Sturgis,

Sturgis, Round Two

by Yoni

1990 Sporty. Chain drive. Four Speed. 1700 miles each way.

This was my second time going to Sturgis, and about my fourth try at the Iron Butt. The Iron Butt Association is an organization for long distance riders. To enter, a prospective member has to ride at least 1,000 miles in a day, and provide the documentation to prove it. Each time I tried, something had gone wrong. This time, I was convinced, I would make it.

I charted a new route out to South Dakota after realizing that the year before I had gone 150 miles more than necessary by following I-81 down to I-80. This time I was going to cross New York on the new Interstate 86, formerly Route 17, and pick up I-90 in Pennsylvania. Somewhere past Chicago, probably just at the Minnesota/Michigan border was the thousand miles I was aiming for on day one.

Of course, it was raining when I woke up in the morning to start the ride.

Grumbling, I drank coffee, put the last few things on my bike, and began the trek west.

I love my rain gear. I have good rain pants, an excellent rain coat, and some weird looking boot covers to make sure my feet stay dry that I purchased several years ago after my Thousand Miles in the Rain trek to Tennessee. I even have rain gloves, having experienced the phenomenon of wrinkly, numbed hands too many times to enjoy. I have a face shield that snaps to the front of my helmet, preventing that stinging sensation of rain on my face that makes me understand why so many male bikers have beards.

I stopped somewhere on 86, almost at the Pennsylvania border and needing gas. It was so sweet to just stop, to enjoy the rest from the unrelenting rain, with the heavy concentration of peering ahead, constant anxiety about trucks and road construction and hydroplaning. As I stopped, filled up, and looked at the sky, the rain let up and I took off my rain coat, leaving rain pants and boots on to protect from road spray, and continued into Pennsylvania, wiggling my toes triumphantly in dry socks.

I-90 through Pennsylvania was short and pretty. Pennsylvania, with its rolling hills and tree filled vistas, has some of the nicest scenery on its interstates, and I always enjoy the trip through.

Indiana, as usual, was a repetitive litany of dirty travel plaza stops along the I-90 toll road, and I reminded myself to find a different way through the next year.

By the time I got to Indiana, the rain had returned and I stopped again to put on rain gear, then had to stop at another Indiana Turnpike plaza to wait out some sheeting rain. So it went for about a hundred miles: I would ride for thirty, then have to stop for twenty minutes due to more sheeting rain, then get going during another break, then have to stop again….

I thought the whole trek through Indiana would be like this until the rain finally let up. Then came the fog.

The fog was so bad that after a hair raising ride from one tollway plaza to the other, barely able to see the big rig trucks in front of me and realizing belatedly that if I could barely see a huge truck covered with lights, then the likelihood of being seen on a little Harley with one measly tail light was very slim, I decided it was time to give up on the Iron Butt and stop until dawn. This presented a challenge, as I had nowhere to go, but could not go anywhere. I sat by my bike for an hour, staring glumly at the street lights that peeked bleakly through the mist. Eventually I decided to try to use the time to nap before the morning came in.

I considered options: They included sleeping beside my bike, which I didn’t think would go over very well in a parking lot and might be conducive to my getting squished by a four wheel vehicle. Alternatively I could try to sleep inside the plaza, which would distance me from my bike and everything I had with me. I put those options aside and considered further: I could sleep at the edge of the truck parking area, which was possible except my safety would be at the mercy of an exhausted truck driver coming in for a rest stop and hopefully seeing me. And dependent on the wrong person not seeing me there. The parking lot edge was far from help should anyone see opportunity in a sleeping biker girl.

I decided to lean back on the load I had on my rear fender and try to go to sleep.

Actually, it was not as bad as it sounds. Through the night I found a variety of different ways to sleep on my bike, settling eventually into the most comfortable with my jacket rolled up and placed on top of my gas tank and me laying on my side, head on the aforementioned jacket and feet resting on a saddlebag. Somehow I negotiated this until dawn without falling off and woke, somewhat stiff and decidedly unrefreshed, to continue the day now that the fog had begun to lift. I pressed onward to Chicago.

Interstate 90 through Illinois mystifies me. When riding through every other state, I keep track of how much farther I have to go by watching the exit numbers. They decrease from east to west and from north to south. Going to Sturgis is a simple countdown as I enter each state. South Dakota starts at exit 430 or some such number, and I am done four hundred miles later, at exit 30.

Not so in Illinois, which has decided to add a sense of mystery to travel by not letting anyone know how much further they have to go. No signs are labeled with anything that makes sense, except the Skyway, a huge bridge at one end of Chicago that leads to a breathtaking view of the cityscape.

The rest of the signs are exits marked not with numbers, but with a series of place names I did not know, and would not be stopping at. One said, “Illinois 73” and I wondered for miles afterward if it meant I had seventy-three miles left of Illinois or if Illinois State Road 73, if it existed, was coming up. Nothing was clear except how much was owed at each toll booth.

This was, after all, The Illinois Tollway: Prairie Home of the Free Range Toll Booths. I resolved to send a letter to the Illinois Tollway Authority after I got home from this trip, suggesting they not waste everyone’s time with the annoying tollbooths spaced out at maddeningly short intervals throughout the interstate. At each one traffic slowed to an almost stop, and when I was forced to a near halt, the Midwestern heat would radiate from the road beneath me and the vehicles around me as I sat in my dripping sweat and inched my way forward, cursing. I recommend that the Tollway Authority simply set up a tollbooth at each entrance to the state where they could charge incoming people twenty dollars and be done with it.

The very last sign thanks drivers for using the Illinois Tollway and then the whole infernal thing is done.

Wisconsin is much nicer.

Wisconsin is as pleasant as Pennsylvania, but with a western influence beginning in the stone outcroppings and vast spaces that begin to appear. I passed through the Wisconsin Dells, vaguely wondering what a Dell was and considering various uses of “dell”: What de hell, dell pickles, the Farmer in the Dell, and other deleterious effects.

After Wisconsin I entered the penultimate state to Sturgis: Minnesota. Minnesota is a vast and unpretentious state. It begins with a long bridge over the Mississippi River and roads that curve through giant hills and trees.

Minnesota became more flat and farmed as I traveled west. I stopped at a rest stop outside Albert Lea and talked with the attendant, a garrulous man in his late seventies who loved the constant motion of a rest stop and came quick-stepping over to me shortly after I had wearily settled at a picnic table to eat dinner. We talked about differences between Minnesota and New York and he learned about upstate New York, with its apple orchards, grape vines and dairy farms. I learned about the crime rates in big Minnesota cities and also that Minnesota has a very relaxed attitude at its rest stops: A person can’t set up a tent at a rest stop; that would be camping. But laying down a sleeping bag and dozing through the night; well, that’s just resting.

Armed with this new knowledge I finished my dinner, said goodbye to the helpful gentleman and continued west for another hundred miles or so before pulling into another rest stop close to the South Dakota border.

The attendant had a similar appearance to the last one I’d talked to: Seventies, friendly, asking how my traveling was going and guessing I was going to Sturgis. After answering affirmatively, I asked about the possibility of sleeping all night there.

“Well, it’s a rest stop, isn’t it?” was the reply. He waved his arm toward the picnic tables and pavilions, telling me, “Go pick a spot.”

I unwrapped from my sleeping bag in the morning, and after stowing it away I set up my mini-stove and heated some water for coffee. I tightened my bike’s chain and gave it a once over check for any malfunctions. Everything seemed to be running fine. I ate a quick yogurt breakfast and continued on, headed toward South Dakota.

After a couple hours of morning riding, I finally entered South Dakota.

Entering each state is a milestone on the seventeen hundred mile run. Exiting New York and on to the hop through Pennsylvania, to Ohio and Indiana and the hell that is I-90 in Illinois, through beautiful Wisconsin and wide, picturesque Minnesota and then, finally, on to the last state of the route: South Dakota.

South Dakota is vast, overwhelmingly powerful in its landscapes. It rolls along looking lush as Minnesota for about a hundred miles and then a sign for the Chamberlain rest stop with the Lewis and Clarke museum appears, followed by a staggeringly breathtaking view of the Missouri River. Every mighty river description Mark Twain every gave comes to mind and if I lived in Chamberlain, I would never manage to leave my home. The river divides the tree filled landscape of the east from the desolate, dry western desert. It slices and ambles through the terrain, never hurrying but so immensely strong in its size. It made me think of the slow lug of a big twin idling down a road, its potential dozing in the happy thud-thud of lazy movement.

It was outside of Chamberlain, after having left the river behind and entering the more desert like part of the trip, that I saw him: A man squatting next to a motorcycle by the side of the road in the heat of the day.

I pulled over, stopping a little ways ahead of the bike, and walked back to it.

“Bike giving you troubles?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered, as I watched that sense of panic at being far from home and broke down a thousand miles from where you know anybody, evaporate from his face.

I had a circuit tester and buried somewhere some spare wire. I pulled out my tools and we went to take a look.

The spark plug was getting spark. Sometimes. Sometimes the whole damned bike would die and we figured it had to be something simple, and electrical. We prodded and poked and checked for current in each wire along what I presumed was the right circuit. I had dragged out my Clymer Sportster manual, which goes up to 1990. His was a 1997, or some such year. Everything was completely different and I was beginning, for the first time, to realize just how extremely outdated my bike is. I tried to check circuit breakers under the seat, only to discover everything is neatly tucked in a cute little high tech housing under what would have been the ignition module cover on my antiquated ride.

Somehow we would periodically get it running and I would run, hop on my bike, and follow him down the highway for thirty miles or so until his bike would begin to fart out again.

We checked, and checked, and pulled over to help one guy with some kind of big twin. He’d been riding motorcycles since 1967 and reminisced about some of the old days while he took a piece of wire from us and repaired whatever needed fixing on his bike.

We stopped every time we saw someone broke down along the road, and talked to every biker and huge camper driver at gas stops, spreading the word that “If Someone Is Broke Down, You Stop”. We formed the Brotherhood of the Biker Down and stopped and stopped our way toward Sturgis, either stopping for others’ break downs or stopping for the Ohio Sportster’s.

It had to be something simple. We had checked and rechecked the battery terminals. Power was either there or not. It was a simple connection somewhere, I was thinking as we were stopped for the umpteenth time along the side of I-90.

The Ohio biker and I thought and considered and turned over other options and baked in the heat as we jiggled and tested various wires, hoping for some modicum of success. A Christian Motorcycle Association member pulling a trailer behind his motorcycle stopped and opined that, “I’m not too good at fixing motorcycles, but I am good at carrying water!” as he gave each of us an ice cold bottle.

We traced the problem to the ignition switch and I wondered if it could be bad inside and if so wondered if there was a way to bypass it. I consulted again my outdated Clymer book. It showed clearly in a wiring diagram which wires were where going to the ignition switch. For a sixteen year old bike. I examined his. Hmm…..

We decided that cutting wires on his Sportster was a drastic step we were not yet prepared to take, and came up with an alternate solution that ended up working: After detaching the ignition switch from its housing, we zip-tied it to the clutch cable and as we traveled down the road, every time his bike started to burp, fart and skip, he would shake the ignition switch and hopefully jiggle whatever was disconnected back into working order.

We traveled this way all the way to Wall, South Dakota, where we stopped for a late dinner. I had been running on anticipation and adrenalin for most of the day and in Wall began to realize that I had to get off the road. I followed the Ohio Sportster as we continued on toward Sturgis, but then pulled into a rest stop along I-90.

I needed to sleep. The rest stop was filled with bikers resting, bikers sleeping next to bikes, bikers laid out in sleeping bags strewn across the lawn. Bikers were conked out all over the rest stop and I decided to join them in repose. I said goodbye to the Ohio biker, who was intent on getting to Sturgis that night, and took my sleeping bag out to the lawn.

I woke in the morning to water being thrown across me.

It was an abrupt wake-up, accompanied by fear induced by being messed with by an unknown, and fury at someone having the nerve to toss water on me. I was trying to see who was by me, which was nobody, when the second splash of water hit directly on my face.

“Sprinklers!”

I heard someone yelling, trying to warn those of us still laying there, and suddenly everything snapped clear. I hurriedly grabbed my sleeping bag and boots and high-tailed it to the sidewalk. Dozens of bikers were on the sidewalk, hopping up and down, laughing hysterically and trying to put their boots on as they held in their arms the blankets and sleeping bags they had just been using, screaming “Sprinklers! Sprinklers!” to warn any bikers still sleeping through the sprinkler assault.

We sounded an urgent alarm while trying desperately not to drop things, bikers laughing at the ridiculousness of the morning wake up, sock covered feet on the pavement and some sleeping bags and boots still abandoned on the grass

Some people came awake to our shouts and one heavy sleeper just lay there on the lawn, becoming damp and then soaked as he slept through the sprinkler onslaught.

Overall, we were decidedly losing the battle.

As I got my sleeping bag packed up and strapped on, stopping to giggle periodically, I reveled in the accomplishment: I was less than one hundred miles from Sturgis and sure to get there soon.

As I had hoped, traffic was sparse at the sprinkler hour of the morning, and I rolled through Sturgis virtually unstopped by any other vehicles. The campground was waiting and so was another phantasmagorical, crazed week at Sturgis.

Go.

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