There 10 parts to this memoir. You may find quick links to each of them in the Archives sidebar to the right.
By the end of the summer of 1966 Earl and I had taken numerous one, two and three day weekend motorcycle tours. Sometimes we would have a destination in mind but more often it was just to take a travel bag, fill it with a couple of T shirts, underwear, socks, and throw in a shaving kit, bungie it to the back seat of the bike, and point the bikes in a general direction and take off.
In those days neither he nor I had very big bikes, mine a four stroke Honda 350cc and his a Yamaha 350 two stroke. Anything above about 60 mph set up wicked vibrations in the handlebars and foot pegs that got to wearing on you after an hour or two. So those trips were not anything like the high speed touring that we would get into in a couple of years. These were leisurely rides on the blue highways, far from the interstates, rolling through small town America.
The joy was in the going, never in the getting there. That was a very good thing because after eleven in the morning there was never a tavern, bar, or road house that we didn’t feel obligated to visit and do our part in helping sustain the economy of rural Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. I’m not saying we dropped a lot of bread in any one town. There were so many small towns, so many little bars, and so little time to help them all out. But we tried to be fair and to do our best. We dropped a trail of dollars and left many dead soldiers (empty beer bottles) standing on the bar at many a honky tonk in the course of a day.
And we did our bit to keep the music industry going by distributing some nickels and dimes in the local juke boxes. We had rather eclectic taste ranging from Johnny Cash and Ray Price, to Johnny Rivers and the Beach Boys. The more we drank the better the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” sounded, especially when we added our outstanding voices to the mix and encouraged the rest of the boys there in redneck heaven to sing along.
Truth is that in all the years that we walked in to dozens of red neck bars in dozens of tiny villages we never once even came close to getting into a fight. We were happy drinkers, lovers not fighters, live and let live “good old boys.” We made sure, however, that we never told anybody where we worked because you never could be sure you wouldn’t run into a 280 pound solid hunk of Republican gorilla with a broken elevator who would want to crush us like flies. The subtlety inherent in explaining that in that we were “civil service” and not political appointees would, we feared, be lost on old Bubba there, so we just said that we were from “back east,” “up north” or “down south” and let it be – which always seemed to work.
Earl was, even back then, a person who liked a certain minimum level of creature comforts. He would not be caught dead sleeping in a sleeping bag in a tent, or in an unheated park cabin, or in a flea bag motel. And I never found the reality of camping nearly so gratifying as the imagining of it. So, along about three hours before sundown he would have us making our way toward the nearest interstate or sizable town and finding a nice middle class motel. Motel 6, when it actually cost $6 a night, and Super 8, when it actually was $8, were too down scale for his taste. So we inevitably ended up splitting the tab at a Holiday Inn or Best Western.
I did notice that he may not have been telling me exactly the truth as to why he insisted that we do that. But those motels that he somehow could sense like a bloodhound on the trail of a convict, always just happened to have a restaurant and a bar on site. And by that time of day, having worked hard all day at saving the economies of small town rural America, neither of us were anxious to try to ride to another bar when we could walk or crawl down the hall to the first martini of the day.
Those were a couple of pretty nice, low key, riding years. Neither of us ever got so totally sloshed that we couldn’t walk, with a little care, and ride, with maybe a little more care and attention to what we were doing. But I kind of doubt the latter. We never got in any trouble with the law, never had an accident and never harmed anything other than killing a few million insects, and, of course, our own bodies. Looking back on it I think that it was all at least half insane and yet we thought not only that it was “normal” but that anybody who wasn’t putting ten thousand miles or more a year riding T to T (tavern to tavern) down blue highways in beautiful rural America on a motorcycle was downright unenlightened.
What we never could quite explain to anybody was the feeling of getting up early, just after dawn, while the dew was still on the grass, the mist had yet to rise from the ponds, and the sun was burning an orange glow into the fog. Then starting out for another day without a care in the world, the birds starting their chatter, the cattle walking in well orchestrated lines to the barns to be milked, Canada geese, Mallards and Teal stirring on the ponds.
Our bikes were not loud. They did not sound like our job was to tear up Hollister as soon as we reached town. We never wanted loud bikes drowning out the sounds of nature and life. To this day I refuse to ride a motorcycle that insults every living thing with its arrogant ear splitting rumble and roar. To me if your bike is loud you have thrown away half of the joy of riding.
I hate breakfast; can’t gag it down; never could; never will. Earl had to have breakfast; a big breakfast that essentially had to last him all day since the rest of his caloric intake until supper would be purely liquid. So he would eat, and eat, and I would sit and drink cup after cup of coffee and we would both smoke half a pack of cigarettes before he finished.
Like booze, tobacco was de rigeur in those days. I smoked cigarettes, sometimes cigars, and at my desk I smoked a pipe. I also chewed tobacco and used snuff when I was outdoors. Other than that I would have nothing to do with tobacco. The truth is that everybody smoked, or so it seemed. Doctors advertised the “smoothness” and lack of “harshness on the throat” of this or that brand on television. My doctor smoked. His nurse smoked. There were ash trays all around the waiting room. Most bars were so thick with blue smoke that you couldn’t see to the end of the room. Nobody thought anything of it.
So, that is what it was like in the mid ‘60s for a couple of motorcycle happy Executive Office “professionals” who still managed to get 60+ hours of work done every week and ended up traveling most of the blue highways in the four states closest to Washington, DC
I haven’t forgotten that I promised you the stories of Earl and I mapping out the Grand National Motorcycle Racing Circuit and following the stars. And how we decided to buy motorcycles from Montgomery Ward (I’m not kidding) and try to assemble them while sloshed. And, finally, I promised to share the insanity of my taking a trip from Washington DC to Daytona Beach on the Honda 350, which explains why I sold it when we got back!
We will get to all of that and much more. I promise. But something has changed since I started writing this little memoir. I find that I am writing this at least as much from the memories of my heart as from the memories in my head. As I sit here typing away, unexpected memories that I have not recalled in decades come rushing back into my consciousness.
So the outline and structure of this memoir that I thought I had figured out before I started writing, has given way to these refound images that keep tumbling, unbidden, out of me. I thought that this was going to be just recalling a few glimpses of the past that I hoped you might find interesting. And I still hope that you will find them enjoyable to read.
But what is also happening, quite unexpectedly, is that I am seeing sketches of my life that were essentially lost to me; and, I find myself having to reprocess those memories through the filter of the person I have become. Sometimes that is enjoyable, sometimes it is painful, but always I find it adds a new subtlety to the person I thought I was and the person I now am. In essence, what started as a writing exercise has become an exercise in self examination. I’m not quite sure what I think of this new thing, but I need to go with the flow and see where it leads.
Monte
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