Filthy www.salon.com librals ride motorcycles.

[dave b]

There is truth here.

...The joy was in the going, never in the getting there. That was a very good thing because after eleven in the morning there was never a tavern, bar, or road house that we didn’t feel obligated to visit and do our part in helping sustain the economy of rural Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. I’m not saying we dropped a lot of bread in any one town. There were so many small towns, so many little bars, and so little time to help them all out. But we tried to be fair and to do our best. We dropped a trail of dollars and left many dead soldiers (empty beer bottles) standing on the bar at many a honky tonk in the course of a day.

And we did our bit to keep the music industry going by distributing some nickels and dimes in the local juke boxes. We had rather eclectic taste ranging from Johnny Cash and Ray Price, to Johnny Rivers and the Beach Boys. The more we drank the better the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” sounded, especially when we added our outstanding voices to the mix and encouraged the rest of the boys there in redneck heaven to sing along.

Truth is that in all the years that we walked in to dozens of red neck bars in dozens of tiny villages we never once even came close to getting into a fight. We were happy drinkers, lovers not fighters, live and let live “good old boys.” We made sure, however, that we never told anybody where we worked because you never could be sure you wouldn’t run into a 280 pound solid hunk of Republican gorilla with a broken elevator who would want to crush us like flies. The subtlety inherent in explaining that in that we were “civil service” and not political appointees would, we feared, be lost on old Bubba there, so we just said that we were from “back east,” “up north” or “down south” and let it be – which always seemed to work.

Earl was, even back then, a person who liked a certain minimum level of creature comforts. He would not be caught dead sleeping in a sleeping bag in a tent, or in an unheated park cabin, or in a flea bag motel. And I never found the reality of camping nearly so gratifying as the imagining of it. So, along about three hours before sundown he would have us making our way toward the nearest interstate or sizable town and finding a nice middle class motel. Motel 6, when it actually cost $6 a night, and Super 8, when it actually was $8, were too down scale for his taste. So we inevitably ended up splitting the tab at a Holiday Inn or Best Western.

I did notice that he may not have been telling me exactly the truth as to why he insisted that we do that. But those motels that he somehow could sense like a bloodhound on the trail of a convict, always just happened to have a restaurant and a bar on site. And by that time of day, having worked hard all day at saving the economies of small town rural America, neither of us were anxious to try to ride to another bar when we could walk or crawl down the hall to the first martini of the day.

Those were a couple of pretty nice, low key, riding years. Neither of us ever got so totally sloshed that we couldn’t walk, with a little care, and ride, with maybe a little more care and attention to what we were doing. But I kind of doubt the latter. We never got in any trouble with the law, never had an accident and never harmed anything other than killing a few million insects, and, of course, our own bodies. Looking back on it I think that it was all at least half insane and yet we thought not only that it was “normal” but that anybody who wasn’t putting ten thousand miles or more a year riding T to T (tavern to tavern) down blue highways in beautiful rural America on a motorcycle was downright unenlightened.

What we never could quite explain to anybody was the feeling of getting up early, just after dawn, while the dew was still on the grass, the mist had yet to rise from the ponds, and the sun was burning an orange glow into the fog. Then starting out for another day without a care in the world, the birds starting their chatter, the cattle walking in well orchestrated lines to the barns to be milked, Canada geese, Mallards and Teal stirring on the ponds...

From Motorcycles: A Magnificent Obsession, Part One - Monte Canfield - Open Salon

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