From the Library

[Biggles]

I was having fun. As I approached one of the curves, which was a blind curve, all of a sudden a tractor-trailer cab coming the other way passed me on my left. 
Following behind it was a large flatbed filled with redwood logs piled high. I was already into the blind curve and the cab passed me. I was looking at a very large flatbed and large trees charging at me with no place to go. This all happened in less than a second.
Perhaps you've had a similar experience when time slowed your mind speeded up the factors that were about  to happen. I figured that if I went forward any further I would be run over by the attacking flatbed. The same would happen if I dumped the bike to the left. To my right was a sheer vertical hillside of dirt that would not allow me to dump the bike. All these options lead to death. I was about to die. Actually, I was okay with that.
What really happened without thinking was just instinctive. I leaned to the right and because the dirt was soft enough and I was going at the right speed, the hillside stopped the motorcycle without going another inch.
Those Were The Days  Edward Walls p90

[Biggles]

Another event worth mentioning was the ticket I was issued in Washington State for not wearing a helmet while driving a motorcycle. Every state has different laws about wearing helmets. I dropped my bike often enough to always wear a helmet while driving a motorcycle unless it was 110° in the desert. The officer caught me in a state of unawareness and issued me a ticket. After I made it home and had been in college for a few months, I got a letter in the mail from Washington State informing me that I hadn't paid the ticket. They were right, I had not. I had good intentions but at the time I was in college without any income besides the G.I. bill. I received a few more letters without a threat to my license. Evidently there is no reciprocity between Pennsylvania and Washington. Finally they sent me a letter stating that my driving privileges in the state of Washington were revoked. I guess I'll always have to avoid driving through Washington State.
Those Were The Days  Edward Walls p94-5

[Biggles]

Somewhere around Moose Jaw I caught up with a motorcycle pack going east along what I call Maple Leaf 1. I never rode with more than three or four other bikes. At the end of the pack was a single motorcycle and I drove alongside him and nodded my head and shrugged my shoulders and with my face gesturing, presenting the question: Is it okay to ride with the group? He shrugged his shoulders and gave me the yes gesture. Just like that I was part of the pack. There were a dozen or so motorcycles claiming authority over a half-mile stretch of the highway. A pack like this creates enough thunder to turn heads as you pass by or stop for a red light. 
You have the feeling of being part of a powerhouse that is questionably legal. I was allowed into this group without initiation. Like robbing a bank or letting my girlfriend, if I had one, ride with the leadership for a few months. Actually, the group started with a half a dozen bikes and picked up more stragglers like me as they continued their journey.
Those Were The Days  Edward Walls p105

[Biggles]

There was a park on the right side of the road and a car pulling out of the park exit. It looked like a white, long, old Ford. It was filled with people and lumbering its way onto the road. There wasn't any traffic on the road except for us. He started his left hand turn to get on the other side of the road and continued his short but slow turn. I was pretty close to him but he still had plenty of time to make his turn. That's when he stopped.
His big old car was covering the whole right side of the road and came to a complete halt. Once again time slowed down to make a decision. I didn't have enough time or distance to go around in front of him. Nor did I know if he would step on the gas and I would wind up T-boning the car. The only choice I had was trying to get round the back of his car without hitting the dirt shoulder and dumping the bike doing 50 mph. I was closing in fast and I went to the right and hoped that I wouldn't hit him or the shoulder. Well, I hit him and the shoulder.
It was a glancing blow off the bike and to his rear bumper. That part of the bike had a foot peg with my foot on it. The hit threw the rear end sideways onto stones on the shoulder. I kept the bike from falling somehow but kept going from one side of the shoulder to the other until I managed to get it back on the road and stabilize the ride. I was almost to the top of the hill when I could finally stop. I looked up and I was about 20 feet away from a hitchhiker. He must've witnessed my entire daredevil, Evil Knievel ride.
Those Were The Days  Edward Walls p109-10

[Biggles]

It was time to see if I could drive the bike with a cast on my leg. The cast had a small heel built into it so I could use that for pushing on the pedal for the rear brake. My toes stuck out the front so I put a sock over the cast. I had to make a slit up my blue jeans to get them over the cast. With the aid of crutches I got to the motorcycle. I attached the crutches to the sissy bar with all the other stuff using bungee cords. I got on the bike, kicked over the engine and away I went. It worked really well for a while. I must've looked like a wounded refugee on motorcycle, cast, crutches, and floppy jeans but I was putting some miles on the bike. 
Probably about 10 miles. I heard some clanking noises from the housing below the engine. Then I heard a snap. The secondary chain broke. I had enough momentum to pull into a gas station. The gas station was more of a repair garage. It had a couple of bays with cars on the lift and people working on them.
Those Were The Days  Edward Walls p115-6

[Biggles]

I changed buses in Buffalo, New York and the next stop was Reading, Pennsylvania. I slept all the way through the ride and was still groggy when I got off the bus at Reading. There was a bus loading to go to Allentown and me and my crutches with the bag went over to the Allentown bus. Unbeknownst to me it was Sunday morning.
The bus was packed with passengers. They were all silver haired church ladies. As I shuffled down the aisle after awkwardly getting up the steps with crutches and bag, all eyes looked down to the floor or out the window. They were as afraid of me as I as of them. Fortunately there was a mafia looking guy down the right side of the aisle who gave me eye contact and motioned that I was acceptable and I could sit next to him.
Those Were The Days  Edward Walls p117

[Biggles]

We finally reached the garage. The owner was there and so was the motorcycle. I paid him storage fees and rolled the bike out to put on the rack. The motorcycle weighs 450 pounds. It was not an easy thing to lift and fit in the back but we did it. It fit very snugly against the rear of the Corvair. The Corvair's engine is in the rear and so was the motorcycle. Standing beside the car and looking at it was a sight to behold. It looked like it was ready for lift off. The front end of the Corvair barely touched the ground.
We piled in the car and drove it about a quarter of a mile. There was very little front tire contact with the ground. The car seemed to seesaw between touching the ground and being air-borne. This would not do. We turned around and went back to the garage. We took the motorcycle off and put the rack in the front of the car along with the motorcycle. I sat in the front seat and stared at the motorcycle which was eye level with me. I couldn't see over it. This would not work!
This was surely a comedy of errors.
Those Were The Days  Edward Walls p122

[Biggles]

Driving a motorcycle is a sensual, visceral, and immediate experience. It's the blast of air parting in an almost physical way around your body. It's the feel of heavy steel machinery between your thighs and knees as you move through turns, running a good road on a clear warm morning. It's the taste of wet grass, deep woods, damp riverbanks, and freshly cut hay that finds its way to the back your throat. You know and experience what is around you and feel the very sensation of motion itself, in a way that you never can behind the wheel of a car.
In a car you drive a road, on a motorcycle you feel it. On a motorcycle every rise and dip, every change in surface or cant, every turn and straightway, is a temporal and physical experience. In a car you are enclosed, removed from what is outside by the machinery that moves you. The windshield, the air-conditioning, the heater, the radio, the upholstered cradle of your seat, the locked doors, the surrounding frame, they all separate you from the reality of the road and weather. On a motorcycle the machine and the environment are an integral part of the experience. As you come home in the afternoon, the sun touches your shoulders with great warm hands. Somewhere in the middle of a long day of riding - especially on curves, where lean and torque, body and bike angle, gravity and speed, determine the physics and the line of movement - the machine becomes an extension of the body, a melding of what is human and what is mechanical.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p xii

[Biggles]

I walked a fine line as I taught. I loved my classroom and my students, but it was often mentally exhausting work. On the bike, however, out there with Rosie between the fields and the forests, I could leave the restrictions of my classroom behind. Out there, with four hundred pounds of machinery humming beneath me, my thoughts would center on what was immediate - the road and the surrounding environment - and my mind would relax and renew. Out there, hundreds of miles of secondary road riding later, I came to know, and to love, a region that was not my own.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p xv

[Biggles]

It was on the way back to campus that I saw a motorcycle parked on someone's front lawn with a sale sign tucked between the handlebars and the windshield. I pulled over and walked across the grass to look at a piece of machinery that somehow had just started a song playing inside my mind. She was a Harley-Davidson 1200 Sportster, red with chrome accessories, black leather saddlebags and seat, custom straight pipes, a peanut tank, and less than three thousand miles on the odometer. 
I wrapped my right hand around the throttle and immediately realized that this motorcycle was something I recognized. Maybe she could teach me - as Rosie had taught me - love for, and connection with, a region that was not my own. Maybe this motorcycle could, as Rosie had done years ago, open a whole new landscape of thought and motion.
Lucy, as I came to know that Sportster, did all of that and more.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p3

[Biggles]

The man behind the register had steady eyes, brown skin, and a sweet smile. He took my five-dollar bill and, looking through the window at the bags on Lucy, asked me where I was going. I almost didn't believe the unnatural squeak of my own voice when I heard the word "Alaska". Two minutes later, out on the pavement by the pumps, I was wedging my water bottle between the T-bag and the backpack when the attendant appeared.
"Here," he said, pressing a tiny tiger-tail keychain into my hand. "You should collect something from each state that you go through." He cast no judgement on my destination or choice of vehicle and in that gift, a promotional Exxon key chain, and the small suggestion to gather mementos along the way, was the implicit statement that such a journey was possible. My mind quieted and my confidence returned as he shook my hand and wished me luck.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p11

[Biggles]

The metal grating that formed the roadbed of the arch was like that of the bridges that I had driven many times before across the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but the span was longer, and not flat. I can understand why bridge builders like metal grating: it's relatively cheap, strong, and will not collect pooled water, or ice and snow, like solid surfaces. The problem with metal grating, however, is that its rough corrugations pull the wheels of motorcycles from side to side. It's an unnerving feeling to have a bike shift unbidden beneath you, and for a moment, coming over the uphill slope toward the apex of that bridge over the Mississippi, I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck as Lucy slid toward the guardrail. In the shift of the bike one must consciously control the instinctive reaction to set a foot down hard to correct an unexpected sideslip. I know people who have done this on metal grate bridges and have had broken ankles to show for it. Feet on the pegs, feet on the pegs. The words ran through my mind, a self-repeating mantra, and I tried to consciously relax and let Lucy run between my hands, guided yet loose, slow enough to keep control, yet fast enough to keep a driving forward momentum. We passed into Iowa without incident and I stopped to take a picture of that Mississippi River bridge: the divide between the eastern and western United States as well as a tiny personal victory.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p30-1

[Biggles]

A tiny woman, sitting with her husband at a sparkling white Formica table onto which sandwiches had just been deposited, stood up.
"C'mon, honey, I'll take you down to the pump and you can use my card."
"No, I'm interrupting. Please, sit down, finish your lunch, I can wait."
"No, no, it's not going anywheres. C'mon, I've done this for others before, and I can certainly do it for you." Pat was in her late fifties with twinkling green eyes, carefully arranged hair, green slacks, and a white sweater so spotless it glowed in the misty afternoon light. At five feet three inches I towered a good head above her, but she seemed a woman who, for whatever she lacked in stature, more than made up for it in warmth and kindness. At the pump she ran her card through and we talked about her part of Kansas and my desire to  see the country as I ran a little less than two dollars' worth of gas into Lucy's tank. I asked if she had ever done any travelling around the States.
"No," Pat said. "I'm not one of those travelling folks, going here and there. I like it here, the furthest I been away from Logan is Colby, and I don't want to go anywheres else. Some people they go here, they go there, but me, I like to stay home, and I've never really wanted to go and see... you know... the Grand Canyon... or Las Vegas." The pump stopped. I screwed the cap back on the tank and reached for my wallet.
"Now you put that away," Pat said. "What is it, all of two dollars? I'm not going to take that from you." She wished me good luck, told me to be careful, stepped back into her white Cutlass to drive up the street to where her lunch waited. I pulled my driving gloves back on, watching her taillights and thinking about the people who spent years, and sometimes their entire lives, searching the world for what Pat knew she had in Logan, Kansas: an understanding of place, a sense of belonging.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p46-7

[Biggles]

I pulled Lucy up and onto the narrow concrete porch that fronted the motel and tied her tarp down. There, under the overhang, she was partially sheltered and I could see her through my room's picture window. Perhaps three minutes after closing the door on the dust devils in the parking lot, the rain began in opaque slanting sheets and hazelnut-sized hail pelted down in a snare drum of noise on the metal roof. There are few things so blissful as to be dry and safe and sheltered when storm rages just inches away. With Lucy parked just outside the window, shedding rain and out of the worst of the weather, country music videos on the television, and a can of chili for dinner eaten cold with a spoon, I was content.
Breaking The Limit   Karen Larsen  p52