Creatures of Comfort
This is the third day of a five day motorcycle ride we are taking through Arizona and New Mexico. I know what you are thinking, that it might be too hot in the American Southwest for that sort of thing. I would like to expand the term of art to “Mad dogs, Englishmen and Motorcyclists go out in the noonday sun.” I am sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Encanto in Las Cruces, New Mexico early this morning, waiting for the rest of the gang to gather, get breakfasted and ready to depart. I have arisen early to take care of a lingering expert witness obligation, so I packed up as quietly as I could (never quite enough apparently from the protestations from Kim, who was trying to sleep), took my gear to the car, cleaned my motorcycle and swapped out my helmet for the full-coverage one that will be hotter, but leave my crisping skin less burdened with excess UV. It was 107 in Phoenix, 93 in Alpine and here in Las Cruces it was 102 when we pulled in yesterday afternoon. It’s about 85 this morning, so I’m expecting another hot one today. One might well ask why the hell I or any of us do this. Why do we do anything that brings added discomfort to our lives? Good question that I find (especially this morning) is worth exploring.
I think it is fair to suggest that comfort becomes a bigger part of the equation as we age, and by extension that is saying that in our youth we prioritize comfort much lower on the list of issues since all the hormonal flows tell us to do and do and do some more and only rarely tell us to consider whether it will hurt or even feel good while we are doing it. As we age and as we spend more time considering the things that will likely lead us to focus on our comfort versus the whole doing thing, we get this conflicted feeling that we are, indeed, allowing ourselves to age sooner than we need to. If we are not doing, then who are we? It all becomes an identity crisis. Well, there is no finer place to face that identity crisis when your primary passion is motorcycling, than on a motorcycle trip in the heat of the Southwestern sun. I have been rightly accused many times of overthinking things, but I think (there I go again) that everyone on this trip feels these things to one degree or another and in one way or another, whether they acknowledge it or not. Maybe the secret to success in such things is to not acknowledge these thoughts, to simply ignore them and pretend that they don’t exist and then they are more likely to go away.
On Sunday, after busting a gut loading the motorcycle on the trailer on Saturday, I told Kim (with an over abundance of optimism) that I would be sore the first day of riding and then good to go for the rest of the ride. I had that half right. I was sore Monday…and Tuesday….and today, now that the ride is over for the day and I’m luxuriating at the Best Western Socorro. I started out feeling OK in the morning when I began this story, but by lunch time and after only 120 miles of riding ( though it took us 4 hours on the bike due to a stop at White Sands National Park and one particularly long construction delay on a mountain pass), I was sore and hot and ornery. Mostly it was the combination of the heat and the saddle soreness, but it didn’t help that I had a bike fall into my bike at a gas stop (just a routine bike trip accident) and my fog lights are now attached by duct tape and my right boot lost its zipper in the altercation. Oh well, worse has befallen me on plenty of other trips, but the soreness is the one that’s getting to me today. Yesterday it was the heat, but today the lower back is making me feel like Methuselah.
Make no mistake, I am enjoying the scenery and especially the camaraderie of the ride. We’ve all known one another a long time, so there are lots of old stories and new ones too, but none of that is helping my aching lower back, sore upper back and tender butt. We started the day with a visit to White Sands, which neither Kim nor I had ever seen before. It is part of the White Sands Missile Range or Proving Ground as it was called in 1945 when the 3,200 square mile desolate and relatively inhospitable site was designated as the place where the U.S. would test the first nuclear weapon. The designation happened in July 9, 1945 and the test explosion, called Trinity, took place one week later at a top secret site just south of where we are staying tonight. In fact, we ate dinner at the Original Owl Cafe in San Antonio, New Mexico, the closest place to that fateful site that exists. In between White Sands and the Owl Cafe, we went through Ruidoso, a year round resort town of sorts, where we had lunch at Tina’s Cafe. I feel like we’re tip-toeing through hallowed ground for humanity in this place and all I can think about is how uncomfortable I’m feeling all day long on the bike.
So, back to the issue of why discomfort takes such a front and center role in our day-to-day existence. I’m guessing the reason is that its hard to get past it to the more important aspects of life when you aren’t comfortable. For my part, I find everything I am doing and seeing this week really important and interesting and I don’t want any of it derailed by my daily discomfort. But there is nothing I can do about that right now. We have been watching the Titanic submersible story where monied adventurers have paid a ton of money to go down and risk complete and utter discomfort and possibly death in order to experience something few other humans can. Once they launch, the risk management options are limited and the outcome will be what it will be. The same is true of this sort of motorcycle trip, obviously on a very different scale of risk and with a far less limited membership of the clu\b of possible and likely participants. But, once the trip is underway, I can do only so much to cauterize the discomfort, all I can really do is grin and bear it. Maybe I can also wish it away, but that seems unlikely after three days.
I have two more days of riding ahead of me and I already have a bit of a broken wing in that my riding boots are now a Rube Goldberg affair that will have duct tape all over them, just like my bike with its fog lights. None of that will clearly make me any more comfortable and may actually make me less comfortable. We will be heading into the mountains again tomorrow and then on Friday we will be back in the race home to sizzling Phoenix, which has not cooled off in the past week. Then I load up the bike again on the trailer and we spend six hours on Saturday driving ourselves and my broken bike and messed up boots home to our hilltop.
I can already tell that our ride home will be spent weighing the pros and cons of motorcycle touring at this stage of life and with my discomfort with the rigors of riding. That will not be an easy conversation, having nothing to do with Kim and everything to do with me and my sore ass. And, of course, between me and my ass are all my feelings about aging, about health and fitness and about my personal passions and identity. It’s not quite a Thelma and Louise moment, but it comes close for me.