Riding a motorcycle is a lot of work, it turns out. Especially on
the two-lane highways. You can’t go on autopilot the way you can on a ramrod straight interstate in a comfy car
with cruise control. You’re constantly engaged.
You lean the bike side to side as one sweeping curve bends into another,
balance blended with throttle and brake and clutch, stomping up and down
through the gears. You eye the blacktop in the distance, and you also watch the
pavement just ahead of the front tire for slippery gravel or hot tar streaks that
soften into slicks in the afternoons. You fight the unrelenting sun from above
and the heat radiating off the pavement and the motor below. Dad says on a hot
day the air four feet off of the highway can be 150 degrees. Dad also washed
his car in the driveway one day when it was 25 degrees out, and his doors froze
shut so he couldn’t go to work that night, so sometimes you have to take what
Dad says with a grain of salt.
Horseshoe Bend is nothing but a Chevron station pinning a
couple of highways together where they cross. It’s mid-afternoon, might be 95 degrees,
might be 110. Doesn’t really matter. An hour and a half ago I parked on the
shoulder of a winding mountain road, stumbled down a steep dirt bank into a
cool creek, and just lay down. Shoes, socks, jeans, and all. Fifteen miles
later, I was dry as a funeral drum. At Horseshoe Bend I grab a 32 ounce red
Gatorade and get in line to pay. When I step to the counter ninety seconds
later, I’ve already downed the Gatorade. I pay for the empty container, then
circle back to the cooler for another 32 ounces of red for the road. A couple hours
down the road when I stop for a sandwich, my urine is deep red. For a split
second I believe I will die alone, slumped beneath a urinal at the Subway in
Weiser, Idaho, and that when the dude with eyeliner and black fingernail polish
manning the counter finds me next time he uses the john, he’ll light some
candles, burn some incense, put on some Bauhaus, and dine on my corpse. But
then I remember the Gatorade and feel a little sheepish for all the drama.
Two-lane highways are a world away from interstates, it
turns out. I strung together a route west from Blackfoot out of only back roads
and highways. I’d driven I-84 many times. I wanted to see new places and
things. And I did. Highway 93 north of Arco, Idaho follows the floor of a lush,
verdant valley, dwarfed on the east and west by sharp and craggy peaks tearing
the stomachs from lazy little summer clouds.
And Garden Valley is a lumberjack
of a town along Banks Lowman Road in western Idaho’s sylvan heights. If it took
human form, it would wear plaid and waders and a red beard inherited from
fierce forebears from the Scottish highlands, and it would bury an ax in your
skull if you spoke a sympathetic word about those “damn wolves” that eat the livestock. Garden Valley
has a Mormon meetinghouse but no gas station. At times, I learned, the gas
station can seem more crucial to the soul than the meetinghouse.
The back roads. Interstates are concrete conveyer belts
that clumsily punch from point A to point B, shunting dirt and grass and
mountain to one side, hurdling rivers, anxious to just get there. But the back roads, the highways, curve with the earth.
They swing out of their way to thread little towns together. Highways are
content to become Main Street for a mile or two, to succumb for a bit to the
soft staccato stop-and-go rhythm of stoplights and street signs.