On the second morning of my first motorcycle trip to see my grandparents in 1972, I walked out to the little Yamaha 350 as the sun came up. It was the last morning of the trip. By early afternoon I would be at their door. I had a cup of coffee in my hand, and I stood beside the motorcycle and drank it, and somewhere in that cup I understood that I loved this. Not the arriving. The riding. All that country between where I’d started and where I was going.
I had set out to see my grandparents. That was the reason. But the road had worked on me while I wasn’t paying attention, and by that morning the reason had changed.
People ask why I kept at it. I can give them numbers: more than fifty years, half a million miles. The numbers are true, but they don’t tell much. They don’t tell you what made a man go back out and do it again.
The feeling came back many times after that. One morning stays with me more than most. It was spring, and I was on I-10 crossing the bayou, coming out of Texas into Louisiana. The morning was as fine as any I’ve seen. It was different country and a different year, and I was not the same young man with the coffee cup. But it was the same feeling, and I knew it the way you know an old friend’s step on the porch.
I keep those two mornings together. The first was when I found it. The second was when it came back and I knew it would stay.
Half a million miles hold more than one essay can carry. But if I could keep only two mornings out of all of them, I’d keep these. When someone asks why I rode all those years, these two come closer to an answer than the miles ever will.
My motorcycle memoir, A Magnificent Ride to Nowhere: My Conversation with the Open Road, follows that longer journey. Read the first chapter.