I had planned to work on the farm again this weekend, so Friday morning pre-dawn I left on Sunshine, the Bandit 1250s, to make the 225 mile trip to our northwoods farm. I would spend the morning riding up, the work day on my computer, and then I would be positioned to work the evening and rest of the weekend on the roof and house.
Although the trip went fine, the weather had shifted and it became bitterly cold (down into the 40's) once I was about 50 miles north of the city. At the 100 mile mark, it started to drizzle and by the time I was 150 miles into the trip north, the drizzle had turned into an icy rain that just zapped all the heat away from my layers and hands faster than my body could replace it. I finally stopped at a McDonalds, with about 90 minutes of rainy, cold, backcountry travel ahead, because I could no longer legitimately feel my fingertips and my fingers were unbearably stiff. Even preparing for the stopping and clutching at that stop was challenging, and it took a lot of aggressive hand shaking and fist squeezing to get enough blood going to manage fine motor control of the bike again. At least the rain had stopped a few miles back.
But we parked and I ordered coffee and considered my options. After nursing all the heat out of that large McD's coffee and guzzling what remained for future inner warmth, I set out again for the final stretch of treelined country roads. It was challenging but, eventually, both Sunshine and I pulled into the tall grass of the farm. I set a flat board under her kickstand so she wouldn't sink into the now-muddy stuff and I set about warming myself back up and getting on with work and house business.
Fast forward to yesterday, and although there was a brief period on Friday evening where the rain had let up, the clouds were now back-building again - another storm was brewing. The ominous forecast for yesterday said a morning of cloud building would lead to even more cold and howling winds and thunderstorms and rain for at least 24 more hours. A storm front that had produced tornados further south was now headed directly this way.
No way I would be on the roof or doing anything productive in this weather, and so I called it and decided to ride back. Unfortunately, it took a while to get things settled at the farmstead yesterday, consuming most of the morning. By the time I was heading out, the wind was literally roaring through the trees and dark clouds and lightening were massing up on this huge north-south front some distance to the west. Confident, or really more 'hopeful' than confident, that I could outrun the storm by heading straight south, Sunshine and I launched towards home again.
We made it exactly 30 minutes into our trip before the sky just opened up and let us have it. The gust front that proceeded that weather actually lightened up her tires and started to pick her up and away from the wet asphalt as we were taking the merging bend onto Highway 53 southbound. That is a very unnerving feeling in a wet curve at 65 mph.
I finally found and pulled under a nearby small-town gas station awning to regroup and put rain covers onto my soft bags and rearrange my backpack with laptop to try to keep the contents dry. Water was in everything. My phone was wet and my outer soft-bag pockets already had a couple inches of standing water in them, so I decided that's it, I'm gonna wait until the building storm starts to subside and make a break for it back to the farm.
Well, the weather never did say 'uncle', and even more storm cells came through and the rain keep saturating the ground and the wind kept howling out of all directions. I sat and ate a slow breakfast burrito and talked with the locals at a nearby food co-op, and watched and waited. Bummer. The forecast weather, according to the weather radar, was just gonna get worse as the day turned to night. So much for waiting, I'm heading back to the farm NOW.
The folks in the co-op couldn't believe it when I finally got up and started to gear up again.
"You're going to ride out there in that?!", the cashier called to me when she saw me zipping up my jacket.
"No time like the present to do something stupid," I called back to her with a smile. I was on the bike and headed back to my farm a few minutes later. What proceeded was some of the most challenging and technical wet weather riding I've ever been through.
Although I was well-used to being able to clear raindrops off my helmet at speed by simply looking left and right quickly to get the water to bead up and roll off the visor, the rain was so constant now and the wind so violent that that technique did nothing, the visor was instantly speckled up with moving water after every attempt to clear it. So I gave up trying, and I found my brain instead picking up familiar shapes through the downpour and random moving blotches of wet and indistinct clarity available through rain-blasted view through my helmet.
Woah, there's the yellow midline. Brake lights ahead? Is that a deer? Is that road debris or standing water? Headlights coming. Stay in your lane. Avoid standing water on the bends. Stay loose, stay relaxed.
But we charged ahead, Sunshine and I, unwise as it may have been, in the earnest desire to just get to familiar ground once more. It took all of my learned skill and experience on the bike thus far to keep myself safe and upright, and, strangely, through all the chaos of the stormy ride, my inside voice was actually silent and still.
I was 100% present in that moment. There was nowhere else to be. Nowhere else to think about. Nothing else to occupy any portion of my brain because my brain was saturated by everything - every tiny bit of stimulus from the outside world and all the feedback from my senses - in order to keep me upright and moving forward and safe. And through it all, I actually felt strangely relaxed and calm.
Pulling into the tall grass again was a relief.
Even as prepared as I was for the wet weather, my leather boots had a couple inches of standing water in them and my pelvis had a strange "ice cream headache" from the inches-deep puddle of icy rainwater that I'd been sitting in on the ride back.
It was a wild ride through challenging weather - and it was really good. The ride made me touch something, reach someplace, that I'm not sure how to describe, even through I've been there a few different times before.
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