Day 16 — Washing Away
Day before yesterday was a hard day. I know, because the Gremlin Chaser lost a wing and Bone slipped a disc.
OK, I also know because the rain that did not quit from Devils Lake, North Dakota to Fergus Falls, Minnesota found its way through all my defenses.
I deployed the one-piece, impermeable banana-yellow BMW rainsuit about 20 minutes south of Devils Lake, on a lonely Route 20 curve where lake met prairie under a disapproving sky.
Decisions about heavy-duty motorcycle rain gear are always tricky. Put it on too soon, and you suffer sweaty, claustrophobic and clumsy minutes or hours to no purpose. Put it on too late, and — — well, you put it on to no purpose at all. This was the right moment for the suit, as the first drops arrived while I tugged the zipper up under my chin.
For some reason — overconfidence? laziness? — I continued to gamble on the waterproofing of of British army-surplus boots, which had held out through all previous storms.
Clouds emptied themselves over eastern North Dakota like an airborne bucket brigade trying to fill an empty pool. The bike and I did a modified Australian crawl through the near-empty hamlets northwest of Fargo, wondering what these one-gas-pump towns looked like when they weren’t drowning.
The boots held out for an hour-and-a-half of lifeguard duty. As soon as I felt socks saturating, I stopped and threw on the rain overboots I’d been saving for Noah’s Flood, but that was baling with a sieve.
The storm rained us into Jamestown, where I stopped at the Salvation Army store to buy thick, dry socks and a heavy wool sweater. I mopped out the boots, and the socks would stay dry a pleasurable little while before my toes swam again. The sweater helped me avoid hypothermia, but by hour three the rain found its way down the back of my neck and up my sleeves, so I was no longer dry inside the banana-yellow suit, just wet in a reasonably warm way.
Here I have to admit that I enjoy this kind of thing: stomping in the world’s great puddle, moving through and with weather rather than shutting it out. When I’m staying fairly dry despite the rain’s best efforts, I laugh because the contrast of warm toes and rain in the face feels so good. When the wet gets through and the trip turns miserable, it’s so miserable that I have to laugh. I like the rain gear working, all that human cleverness, and I like the gear failing, the true boss asserting itself. I like cobbling together respites and solutions — the Salvation Army store — and I savor the things I couldn’t have seen and people I wouldn’t have met staying dry.
Like the public art in those drowned towns along Route 20.
An antique billboard advertising one crossroads’ claim to fame: a loop of train track that, unlike all those other half-round Midwestern loading loops, makes a complete circle: “It’s interesting!”
Fronting a rectangle of lawn in front of a little rectangular ranch house, a crude cast-iron eagle on a knee-high pedestal: bellicose in the spread of his silver-painted wings, but still somehow disconsolate. Maybe it was just the rain, or maybe it was the thought of how he’d look come nightfall, when the spotlight just below him lit and he’d become a low, lone beacon on the plain.
Like the biscuit-colored old man who joined me in the men’s room where I was swabbing out the boots. He had that Midwestern simplicity which assumes that news to him is news to me. “Vermont? You got a long way to go!” he said, not confirming or commiserating or even scolding as a Yankee might, but trying to get me to understand. Then he proceeded to run through every Vermont association in his head, from the old Newhart show’s two-Darryl inn to the Crosby-Kaye White Christmas, not to mention several fascinating cases of people he knew who might have moved to or been from or maybe visited there.
He was just being companionable, in his way. As are Bone and the Gremlin Chaser.
Bone is a deer vertebra found in the dust as I patched my back tire on a hillside between Libby and Kalispell, Montana. The flat tire was the trip’s second mechanical predicament; I was worried about patterns, omens, signs. And there was Bone, tipped up in the dirt like a helping hand, conveniently placed to backstop my vibrating mini-compressor. The patch held, the compressor pumped the tire full, and Bone came along for the ride, bungee-strapped to the big red dry bag.
Before the big storm, Bone was still flesh and bone. Filaments of dessicated tendon whiskered from its various knobs and crannies, and an entire disc of mummified cartilage clung to the nerve column. Memento mori, Bone said, the same thing over and over, but only in a companionably cautioning way. I liked having Bone along.
And when the trip’s third mechanical crisis — the absence of an o-ring allowing engine pressure to unscrew the oil filler plug, spraying hot red MotorX 15–50w all over the left side of bike and me — pulled me over the next day in Kalispell, a cowboy-hatted angel appeared to help me clean up and limp over to the nearest moto shop. While I was finding fixes, Jacob, at work in the miscellenarium under his pickup cap, had crafted a key chain for me, incorporating four angels’ wings, a cross and a yodeling cowboy-hatted skull. “A gremlin chaser,” said Jacob — — of whom more later. “You need one.”
I rolled into Fergus Falls, Minnesota doing laps in drenched gear, not as thoroughly damp as a whale but not too much drier than a diver in a wet suit. It was dark in the motel parking lot, and I’m lucky I saw the little glint at the front of the tank bag’s rain cover: one of the angel wings, somehow detached by storm and turbulence and, much more remarkably, somehow stuck to the black plastic cover long enough for me to find it. Lost, but not gone.
And when I got the big red dry bag into the motel room, I saw that bone was no longer one thing. Rain and ride had washed away the filaments of muscle, and the disc of cartilage hung like gristle on a steak. I respectfully tossed the flesh in the bathroom wastebasket, toweled Bone off and set it on the electric baseboard to dry. Not lost, just washed clean down to mantra. A hard day, but the room warmed fast and the mini Mr. Coffee was stocked with hi-test. I strung a clothesline from the hinges of the bathroom and front doors, hung all my wet things and got out the pliers to work on the angel’s wing.
