Hitting the Road
As I get older, I dream more about hitting the road. What’s that about? When I get asked what I would do in retirement I have to review the bidding this way. I’ve spent ten years teaching. I actually became a Clinical Professor of Management and taught courses at the graduate level at Cornell for those ten years. That took care of that retiree notion. I’ve served on several not-for-profit boards ranging from the global to the local and from educational to developmental and relief. So much for the charitable endeavor do-good work. The third in the series is writing the great American novel. I’ve been a writer for years now and have actually recently written five books ranging from academic to fiction to memoir to a fun dog book. So you see, I’ve pretty much covered the waterfront of typical retirement dreams. So, what’s left now that I’ve finally reached retirement age?
Bob liked keeping his age a mystery. It wasn’t so much a vanity issue as an ageism issue. Bob did not like feeling that he would be constrained by other people’s sense of what older people could and could not do. Bob was 84 years old, but so what? He had been a tenured professor of Economic Anthropology for forty years until he voluntarily gave up his tenure. He did that somewhat to make way for younger faculty, but mostly because he was shit tired of the subject. How many times can you explain the concept of limitless wants and why some cultures with low expectations end up in the backwater of development? He and his wife, Maggie had lots of plans to travel and take courses in foreign languages, but Maggie’s cancer had returned and that was that.
For some reason, Bob got it into his head that he needed to stay relevant and productive. For some reason he had decided that translated into taking a job with his University in the custodial department. He became the janitor of the main gym building. That way he got to see all his friends again every day even though he wasn’t teaching any more. None of them could understand why Bob was doing this. Those who didn’t know Bob well assumed it was a problem with his TIAA/CREF retirement fund and that it was a money problem. Those who knew Bob well knew it had more to do with his egalitarian view of life. He thought janitors were just as important to the human order as professors.
Every day, Bob started out with the New York Times and a cup of coffee that he took with him across the road to the old historic cemetery. He had pulled some strings and gotten burial plots for he and Maggie in the back corner. No one else even knew there were open plots, but Bob and Maggie had discovered the vacant back corner one rainy day and Bob had doggedly tracked down the local Episcopal church that controlled the cemetery. Figuring out how to buy the plots was an exercise in persistence, but he had done it. It was before Maggie’s cancer came back and Bob had made her promise to have breakfast with him every day after he died. She hadn’t made him promise the same, but he knew it was what he was supposed to do.
The other passion besides Maggie that Bob had retained over the years was motorcycling. He really was’t very good at it. He was never a very good rider, truth be told. But Bob loved to ride. When he rode he would ride all day. In fact, among his group of motorcycling buddies, he had more stamina for riding than any of them. He held the longest-day record. Bob had ridden twelve hundred miles in one day. When he was sixteen he had bought a Triumph 650 tax-free in London and had to get it back to Rome over the weekend. He had gotten caught up on the paperwork and had only gotten to Boulogne, just across the channel. From 6am (he was too excited to sleep) he had ridden for eighteen hours, down to Lyon, through the Mont Blanc tunnel, around Milan, past Bologna on the Autostrada and eventually into Rome by midnight. One would think that was all about being sixteen and full of beans. But Bob did the same thing at age 79 from Woodstock, Vermont to Augusta, Georgia. Bob was a long-distance beast.
Bob had started out riding Harley Davidson Road Kings because that’s what his friends in Vermont rode. When they switched to BMW’s, so did Bob. He had ridden them all. He was a BMW trend-follower rather than trend-setter. When everybody was riding K bikes, he rode a K bike. When the trend turned to adventure touring GS’s, that’s where Bob went. Bob just loved to ride.
When Maggie had died, after the funeral, Bob had decided to go “rideabout”. That’s a motorcycle version of an Australian walkabout. He just loaded up the R1200GS and lit out without telling anyone. That breaks pretty much every rule in the adventure touring handbook. Even when you do choose to head off on your own, you’re supposed to file a trip plan with friends or at least strap a GPS locator (Garmin InReach) device to your arm so friends and family can track you on the internet. But Bob just headed north into Canada and turned left, headed towards Alaska. He needed to clear his head. That could only happen with mileage.
When Neil Peart, the drummer of the rock group Rush had a similar family crisis, he spent a year on his motorcycle riding solo around North America. He wrote a book called Ghost Rider about the experience. There is something spiritual about hitting the road on a solo quest for answers. Bob didn’t invent it, but he was determined to perfect it.
It’s not clear why motorcycling stories hold so much meaning to me, but they do. Che Guevara told of his journey to revolutionary greatness in The Motorcycle Diaries. There is the metaphysical Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. One can’t ignore the movie chronicling the tales of Burt Monroe, The World’s Fastest Indian, about never giving up. But Bob’s favorite was either the Peart book or Rebuilding the Indian by Fred Haefele. The latter is about reclaiming the things in your life that are really important to you. Bob needed such a quest.
I think motorcycling and hitting the road are packed with meaning. Motorcycling is about freedom and dealing with being alone in the vastness. Hitting the road is even more primordial. People are either settlers or pioneers. I tend to believe that motorcycling appeals to pioneers. Their sun-bleached bones may lie beside the trail as the settlers’ wagons roll into town, but riding point is what they crave. To do that and to regain your sense of place, like Bob’s comfort cleaning the gym, sometimes you have to hit the road hard and purge your demons.