Montezuma Magic

Anza Borrego at the end of Montezuma Valley Road

The asphalt is rushing underneath. A big crestless wave of concrete. Moving with a shocking sense of speed and vitality. It seems elaborate and alive and fresh with that early morning dew-on-the-grass kind of confidence.

Yet the route is so inherently dull. Laid out so straight-as-an-arrow that I find myself wondering where the pavement thinks it might actually be going?

For all the movement around me, all the cars and the trucks and the traffic, I don’t actually feel like I’m going anywhere at the moment…

At it’s core, I have to believe that the road knows it has better places to be than this treadmill of traffic… This stillborn conduit of everyday life…

But freeways are freeways…

They move people from Point A to Point B. They’re routes of progression. Routes of advancement. They go forward. Day in and day out… Yet in some ways they never really seem to advance…

Much like my life at the moment…

Tugging in the clutch lever ever so slightly, I knock the bike down the gear and the engine revs its awesomely torquey head off — The turn signals click, the traffic dives towards the right lane, the route of regularity exits… The road begins to get fun…

It’s 1 pm and there’s a loud, vibrant, noisy commotion whirling around me.

Ahhhhh, this feels good…

Days of work have lead me to this… To this singular movement and moment and belief…

And just a few miles later I’m filling up the gas tank, perusing a map, and wondering where in the hell I’m headed…

Just thirty minutes ago, I hit the garage door clicker and asked myself if I even felt like I riding — But today is too perfect, to beautiful, to crystal-clear to let go of…

Moments of potential magic only come around so often in this life….For last year I’m not really sure if I’ve really taken advantage of them… These days I find myself wondering how many days we get in this life and how many we actually embrace?

And then there’s a boom… A boom-shack-a-lacka… The engine wailing…

The uncluttered mass of an engine’s explosion shuttering its excess waste out the block and down through the exhaust, until there’s this unburned shuttered pulse riveting up my spine. A slight kickback. The bike wiggles… And then it’s ready to thrust again…

Like it never happened…

And it feels so damn good… And so damn strange… All of which is so out of character for what it seems my character has been as of late…

Over the past chunk of time, I find myself feeling this odd sense of excitement about the future — Because things have never seemed this good or looked this positive… On all fronts… I have so much to be thankful for and even though I’m not the most religious of folks, so much seems downright blessed right now…

Yet I can’t help finding fault in the greatness — The world is bouncing back from the edge of a near global abyss and in my darkest moments I find myself wondering just how ‘real’ that bounce might be… And what that means for me?

And then I’m also bouncing off the walls…

I feel like a fucking hamster…

Amazingly it was just six days ago when the latest show that I’ve worked on, ‘Man Made: Bugatti Super Car‘, premiered on the National Geographic Channel — And yet if I’m really, really honest with myself (and that means you too dear blog reader) that feels like a thousand miles ago on the journey of life…

As if it never computed. As if it never mattered. As if it never happened…

And I find myself wondering, how is it possible that the thing that kept you awake all those many nights in damn-near daydream stupor suddenly seems, well, darn I say meaningless? How did I move on so quickly?

Have I lost the ability to appreciate the moment?

Have I become too jaded?

Does anything matter anymore?

For all the excitement, for the all success, for the very culmination in the idea that the dream is actually alive and kicking — perhaps more so than ever before — It oddly feels as if it never even happened…

Is all of this an illusion? Is life?

At the moment, I’m left wondering when did it all begin to accelerate this quickly? When did I loose the ability to cherish the very moment I’ve worked so hard for?

I just don’t know…

That’s a different way of saying that I used to bemoan the fact that I didn’t know who I was — But then at some point I found myself — And it felt ‘right’, it felt ‘real’, I was who I wanted to be and it was all moving forward with a certain purpose and drive and vision — And yet now I’ve done, gone, and lost whatever magic that was…

I feel driven and split and confused and conflicted and so out of sorts that I think I need my own engine ‘tuned’…

Every day there are moments which feel familiar, moments which seem real and intrinsic to who I am, moments which give me joy… And yet there are also moments which feel so strange, so different, so out of place, so against the texture of me, that I’m left emotionally bouncing back and forth between who I think I am, who I want to be, who I think I have the ability to become…

What dreams are real and justified and which are jaded illusions, and which are so far-off in never-neverland that they’re just pipedreams…

And maybe most importantly, when did dreams become qualified?

What happened to excess belief and that gnawing, deep-down self-confidence where you know — just know in your gut — that while you don’t exactly know where you are headed, you know where you’ll end up?

Tonight, I’m left wondering if that’s a real attribute or just merely a product of age? Can you only experience that in your teens and twenties? Does the real-world always eventually catch up with you? Do credit cards and car payments start you down a path of no return?

Ultimately does the money matter more than the humanity or the product?

In today’s post-economic-apocalyptic world, how do we measure success?

These days are we all supposed to be Huxtables, and Keatons, and Tanners?

Is the drive the family? The ego? The business of business? The product?… Or is it still the dream?

Ten or twenty minutes later — Maybe an hour, maybe two — I’m flying through Ranchita, California… A speck of a town that’s a dot on a map in a guidebook that nobody buys…

And it is so fucking fantastic…

The road is open, to say the traffic is light is foolish — There isn’t any — And a heartbeat later I have the opportunity to grind one of the great roads in California…

CA S-22… Better know as Montezuma Valley Road…

If there is motorcycle-magic in this world, this is ground-zero…

A flick of the wrist, the pull of a clutch lever, going gear-up, then a gear-down, and more twisting of the wrist… And I’m there… I’m alive.. I’m in fantasyland… This doesn’t feel real and yet I know it is…

Perfect pavement bends in beautiful corners designed to accentuate the majesty of the dessert’s mountainous cliffs… And the road just twists… Back and forth and back and forth… It’s seasickness for asphalt… And the views… The Salton Sea never looked this good (ok, I’m not exactly sure it ever looked good, but maybe that’s a generational thing)… If you’re a gearhead this is paradise… There’s no two-ways about it… The snakey-snarky road surface flicks around with such relentless abandon that it’s hard to believe that there’s something better in this world… Most roads have one 180º corner, this road has dozens… And that’s if you just count the ‘big ones’…

As the heat of the engine builds and the outside temperature conversely drops, I pilot the bike into a succession of endless corners and smirk…

It’s the perfect golf-shot moment… The reason we come back ride after ride… Because every now and then, it can really be this good…