Afterword

People ask -- hell, I ask myself -- why does one do this? What is the thrill about riding a motorcycle across country, fighting chilling cold and scorching heat, dirt, rain, bugs, wind, crazy traffic, long stretches of desolate highway, long days on the saddle, cheap hotels, variable nutrition, especially if you do it alone? And you do it alone because, who else do you know that would be crazy enough and find the time to do a trip like this?

The first time I did a coast-to-coast motorcycle trip, in 1996, it was a challenge. I had started riding motorcycles only four years earlier, and the idea of riding across America was some sort of a romantic biker dream imbued with the image of freedom and the audacity of Easy Rider. Well, it's not really that free. One still has to deal with all the details of daily necessities like food, shelter, hygeine, clothing, packing, fuel, maintenance and repairs of the vehicle. It's not free monetarily either. All these necessities cost money -- at least more than you would spend by staying home. I can think of ways to travel that would be a lot more free, from a responsibility standpoint -- like paying somebody else to worry about all the details. But you may not realize this until you do it once -- at least I didn't.

That said, why do it again and again?

The best answer I can find is, it's an odyssey. Like Odysseus, you're out there wandering, to an extent at the whim of the elements. For me, the best trips are not very well planned. In fact, the trips I have liked least have been when planning forced me to try to keep a schedule. Better to have a general direction but no hard schedule. What comes will come. And this is the excitement, because what comes is that you see places and scenery and things that you might not otherwise see if you planned more carefully, if you rushed, or if your trip was planned by someone else.

One of the best parts is seeing people. On virtually all my motorcycle trips I have had a chance to visit old friends, long lost friends, family members, and occasionally make new friends, even if just in passing and the visits last only a few hours or a day. The people you see are, mostly, people you might never see again in this modern age if you had to specifically plan a trip to visit. In that respect, it ties life together and ties the present to the past. It is a popular cliche to say that the world has become a smaller place, with modern transporation and communication methods allowing faster travel and ready communication over long distances. But in reality, in the last 100 years and even in my lifetime, the world has become a much larger place. Families and friends that once had local anchors and maintained connections over a lifetime are now scattered far and wide. Rapid travel and communication have made it easier for friends and family to move away from you and for you to move away from them, easier for businesses to maintain diverse operations at a distance and require people to relocate, often many times, to the point where family coherence and friendship continuity are difficult to maintain. We suffer from this, like many other aspects of the modern industrialized world that have developed much more rapidly than the slow evolutionary processes that prepared our brains for life in the world and, though we may not be completely aware that it is happening, outstrip our ability to deal psychologically with life and the environment and events that surround us. We feel alone. Often we are alone, even in the midst of new friends, lovers, acquaintances, because new people do not have the deeper ties to common experiences and connections of history and place. With being alone comes a sense of loss. For me, at least, the best part of the odyssey of motorcycle travel is that it takes me places that I would otherwise never go, causes me to drop in and visit people I would otherwise never see, ties the present to the past, regains some of what has been lost, and helps to give me perspective and life more meaning. By not knowing where I may be going, I obtain a better understanding of from where, and from whom, I have come.

I find this enjoyable.