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On Highway 26 in the Ochoco National Forest in Oregon, in the ninth week of my coast-to-coast-to-coast trip in the summer of 2022, I technically had my first deer strike.
The August heat had forced me to become quasi-nocturnal, so the Ducati Hypermotard and I could be gassed and caffeinated, respectively, wheels turning as the sun crested the horizon behind me and the thermometer began its inevitable climb back towards the 90s. That day's ride was a good one, an autumnal crispness in the air through the central Oregon hills, a searing blue sky, and clean fresh blacktop, uncrowded by the usual what's-your-hurry pickups, campers, and boat trailers I'd become an expert at passing on roads like this one all across the continent.
So even though I was a few hours and a tank of gas into my day already, mid-morning sun was hitting the spruce at a steep angle, casting those dappled broken shadows that make it so difficult to comprehend even a short distance down the road. Out of caution, I had already eased off the throttle as my brain tried to sort through the disjointed visual field ahead of me. Unfortunately, not enough, as I was still somewhere in the 40 mph range and practically on top of the family of whitetails before either of us realized it and they scattered in every direction.
By now I was comfortably over 10,000 miles into this trip, so a couple thousand to go felt tantalizingly close to being home. Steamrolling a minor herd of deer at the finish line did not sound like my idea of a photo finish. Not that my feelings at the time actually mattered, as it was certainly luck that let me holeshot directly between two of them, hard on the brakes, shouting expletives at the inside of my visor, my right leg making enough contact with one of Bambi's haunches that I knocked her off kilter but leaving us both unscathed.
My old mantra kicked in as I eased my way around the next corner, letting the adrenaline shakes subside: A mile of road has two miles of ditch.
Where the long road began: 2010 and the first trip
Having not grown up in a motorsport family, my first taste of the seductive call of motorbikes came courtesy of the chef at my first restaurant job. This being the early 2010s, he rolled into work one day on a blue Honda twin older than either of us, metal flake three-quarter helmet glinting proudly in June sun, crisp selvedge cuffed over patinaed Red Wings. At the time, I thought it was Obviously The Coolest Thing. In retrospect, I'm reasonably certain it was actually a bodged together hipster "café," dripping in cheaply chromed universal parts and choking through pod filters on stock-jetted CV carbs.
I needed one in the way that only restless 20-somethings do.
A few months later, I had traded $650 cash for a mostly running 1982 Honda CB450 and spent that summer wobbling along the Mississippi, then zig-zagging across the gridiron checkerboard of soy-corn-soy of central Minnesota. Immediately addicted to the speed and the smell and the way you meld with the bike and pilot it by what feels like pure telekinesis. After that came the siren song known so well to riders, voyagers, flâneurs, and the generally masochistic.
Later that summer, I'm at a party, which for a bunch of stone-broke line cooks means drinking cheap beer in the parking lot behind somebody's restaurant at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday. A stranger in attendance is visiting home from his new digs in San Francisco, where he says there is a room available in his apartment and ample job opportunities at the well regarded Italian restaurant where he works. I'm newly single, a year out of college into a very confusing job market, and my lease is coming up. The kismet is too strong to say anything but yes.
I disposed of most earthly possessions, scavenged a grate out of an old oven and a six pack of bungee cords to build a luggage rack, and set out west in September, 2010 with little more than a paper road atlas and little red jerry can. A slap on the back and a wry "You've got chutzpah, kid" from my mom. She did an excellent job hiding the worry behind her eyes.
That was the first cross-country trip. The story of the following decade was of my two crafts, my two careers. Countless hours on the line, pain and adrenaline and so, so much pasta. My day off, usually a randomly selected weekday, picking an interesting looking restaurant two hours away via CB450 and getting intentionally lost in the Oakland hills on the way home. Increasing responsibility at the restaurant, bringing with it the kind of paralyzing self doubt you fight by performing with ironclad certainty, to predictably poor effect. Long day rides, exploring a gradually expanding radius of the fog-shrouded coastal cliffs and cypress-lined backroads of the Bay Area with a growing confidence and relatively small number of self-induced collisions.
Years later, now a seasoned executive chef, intermixed with big plans for the future of my restaurant was a vague notion to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my Big Trip with a reverse re-do, just a quick SFO-MSP lark some time that summer, make some new memories, take some better photos. Summer 2020 was going to be a well earned sabbatical, a couple of weeks on the road just the way I remembered it. Winding my way through obscure national forests, rain pinging against my helmet, that serene loneliness in the rhythm of ride-sleep-ride as my miniscule circle of perception flew across an endless continent.
Reality, of course, was a very different kind of loneliness and rhythm. I remember bustling streets turned into plywood canyons, the eerie silent emptiness of the city, the wild desperation in the eyes of the "essential workers" framed by their surgical masks, first in grocery stores and then, once we were allowed, the kitchen. Realizing that I must have that look, too.
Especially the first time, mothballing a restaurant is a surprisingly complicated and laborious task, a full work day for a skeleton crew. Discarding food, disconnecting gear, waffling between terror for the future of the craft we had poured our youth into, or relief at the prospect of a break. By the third time it got easier, at least on a logistical level, and emotionally we had developed a certain grim numbness.
2022, the ride comes together
Two years later, my belated anniversary ride came together. What had originally started as a CA-MN-CA homage to the original gradually ballooned into a full-fledged sequel. Over two years as an "essential worker" led me to pose the question, why stop halfway? If not now, when? I embarked June 4 with a loose plan to be gone for eightish weeks. This time I had GPS, waterproof(ish) gear, Bluetooth, and the Ducati. Although as it turns out, if you ride long distances in the United States, a Japanese 450 and an Italian 1100 somehow attract a similar number of gas-station-parking-lot comments to the effect of "You're riding how far on that little thing?!"
The peak-end rule tells us that we remember the leg cramps in the ninth hour of the flight much less vividly than the rustling leaves of the palapa overhead as we recline in the sand and thirstily drink the first fresh coconut of a vacation. It explains type-two fun, and the way a moment of white-knuckle terror can become a maudlin anecdote to amuse gregarious strangers in dive bars.
Colorado, all peaks, nothing but perfect black asphalt and the rollercoaster climb out of deep canyons filled with buzzing gnats straight up skyward into yet another pass and snow in the shadows, then snow in the gutters, then the summit and snow everywhere, and then down again to do it all over. Every little town has an ice cold stream or a natural sulfurous spring or both, and both are perfect after a long day's ride.
The rain washes out Yellowstone so I detour my way to Montana. Wyoming and I make a pact that I'll be done with her by sunset and we do it but that was a peak of pain and sad to imagine what those infinite green plains would have looked like thick with buffalo. The Black Hills, an absolute labyrinth of tight, twisting, tunneled roads and wide sweepers along trickling creeks with gold in them, an oasis of moto bliss in a vast interstate steppe.
The Badlands and my first taste of the summer heat, Minnesota and family, Wisconsin, ferry across lake Michigan, Ohio, Fourth of July with friends in Pittsburgh, and now it's getting really hot and every time I end up not on a winding country lane I'm quietly furious at the rest of the country for not getting on the same page about lane-splitting.
More friends in Buffalo and then east, and now every blade of grass I saw waving in the Wyoming breeze is a person vying with me for air and space and it's just people everywhere and I'm beginning to see in reverse what an impression the West must have made when they connected the last railroad ties.
Getting hotter down the eastern seaboard, the rest is a blur, just sweat and stopping every 30 minutes to drink in the air conditioning in a gas station and pack ice into my water bladder. Hatteras, Ocracoke, glad I saw that and ferries are always fun but now I can't take photos because the humidity is fogging my camera lens from the inside and I gotta get back to the mountains.
Staying off the interstates makes you realize how much they disconnect you from the landscape, a feat of engineering designed among other things to erase topography. On a backroad, every curve and rise and bridge and decreasing radius begins to make sense, you can appreciate which parts needed dynamite and which were challenging to design.
"The whole world is understaffed, please be kind." Signs like these adorning the windows of cafés and family restaurants were one of the few constants across the continent, transcending borders and cultures and income levels everywhere I went. My industry friends in every city telling the same stories of the brutalities we'd all endured these last couple years, and little improvement on the horizon.
The Blue Ridge, crank the John Denver. The heaviest rain I've ever ridden in, but I'll take being full-body clammy under my 'stich over that damned heat in the lowlands. Second tire change of the trip in Knoxville. The grass hills of Tennessee and Kentucky and the Ozarks are beautiful, more rain, more goddamn heat, more good food everywhere, and I'm rushing along now because I know there's still a Kansas between me and the mountains, the continental divide, and from there the slow westward descent to the Pacific, which I didn't think I would miss so much.
Colorado part two, now I need a new chain. I'm beginning to understand the shaft drive jocks. Another broken phone, this time because I was a bit emotional and distracted after visiting the Owl Farm where Hunter S. Thompson shot himself. More mountain passes. I think I rode them all but wasn't really counting. At the summits it was winter in July but now it's spring in August and there are wildflowers everywhere. The Flaming Gorge in Utah, a place where all photos look like raving lunatic paintings, cherry red rock cliffs collapsing into water that can't possibly be that electric teal.
Dozens and dozens of miles tiptoeing over loose chipseal all through Idaho and eastern Oregon, but not a single puncture. Fuzzy white mountain goats in Boise National Forest, then my whitetailed friends in Oregon. Excellent meals in Portland, I keep forgetting about the full-service gas station thing, and I think I piss off some attendants when I am already paid and kickstand up before they come around to me.
Descending out of the Klamath and the smell hits right through my helmet, curling eucalyptus bark and redwood needles and cool salty fog and I know what I'm smelling is home. This is home now.
What is a journey?
Writing this has come in fits and starts, the interceding months tilting my perception through the lens of memory. I've also learned that the story makes poor conversation at cocktail parties. The elevator pitch usually elicits a "huh, crazy," along with that look that says "I am now developing a plan to change the topic or exit this conversation." Pitying smiles, confused nods, shuffling hands. Afterwards, I wonder doubtfully, was this not a remarkable experience? Did I not challenge myself, seek to carve a route to catharsis the way so many others seem to crave? Should the story just be "confused man drives down road," nothing more?
Then a biting gust of fresh cold air coming over a San Francisco hill instantly transports me back to a mountaintop in Colorado. Snow crunches under my boots while alpine streams trickle down into a valley that only a few miles away simmers under the July sun, and I can smell the oily heat radiate off my engine as the pine trunks creak. To hell with cocktail parties.
Walter Benjamin wrote, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.” What is a long journey after all, but a means to collect memories? Whether you choose to walk or fly or ride, aren’t you simply choosing which memories to collect, and how thin will be the line between your passion and the chaos?
