On the home stretch, I
found myself tallying up what little I know about good fortune and fate. —DM
Tom as we motorshambled around the mountain town of Woodstock, N.H.,
looking for a our 14th straight motel room.
long trip.”
rides in the sun that made my heart swell so palpably that I worried—I hoped!—it might be permanently
stretched.
N.Y.
Lou Gehrig said, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." But of course he was only guessing.
And only when you're swimming with the universal tide do you happen into scenes like the one at the
family-owned gas station back near St. Peter's, Nova Scotia. Dad is manning the pump. Mom is inside at the
cash register, keeping warm on an unseasonably cold and windy summer's day.
motorcycles, muttering his impressions to himself.
bike. “Orange is my favorite color,” he says. But then he points to Tom’s red
tank and offers a counterpoint. “But that one reminds me of Christmas.”
and the kid happily flits back into the warm station to tell his mother about the men and their motorcycles.
I’m afraid to say—to go on to one another about how lucky we have been in life, to
have had wild adventure and family love, to have had interesting work and rich
friendship too.
lead to conclusions. And conclusions about fortune are almost always foolish
and usually dangerous.
last leg of the trip. Two lucky bastards on a three-week trip on
shiny toys—kids, wives and work to go home to—using a poor state's leached land
as our personal roller coaster.
The bartender ascertained we were tourists and rattled off a
half-formed standup redneck routine about how she had her third baby on Sunday
and returned to work the following Thursday. About how she’s so ill-educated that she
grew up believing that the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania was connected to
the Grand Canyon (of Arizona). About how, if we think she’s a hillbilly, down
the road we'd find they have “even less teeth.”
A
yard sign in Meadeville read:
Period!
toward a cheap motel. The attendant asked where we were from.
reminds me of Western P.A.”
patron left his USA Today. On the
front page, President Obama was throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star
Game.
During the presidential campaign last year, Obama said, “You go into some of these small towns in
Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been
gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the
Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and
they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to
guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
But a broader axiom also applies: Be mighty fucking reluctant to explain people’s fortunes, good
or bad, yours or others’. Remember the chipmunks!
as you dare down the best road you can find and try not to take the weather
personally—or take credit for it.
moment on the hotel patio at Lake George, New York, where our wives met us.
in the rental car from Albany, I admitted and Tom copped to being a little
nervous. And shortly after the happy and giggling reunion, we got the first hint as to why:
Without telling us (or consulting one another) each woman had used the occasion of our absence and the inspiration of our self-will, to get a tattoo.
The old guy talked tough outside the New Hampshire motorcycle shop, but I think if his wife ain't goin' to Sturgis, he ain't goin' either.