April 11, 2017 – Finding The Pace Home

          Crossing the rest of Utah this morning provided even more spectacular scenery as I cut through Capital Reef National Park on route 24.  The painted mesas and erosion formations continue to dazzle both in form and intricacy and in scale as they stretch on for miles.  As I headed west the color faded but the scale increased as the valleys stretched into large basins miles wide bordered by snow capped behemoth mountain ranges.             In general the further west you go the more things get spaced out.  The added distances have advantages and disadvantages as far as motorcycle travel go.  On the one hand have reacquainted myself with my concerns for breaking down and making it to the next gas pump, something I did not have to worry about back east as there were services and people everywhere.  On the other side the back roads I am taking lead to miles and miles of empty tarmac.  In the wide valleys it stretches in straight unoccupied lines like a drag racing speedway, and I like to go fast.

            As I entered Nevada I had plenty of opportunity to open throttle, between the mountain passes.  The rest of this trip is about the ride home; no more colleges lie in my chosen route.  Things external to us, our obligations, jobs, laws, daylight savings time or 30-day billing cycles regulate most of our lives.  Being literally all alone on the road today I found my Zen of unregulated travel. 

How much do you push yourself and why?  If there were no outside forces putting pressure on you what would you do and how fast would you accomplish it?  My life has been dominated by things I haven’t done yet.  Ever since graduate school I realized I would always have unfinished business to attend to.  Life seems to work that way giving more to do than there is time to do it.  And if your good at getting things done others just seem to hand you more and often their work increasing the problem exponentially for high functioning people.  Today, being unregulated I did not stop.  I moved forward at the internal pace I wanted to roll forward at. 

Somewhere in Nevada the speedometer slipped well into triple digits.  I realize I have a higher than average pace I tend to move at.  On the bike it is not speed for the sake of reaching a number or record, but the exhilaration of going fast in a safe and comfortable environment.  I am uncomfortable straining the engine to reach a certain MPH, but I find it very enjoyable to let the bike purr along at the pace it feels like it wants to go and then realize it is clocking a phenomenal speed.  This is how I would like to live my life as well.  Allowed to set my own goals and then appreciated for doing them well.

This is not however, how the world works.  And as the day continued on I found myself trying to calculate the time, mileage and place settings for the best return through Nevada.  There were too many miles not to have to stay at least one more night on the road and in Nevada roadhouses and hotels are not evenly spaced out along route I had taken.  In mid afternoon I was just pulling into Ely Nevada, trying to figure out if I had enough daylight and stamina to ride the over 300 miles into Reno where I know a very nice innkeeper. 

At the gas station I flirted with two very nice dogs that were sitting in an idling pickup truck at the next pump.  When their owner returned they saw my bike and informed me that there was another motorcyclist in distress parked outside the station.  It seems my fellow motorcyclist was dealing with a bike that was loosing oil, and the owner of the dogs was concerned they would try and ride the bike without oil in it.  I finished filling up and found the motorcyclist and his Honda VFR in the parking lot dripping in oil.  He was trying to figure out how to make it the two and a half hour ride home, and had just bought and added the last two quarts of oil the station had on hand into his crankcase.  I introduced myself and offered to help and within a few minutes figured out that the oil filter was cracked and that he would not get far without some repairs.  I gave him a ride to the Napa auto parts store about a mile away and with luck they had the correct filter.  With some purchased and improvised tools from the gas station, we proceeded to change his oil and filter in the parking lot and got him on his way.

This is one of the great things about the people you meet motorcycling they help each other out.  For my part, this took a couple of hours out of my day, but it reinforced in me something about timing and pacing.  Here I was earlier in the day worrying about breaking down or getting stuck in the middle of nowhere.  If I weren’t open to changing my plans and slowing my pace of travel, I would never have paused to help.  By stopping I realized a couple of things.  I had helped facilitate someone else getting home, and I had a somewhat useful skillset of knowledge about motorcycle repair that might be useful to others.

That skillset of knowledge has developed internally.  Not because anybody else told me to learn it.  It came through setting my own pace and spending my free unscripted time wrenching on my own bikes.  In the end I find this most rewarding, being able to set my own goals and then encounter opportunities to be able to share those skills and have the interactions of life appreciate their use…

I felt so good after this encounter that I rode another 120 miles along Highway 50.  Highway 50 in Nevada is called “the loneliest highway in the country”.  But after helping someone else, even though I was practically the only vehicle on the road, I didn’t feel so alone…