why the kickstand scraped a little dirt as I parked, I note the gravel lot’s divots and ruts. Rather than take time for a pre-flight check, I click the helmet’s chin strap shut and twist my wrist.
Consequence is all but inevitable. The sunglasses will still be there two minutes and a half-mile later, when I wonder why they aren’t on my face, but that’s a rare unearned mercy. Jacket and CamelBak will topple to the grit. The five minutes’ panic over the missing passport cost much more than that in expended cardiac years. If I’d wondered harder why the bike seemed just a little lower to the ground, if I’d thought of it as a subtle but unignorable problem in stowage, weight and suspension, I might have diagnosed the rear-tire puncture outside the Indian Head motorcycle shop in Libby, Montana, rather than an hour or so later on a cell-serviceless stretch of road between Libby and Kalispell, when whatever was stuck in the rear tire shot out, taking all the air with it. And every time I forget to take time to tuck and wrap away the helmet chinstrap’s absurd excess length, I hear my mistake as soon as I clear second gear, the long tail fast-rapping on the helmet, rip-roaring in the wind.
A constant effort at returning things to from whence they came, eschewing every shortcut, sticking to the plan, paying attention to subtleties and intuitions, taking the time to do it — whatever it is — the right way, every step in order… Motorcycle stowage is a discipline, a demand, a calling which anyone who has ever seen my desk or my closet would tell me I should avoid, ignore, refuse. Those who know me well might cite severe ADD and moderate sleep apnea as contributors to my distraction. Motorcycle commuting? Sure, they’d allow. A forgotten textbook is only forty minutes, there and back again. But long-distance motorcycle stowage? Not for you, they’d say. Have you thought about seeing the country by train?
So. When I pulled into the westside Devils Lake CENEX gas station Sunday afternoon, I followed a gradually evolved system. I placed my orange plastic hard-case wallet on the motorcycle’s seat, rather than put the ATM card back in the wallet and the wallet back in the inner-inner pocket only to find that the swipe wasn’t accepted or debit mode not permitted and have to dig it all out again. I pumped the gas, replaced the bike’s pull-out tank cap. I remember putting the card back in the wallet and reaching through the overpants pocket to push the wallet into the cargo-pants pocket and thinking gratefully, momentarily, that for once it had gone in without struggle. I pulled my gloves back on, swung a leg over the bike and pulled out onto Highway 2.
Somewhere down that road, I felt a light bop on my right foot. That happens, motorcycling. Rocks. Trash. Chips of macadam. Big bugs, even the carcasses of tiny birds. I looked down. Nothing splattered on my boot. I rolled on.
More than two hours later, I was taking a rest, eating sardines and crackers on a picnic table in Grand Forks, North Dakota’s Sertoma Japanese Garden Park, looking forward to crossing the Red River into Minnesota. Or not. I was tired, and beginning to question my plan to head due east on funky old 2 to Duluth and the northern Great Lakes, rather than make the slightly faster and certainly simpler transit that would begin with a ride down North Dakota’s eastern border to Fargo, where I’d pick up the interstate system and zoom toward Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo. I called Fargo to see about a motel room, got to that point where the clerk asked me for a credit card, reached for that inner-inner pocket — — and realized my wallet was gone.
Maybe I snugged it between layers of armor and fabric which felt, for just that moment, like a pocket. Maybe I got it part-way in the pocket. Maybe I got it in, but the velcro didn’t close.
Maybe — if I’d paid attention to that bop on my foot and stopped there, pulled over and patted pockets, walked my panic back along the shoulder while I could still remember exactly what I’d been seeing when the wallet slid down through layered space held open by thick knee pads and tapped me on the foot to say goodbye — I could have found it.
Two more hours later — after the calls to the state highway patrol and the local police and the trying-to-be-calm 90-mile ride back to Devils Lake, after the bee stung me where my third eye would be if I had one and one among the so-many-their-swarms-show-up-on-radar mosquitoes and midges of the swampy Upper Missouri River system attached itself to my right cornea while I putt-putted and walked seven miles of verge in the failing sideways light — I couldn’t.
Motorcycle stowage.
I try.
And I believe that, in some way, the trying (with its no-way-around-it risk of failure) is good for me, as I know that the attentiveness required by riding itself is good and balm, a respite not from but of focus: a chance to be doing just one thing, body and mind, for miles and miles and miles. This is something I need, and in the course of getting it, I will sometimes incur consequences like these: the panic, the apparently wasted time, the room in the sweet, dull town I’d hoped never to see again, the family’s worry, the time on the phone cancelling cards and arranging for replacements, the accumulating understanding that this is not stranding or ending but mere elaborated inconvenience, just story, just what happened.
The reluctant desk clerk back in Sandpoint, Idaho, who asked what had happened to my face, to my life? Well, we’re all stories. I listened to all the info she was flinging and got a glimpse of hers. And somehow, because she was paying a particular kind of attention when she looked from my face to that driver’s license photo, she read a chapter in mine.
“What happened?”
My vanity wanted to answer her in several ways. It wanted to point out that a case could still be made for weathered good looks, or at least the hard-won beauty of experience. It wanted to answer that the changes which shocked her — the grey, the lines, the sag, slide and fall — come to us all, and were surely coming for her. But how could I blame her for lacking the guile to say something other than the truth?
I said they’d been interesting years.
