Arkansas Lost and Alone Part 1 of 4: Trouble Shooting
I am feeling very strange. For the first time in my life, I got out of bed in the morning and left without a destination.
BLOG POST #004 - Lost and Alone: Trouble Shooting
How I learned to ride a motorcycle, speak Spanish and not die. Riding solo in search of adventure from Detroit to Argentina.
Over the past few weeks, I had hustled to buy a motorcycle, get a license to ride it, say goodbye to my family, and check my life insurance. I bought a more rugged USB charging cord, and I broke up with my girlfriend, Larry. Change can be very sad, emotional. Girlfriend aside, I am very particular about my USB charging cords.
I'm not sure how the nickname "Larry" was chosen, but the joke was; everyone was sick of hearing her name. I invited friends and family to slap me across the face if I uttered it again. My sister did in fact smack my face the last time I saw her.
For my first ride, I had to make it to my aunt's wedding here in Arkansas. But now, as I am leaving her house, I have no hard deadlines or waypoints. The full weight of what I'm doing starts to dawn on me.
I thought to myself, "Let's see. Simple. I'll head towards Texas. I will ride all the way through Mexico...Central America...then a bunch of other countries, blah, blah, before finally *BOOM* Argentina. Hopefully. I know I need to keep heading south."
I look up at the horizon to calculate my bearings off the location of the sun.
"Ummm. So. Which way is south?"
The "middle part" in between Texas and Argentina is still fuzzy in my head at this point. Freedom is good. But this much freedom is disconcerting. It feels oddly relaxing, but also quite terrifying. I am a guy that appreciates my own "terror", so I find it amusing to let that fear pulse through my veins. I am excited to steer boldly into the vast mystery ahead.
"Let's do this."
I made a bunch of new friends on a wildlife trip last year, and one of the guys happened to be from here in Arkansas originally. Don is an uber-smart, frenetic entrepreneur who lives in Minnesota or California or maybe Las Vegas.
As two bald fifty-something white guys with salt-and-pepper beards, we look quite similar. Being that I was the crazy one, eager to jump off cliffs and rope swing over the river, the running joke was that I would be his stuntman in our imaginative moviescape. The similarities end at: his girlfriend is half my age and his income is double that of mine.
Clever enough, as well as successful enough to do what he wants; Don doesn't really need to commit to having just one home. He has a soft spot for his birth state of Arkansas, so he is building a gorgeous third or fourth home here in the mountains. I ask if I can camp at his place overnight. He says that I am welcome and wants me to take a bunch of photos, to make sure the construction guys are doing what they said.
I'm still perfecting all my road warrior gear as I go, including my burner phone mounted on a handlebar stand. Its main purpose is navigation. I made sure it was on a different network than my regular phone, so that if one doesn't have service in a remote area, maybe the other phone will. Its secondary purpose is to be stolen. Like some chess game of survival, my mind is always working on a safety plan five moves ahead, with double-triple resource redundancy. Obviously, it is good to avoid crime by getting local advice, being discreet, and paying attention.
But we Americans seem to love a little righteous deadly force as well. As a nation raised on Chuck Norris and Clint Eastwood Yankee awesomeness, we Americans go straight for a gun or a knife, in a tight spot. But I would gently ask, what about having a "theft plan" instead?
I have this burner phone and a dummy wallet on stand-by, as a decoy for random ruffians I might meet along the way. I can spare the secondary phone, and the wallet only has about thirty dollars in it, plus some nominal amount of local cash, as well as a bunch of expired credit cards. If I'm being robbed, once I have given them my wallet and my phone, chances are they're going to make a speedy escape at that point.
Sadly, the only time I've used the decoy wallet, was while being stopped by foreign cops who wanted a little bribe money. Traveling in Nigeria a few years back we were detained by an immigration officer with no uniform, no badge or ID, and who didn't know what a Nigerian visa even looked like. The decoy wallet was the perfect prop for some misdirection, it caused him think I only had a small amount of cash on me and therefore protected my main stash of money.
The ride to Don's place would take a few hours. The roads are good. The sun is out. I am relaxed and enjoying it. The pleasantness overcomes me as I lean into the turns on La Barra, which is fast becoming the reliable bike I desired. The scenery stretches out like a long wall of green lining the rural backroads, only occasionally broken up by small towns that speckle the map along the way.
I am confident in my early riding abilities and optimistic about the future. La Barra and I are getting along just fine. Now that I have significant miles under my belt, I am right at home in the saddle and not so stressed about wiping out. I know that there are variables that I cannot control, like the other drivers on the road. But honestly, I feel well in command of my destiny. Success is mine to lose at this point. If I don't do anything overtly dumb, then I'll be fine.
With the motorcycle unknowns largely solved, I can now glimpse this whole trip unfolding before me. I feel more pure excitement for the open road than ever before. I am laughing for no reason as I ride. I am super friendly to everyone, and my dad-joke humor is in fine form. Whatever musical earworm was playing at the last gas station becomes my anthem for the next fifty miles and I serenade the open road at the top of my lungs. My "Bohemian Rhapsody" falsetto vibrato sounds more like Freddy Mercury with respiratory COVID bellowing in pain, but you can't beat my enthusiasm.
A while back I found out about a United Nations annual report called the Global Happiness Index. How strange that the UN is in the business of assessing world merriment. In any case, apologies to Finland with their 7.842 rating because I am at the top of the list today, feeling like a solid 9. As my Scottish friend used to say, "The sun is shining, God is in heaven, and all is right in the world."
Don's place is being built into the side of either a "tall hill" or a "short mountain", depending on who you ask. As I rounded the corner off the main paved street onto a dirt road, the back tire whipped out from under me. La Barra slid right, and I jumped off to the left. I couldn't really freak out because it was over so quickly. I just reacted in real-time and then stood there awkwardly taking stock of the situation, without so much as a scrape. More than anything, it just struck me as funny.
Later I found tears in the elbow of my protective biker jacket. I don't even remember hitting the ground, but it all happened so fast that I guess I blacked it out.
Motorcycle crashes are surely in my future. That is a pretty scary thought. But right now, my first reaction is, "Facebook post!". I recorded a video of the scene and had a good laugh.
I reckon I was going about eighteen miles per hour. This is based upon the fact that I was clearly going faster than I could run, but not by much. My judgment is not so sound as I get older, so maybe it was a nine mile an hour spill and I can only run seven. As I often say, "I am an active participant in my own mythology,” so I'm sticking with the eighteen.
Then it dawned on me that this was not exactly "slow" given the fact that my rear wheel takes a full three minutes to stop spinning, while La Barra lies on her side. I can see that I am going to strain this relationship with her. As motorcycles go, I wouldn't say that she is elegant or classy like some fat, polished-up touring bike. Her style is more rugged, reliable, and unstoppable. She is like a war horse whose main job is to gallop full speed into battle, in the face of flying bullets and looking good while doing it.
This bike is gives off the vibe that she knows she's built to get dumped on the ground like this and fine doing the job. Yet at the same time she's possibly a little annoyed that it was for such a dumb reason with such a nascent rider. I can feel her female eye-roll disapproval like she's thinking, "Only a man does something stupid, and then thinks it’s funny, and then takes pictures."
I consider myself agile for my age. If someone told me to take a running leap over the restaurant bar to kill a cockroach on the wall, I would tell them that they were nuts and I don't want to break my neck. But a few months back, skating at full speed chasing a puck around the goal I did a similar maneuver during my hockey game. A very large defender was coming straight at me, so to avoid a headfirst collision I leapt over the goal with utterly no plan for how to "land" on the other side. Crashes, collisions, and accidental acrobatics seem to be areas where a lack of thought is the best thing I can do. That principle appears to have served me well today.
The road is made up of powdery brown dust that is not quite sand, but not quite dirt. I make a mental note not to underestimate loose surfaces again.
La Barra is leaking gas, as all Kawasaki KLR's do when laid down sideways. A kindly fellow and his son pull over to help me get her back up on two wheels. Once we exchanged pleasantries and took selfies all around, they were on their way again.
The main problem I was left with was that the chain has popped off of the back sprocket. I was glad I left early in the morning so that I would have time to deal with this in the daylight. I have developed a grand diversity of skills and experiences in my job and in my life. Repairing motorcycles is not one of them. But the more important thing that I do have is: adaptability. I am good at "not" being good at something. I am comfortable in "uncomfortable" situations.
I mutter to myself, "Let's just figure this out."
NEXT POST COMING SOON: July 31, 2024