Captain America
Today I stopped by the local BMW Motorcycle store in Escondido. I am planning out my upcoming rides and feel I need a few pieces of on-bike luggage. This is less about the trip we have planned to Moab in May and more about the trip In June and July back east. The plan is to take the motorcycle trailer back to Ithaca to bring back some personal effects from Homeward Bound, so why not bring the motorcycle along as well to take a few rides around the Finger Lakes for old times sake. On the way back we plan to go through Des Moines, Iowa, where I have to give testimony in an expert witness case I have been working on. I don’t yet know the exact dates, but it is in mid-July, so I have suggested that Kim drop me off in Des Moines and head back to California without me. She is planning to have Maggie join her for that ride home and I will stay there for as long as I’m needed for the hearing and will then use this as an opportunity for a solo summer ride back through some parts of the country that I don’t get to very often.
I’ve scoped this out on the map and it looks like I will start by riding to Crazy Horse Monument in South Dakota and stay there for the night. Seeing Crazy Horse at dawn strikes me as a good thing to do. From there I will wiggle my way across Wyoming to Jackson to visit my old buddy and partner Bruce and his wife Sandy. That will be night two. From there its a short hop to Salt Lake City, Utah where I will see Deb and Melissa and perhaps check out the old homesteads in Park City. From Salt Lake City I can either go on Rt. 15 down to Las Vegas and then home, but that is both a mostly boring ride and one I have already dome lots of times. So instead, I have decided to drive across northern Nevada and the loneliest roads in America in order to get to Sonoma and my pals who live up there in wine country. I will need to overnight in Winnemucca and will end my fifth day of riding by staying with them for the evening. My plan from there is to go over the Golden Gate Bridge and follow the coast highway down through Monterey and Big Sur to stay in our favorite Cambria Fireside Inn. I will end my week with a ride down the PCH through Malibu so I can once again wonder why people pay so much to live in such a crowded and tricky-tacky area. From L.A. south the road will be familiar with Rt. 5 taking me down through Orange County and Camp Pendleton. From there, the horse knows its own way into the barn.
That is expected to be a 2,300 mile odyssey done in seven riding days (an easy 328 miles/day on average). Using 60 mph as the normal average speed, that means an average of 5.5 hours of riding per day. That is not intended to be a killer pace and the route is not intended to be the most efficient (indeed it is 600 miles longer than the most direct route), but its summertime and the living in easy. If I hit bad weather, maybe I’ll just stay over another day or go see the world’s largest ball of twine. The point of the trip is to free-wheel it solo and see friends along the way.
To prepare for the trip I plan to use my heretofore unused aluminum panniers to carry the bulk of my luggage. I also bought a special BMW top duffle bag to give me something to lean up against and add supplemental storage. I bought a small, compact tank bag for things I will need easy access to including money, phone, map, etc. I do this when we go riding around Europe on rented bikes, so I feel pretty confident about what I need on the bike for a domestic road trip, even though I don’t do them so much any more. The biggest question will be whether I take a rain suit or not. Generally, I don’t like rain suits, but if the weather looks iffy, I may relent and take one just to be safe. If I gotta ride through rain I know I can do it. Hell, I’ve been doing it for over 55 years so far and haven’t melted, but my tolerance for discomfort is a lot lower than it used to be, and I will be out there all on my own, so better safe than sorry.
Twenty years ago I got to ride part of the way cross-country with an old motorcycling hero of mine, Peter Fonda. His drug-addled brain couldn’t shed to much light on too many things by that time, but the one thing he said to me was that the only way to take a road trip by motorcycle was to do it alone and without a plan. I can use this ride to do half of that and I can stay flexible on the plan as much as I want to, so maybe I’ll dedicate this ride to Captain America.
That’s an appropriate name since I will be riding across approximately half of the continental United States. Given that the list of states I will he riding through include Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and then California, even at only seven states, this is still more than halfway across the expanse. That represents in total 16% of the U.S. population, with 75% of it from California alone. Those states will have 14% of the Senators and 17% of the Representatives to Congress. That means that there are 4 Democratic Senators versus 10 Republicans and 49 Democratic Representatives versus 24 Republicans. It’s not exactly a perfectly even sampling of Americana that I will be riding through, but it comes close. And the politics as represented in the mix of senators and representatives is about what you would expect that our Founding Fathers settled on with large states like California controlling the House and smaller states (in population) like Wyoming and South Dakota, controlling the Senate. The bicameral system of the legislative branch is supposed to be a place where the competing interests of the collective are to balance out and we are forced to find compromise that causes the simple majority to seek appeasement for the minority. That’s a great concept that has worked reasonably well at times over our two-hundred-fifty year history and not so well at other times. Now is one of the not so well times.
Unfortunately, the times when it has worked fine are times when the dominance of the white majority has been able to stand strong and perhaps grant a bit of patronage to the minorities of the country. A time when that most notably broke down was one-hundred-sixty years ago when the existing system of slavery became the cause celeb of northern abolitionists who insisted and had to win through battle the removal of that ungodly practice and scourge on our nation’s history. Peace was restored in the nation at great cost throughout. The next notable time was perhaps sixty years ago when one-hundred years of “equality” was finally challenged by the minorities of the country as being insufficient and falsely claimed equality and once again the more righteous of the white population of the country found it in their self interest (whether through moral suasion or outright fear of reprisal) to grant civil rights to minorities that had otherwise been withheld. And peace was restored once again.
Today, we are again faced with a creeping and heinous trend towards trying to reclaim a mostly masquerading form of white supremacy hiding in the guise of originalist states rights. On the one hand we have four women now on the Supreme Court with one finally being a black woman of great judicial distinction, but on the other hand we have an overt majority on that court that has originalist sympathy that is slowly but surely stripping away the gains of sixty years ago. The most pernicious of those allowances is the ability of states to dismantle and restrict the right of members of the minority, who are gradually assuming the numerical majority, the right to vote as they wish to move the country back towards its egalitarian intent in the most absolute sense (perhaps even more than the Founding Fathers were prepared to admit even to themselves in those days of accepted practice of slavery and gender-bias).
I wish Captain America really existed to smite these transgressors with a vengeance and force the country towards true equality, but that is unrealistic. All he can do is perhaps travel the roads from Des Moines to San Diego and see what he can see and learn what he can learn about the true heart of America. Amen.