Father’s Day is here and therefore I am gone. I have taken the weekend off and I’m not even going to cut the yard. I feel my roots calling me back to the sea, the beautiful sea and all I need is a ship with good sails, a barrel of hard tack biscuits and the bright northern star to steer by.
But I’m in Statesville, North Carolina about four hours from the coast.
So I’ll climb on my black BMW motorcycle and head for the Smokey Mountains due west and pick up some county road and ride for a couple hundred miles. I’ll throttle up that 1100cc engine and let it run free like a wild stallion until I finally come to some small country gas station where the parking lot is hard packed dirt and they play music by Waylon and Willie and the boys. Don’t call me because I don’t have my cell phone with me, just chewing tobaccy, Mr. Samuel Colt, a thick roll of twenties, spurs that jingle and a dog named Yeller. Well, actually I have mainly my health insurance card and allergy meds.
Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” Now folks, that’s Man Talk.
Father’s day has been bought and purchased just like Christmas and I’ve decided I’m not buying into it. I’ve got enough cologne to make even Congress smell good and I have enough neckties---I only need about two-- for making arm slings or tourniquets for snake bites. So it’s just me, the motorcycle and the open road.
You see things on a motorcycle unlike anything viewed from a car. In a car you sit in a compartment and even though you don’t realize it you see everything as though it was on TV. The scenes are all framed with no smell and no real sense of dimension while you sit still watching images go by. It’s like trying to watch life on an old 35 mm movie film.
But on a motorcycle you are part of the scene. The asphalt whizzing by six inches below your boot is what you were walking on five minutes earlier and it’s now so blurred you can’t focus on the small rocks and cracks that make up the road—yet you could put your foot down and touch it at any moment.
When you ride a motorcycle you converse only with your thoughts and hour after hour a man has plenty of time to ponder his sins and decide which ones to repent of and which ones might need a little more time to bake before they’re done. You women do not need to do this because you are better than us men. Men know this.
As a father I’ve hit plenty of fouls and few homeruns. Mothers have the best batting score.
So I’m taking me and my sins and heading west. I’ll join up with other fathers camping by a creek bank and sit by a crackling fire at night and share stories. It will be good to be with people that know the same songs I do such as “Me and Bobby McGee” and “I’ll Fly Away” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain”. We’ll sing about being lonesome and about rivers gone dry. Come morning we’ll pack up and ride through small towns without stopping and pass people in their cars, people sitting on their porches and I’ll see the envy on their faces. The journey is its own reward--- revel in the freedom.
I’ll be back on Monday. I have a dental appointment.
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