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On Riding in November [1]
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Date: 2023-11-21
On Riding in November
Riding a motorcycle in Chicago in November feels like getting away with a crime. What is the crime? Petty theft. And the item in question is time, because when you ride in November, you’re not borrowing time; you’re outright stealing it.
Though it seems to happen more often these days, it’s still rare. I went out to my garage that’s either a large garage or a small pole-barn this past Saturday expecting to potter around, listening to music on the old junk-shop stereo and putting stuff away, tidying up, sweeping, and generally enjoying a lazy Saturday with no particular place to go and no gig that evening.
I’d put the motorcycles away the previous weekend. There’s always a ceremonial feel to this process, and it’s always a sad one: they go in the back of the shed and they each get their battery-tender binky and their bike-cover nightie. Then I don’t see them for at least five months. I’d already said my see-ya’s.
But Saturday morning was in the high fifties and it was projected to go even higher by the afternoon. The Harley was waaaaay in the back, surrounded by two Yamahas. The Goldwing was tucked back in the corner behind the truck. I could see its beaky face poking inquisitively around the truck’s back bumper, a hopeful expression on its headlights.
One more look at the forecast was all I needed. I wrestled the Goldwing out from behind the truck and started it. The engine caught immediately like I had last shut it off five minutes ago.
I don’t ride to get places, most of the time. I just ride because I really enjoy it. I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of centaurs from Hellenic mythology and this is as close as I’m going to get, where the demarcation between man and machine blurs for awhile and now I’m no longer riding; I’m dancing. I even bring along the appropriate soundtrack.
But today the ride feels less like the gift it usually feels like. Today it feels like I’m poaching it. I shouldn’t get to do this. Not in November.
We’re past peak leaf. The trees are mostly bare and skeletal. This is how they’re going to look in three weeks, when it’s thirty degrees out and a 40-mile per hour wind is flinging sleet in your face as you walk up the sidewalk to the front door of whomever is hosting Thanksgiving this year. This his how they’re going to look in three months. Five months. They won’t be green again until late April.
Riding south towards Channahon, Wilmington, Kankakee, I notice that, even though it’s still before noon, the light has a late look to it. Maybe it’s the angle of the sun. We’re less than six weeks away from the winter solstice, and the sun will be starting to set in less than four hours. But, even banging along at 70 on Interstate 55, it’s pleasant. Balmy, even.
North River Road brings you east along the north bank of the Kankakee River. A right turn as soon as it’s possible brings you into downtown Wilmington, and as soon as you get past the light at the intersection of 53 and 102, you dive back into the woods. You better fold in the highway pegs if you don’t want to high-side it, because these are long fast sweepers that beg you to bank it in hard and come out the other side on the power.
But it’s that late quality of the light that never quite gets out of my brain entirely. It’s like the sky is a giant clock face and, for once, you can almost see the hands move. You can even—almost--hear it tick, big clacking noises with lots of reverb. "Gonna be cold soon," those clacking noises say. "Gonna be winter soon. Deep freeze coming; months and months of scraping windshields clear of ice; of shoveling snow and salting sidewalks. Won’t be green again around here for a long time. "
The Goldwing can’t outrun time, but it makes it fun trying. Kicking it down a gear or two and flicking it through the switchbacks coming into Custer Park on 113 is a nice distraction, anyway, and listening to Honda’s flat-six jewel as it approaches the redline is a joy, especially when it is harmonizing with Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. But it’s that time thing I can’t forget.
You can stare at that big clock as much as you want, but you can’t see the hands moving unless something really memorable happens. So time has a funny way of sneaking up on you. We all know this. You start thinking about things in a different way when you get near the end of your 40’s, maybe even your 30’s. You start thinking about the prospect of retiring. Of investing. Of resting. Me, I got lucky. I turned 50 this past year. I didn’t see the hands move until I lost two of my good childhood friends.
Brian was the younger brother of my best hometown friend, Shaun. They lived up the street from us and we literally grew up together. Brian got a brain tumor in his thirties and fought it until he had nothing left to fight it with. At least we saw that one coming.
Garrett was one of my high school circle, my posse. There were six of us. Adam, Bob, Garrett, Jay, Joe, Larry. Tanya hung around with us when she was really bored, I remember. Like your core group does, we got into some stuff and we saw some stuff. Those guys were my family. They still are today.
We lost Garrett suddenly. He was there one day—I talked to him—and gone the next. It’s a crappy wake-up call, but one we all get. What Stephen King called The Bone Phone. For a while, it was like I couldn’t just see the hands on that clock moving, but spinning like the blades on a wind turbine. Even now I still look in the mirror and think "Fifty? How the hell did I get here?"
113 takes you into Kankakee. You bang into 17 and that bangs you into 52, and you can turn north and head up through Bradley and Bourbonnais, and when you get to Olivet Nazarene University, you can bag 102 back west. That’s when I first notice that the three layers under my bomber jacket aren’t cutting it as well as they were a little while ago. Time to head back. There’s work to be done after all, and I gotta feed Coda. It’s past his dinnertime by now.
A cloud covers the sun just as I’m taking Strip Mine Road to 129 to jump back on the expressway. The temperature drops ten degrees, and the hands on the big clock jerk forward one notch. Clack.
There’s a scene near the end of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle that I’ve always…well, not loved so much as appreciated. Old Narnia is dead. The land where it once was now exists in a world that no longer has a sun; everything is dark and bitterly cold. Frozen solid. There’s nothing alive in there. Peter stands with Aslan in the opening that was once the Stable Door, on the threshold between one world and the next. It’s time to leave this one behind. Pulling into the driveway, I notice that, at 3:30, the sun is already going down. I can hear Aslan talking to Peter.
“Peter, High King of Narnia,” said Aslan. “Shut the Door.”
Putting the bikes away for the winter always feels like this. Getting back to the garage and tucking the Goldwing back in behind the truck and shutting the door after a reprieve from the onset of winter somehow makes it worse. But the hands on that big clock keep on ticking, in good ways as well as bad, and some patience and a bit of resolve will eventually bring them back around to the spring side of things. Five months is not that long, even if it feels longer than that.
Thank you, God, for this lovely and unexpected day. I show my gratitude to You by appreciating it as best I can in my own weird way. I trust in Your plan and believe that, soon, I’ll get to open that door again. I don’t mind waiting.
And Brian and Garrett, I hope that what you’re doing right now puts a day like this in the shade.
[END]
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