ROAD DREAMS ON THE INTERSTATE FLORIDA STYLE
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FEDERAL IMPERIAL FORCES HAVE BEEN RUNNING THOUGHT-SCANS ON BIKERS AFTER THEY LEAVE STURGIS. THIS BRIEF SECTION IS FROM ONE DAMAGED SCAN TAPE THAT WAS RECOVERED AT THE CRASH SITE OF AN IMPERIAL CHOPPER.
"When I get back home to Florida, first thing I'm gonna do is find a good steak house and eat lobster. Then I'm gonna get in the ocean and stay air conditioned for a week. Think I'll go up to Crystal River, too, where those manatees hang out and get drunk for three days running. This traveling all the way to the Black Hills every summer is getting to me. Every year I swear I'll never go west again. Last year when I left Beth and the kid one more time what do I end up doing? Dodge tornadoes and ride through temperatures over a hundred and fifteen degrees. I must be nuts.
Still, I always go. If I had any sense, I'd stay home and earn some extra cash so we could go on one of those cruises you read about in the AAA magazine. But most cruises go to Florida, and that's where I need to get away from. I have to admit, I do like that big western sky.
I better pay attention to the road more and stop day-dreaming. This Dallas traffic is the worst I've ever seen; and I've been to Miami. There's one of those thought scanners following me. Thinks I don't see him. Better keep thinking like I don't know, and act smart... be patriotic."
Oh yeah, the great central West of North America is something to see. I even hear it from German tourists. They say they've been everywhere, but nothing is like that Wild West. It doesn't make any difference how many movies you've seen about the place; nothing can prepare you for what's there. If you could drain off the Pacific Ocean and browse around the canyons and plains that waters have been working on forever; then if maybe you'd want to throw in some volcanic creations and prehistoric confusion; add flowers, cedars and sage, rivers, sunrises, sunsets, seasons, wild animals, stars and enough convenience stores with microwave ovens to keep you fed, you could recreate the pleasure of being in that location.
Right now it's waiting for you there if you show up and do nothing. Fact is, even with the changes that have overtaken every frontier region left to us, large sections of this territory are still pretty much the same as they were before they were taken away from their ancient caretakers a century ago.
No doubt you'd deny the truth of this claim if you and your ancestors grew up in that region and watched what's happened to it from day to day since air conditioning made it accessible to a larger group of citizens. But newcomers even now gasp at the sight of the place. The scale of open wild nature in the American West is enough to make a German weep with confusion.
I talked one morning to a man and his wife from Hamburg, Germany at our motel parking lot as I was packing my bike up for another day's ride, and that's the story I got. They told me to imagine a place where everything was parceled out in small sections and organized to accommodate either land owners or crowds of people. And no matter where you went, you couldn't get away from other people, from boundaries or from human enterprise.
Imagine growing up in a place where enterprise and crowd pleasing is all you'd known, and then waking up one morning in the mountains, plains or plateaus of the American West, alone. Those Germans described the experience as a mixture of terror and unexpected breathlessness.
At first they were overwhelmed with a feeling of being lost with nothing to hold onto. Then after a week or so of traveling hundreds of miles without finding an end to the unexpected vastness and scale of things, they found themselves captured by the power of the land. It touched something in their natures that a lifetime of enterprise hadn't been able to erase.
I said to them maybe they were just overworked. But they smiled and told me Americans couldn't ever appreciate what was right under their noses. Maybe not. But how could Germans? I asked them who turned Germany into the place Germans live in today? Germans, wasn't it?
They smiled again like you would with your kids when children answer something they don't know about. Made me want to kick them in the shins. But with a little effort I smiled instead, and then I accepted their invitation to visit in Hamburg whenever I passed through. Imagine me in Hamburg. Who knows? Maybe next year I'll be on my annual Atlantic cruise to old industrial landmarks.
I didn't talk very long to those tourists who happened to be heading back East at the time. Myself, I was just approaching the end of my Texas ride west, the beginning of my own tour. I have to admit that this conversation filled me with a lot of doubts about foreigners coming into the good old U.S.A. with their ideas about how they'd like to fix things up and set America on the right course.
What is it about people from all over the world, looking at our country and wanting to come here and start mucking around with things again? Didn't we already go through that? I though we had it down. I've seen tourists in Florida eyeballing the place; and a lot of Spanish speaking people are moving in. Then the Asians started getting in the act taking work away from people who've been here all their lives. So I've always wondered what was going on.
Some bikers I used to know joined white power organizations that were talking about holding the line against alien invasion. I mostly sat back and watched. Beth told me there was no obligation to jump into the fight. She said I ought to hold my opinions until I got more first hand information on the subject or even got to know these outsiders.
Beth claims great knowledge on the subject as usual, because she calls herself some kind of traveling humanitarian. I don't want to pop her bubble- I have to live with the woman; and I love her. She couldn't help being a hippy. Better to let it slide. So up till now I've been holding off on deciding exactly what the foreigner policy should be in America with respect to non-Floridians.
I'd known just those two Germans. Two that irritated me I'll have to admit. What got me was the way they came from what sounded to me like a slave culture. They come to a place known a short while back as the New World where people have been dreaming about freedom, working on freedom for a couple of lifetimes, and they offer advice on the subject. I didn't know if I should listen.
Those tourists were like a lot of people I know. They love their old world and hate it at the same time. It's like they're split in two. They've got to have cities and control over nature; but then, all of a sudden, they feel the need for freedom, beauty and wildness at the same time. Even though it seems nobody can make up their minds whether they prefer to live inside nature's guidelines or with an extended bank balance, it's clear which way most groups have chosen to go ever since the days of Columbus.
People are impressed by the power of enterprise. Who would've refused a ticket for the first voyage of the Titanic if they'd been offered one? Nobody. Me, I can't resist motorcycles, which wouldn't exist except for years of inventing and planning by a long list of enterprising people. Human enterprise is admired worldwide. On the other hand natural power, which is capable of instantly overpowering all of man's concoctions in an instant and which requires no effort or planning by anybody, has become relegated to marked off areas and is admired mostly while people are on short vacations.
Everybody loves the idea of American Indian culture and the benefits of nature, the glories of spiritual power, universal angelic miracles of greatness- Halleluiah. But whether they admit it or not, if it came down to taking sides, I suppose they'd back the work week before anything else. Europeans today blame Americans for wiping out nature and the Indians because of frontier greed. But it was the Europeans who came over here and did the deed. How is it people sing on their day off from work about leafy glades but keep living something altogether different when Monday comes around?
Now that the old Indian dreams are re-surfacing here and there, European types are working themselves hard on the job so they can mount up two weeks of free time for some appreciation of nature. Groups of them are buying hiking shoes and four-wheel drive trucks, loading their cars down with boats and bicycles. And they're talking about how if they worked even harder, they could extend their vacations to three weeks. All the while it's the outcome from their kind of work that's eating up what natural pleasures remain. Beth was right about me not being able to come up with a workable opinion on these people. From the little I know about them, they come out split down the middle. There must be more to it then you'd imagine.
"Here's a low bridge coming up with a tunnel. See if the chopper pulls up in....."
THAT WAS ALL WE WERE ABLE TO MAKE OUT FROM THE TAPE. THE REST WAS LOST IN THE CHOPPER CRASH. WHAT WE COULDN'T FIGURE OUT WAS WHETHER THIS FLORIDA DUDE WAS THINKING OR PRETENDING TO BE THINKING.....WHAT DO YOU THINK? BUT WE DO KNOW FROM EXPERTS IN THE FIELD OF DAYDREAMING THAT THIS USUALLY IS THE CASE.
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