Bald Eagles Love Jerky (and Other Patriotic Observations)
24 July 2025… I feel really American this evening, astride this large, American motorcycle, wearing boots. And also Wrangler jeans, against my better judgment. But they were four dollars at Goodwill, so, God bless America and cowboys. My helmet is one of those three-quarters helmets, so you can see my wild, American, lumberjack beard. In truth, it's actually probably less "wild" and "American" and "lumberjack" and more "manicured" and "French" and "insurance auditor," but I've lived overseas for a long time and I'm doing my best to fit in. Give me grace. Or give me hot dogs. Either one is fine.
I am rumbling down this American highway through purple mountains, under spacious skies, past amber waves of grain. And also a bald eagle is soaring alongside me, forty feet up, close enough that I can see the mustard colored beak. It's eying me, admiring my bike. Join the club, buddy. It is also possible the bird doesn't care about my mode of locomotion, just the jerky in my saddlebag. Bald eagles have x-ray vision and they love jerky, so long as it's made out of terrorists.
This is all auspicious. It's day one of a motorcycle odyssey that will push 40 days. You might think it's a bit melodramatic to call this trip an odyssey, but if the word works for an undistinguished minivan I think I can use it however I want. My daughter Susu is in the passenger saddle for this first loop: a bit more than 1,500 miles over four days, from my in-laws' place in southeast Idaho to my hometown in north-central Oregon -- via a rendevouz with a good friend near Snoqualmie Pass in Washington -- and then back to my in-laws' farm. We'll spend a day on the homestead, then we'll head south another 600 miles to St. George to spend a week with my parents. From there, I'll head on alone, ending up in northern Virginia after tracing a serpentine line across the map of the United States, mostly on back roads, for around 7,000 miles.
I've lived overseas for much of the past 15 years. Now I've got some time stateside. I want to see and talk to regular Americans, not the caracatures that partisan news outlets create and social media users amplify with clever video cuts and decontextualized quotes that maintain only the most tenuous toehold on truth. For reasons I don't fully understand, people seem a lot more willing to waltz into conversation with a stranger on a motorcycle than they are with a stranger in a Mazda. Maybe it's the absence of a cocoon of steel and glass around you. Maybe it's the way riders wear the weather and the world all over their face and shins, and it's tangled in their hair; it's like they're open to everything, so they probably wouldn't scowl at a chat. Often these little conversations just skim the surface of anything. But sometimes they plum surprising depths. It just sort of happens. And there you are, standing in a parking lot with a rando, listening to them talk about things they love, things they worry about, things they dream of. Given the chance, people mesh.
I want to tread on America’s skin, too. The deep deserts and immovable mountains, craggy hills and wide skies, lakes and plains and green forests, cities conjured from the depths of human ingenuity. The idea that America has a rotten core, and that some insidious Other is responsible, is good business and even better politics. I don't buy it though. I've unsubscribed. I think America still has a good, solid, beating heart. So I think maybe I'm riding all the way across this country without car doors and windows to mediate my relationship with the nation mostly so that I can write my own narrative of America and Americans.
These aren't actually purple mountains we're riding through. They're blue mountains. The Blue Mountains, to be precise. They partition central Oregon from western Idaho's fertile valleys, which Idahoans waste growing onions and Oreida french fries. We left triple digit heat behind us in Idaho's lower elevations. Now it's five o'clock and the sky is in tumult. Curtains of rain hang to the south and black clouds brood to the north, contemplating busting open. I think maybe I can split the storms right down the middle on dry pavement. This is my opinion because a man at a gas station in Baker City twenty miles back told me so. I said, "Think I can make it to La Grande without getting wet?" He gazed sagely to the west and said, "Yup." He was lightly stoned.
A few miles further and the highway is suddenly wet. My skin is still dry but I'm nipping at the heels of the storm. That sweet and full scent of damp pines and sage brush mingles with the smell of rainy pavement. My nose can't decide whether this frangrance is wet or dry. I decide it's both. Just like summer.
My bike starts to drop into a narrow canyon, the soaring walls framing the road are kaleidoscopes of green, the temperature plummets. The wet earth breathing cool and low into the sky, the angry clouds pushing down over the mountains with cold fists. There is something elemental, something alive, about the world moving raw and real across your skin with no windshield to shunt it aside, no climate-controlled bubble to smother you. The sense that all of this is always happening but you never really notice because you're never really there.
I'm there now. Water needles my face. It's starting to rain. But the clouds way off to the west are thinning, tired of glowering. They've swelled and burst and now they're falling to pieces, dying in summer evening sunlight that streams in beneath the thunderstorms overhead. It's raining and it's flaming in the big, beating heart of America, up above the fruited plain.
