One year ago Larry and I set out on our ill-fated trip to bike week in Sturgis, South Dakota. I had recently lost my job and had the summer wide open. With my life falling apart I decided to ignore my problems and obsessively plan a 2,600 mile motorcycle ride. Larry and I only covered a little over 1,100 miles and didn’t make it anywhere near South Dakota. An epic trip became a crowning failure. What I know now is that I needed to fail.
I had packed enough extra weight to give myself uneven tire wear. This is also a metaphor for how I’ve lived my life. Carrying too much shit, none of it is what I actually need and I’m destroying myself in the process. In the end my body was felled by 110 plus degree temperatures and my mind broke when I had to accept that I wasn’t going to pull off the trip. I had needed a win badly and instead I got my ass handed to me by the universe. On the morning of day three I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since day one. I tried to shove a granola bar in my gaping maw only to spit the bite out immediately. A piece of granola landed on my exhaust pipe and it stayed there until we got home. I left that piece of granola there because I wanted a reminder that I was fucked. It sounds crazy but that was my thought process. We made it to Flagstaff on day three. I set up our tent, climbed into it with Larry and proceeded to cry surrounded by the beauty of nature. The prospect of two more weeks of riding in brutal heat seemed unsafe, so I accepted my fate with weepy dignity. I took our tent down as quickly as I set it up and we checked into a La Quinta. A few hours in the air conditioning took the edge off the heat stroke and I was able to slurp down a cup-o-soup prepared with hot water from the room coffee maker. Still the best meal I’ve had in recent memory.
I’ve been fortunate to do some incredible stuff in life by finding ways to improve my hand. Over time I deluded myself into thinking there wasn’t anything I couldn’t overcome without a little ingenuity. Accepting failure, or anything disagreeable, is not an area where I excel. I needed that trip to knock some sense into me. My life would get worse before it would get better, but what felt like a failure became a crucial turning point. Something popped loose in my head on the side of a mountain in Flagstaff. I never felt lower than I did at the time and now I can’t wait to go back. No disrespect to the outstanding KOA campground but Larry and I will be staying at the La Quinta.