Peaceful Motorcycle Ride: Part 12: A Perfect End

I intended to do a short ride before breaking camp and heading home. However, I was just too happy sitting on my ass brewing coffee. Everything had been perfect, there was no need to do more.

I listened to people in adjacent campsites packing up. First the ones without kids; slipping out of camp quietly and efficiently. Then the ones with kids; in a flurry of helter skelter commotion. I didn’t mind the hubbub. I’d been silent the whole trip. Speaking hardly a word, hearing little but nature. Solitude is grand, loneliness is not. The sounds of domestic chaos was human interaction without interaction at all. Perfect! Also, it was distantly amusing. I sat in peace, cradling my coffee and watching the squirrels organize raiding parties against my breakfast food. The noise of people half my age struggling to pack rugrats in a Subaru reminded me to appreciate my idyllic morning.

It started getting cloudy so I finally levered my ass out of my chair. I packed up in a flash. My tent and cot were as efficient as usual but the bike got messy. I’d been topping off the gas tank from a little two gallon can every night (plus I had a one gallon Rotopax). I like to keep it always full, but I’d forgotten the previous night. Predictably, the “California compliant” can spilled gas all over the place; which seems to be their purpose. Then I used a new brand of chain lube I’d never tried and what a fiasco! I slimed sticky messy goo all over the place. Whoops!

A squirrel made a run at the chain lube (which looked like Cheese Whiz from hell). I let him learn. When its target turned out to be petroleum rather than sugar it glared angrily at me. Sorry buddy.

I rolled the bike on the trailer, strapped it down, and headed out. It started raining. For once, I’d had good timing!

I was pretty far north so my AM radio picked up Canadian stations. I thought I’d evade the propaganda of American NPR. Wrong! If anything, Canada has it worse! They’ve gone down the rabbit hole and started pulling in dirt after themselves. The radio was like this: Covid, covid, covid, a few words about sports, covid, covid, covid, ninety seconds about weather, covid, covid, covid, the government knows best and Trudeau loves you, covid, covid, covid, and… wait for it… stay tuned… back to covid. As far as I can tell, literally nothing exists in Canada but Trudeau’s novelty socks and dead bodies. No wonder people have lost it!

I turned the radio off.

Rather than wind through swamps and forests, I cut at right angles into a vast region of farmland. This gained me easy rolling on smooth pavement. I also got to gawk at the ongoing harvest. Crops are pretty shitty this year because of the drought. I’m sure I could turn on the radio and find out how it’s a direct result of covid… and possibly global warming… which causes covid because covid covids the covid. However, I’m perfectly happy with my deplorable misinformation that crops grow shitty when they don’t have water. Call it “the Idiocracy theorem”. Harvesters were racing against the rain; doing what they could. Feeding the world and all that. Good for them!

Suddenly, in the middle of a vast, recently harvested field, I spied a bear. Awesome! I’d been wanting a bear photo! The poor bastard was in the middle of a huge empty field; about a quarter mile distant and exposed in broad daylight. He was aware of this and hauling ass for cover.

I whipped Dodge and trailer through an unwieldy U-Turn, floored it back to the nearest cross road, and skidded to a halt. Smokey was going to have to cross the road! I didn’t have time to drive down the road (and didn’t want to hassle an already running bear) so I grabbed my camera and steadied it over the truck’s hood.

He approached the road at a dead run and then trotted across… right in front of my camera! Yahoo!

I played it back. I had a nice full color video of a huge grain field bisected by a muddy road. A raisin sized speck scooted across it. Hardly the work of Marty Stouffer. Oh well.

I returned home happy, smelling like pine, and rested. When the spastics of cloud cuckoo land get you down with their black death fantasies and epic failures of the Jews in the attic test, go play in the dirt. You’ll thank yourself.