Between holidays blab

BITS OF NEWS here and there, on Maine, South America, and our friends the Phantom and Johnny Danger.

Aunt Roberta sent this pic on Thanksgiving, the ’49 truck where I left it in her back field on Flanders Bay, in Sullivan, Maine. I may be able to hitch a ride 300 miles north in a few weeks with my sister-in-law from Bangor. She’ll be in Boston some time soon. Or if the roads are ice-free I might ride the iron piggy up, put her on the back of the truck and bring them both home that way.

Better get around to it before the mice move in and start chewing up the seat for nesting material.

In Houston, ol’ CCjon is trying to work an air-freight deal out of Miami, ship the motorcycles to Bogota after the first of the year; his 650 bike, Iron Man Nestor’s, and, not too likely, mine. Destination, the land of fire, Tierra del Fuego. Nestor’s already been there. He’d likely ride part of the way south with us, turn around and ride solo back up to his home in Colombia.

We’ve been trying to make South America happen for three years now, keep getting skunked, tripped up time and again on dumb circumstances; nothing as dire as a warning from the Universe, along the lines of, Do you really want to insist on being bones in the Atacama, dumbass?

All the same, I think I’m inclined to leave the South America box unchecked for now.

In the column under Reasons Not To Go:

January’s an awfully late start. We’d miss eight to ten weeks of 2018’s best riding weather south of the equator. We’d be pushing to get south on a deadline. Riding under pressure always turns things on their head. It makes the sum of every day’s experience all about the destination. To me, the journey is everything, the destination nothing.

Given the late start, CCjon plans to sell his bike in southern Argentina instead of riding it back north to a port where he could ship it home: Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogota or wherever. After trying to cram the experience of an entire continent into a few months, there’s no way I’d want to sell the 650 piglet for short money (Gotta get on this plane, anybody want to buy my motorcycle?)  To get the piglet home I’d be riding north with the Patagonian winter at my back. More riding under time pressure…

So anyway, I’ll leave it there and just see what happens. On the drop-dead date I might wake up thinking it sounds like the best idea ever, saddle up and go.

But I don’t think so.

Bob Weeks, my biker bud from British Columbia, is doing Australia right. When I stayed with Bob and Janey this summer at their home near Valemount, BC, Bob said he’d be back from Down Under in three months, six months, whatever it took.

I’ve been following his travels as he roams the coastal plains and mountains, crosses deserts and rainforests, follows rivers here and there.

Fording crocodile habitat… keep yer eyes peeled & don’t stall halfway across.

Circumnavigating the continent on the straight roads… the twisty roads…

A ferry on a river too deep to ride across.

He’s wearing out the old skins…

…spooning-on new ones and scuffing them down to nothing.

Bob’s out there doing it, being a free man on the Earth. Live long and ride far, brother.

In the Phantom universe, we left Heloise on the outskirts of New York after her battle with the Nomad and have cut to the Himalayas to check in with her brother, Kit. He’s studying at a monastery where the long-deceased 11th and 16th Phantoms went for their secondary educations.

He’s pulled off the illusion that he’s the same young man who was there before, and now destiny has drawn him back for spin #3 on the karmic wheel. Call it a new twist on the immortality myth at the heart of the Phantom legend.

Kit’s supposed to be incommunicado for the duration, but here we see him writing a letter home to the Deep Woods. What gives?

Kit’s in the dark about recent events in New York, has no idea his sister had to fight for her life against the murderous Nomad.

Oh, for the wide-open storytelling spaces Lee Falk enjoyed in the heyday of the newspaper biz. He had four panels a day—panels that ran big in the papers. I generally need to get by on two panels. Two that run small. Too small.

When I script three-panel days—which I need to do at least twice a week to get any sort of momentum going—it leaves Mike Manley pressed for space to tell the visual narrative.

Catch 22…

In closing, a word about the late Johnny Danger. You remember him.

My travels this summer in the American and Canadian west had to end just before my friend’s sendoff in Bishop, California, on September 29. I had to get headed east for Daughter #2’s wedding in Maine.

Kathy Peterson, Danger’s bride of 24 years, sent me the program recently. Lots of great pics of my old pal. A life well lived, indeed.

I’ll wind things up with a few closer angles on the pages Kathy put together.

Ranger Danger at Kennesaw National Historic Battlefield Park, Georgia. It was the first full-lodge-member assignment of his career with the National Park Service.

Nuptials in Alaska, 1994.

Stalking the mighty Arctic Bullwinkle.

Having a goofy good time, just for nothing. The thing Danger loved most of all.

Finally, here’s a print I’ve seen close up over the years, on the motorcycle rides west; a framed, limited edition print by the artist Karen Carson. It hangs on a wall at Danger and Kathy’s place in Bishop, California, Owens Valley, foot of the Eastern Sierra.

That was how he looked at life, even through the worst stretches of his 17-year medical ordeal. We go somewhere, nowhere, I don’t think he had opinions about that, but he did have a spirit of Thanksgiving all the year long.

A man of good cheer, no matter what. A stand-up guy. A mensch.

Or, as the first Americans on the Sierra might have said it: one who trod the path of the true human being.

Tony DePaul, November 26, 2018, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA