What's A Run?

What's A Run?

I was sitting on my barstool one evening, when a guy in a black leather jacket, with a helmet tucked under one arm, and a rolled poster under the other arm, came in and asked to talk to the owner. The owner was tending bar, and talked to this guy over the bar, right next to me. I wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose. I couldn’t not listen.

This biker asked the owner if he could hang up a poster for his daughter’s third annual memorial run . The owner shook the biker’s hand, and told him to hang it in the window where everyone would see it. Then he asked him if he had any tickets he’d like to leave for sale.

I had to ask this biker what he was talking about after he had hung up the poster and sat down to have a long neck Bud. He explained to me that all bikers are brothers and sisters. They care about each other. It’s a real brotherhood, with brother helping brother. When one of them passes on to that highway in the sky, they keep that brother’s or sister’s memory alive, and memorialize them with annual runs.

All their buddies, and other bikers who never even knew the lost ones but who want to show they care, gather once a year to go for a ride, stopping at pre-selected favorite hang-outs along the way as they travel a pre-set course.

The ride often ends at a graveside, where a small informal type ceremony takes place, with family and friends saying a few words. And then back to the starting point, where there’s food and drink, and talk of good times, and just being themselves. Family. The brotherhood of bikers.

I asked the biker why he was selling tickets. Where was the money going? He explained that some runs sell tickets for around ten bucks just to cover the cost of food and beer at the end of the run. And others have set up a memorial scholarship, or something else along those lines, so they ask a little more for tickets, but tell you ahead of time where every dime would go.

He told me of one run that accepted donations to buy a memorial stone. Not a gravestone, which is what I first thought. But a stone to be placed at his beloved Indian Lookout Country Club, home of the Harley Rendezvous. It wasn’t that the Rendezvous couldn’t afford a memorial stone for Kemp, its founder. It was that his brothers and sisters wanted to be a part of getting the memorial stone.

I’ve never been on a run. But I didn’t understand them before. I only knew about the charity runs some of the organizations and clubs have, like Toys for Tots. Now I know about the other kind, and the brotherhood that makes them so special.

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