R+112 Geezer Glide

(Journal Entry): Need to get out and about on my bike. Yeah, let's do that instead of dicking around with this journal.

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Much Later:

...and so I did. I just kind of loafed around at 70-80 all over North Texas, going nowhere in particular.

I ran up to Taovoyas Indian Bridge and probably about 100 feet into Oklahoma.

Thus my "interstate" trip for the day.

I passed by a guy with his big ol' Victory touring bike parked on the wide shoulder of the bridge. He was close enough to the border as to make no difference, and was leaning back on his bike resting with his feet propped up on the concrete railing. He probably had one foot in Texas and the other in Oklahoma, although to be honest, since they use the "vegetation line" on a changing river as the official border, it's hard telling.

(Texas became a state in 1845, but George Bush's crew were still dicking around with taking another shot at definitively defining the border up this way until at least 2000. But it's still pretty sloppy.)

Anyhow, the biker was just relaxing, watching the Red River swirling lazily downstream through ever-changing red-sand bottom channels. It's one of my frequent stopping points when I'm out and about, having river, trees, views -- all the good stuff -- and essentially zero traffic. I hooked a u-turn and went back into Texas, parking across the roadway from him.

He nodded at me when I got off my bike and I nodded back.

"Just taking my 100-mile break," I told him.

"Yeah," he said, "them breaks get shorter and shorter the older we get, don't they?"

I laughed and allowed they did. He was probably near my age, scruffy short grey beard and even greyer longish hair.

We talked about the long-gone days when we used to be able to run literally all day with nothing but a single half-hour or so meal break and stops every 150 miles for gas, which we got without ever getting off the bike. Then we talked bikes, "Victoria", his Victory ("last year they built them") and "Bettina", my Electra Glide (my "Geezer Glide", as I called her in relation to the "old" conversation we were having), and others we'd owned, and our women, and close calls (that time that the farm equipment half into his lane brushed his fairing and ripped a hole into the upper arm of his leather jacket).

He stood and stretched and asked if I cared if he fired a few rounds. I told him the only time I cared about stuff like that was if he was shooting at me and he laughed and said no, just at some cans he spotted that were stuck in  debris the river piled up along the bridge supports.

"I don't point at anyone who don't need it," he clarified. "Besides," nodding at my beltline, "I'd probably lose to anyone carrying that kind of artillery anyhow." He's literally the first person that I know of who's ever noticed that I carry ANYTHING under my leather and tshirt, certainly the first who's ever acknowledged it.

"Just needed to try out some new equipment," he said, recovering a 9mm pistol from his motorcycle's saddlebags and screwing a tight-thread brass-fitted suppressor (or "silencer" for the Hollywood-educated) into the barrel.

It was a really good suppressor especially for shooting out of a semi-auto with supersonic ammo, both of which tend to defeat "quiet". I was surprised and impressed, and he was pleased.

We chatted some more about weapons. He showed me the 9mm rifle that broke down into a package so small that not only did he carry it in his saddlebags, but actually in a laptop case. Fancy.

We talked about the Bridger Teton Wilderness up in Wyoming, which both of us know, and that time he and a friend of his were chased by an angry moose down a trail somewhere up in the vicinity of Big Sandy Lake. He reckons the moose quit after charging about 25 or 30 yards, but he didn't even slow down for another half-mile. Moose are no joke.

"Dropped a little mud there that day," he confided, shaking his head and smiling.

He was a good guy. We're both older than God and actually had a lot of importantly trivial and mundane life references in common, which at our age is not so frequent as you might think. I liked him.

Then we climbed back onto our sleds, wished each other a good ride and he roared off into Oklahoma and I bounced back into Texas. Don't know his name. Never seen him before and probably never will again, but I gotta say, I enjoyed that half-hour or so of just friendly zero-agenda bullshitting out there on no-man's bridge on a warm afternoon.

I trailed along the Red River until I fetched up again in Spanish Fort. Been awhile since I was here. Again, a near-perfect day, high 70s (25-26C), the only sound a dog lazily barking at something for a minute in a pro-forma kind of way out in the far distant background. 

A cool breeze barely ruffled my hair -- I found a concrete picnic table shaded by trees that had grown around and near destroyed it. It was next to an abandoned brick, dirt-road general store that looked like it was probably old when Bonnie and Clyde were hunting the area.

I sat on the rough bench built into the picnic table and broke out my journal to write. I only got a few lines down (some of which are here) before I got distracted by -- the silence. 

I was tempted to lay back on the table and just watch the clouds drift quietly past the branches and leaves above me -- and I have no doubt if I had, I'd have been there sleeping in that warm sun till nightfall came on.

Bettina Enjoying The Break

I wished I'd brought a lunch.

Then I reluctantly geared up and Bettina and I loafed and swept along down twisty back-roads where, and I swear to God this is true, some raggedy-assed old bumpkin in a pickup dragging farm equipment on a flatbed trailer came around a curve in my lane. I was running about 60, he about 25 or 30. His slow speed gave me that extra bazillionth of a second to do something useful and probably saved my life.

Both of us did some pretty fancy driving to resolve this, but it all worked out. Anyhow,it ended better than my bridge friend's description of HIS "actual contact" near miss as I managed to clear all the equipment by upwards of a foot. I gotta tell the truth here -- the day had me so laid back that there wasn't even an adrenaline rush. Mostly just a flash of annoyance at the asshole dragging the trailer. I almost immediately settled back into the ride without a backward glance.

I eventually fetched up in Nocona in the late afternoon, and then peddled for home...

It was a good day...maybe barbecue tonight. Yeah, that will work...