Copyright © 2011 by Ralph Couey
The sun is just rising into a clear sky, the day still fresh, new, and unspoiled. After one last check of the loaded bike, the key is turned, the starter punched. The engine roars, and with a final good-bye, the bike rolls down the driveway and onto the road. The spirit soars, for we have answered the call of the open road.
Every spring, I suffer the pangs of adventure. I try to satisfy, or at least allay them with 200-mile Saturday rides, and taking the long way home from work. But as the weather warms, and the day lengthens, I cannot help but open a road atlas and dream a little.
Dramatic landscapes float through my mind, much like a high plains thunderstorm gliding across the sky. In those visions is a voice, subtle and seductive, that calls me to flee the box of my life for the freedom of the open road.
A map is the canvas upon which I paint my dreams; a portrait of limitless plains, powerful mountains, shifting deserts, and shoreline highways. My eyes follow the multi-colored lines on the page, but in my mind, I feel the sun on my shoulders, the wind in my face, and the exultation of a questing and restless spirit.
Even in my childhood, the horizon always beckoned. For others, that line between earth and sky is a barrier, a protective wall surrounding the known and familiar. To me, however, the horizon is a gateway to places I’ve never been and things I’d never seen; people I’d never met. Experiences I’d never had. I am irresistibly drawn to the unknown beyond the known.
We traveled far as a family. Before I was 12, I had already been to 21 states, Canada, and Mexico. But it wasn’t until I began my relationship with a motorcycle that I discovered the real joy in the journey.
My first long road trip was a Labor Day escape to the shores of Lake Superior. I remember that day well. The heat and humidity was already oppressive by 8:00 in the morning as I headed north, crossing the farmlands of northern Missouri and Iowa. Departing Minneapolis in the evening, I raced the sunset for Duluth, cresting the hill above that port city just after sunset. Below me, the city glittered like jewels scattered along the shore.
But the best moment was when I reached my campsite at Two Harbors. After 700 miles and 14 long hours, I beheld a huge full moon rising over the still waters, its soft light bathing the world in silver. Even today, the memory still leaves me breathless.
Two years later, I embarked on an epic 9-day sojourn through the rugged beauty of the American Southwest.
Yet today, I can close my eyes and remember the easy grace of Kansas’ Flint Hills, the torn and beaten land in Oklahoma and West Texas still scarred from the dust bowl. And an old weather-beaten shack off the side of the road; the wooden gravestone of a broken dream.
I see the verdant valleys of New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains, and the stark, empty desert of the Jornada del Muerto. There was a lovingly restored Tombstone, Arizona; the incredible heat of Phoenix, the natural artistry of Sedona, and the raw beauty of Oak Creek Canyon. Through Colorado’s Rockies, I careened along twisted mountain traces, balancing the centrifugal against the centripetal on a knife-edge of lunacy.
There was the retired couple who really understood the “why” of my journey. The 4-year-old boy in Tombstone, how wide his eyes were, sitting on the motorcycle’s seat. And the longing in them as his smiling father led him away.
So, it is on this April night that a thousand memories visit, leaving behind a familiar sweet ache. I want to go again. It does not matter that I am not the young man I once was. I am certain the time will come again.
Someday, the rising sun will find me once again on a bike packed for adventure and discovery. And I will joyfully ride to the distant horizon, my heart singing a glorious anthem…
The song of the open road.
