cairn mountains at Two Wheels To There

Worknight Runaway – 2011.08.30

Published on July 27, 2015 by Ry Austin 6 Comments

Frigid river water washed the countless casualties from Surtch Pherther’s glasses and visor, and the workday’s salt and the evening’s dust from his face. Ten feet out, given the chance, the Shamton Waterfall could have washed away so much more, but Surtch hadn’t taken this path on his O’Mahoney’s Grill trip the year before, back when food had no flavor, the jukebox no tunes, sunlight no warmth, and he no desire.

Here it was a midweek worknight a mere three days after he’d got the ’09 XR1200 “Riot Machine” with just 300 miles for a steal from a DeLusiville dealership because this bike was never given a fighting chance stateside because it seldom saw the showroom floor because Harley’s typical customer didn’t give a realtime damn because it just can’t seat a big spare tire… And though Surtch was fine with all that, he thought it a shame just the same.

He’d bombed the eastbound I at 80 to 100 mph after work because he’d craved it, because Riot Machine had roared for it, and because broad Big Canyon, with few lurk-spots for cops, had beckoned. On the back side he’d throttled down and let the naked bike’s 1200 ccs rumble-vibe through Silvervale’s ranch-lands turned rec-lands and cash cows for the one percent and then down Middlefield Draw to the midweek-empty diner for a pastrami on rye with chips and a dill spear and coffee as the sun nestled west in the virga-streaked and cloud-strewn sky. Afterward, with nowhere to be and anywhere to go, he’d set off southeast for West Cairn Road and into the mouth of the Shamton drainage at a speed to match the meandering route and its swift shifts from sunlight to shade.

Riverside, Surtch rinsed and wrung the microfiber, wiped his glasses and visor of lingering streaks, and folded the cloth and tucked it damp into his jacket’s right pocket. Pebbles on the path back crackled under his boots, and the cooling air raised aromas of evergreens and damp soil and cradled the spray from the waterfall that continued to shush as though to hush others with whom it had been babbling before the rider’s arrival. It was shift change in the woods–day was turning in, night was stirring to stalk a bite to eat, and Surtch, fresh from the riverbank, was aware.

With a turn of the key and a press of the starter, road-hot Riot Machine barked right back to life, and soon thereafter Surtch was clearing Bardom Pass. Taking the tight switchbacks slow, he sank into the other side, into the Mackenzie drainage that for 15-ish miles runs along the Cairn Mountains Wilderness, and into a night that seemed to fall as suddenly as its dangers arose. He’d seen no deer before the waterfall and the pass, but now there were only signs of their abundance: fuzzy forms in the brush, just within the headlight’s reach, and here and there large eyes glinting like early ornaments among the boughs.

A few miles beyond where the mouth of the drainage yawns wide, where lush graze-land lies out flat and far, he crossed the state line and then thundered into the first fuel stop he came upon in weeknight-quiet Booth Union. After filling up and then sipping a Gatorade and munching a granola bar at the station’s front walk, he joined the westbound I, busy with cagers and big rigs to serve as possible blockers against wildlife would-be tacklers.

Combined with the increasing mugginess and the drone of steady revs, the pastureland links between Bromley’s Draw, Silvergate Gulch, and Big Canyon might have rendered Surtch body-bored and mind-numb had it not been for a coming storm: The sky, which had been building tension and making threats all late-day long, was finally throwing a fit with light but steady rain–refreshing, really–and random, remote flashes that silhouetted the tall and toothlike Westwitness Peaks on the otherwise blackdrop backdrop.

Finally, at about ten o’clock that night, after over 200 satisfying miles, Surtch raced Riot Machine to a fork-squeezing stop at the back of his drive and shut it off. Behind him–speeding, crashing, enfolding, and companioned by the tink-plunk tune of cooling cylinders and pipes–rushed that intoxicating odor of hot V-twin exhaust, something that proper Escape Artist never could and never would produce. Of course, Surtch loved Escape Artist: It could take him remote, to where his soul was closest to the surface. But Riot Machine roared to his flesh and his blood, was a wild thing. Indeed, where Escape Artist was spirit, Riot Machine was body alone–tautly muscled, hot and lusty.

Are you occasionally able to fit in a longer ride during your work week, or is the risk too high–that you’ll just keep heading away, from home, from work, from responsibility?…

Now, don’t rub it in too much, you… you retired people. You know who you are. 🙂

A Dirt Road to the Future – 2011.08.21

Published on June 22, 2015 by Ry Austin 12 Comments

Surtch Pherther switched off Escape Artist and leaned it on its stand at the T-junction of Ourantah Ridge Road and the rural highway between Trapper and Portcullis.

Ahead, to the east across the asphalt, badlands lay in wait, known to Surtch only through paper maps and hearsay, a rumorland–a land of rides to come. And behind him? Well, behind stretched 45 miles of the most delicious dirt he’d ridden yet, a finer way from point A to B-b-b-beyond, a tool and a toy–a promising path to his riding future. In fact, Surtch was already speculating how to extend the experience, how to nudge the dirt–by linked like routes of rocks and dust–closer to the City of Contradictions.

Civilization seems to self-assess somewhat by the amount of pavement it lays, to equate progress with wildness subdued, dirt covered, and curves tamed. It might then be the two-wheeler’s duty–civil disobedience moto style–to bypass the straight with twisty and the paved with dusty, leaving the slabs and their vanishing points to cagers and deadline riders.

Surtch Pherther at Two Wheels To There: A motorcycle blog by Ry Austin — Mr. and Mrs. Ed

That morning, Surtch had broken camp, scarfed down breakfast bars and parfait and cold coffee, bidden his folks goodbye, and coasted Escape Artist down toward the boat ramp, hanging a left just before. There, San Cosme Reservoir Road reached far to the tip of a sloped spur, then sharp-turned south, switched to gravel, and scampered up past thorny shrubs, sagebrush, and quaking aspen stands that tremble-filtered the harsh light for undergrowth of tender grasses and wildflowers and small ferns…

Soon it sprinted–a rutty, pocked, dirt traverse–through a lodgepole wood across a craggy mountainside toward a jumble o’ junctions where Surtch had U-turned the year before for poor dirt legs, throb-throb-throbbing in his full-faced head from having his wisdom teeth yanked just days before, and mind-fog and body-blahs from half a week of juggling painkillers…

It leapt through meadows and mixed forests high above San Cosme Creek–a creek to which a younger self and his brother and their dad had tromped through autumn-tan and -brittle brush in a frigid late fall to cast for brooks and browns but catch zilch…

It dashed past a shadow of a two-track down which on that same long ago trip the three had driven dad’s ’72 Ford “Blue Ox” Bronco and eaten hash browns with onions and lemon-peppered pork chops before a bonfire and slept like dead in their bags through a mute night to wake the next morn to half a foot of snow and they miles in on a “closed” road…

It hopped left and right in switchbacks tight to San Cosme Peak’s shoulder where Surtch wrong-turned twice but soon got on track for a change of scene to gray from green, to sparse pines among rabbit brush and sagebrush again and a clay soil road that went greasy from a cloudburst, causing Escape Artist to waggle about and to about go down, spooking a passing sheepdog but not the Peruvian shepherd or the pro horse he rode by on, the only creatures (short of Mr. and Mrs. Ed, of course, of course) that Surtch had seen all afternoon…

And finally it scrambled up to the last stretch of Ourantah Ridge, to the north of which the land rolled soft and somewhat green toward dinosaur digs and toward pumpjacks keeping time in fieldlings of oil and gas and toward the vast Cairn Mountains’ rock pile peaks, and to the south of which the earth broke jagged-dramatic toward coalfields and more dino digs and the Bucksaw Cliffs flanking a clayscape waste and toward–afar–the vivid desert of sandstone and dunes.

Back at the T-junction, Surtch switched on Escape Artist, heeled up its stand, and pressed its starter. By highway, the nearest town was 30 miles off. About 110 farther–through Lupo Pass and South Middlefield, past Keetstone Lake and the Silvervale roads, and over Big Canyon summit–waited the City of Contradictions, surely facing fitful sleep through another sultry summer night.

But for his hunger for a cheesesteak with fries and coffee at Pemm’s Hash House in Trapper, the lateness of the day with its shadows already presenting and the typical chill already making the usual threats and more cloudbursts abrewin’, and the guarantee that large game would soon again be jaywalking after dark, Surtch would’ve U-turned and gone back the way he’d come.

Oh well–he’d be back. Yes, Surtch Pherther would be back. For Ourantah Ridge Road had changed everything.

Was a specific road or stretch of road a game changer to the development of your skills or confidence as a rider?

To Desire, a Satisfaction – 2011.08.13(b)

Published on May 11, 2015 by Ry Austin 2 Comments

With the armor stacked on the toilet tank, Surtch Pherther plunged his dust-choked jacket into the clawfoot tub’s warm water and suds, agitated the mix, and went back to the kitchen to seek dinner, leaving the textile tea to steep.

For riding, it had been a good day: From sunrise to -set he’d been there, immersed, reluctant to release the small adventure. It might sound trite, but if lessons lingered in the mindquake’s wake, never take desire for granted was one. Indeed, postquake, Surtch had arrived at maybe his best understanding yet of this bizarre, existential experience: To be human is to desire, and to desire is itself a satisfaction.

In the kitchen he was trying to cobble together a meal from clearly incompatible components when he became distracted by what sounded like a leaf blower, distracted less by the muffled hum than by the incongruity: It was late evening, well after dark, so “why the hell would anyone be using a leaf blower”? He stepped down the back stairs, out the door into the sticky night’s big arms, along the dim drive to the walk, and stopped… Aside from the chirping of crickets, the street was quiet.

Yes, for riding, it had been a very good day: From the Tumen Creek kilns, he’d taken that ridge-cresting road past a wind farm vast and new since he was last through, back when his dad, siblings, and a younger self were regularly backpacking deep into the Cairn Mountains Wilderness, back when it seemed that such times couldn’t possibly end. But they had ended, and recently–with his dad in denial and no one discussing it–and in life’s typical style too: by its stealing from aging man what it granted him in youth. The key was for all involved to evolve or wither in soul, to pursue new pastimes, to seek new adventures.

I don’t mind your doing your job, Father Time, Surtch had often thought to the universe, Lord knows that the cosmic clockworks would be nothin’ without you. But it’s when you wrench the throttle of this absurd conveyance… You can give us mental whiplash, you know, leave us essentially changed.

Back in the kitchen the incompatibility of dinner’s components refused to be resolved through their combining, and though Surtch tried to dismiss that nagging, muffled hum, distraction was again taking hold. He strode down the back stairs, out the door into the night’s muggy hug, along the dark drive to the walk, and stopped… Crick-crick-crick-crickets was the only sound on the street. “Weird,” he mumbled, “weirdness is goin’ on.”

From the wind farm, he’d descended a short dugway and then headed south into the Hacker Creek drainage to re-find westbound Rose Pitch Road. It was a route that, midweek, might have offered a relaxing ride through forest and meadows, but this Saturday in August the heating air was abuzz and a-gag with noise and smoke and dust from wild herds of two-strokes and four-wheelers tearing recklessly along the road and without restraint across trackless terrain. Surtch knew that they were only providing the state with more reasons to tighten restrictions, but he also knew their type: If challenged, they’d be eager and ready–pistols in hands, rifles in arms–to defend their “right” to abuse the places they “love”.

Late in the day–with shadows growing long; with the wetlands chill rising to roost in the woods, and large game milling down to the marshes to water; with the twisties of West Cairn Road through Bardom Pass and the south end foothills near ahead, and far ahead, sleepy Middlefield and the Westwitness Peaks–Surtch had finally hit pavement.

He agitated the jacket once more in the tepid, sudsless murk before reaching in to scoop it out. Dirty water fell into the tub, and in his arms the wet wad was buzzing like a hive of livid bees. “Oh, shit!” He dropped it–splat!–in the hall, fumbled open the jacket’s inside pocket, and yanked out his cell phone that was vibe-ing its life away and popped off its back and flipped its searing battery onto the kitchen floor.

It had been his phone–the noise of its dying vibes amplified by the water and the tub–that for half an hour or so was sounding like a blasted leaf blower…

WELCOME: smart-alecky comments and caption suggestions for the poor tripod placement for the photo above. Here’s a start…

“Hey, Propeller Helmet, you’ll need wings as well if you hope to take flight!”

A Century Cold and “All the Time in the World” – 2011.08.13(a)

Published on April 12, 2015 by Ry Austin 7 Comments

Leaning aloft through banked sweepers known just to them, cliff swallows skillfully, thrillfully swooped about the spacious kilns…

Surtch Pherther had tiptoed over the threshold, through the inner dimness, and–opposite the archway, five feet high, and below the loading window, fifteen above–settled to the cool, earth floor and against the thick, stone wall still charred from the kiln’s last firing over a century back.

Yes, they were cold, for over a hundred years and nightly since: thirty-six-thousand-five-hundred plus and counting. Necessarily stout, they easily trap the small hours chill that’s regular for their near-prairie setting and greedily hold it through even the hottest, August day.

As Surtch held still, the flighty dwellers began to return, swooshing in and then circling the dome-cone ceiling once, twice, thrice–the echoes of their wingbeats, amplified by the odd acoustics, sprinkling all around. At last alighting in their little, mud cups–removed from ground threats and sheltered from the terrain’s frequent tempests–they’d either nestle out of sight, or rest their colorful heads abrim to peep at goings-on below….

It had been 15 years since a youngish self of his had first, and last, seen the Tumen Creek kilns, while taking the long way home from a camping weekend with his kin. The curious, middle-of-nowhere monoliths were a surprise to him and his folks and remained a mystery to them for months thereafter. In the years since, the state had fenced out free-rangers, laid a footbridge over a deep ditch, placed a picnic table and info boards, and begun masonry restoration.

Surtch thought it a shame it had taken so long for them to be deemed worth preserving. Yet it was akin to the usual fate of the great, structures, societies, and souls alike: subject to history’s glacial-pace consideration–its eyes ever-focused on the fuzzy future, its mind ever-appraising the distant past.

Once-upon-a-time, when many were plagued with gold fever, the Wild West was plentiful with such kilns, used for smoldering wood into a hotter-, cleaner-, slower-burning fuel for forges and smelters. Yet for the Italian immigrants’ pride, sweat, and skills that went into their construction, the productive lives of most kilns were short–for mining busts and the advent of the transcontinental railroad, of course, but chiefly for their own appetites: Over a mere thirteen days, a 30 foot by 30 foot kiln could reduce about 30 cords (3,840 cubic feet of wood) to a quarter of its bulk as charcoal.

As folks in ranges west laid claim to prospective mother-lodes, and in the nearby Cairn Mountains to hundreds of acres of forest, Tumen Creek and most other Wild West towns laid claim to notorious outlaws and notable frontiers-people such as Butch Cassidy and Calamity Jane.

Now, on a rise overlooking the site and its wild cemetery, Surtch envisioned a host of happy ghosts and contemplated cliff swallows, grassland critters, the constant breeze, and the only enduring symbols of Tumen’s most noteworthy claim: about two-dozen gravestones, mostly of infants, children, and mothers (were and were to have been). Though it was the typical tragedy for towns of its type and time, to them it was just life–life unjust.

By slab, Tumen Creek was a patch past a hundred miles from the City of Contradictions, but by Surtch’s mid-morning route over Harbinger Pass and by South Morgan Reservoir and through quaint Smithton, up Calbon Creek and over its dirt saddle head, across West Cairn Road and past Myers Reservoir, it was… It was… It was… Who knew? It was more, or it was less–and that more or less didn’t matter.

Though the two modes of transportation are about getting there, each arrives at it differently: Automobiles embody the “there” of physical destinations and map pins and switching off the key; and motorcycles, as Surtch further welcomed with every outing, embrace the “getting” of thrills on tread-testing turns and the quest for oneself on that journey from point A to B-b-b-beyond…

Back at Escape Artist, he donned his gear, threw his leg over, and gazed east at a ridge-cresting road he’d never been on. It was already a few hours past noon, but it was a Saturday in August, sure to be long with summer light and warmth.

“I’ve got all the time in the world,” thought Surtch, “all the time in the world…”

To Embrace a Lent Rhythm – 2011.07.30 / 08.06

Published on March 15, 2015 by Ry Austin 2 Comments

“Every future has a beginning, and I must start sometime if I’m going to learn this.” Surtch Pherther loathed truisms. Yet for nearly two years he’d been repeating relevant ones as a sort of mantra. Or rather, he’d been repeating them when clarity of thought permitted, when he wasn’t squinting from deep inside the mindquake’s murk, his eyes straining for signs of light.

He was as cautious to declare the quake’s brutal occupation nearly over as he was uncertain about its pinpoint beginning. Superstition, as well as uncertainty, informed that caution: He wasn’t so reckless as to proclaim “evicted” until his precious mind was again well-fortified to keep another quake at bay, or at least strong enough to fight like hell.

As a verb, as an action, “fight” had been all but erased from his vocabulary, and as a noun, as an object, it was severely faded. It is sheer cruelty when actions are stolen before their objects, when one can still know where he’d rather be, but no longer possesses the vehicle to get there. “Fight” without being able to is like placing water beyond a thirsty man’s reach, like cutting a barred window into the wall of a lifer’s cell.

Time is supposed to heal all wounds, but that can occur only if enough time, a subjective variable, follows the wounding. After all, the passage of one’s time can be ceased too easily, impulsively.

In some respects, time seemed slow for Surtch, and always in short supply. He suspected that was true for most. His dear sister and dear brother had recommended re-engagement, and sure, he needed that, but not as mere diversion: Surtch wanted engagement activities as gappers of distance. He couldn’t control time, but he sure as hell could try to fill it, and enough magically amplifying activities crammed into a span could relegate a bleak bookend further into the perceptual past.

Such pseudo-intellectual language intoxicated Surtch, or had once-upon-a-time. The question, and his top concern now: Could it help to restore him?…

For Surtch, riding pavement on the Vespa he’d owned for over three years was second nature from the start: There’d been no learning curve with twist-n-go. Well, none aside from the embarrassment early on when, with a few new garden hoses strapped to the back rack and seat, he’d lost control of the throttle in Home Depot’s crowded parking lot.

Yeah, that’s right–lost control – of his scooter‘s throttle – in a lot teeming with testosterone…

His first dual-sporting-on-dirt hurdle was psychological and somewhat cartoonish as well: his hyperawareness that a freakishly tall, 450 pound internal combustion pendulum was swinging beneath him erratically, and his sneaking suspicion that it harbored a secret desire to ride him through the gravel and dirt, rocky ruts, and mud.

Surtch knew the sensation he was seeking, had ridden with it briefly on that gently bounding and dodging road through the Wapiti Hills on his first two-wheeled foray into the remoteness, an outing that ended in a ridiculous spill: Surtch with a bloody nose, a throbbing leg, and sorely wounded confidence; and weeks-old Escape Artist with some minor cracks and scrapes. He had nevertheless scented the game.

He recalled a younger self that grew up skiing with his dad and siblings. In the steep-n-deep, magic moments would happen, but not through his efforts: It was as though the sought sensation wasn’t the commands that he sent down through his legs to the skis and snow, but a lent rhythm that rose from the living earth through its deep powder to him, a naive recipient.

It would occur for a few turns or for half a run and then recede. It was difficult to describe, but he knew when it happened and that it was as the goal. Surtch also remembered that it seemed to despise being discussed.

It was like that passage from Kerouac’s Big Sur:

“…I remember that frightening thing Milarepa said which is other than those reassuring words of his I remembered in the cabin of sweet loneness on Big Sur: ‘When the various experiences come to light in meditation, do not be proud and anxious to tell other people, else to Goddess and Mothers you will bring annoyance’ and here I am a perfectly obvious fool American writer doing just that not only for a living (which I was always able to glean anyway from railroad and ship and lifting boards and sacks with humble hand) but because if I don’t write what actually I see happening in this unhappy globe which is rounded by the contours of my deathskull I think I’ll have been sent on earth by poor God for nothing…”

The last thing Surtch wanted to do was bring annoyance to Goddess and Mothers. But Kerouac had understood–and it remains as true and at least as crucial–that there must be witnesses. Otherwise, there is no possible testimony. Otherwise, it’s as though nothing exists, as though nothing occurs.

We cannot borrow rhythms, thought Surtch–that’s a power we don’t possess. They can only happen, or be lent–by the living earth, the humming cosmos, or the Almighty itself. What’s left to us is to recognize the rhythms and embrace them if we can.

We might be adrenalin addicts, dosing up on that fine line between here-for-now and gone forever; might be throttle jockeys, testing grounded flight at high revs in fifth and sixth on highway tarmacs; might be lean-freaks, teasing the tenuous threshold between grip and slip while feeding our craving to carve – those – curves; might be rhythm fiends, moved by that mesmeric tango between throttle control and a rising, falling, dodging road.

One thing’s for sure, though… We are like eager youths, desiring the seductive ways and skillful touch of the next thrilling sensation.