The Fall Run to Montana, September 2-23, 2010

As always, I slept wherever I happened to be when my day was over. I don’t mind a campground if one is handy, but a town park will do, an athletic field, a turnpike fuel plaza, a patch of weeds somewhere…

I listen for a whisper in the ear. If it says, No, not a good spot, I go down the road a bit more. That happened just once on this trek, in Iowa. Hours after dark I pulled into a county park on the Maple River.  Nobody there. (Nobody I saw.) It probably would have been fine. I could have slept without anybody whacking my skull with a bat, Easy Rider-style. Still, those particular woods didn’t feel right. I have no idea why. But I heard the whisper, saddled up, went down the road a little more that night.

I stopped for gas in Holstein, Iowa, a pretty little town, asked the guy behind the counter where I could camp for cheap, or better yet, free. (The night fuel guys always know, they’ve been asked before.) He told me about an American Legion property a few towns over, in Ida Grove, said he rode by it that day, saw a few people camped there. So that’s where I ended up. A sign asked travelers stopping for the night to throw $7 in the till, an iron pipe with a cash slot.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself: It was hot in Ohio and Indiana when I set out from Rhode Island so I went up over the Great Lakes, for the Canadian air. Up over four of the lakes, that is. I cut under Lake Superior and crossed into Michigan on the South Shore. The heat had been brutal on Day 1 in Massachusetts and New York. I didn’t know I had a week of cold rain ahead, all the way out to the Montana/Idaho/Alberta line.

I often slept in wet clothes. Didn’t stop until late at night, too beat to fix a meal, just get in the tent and sack out, recharge for the next day’s ride.

I’m all disorganized today. Need to back up yet again: A few weeks before I left Rhode Island, I rode down to Philly to see my friend, Kevin Diegnan. We were born 10 days apart in the same hospital, 1954, grew up together on 64th Street. We lost touch in recent years but it was one of those friendships where you just pick up the conversation where you left off.

Kevin had been fighting cancer for six years, had numerous surgeries, never said a word about it in our occasional emails. Well, when the news got out through a classmate of ours, I got on the bike and rode down to see Kevin, in Broomall, PA. He heard the motor when I pulled up in the drive, came to the door with a big smile I’ll never forget. He was on oxygen, had a chronic cough, had gone through chemo a few hours earlier but was game for a visit.

On the way out, I slept in a town park in Grand Marais, Michigan, on Lake Superior. Kevin Jr. called early the next morning, a Sunday, to tell me his dad was gone. Needless to say, a lot of things were on my mind in the days ahead, for thousands of miles. All the big questions. How is it my friend got the deal he did, a tough six years at the end, meanwhile I’m out here goofing around on a motorcycle?

Destiny? Accident? It’s all a mystery to me.

I dedicated the ride to Kevin at that point. Thought about him quite a lot, and about Fran and their sons. The family was with me across Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana…

It was a somber ride for many days, and the rain seemed to suit it. But I smiled, too, at the many good memories that came to mind, our growing up years on 64th Street, long-ago days at St. Donato’s School, St. Tommy More…

Kevin and I both got booted out of Tommy More in freshman year. Me for the accumulated weight of many minor demerits, and then finally not showing up anymore;  Kevin for counterpunching when a priest took a swing at him. POW! Always a stand-up guy, he had a stand-up exit. From that school, and from life.

It dawned on me, on some lonely road somewhere, that my friend didn’t lose his fight with cancer. He won it. For a very long time.

A very tough ride that night. Heavy rain, high winds, poor visibility. I talked to a guy at a fuel stop, biker, Native American, he said, Man, I never ride at night anymore, too many animals on the road. You’re going to hit an elk. You’re going to hit three elk!

Didn’t see a single one that night. And when I did almost hit an elk a few days later, it was an antelope! In broad daylight, too, 11 in the morning.

I fortified the ride to Butte with a much-needed KFC dinner in Helena. I had been eating out of the saddlebags for a week: oatmeal, lentils, rice, tuna, baked beans, black-eyed peas, pasta, potatoes… I got the meal to go and ate it sitting on the curb outside, because I knew I’d wolf it down. Didn’t want to offend others by eating indoors with the outdoor SMACK! SLURP! CHOMP! SNARF! of an extra-hungry motorcycle rider.

Hot chicken fat tastes so good when you’ve been wet and cold for a week.

This day held a near-encounter with a speeding antelope, which redefined and canceled-out all my near-miss experience to date. This was on US 287, rolling pasture with four-strand wire fences on each side of the road, maybe 60 feet off the blacktop. The antelope must have gotten between the fences overnight and was lying down in tall grass. When the sound of the iron piggy spooked him, he got up and ran perpendicular to the road. I was doing 65 or so, no room to swerve, not enough room to stop, I knew for certain I’d hit him or he’d hit me so… get on the brakes hard, bleed speed, what else? Just when I was about to hit him he turned right and ran with the bike, ahead a few lengths and a few feet off to the right. I put the bike on cruise, reached into my pocket for the camera — what a shot it would have been! But he broke left, crossed in front of me and hit the barbed-wire fence on the other side. Didn’t attempt to jump it, just plowed into it at a dead run. I saw him twisting in the wire, legs kicking, slashing, saw the white underbelly as he rolled, then he was through the wire and streaking away like a missile.

Later that day, I stopped in Two Dot, a town I picked off the map once and used in a screenplay I wrote. Had a beer at the only going concern in town, the Two Dot Bar. Three or four locals soaked up the heat of a wood stove burning winter-hot. Two young women were behind the bar, running the place. Maybe they owned it, I didn’t ask. One happily told me they were “drinking up the profits.”

I asked one of them about the antelope hazard on the local roads, told her my near-miss story. She asked if the antelope had hit the fencepost. I said, no, he went between the posts and hit the wire. Well that was a smart antelope, she said, they usually bounce off a post when they try to bulldoze their way through a fence like that.