We dropped down from Lake Tahoe into the Great Basin. The
signage warned us about a veritable Noah’s Ark of animal life: bear,
deer, cattle, moose, horses, men on horses, men on tractors. It got hot,
fast.
Ninety-two miles in we had lunch in Fallon, Nevada. Then we
entered the desert, our motorcycles shredding the silence.
When I mentioned to Hunter, my riding companion, that the
next stretch of 409 miles was known as the Loneliest Road in America,
his response was “Well, I’m the loneliest man in America.”
Hunter was fleeing a relationship and riding with me back
to the East Coast. I had set out from Cambridge on my motorcycle some
seven weeks and 7,000 miles earlier, pinballing around the cities of the
Midwest and then whipping across the plains and over the mountains to
Seattle. I joked with friends that I was just swinging by Seattle to
pick Hunter up. The truth is, our journeys happened to align. And yet I
wasn’t sure what had caused me to fling myself out on the road once
again. I had nothing to flee. Maybe it was like John Steinbeck said:
“Once a bum always a bum.”
Hunter tore ahead astride Rhonda, his 1979 CB750. Rhonda
had a menacing growl and a whole host of complications. She was in her
dirty thirties, we joked—a longtime smoker. We wondered if she could
make it through the desert unscathed. We wondered if we could make it through the desert unscathed.
I cruised steadily behind on Darsan, my 1990 BMW K75, so named because the Hindu concept of darshan—witnessing and being witnessed by the divine—has long intrigued me. And what better way to take darshan of America than on a motorcycle?
In his own American motorcycle journal, Robert Pirsig
wrote, “The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you
bring up there.” But what about valleys? Hunter and I were about to find
out.
The emptiness was striking. All that space has a way of
shrinking distance. The image of Hunter ahead, ducking into the wind and
surging toward the mountains, is burned into my memory. Largely because
to get to the mountains we had to surge toward them for a long time.
The valleys were designed to a scale that we city boys weren’t
accustomed to. The road was straight, the landscape barren. Though we
pushed our bikes to 85, 90, 95 miles per hour, the pervading sense of
stillness was broken only by the roaring wind.
We pulled over and removed our helmets, and the silence
pulsed in our ears. Hunter’s constant fear was that Rhonda’s engine
would seize and she would explode—spontaneous motorcycle combustion.
We
poured water on her cylinders and watched it sizzle. My constant fear
was that my tires would explode. They’d traversed the country and then
some. The upshot is that constant fear truly puts you in the moment. The
great matter is birth and death, after all.
We plowed on. Over the miles we developed a natural
rhythm: I’d overtake, lead for a while, and then, wordlessly, we’d
switch positions. Peak, then valley; peak, then valley. After 112 miles
we made it to Austin, population 300. Hunter entered the gas station and
returned with a pin that read “I Survived the Loneliest Road in
America.”
