Retracing Your Roots A 1,100 Miles At A Time

Ducs on the Road at Alice's in NorCal

It’s flat and foggy. A collection of roadways, rattled by the everyday, intersect one on top of another. There are holes and grooves and unannounced visitors tucked behind the wheel of their ordinary machines coming up fast in the right lane. Folks cross the street without a care in the world. They never even look. Semi’s stroll along mass arteries of societal movement and never check their blind spots. It’s chaotic and mundane and unaware – And no matter what you do, you feel like you’ve already been here before… That you do it everyday…

And then the light changes. Goes Green. And the stop becomes the start of something special…

The road darts up the valley wall. Corners approach. Bend after bend they begin to build. One twist becomes one lean, which becomes one seamless arch – Then it all becomes two. Then three. Then four. The one-dimensional route becoming the two-dimensional, which begets the multi-dimensional. And you feel the bike bite down. The suspension settles. The tires grab the asphalt. The throttle advances. The gears engage. The L-Twin hums as the comfortable ceases and the challenge beckons. Your fingers beginning to bend just a bit before you hear the pop of the clutch, and the mechanical advances into the emotional. One gear up at a time.

A second, a minute, a moment, it all comes together — without even thinking about it – and then it’s just you and the road and the ride. Alone.

The ability to see ahead diminishes as the light goes dark, and the darkness then quickly becomes light again. To the side, tree after tree flies past and waves goodbye just as it says hello. The canopy above revealing little of what lies ahead and even less of where you’ve just been. You squint. You try to look ahead. But you can’t make it out. There are just pooled spots of light sitting on fragments of curved kinks that only a few hours ago you were idly tracing with your finger on a worn-out map while sipping your first coffee of the day.

Somehow, somewhere, it just doesn’t seem possible to be here. Right now. And yet you are. You are this very moment. This one, little bit of time, tucked away on the side of mountain.

As the road keeps climbing upwards, under your helmet, you struggle for your bearings. Initially grasping for the last remnants of a remotely general direction for where you’re headed. But slowly, as each corner wears you down, the need to know where you are dissipates. It evaporates. It disappears. Completely. You are lost and yet you are not – You’re just running from the preplanned part of your everyday life. Instead running towards the unarranged adventure. The thing that lies ahead and beyond what you can see. And for the first time in ages it feels good to not be worrying about where you’re going, just that you’re getting there.

After all, that’s why they make the maps in the first place.

Hitting the first uncovered straight in multiple miles, you catch a glimpse of the sun that’s sitting overhead as it settles into a groove. And through the break in the tree line you hear the exhaust resonate throughout the canyon walls. Booming and echoing from right below your helmet to the very valley floor sitting beneath you.

And you see. You see and see and see.

Acres of the uninhabited. Natures very own solitude. The last vestige of life before mankind ever arrived here. It is beautiful and it’s awe-inspiring and so counter to the half-dozen or so concrete or stuccoed boxes that you move between in your regular daily regiment that you find yourself wondering where did all this come from? And more importantly, how did I get here?

Then it’s gone. A flash frame in a scene of forward progress.

Hundreds of trunks of bark race right next to you, as bits of light flash in-between, and you just carve. Carve corner after curve after corner. The rhythm of the roadway repeating itself in the revs of the engine. Up and down and up and down. You shift. The bike. Your weight. Your mindset. It’s engaged. It’s complicated. It’s sequential events unfolding in microseconds of thoughtless processes; You see the road come at you, You catalogue it, You think back on the collection of roads you’ve ridden in the past, You process the event at hand, You come up with a game plan, You enact it. It just happens — almost instantly.

And a hundred corners later, you climb off the bike and breath. Big breaths. Deep down to the bottoms of your lugs. Because you’ve just experienced something that doesn’t happen everyday – something that doesn’t even happen every month.

You’ve just experience the beauty of a multi-day ride.

It’s been three days since I returned home from a 1,100-plus-mile voyage with the old man, and while my body is physically beat, my moto-spirit has never been better.

I feel more at peace with riding than I’ve felt in countless months. More confident. More connected. More passionate. More alive with what it means to actually ride.

It is as if I have returned myself to me. In a way that perhaps only I can understand.

And oddly, in a way I have.

Because for the last week MotorMilt and I have retraced our very own footsteps, rushing up and down the California coastline, one curvy road at a time, in an eerily reminiscent journey to an adventure we took almost five years to the very day from when we left town. Five long arduous years that have been full of change and circumstance and the evolution of life. 1,825 days where the only constant has been that there are few constants if any in life. With the obvious exception being a mechanical, dare I say near maniacal, advancement of time.

Honestly I don’t know what took so long to do this.

While we’ve done road trips or multi-day rides over these past five years, none of those journeys were like this journey. Because none of those trips featured this many miles in just five days of back to back riding, this far up and out of what I know.

It’s a kind of riding that is so righteous and profound that I’m not sure that I can fully comprehend it’s meaning in totality. It is as if the mile-markers are Brillo pads for everything that ails us in life and as you pass each one by a little bit more of the regular pressures or concerns of daily life get scrubbed away.

Each corner or sequence or hidden short-cut that turns out to be the long-way around holds the power to re-initialize your own hard drive and each gas station fill-up doesn’t just put fuel in the tank, but also installs a little bit more fresh code for your own personal operating system. Somewhere on day two or three or four, you wake up and suddenly it’s as if you’re a brand new machine all over again, fresh from the factory floor.

I’ve sorely missed that feeling.

Instead of bemoaning its absence, what I should have done in retrospect was tossed my leg over a bike and just go for it. Just ride. Till the flame in the sunset went out. But I didn’t. I let the real world and the deadlines and pitfalls of so many other things get in the way. Which begs the question, why do we wait to do the things that give us the most pleasure? Why do with rationalize the destruction of the very things that let us be us?

Sitting here tonight, I can’t escape the thought that there is something marvelous and magical and damn right special about just hitting the road with minimal pre-planning, a couple of saddlebags filled with two-days worth of clothes – max — and nothing more than a general direction of where you’re headed. It’s illogical, it’s unorthodox, it’s counter-intuitive on just about every level to how I run the rest of my life and yet it’s trips like this that lay the very foundation of my soul. For they are so much more than the sum of their parts. They are journeys built on a collection of routes and roads and off-the-beaten path highways that transcend the love affair with a machine or a weekend jaunt, and instead enter a realm of serenity where you exist in a nine or ten hour window of obsessive-compulsive movement.

They offer the kind of release that’s impossible to achieve on a regular ride. Impossible to feel when you’re wondering where you put the garage door clicker or if you locked the front door. When you’re on the road for multiple days none of that matters. Your head lets go of the grocery lists and the car payments. It’s as if you exist in a vacuum, where it’s just you and the road and the freedom to come and go as you please. It’s an almost primal reason to advance.

However the thing that truly stands out about the past week – and what I’ll always remember about this particular trip – were the things that finally had the time to be said. The words and the phrases and the sentences that somehow seem to get lost in the madness of the everyday. While the ride was great, it’s the bits in-between and afterwards that encompass the outstanding. Whether it was standing on the edge of North America and peering into the great blue beyond or shuffling up to the bar late at night and ordering a well deserved single malt, those are the true memories I’ll hold. The true moments. The things that matter the most.

It is perhaps that the best part of a long adventure – the time you have person to person to communicate when you’re unwired, untethered and unable to receive Outlook notifications.

A couple of other quick thoughts on the journey;

Jun 09, 2009 | Categories: Rides, Top Rides | Tags: Big Sur, CA Route 1, CA Route 9, Ducati Monster, Ducati ST3, Los Angeles, Monterey, Morro Bay, NorCal, Pacific Coast Highway, Palo Alto, PCH, Roadtrip, Santa Cruz | Leave A Comment »