With 23 days until departure I find myself wondering what compels me to take this trip.7000 miles by motorcycle is not exactly an expedition to Antarctica by canoe, but it is pretty far off the norm for my neighborhood.
They say regrets are not for the things you did in life but for the things you failed to do. At the highest level I can at least say that I own this compulsion enough to know I would deeply regret letting the chance pass me by if I found myself on my deathbed having not done it. But that still does not explain where it comes from.
Perhaps oddly, I have a sense that I owe it to somebody...to my predecessors...to the westbound pioneers who planted me in the Great American Southwest. I set my face for this trip in 1970...a scant 100 years since the heydays of the American West. Now, over 40 years later, almost half again further from those heady days, I hear them calling me to come see their land with their eyes...traveling into the sun with the wind in my face...before it's too late.
My great grand parents came to Texas in wagons. My grandfather drove from Oklahoma to California in a Model-T before there were highways and the trip required opening and closing the gates of the farms the road passed through. I spent years of my boyhood living within a stone's throw of the southwestern ends of Route 66, first in the California deserts of Victorville and then at the Texas end in Amarillo. How could I not need to travel west?
I guess I have an even stronger sense that I owe this trip to my great grandchildren. I need to add to the legacy. I need to maintain the pace. In 2070, they need to be able to say "My great grandfather, when he was 57, rode a motorcycle from Texas to Canada...right up the spine of the Rockies. If he could do that, then surely I can ____."
Yea, I know. It's not curing cancer and it is not world peace...it is more visceral than that. What challenges await?
They say regrets are not for the things you did in life but for the things you failed to do. At the highest level I can at least say that I own this compulsion enough to know I would deeply regret letting the chance pass me by if I found myself on my deathbed having not done it. But that still does not explain where it comes from.
Perhaps oddly, I have a sense that I owe it to somebody...to my predecessors...to the westbound pioneers who planted me in the Great American Southwest. I set my face for this trip in 1970...a scant 100 years since the heydays of the American West. Now, over 40 years later, almost half again further from those heady days, I hear them calling me to come see their land with their eyes...traveling into the sun with the wind in my face...before it's too late.
My great grand parents came to Texas in wagons. My grandfather drove from Oklahoma to California in a Model-T before there were highways and the trip required opening and closing the gates of the farms the road passed through. I spent years of my boyhood living within a stone's throw of the southwestern ends of Route 66, first in the California deserts of Victorville and then at the Texas end in Amarillo. How could I not need to travel west?
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| DC & STella Exit a Curve |
Yea, I know. It's not curing cancer and it is not world peace...it is more visceral than that. What challenges await?
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