Flashback Friday

These pictures were posted previously on June 24th, 2009 on Esisting In BFE but I repost today for a few reasons.  Firstly, some things need reposting just because.  Secondly, I'm counting on your memories being as bad as mine so this is like a new fresh post, and thirdly, since I am returning to Northlandia next week, I will be, once again, back in the saddle.  

"From Muscatine we wanted to have a barley pop in Keithsburg so we went across the river and headed South. When we reached the road that goes into town, we discovered they were oiling the road...both sides...on a Saturday. We pulled off and decided to head further east and catch another road. We found a gravel road not too far down and at an intersection tried to catch the road again hoping that the oiling was just that section. We were wrong. Once again we tried the oil road but bailed where a guy was holding a stop/slow sign. Once again we tried a gravel road and came upon another intersection. We turned right and after a while came to a dead end! OK, back we go and turn right this time, hoping to catch the original gravel road we tried before. This is what we came upon. Rushing water over the road. But Tim sent Carried down to see if she could come up with navigable road. Down to the end of the road she walked - and Tim decided to take his bike down to see the situation."

"After asking Carrie to see if she could find solid ground, and not finding any we couldn't use this road to get back to civilization."

"Water rushing across the road."

"Back to the oiled road and the guy holding the stop/slow sign. I drive up to him and ask him if the road is oiled all the way to Keithsburg. He replies that the road is fine from this point all the way into town on the right side. OK, so it dawns on me that we spent an hour or more on gravel, going to a dead end and then risking flooded roads, when we were OK all along at the stop/slow sign."

I was planning on coming up with some universal truths about riding a bike but in my research I came across the below essay on the joys of bike riding.  This is quite good and hope you will read it.  I wish I could be as descriptive and erudite as this person, but because I am not, I will use his or her.  

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"A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I’m alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sun that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision or IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It’s like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raising acoustic ghosts out of the wind’s roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock ‘n roll, dark orchestras, women’s voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree- smells and flower- smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it’s as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.

Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It’s a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It’s light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it’s a conduit of grace, it’s a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I’ve had a handful of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn’t trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride one of the best things I’ve done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we’re safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, “Sleep, sleep.” Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that’s no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride."  (author unknown)

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One thing that comes to mind as I peruse this post and get it ready for publishing.  When I left Northlandia last time in December, I put a battery charger on Miss Frump and the morotrcycle for winter storage.  I had to take the seat off the bike and do some hunting for the battery.  I sure hope I can put it back together - I remember having to do some unhooking of stuff.  Fingers crossed.