Last week, though, an old school friend on a business trip about 300 miles away offers a welcome excuse for a leg stretching ride, something more than "to the gym, from the gym, to the gym, from the gym, ..." The ride down was picture perfect, carving highways and long stretches of double-digit back roads to get to the southern Wisconsin / Illinois border. A few maintenance issues but nothing a quick stop by the parts store for a replacement bolt that had shaken off during the rougher parts of the ride, and a new chain (with an oil change) installed last night by Motorcycle Performance in Madison, since the old chain was starting to make a really bad rattle (picked up a rock..?) with every circuit which I only noticed after I had stripped the bike of its saddle bags and went to park it without a helmet on.
So my friend and his six co-workers and I went to dinner (and watched the Packers lose) and hung out yesterday and this morning, and this afternoon I started my ride back the "long way", intending to ride due west to the Mississippi river valley and then swinging by a tiny town in southwestern Wisconsin to visit my daughter on the ride north from there.
Very much unlike yesterday's long and sunny ride, this afternoon saw the skies in southern Wisconsin turn very moody and dark, and my ride started out in a slow, drizzle that quickly turned into a regular rainstorm. I finally called 'time' about 30 miles from where my younger daughter lives in order to regroup and dry out.
But as I sit and dry out and reflect on the the last hour or so of riding, I realized that at some point, I just forgot that I was actually riding a motorcycle. The movement felt completely natural, as though it was perfectly normal for my body to fly down these beautiful (but wet) Wisconsin two-lanes across fields and farmland at 70+ miles per hour. The means and method became invisible to my mind, and for a good long part of that ride, I was free and just saturated by the experience... wet, glassy roads, cloudy hilltops, saturated helmet, the rain saturating the tops of my legs and jeans, taking in the ride through a rain-soaked visor, all of it... pure experience.
In many ways, I feel like I just started riding again. It feels new somehow, and yet deeply familiar. I think somehow all this thinking about riding has calmed down and now I just ride. Period.
For the rest of this life, I will be on a motorcycle and riding...
