February 7, 2006
No Thought Road
Down this little lane lies
nothing you can know. And lanes
are like lines, you follow them
wherever, wondering all the time
whether or not you are a self
or another, the one who
put them down before.
The lanes are gridded wonderlands
left by the evolution of the brain
like sinks in the meadow
of a lowland plain. And you ride them
across the mind as you might
a languid thought on an empty day.
But nothing comes back
to haunt you.
Roads come into being out of need, but needs change; and roads can go through life-cycles like any other geographic entity. They can be essential at the start, only to be all but abandoned in later years. Demographics change, the country develops, moves. Such roads, the byways, the roads replaced in later years by superhighways, are the roads that linked towns and run between places very few people need now to go. Backroads and side roads, but mostly the two-lane interstate roads are what first helped to connect across the country. These are the very roads the biker seeks out to rediscover, for these roads cross the most vital spaces of the American West.
Circular Ruins
they say
the sun hit here
collapses
it was a white deflation
we do not worship the sun
but the heat
the earth reception
walls of utter clay
cone for the eye
the debris outlasts
all desert life
sun cannot repeat
and devolves each day anew
but the ruins
fleeting as death
hold the moment
somehow pure
and riding up dust
devils leap your wheels
beyond delimitation
out of the circle
into suns
It is perhaps in this very context that the motorcycle starts to become something of a "time machine". Not for traveling through time, but for traveling in time. Riding a bike requires full, engaged consciousness, much as rock climbing, or sky diving, or any of a number of activities that demand not only your physical involvement but your undivided attention to that physicality as well. And that's the key, riding produces its own state of consciousness, living not necessarily at the edge, but in complete awareness of your physical being. This physical presence of self is something that we might not normally think about. Certainly, we have motor functions that we can be aware of; we lift a hand and pick up a cup of coffee, eye and hand coordinate to bring another physical experience to our tongues and taste buds. But full physical awareness, a coordinated sense of the body as a functioning whole, is something that happens perhaps only in moments when your body somehow comes into immediate contact with the world. On a ride, you must think with your whole body, with your hands and feet as well as with your eyes, ears, and mind. Normally, this heightened sense of being is only so when we are in physical danger of some sort. In motorcycling, that danger starts when you balance your machine and head down the driveway; and it's heightened by other people, especially those driving their SUVs at 90 mph, oblivious to their actual speed. As you're sucked into their jetstream, you can easily have one of those moments of enlightenment. The physical world for the rider demands a full and unbroken awareness.
Indian Country
Hopi Mesas and one sidetracked
machismo pickup dislodges an old feeling
but I climb anyway to the top
where the only hotel for a hundred miles
says for the unique traveler, foreigner,
outrider…
90 bucks. A great view of the plains
though, over a languid herd. Next to it an old dirt field
crowded with picnic tables and sand in eight foot drifts
where the other Indians hang out
sparse desert xeroscape with a couple of alien tamarisk
and every table bolted down,
historicized. And I’m washed out
after the frontier experience, open air on a iron horse
seeing how the wind makes a difference internally
a part of the whispers in your head
bending you over in highway expressionism
till you get off and can’t stand up.
Tourist attraction. Fine jewelry
forged in the absence of government support
into an art loosely tied to the mesas like balloons,
light silver and turquoise from out-of-state
corporate mines. But suddenly the highway
drops off the high desert plateau
it’s traversed for sixty miles, and enters a small
canyon where the Kearns agency once sat,
the road like the wind encrypted into a lodgepole design
twists the desert like dough and you begin to bake again
out in the desert and far enough away to know
why the mesas were the perfect protection.
There are three elements that make the ride enjoyable; they are earth, wind, and fire. The road and its intersection with the landscape, the earth connection, many think is the primary factor in a good ride. But the road is always tempered by the other two elements: wind and weather. The sun makes itself known in the most elemental way on a motorcycle. You feel it against your skin, even when there is wind or cold. The sun becomes an element much like it was in the early years of human evolution: a warmth that signals your fitness to the place and time. Weather can have a dramatic effect on the psyche. On a bike, you have the option of riding through bad weather, or stopping and waiting it out. But you are never, in your other life, in a car or at home, as aware of the determining nature of weather, of its influence on your actions, of the part it plays in your decisions and your attitudes. I remember sitting out a hail storm under an overpass outside of Sturgis; the biggest cloud burst I have seen in decades. The sky was black-gray, with a darkness almost that of night, in mid-afternoon. There were a dozen of us stopped beneath the overpass, the hail was vicious, and the signs were it would continue to grow in force. Even those on the fringes of the covering by the road above, those whose arm or leg was exposed to the weather, were drenched within seconds. I can't help but think of how primal that scene was, how communal too, with only those exposed constantly to the vicissitudes of weather, huddled under a highway structure together. No one knew anyone else, but everyone knew the weather. The sun on a hot day crossing the Black Rock desert in northwestern Nevada outside Winnemucca can do the same thing, in a different way. It can make you feel like you are back at the root of human existence, in the face of the sun, on a cloudless day, riding through a landscape that has not changed in thousands of years. The third element of the triad is fire, the machine you ride. If it's running just right, and that is a tune that it's impossible to explain, you can only hear it, feel it under you, the pistons just in sync at the pace of their maker's design, the machine cruising with power in reserve to do whatever momentary thing is needed. And if it's running just right then the day is fine and the landscape you ride is fully realized. If the bike has problems, your mind moves off the moment to the consequences of where you are, what you must do, the time, the hour of the day. Present and future become irretrievably entangled. When the bike is riding right, the ride becomes a simple neglect of its marvelous function. You forget it's complexity, and let it carry you as if it were but another set of lifelong legs. So when earth, wind and fire are in sync, the ride cannot be other than a complete spiritual experience.
Highway Mythology
The highway runs like a mad thought
through the ecozones of the mountainous West
and threads together the desert fabrics
with a twine of stunted piñon and juniper
on a spindle of high plateau and bluffs.
The highway worms through the West
like the rotted wood of the transcontinental
through the decay of towns and outposts.
But the land does not change even when
the rust of the sun corrodes the byways
like open veins. Then near the western shore
salt spices the air, and tribal tempos of surf
send their immutable messages inland.
Highways carry a somnambulant America
like anxieties that abscess into brackish streams
running through the body of the quiescent land.
But on a bike you’re a cell in a solitary
pulmonary seam, osmosing through the flesh
of invisible distances, reopening the dead
letter offices in abandoned towns, and riding
the airstreams, a kite of whittled bones
sailing blacktops scattered with plastic bottles.
When over your shoulder you see another
riding the other direction, looking back
and realize blue highways run two ways
confusing the snake’s future with its past.
It's apparent that the old Romantic image of the West remains, but it's now been recycled through the desperate imaginations of retirees and young adventurers, looking for some kind of unspoken fulfillment in Beauty that they have not yet found in their lives. The West has become a small landscape portrait of America itself, and critics in their Winnebagos and Apaches, on bikes, in retro fitted VW buses, are combing the portrait for its distinct aesthetic, for the nature of its nature. These are critics no longer satisfied with open country, it must now be beyond the edge of what others have seen, more beautiful, more remote, always less known. The known becomes the tainted, the unsophisticated. Only the new, the unexplored, can fit the psychic scheme of the critics' demands for an American West that fulfills the Romantic dream. In some way, bikers continue this transformation of the American West, by talking up the best routes, the nicest places to stay. But there are still a few renegades out there, a few with bedrolls and bivouac tents, who turn off the road not to find the last outback, but to see the stretches of the West that have always been there, only forgotten a bit by others in the clamor to get to the next hot spot.
Copyright © George Moore
All rights reserved.Living in the mountains west of the city, George Moore is a poet and writer teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His poetry has appeared nationally in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly; Poetry; and the North American Review. His new poetry collection All Night Card Game in the Backroom of Time, is available online at Pulpbits Books, and a new CD chapbook of poems, Tree in the Wall, is forthcoming from Sunshine Press. Moore is also a cross-country motorcyclist, and is currently seeking a publisher for his book, The Lone Rider's Guide to the American West.
