Harley Dreams

Rolling east. Noon. The sun beat down hard on the black top road. Reflecting water that was not really there, glimmering on the asphalt ahead. The heat shimmered up from the ground, slamming into me with every passing mile. Sixty, seventy miles an hour, the only thing I hear is the firing of the engine and the hiss of hot air passing around the helmet straps. The motor sucks up what it wants from the atmosphere, mixes it with fuel, uses it then spits out what remains at the end of the shiny metal pipes behind me. The hypnotic rumble of the big Hog is my only companion.

Alone, the way I like it. I will never be any good at crowds. The landscape flattened after I put the little towns in my mirrors. The middle of Florida is the part the Mouse won't let you see. Trees and swampy enclaves give way to prairies into which man has dug great big holes. Little two lane roads intrude upon these scenes in the scarred flatlands made artificially hilly by the giant stacks of gypsum dotting the plains like crumbling, burned out volcanoes. The holes are the result of a hundred years of phosphate mining and before phosphate, dolomite. Fertilizers for nearly every crop on the planet.

I had not seen a soul in miles. Passed two decrepit gas stations, one offered Pepsi on a faded red, white and rusty blue metal sign. The placard leaned on its side. The letters still visible above the panic grass spelled Pep. A dust devil blew debris across the otherwise colorless parking lot.

The smell was acrid as the fetid winds blew all kinds of chemicals off the surfaces of the upturned dirt. Liquid, pooled in the center of the stacks is a mixture of sulfuric acid and rainwater runoff. The process of making fertilizer is a breakdown of what is beneath the ground combined with caustic additives. The whitish, dusty residue of these efforts coats everything. I tasted the smell with every breath. I throttled down to bump over grassy railroad tracks. A pair of dark winged buzzards eyed me nervously. They stood guard over some disgusting roadside delicacy, intermittently pecking and looking me over as I passed.

A giant drag line came into view as I rounded the next turn. A machine as big as a house, it was digging enormous amounts of dinosaur remains and dumping the piles into trucks that looked too big to move. The claw arm of the crane looked like some kind of prehistoric creature itself, its long neck extending in some subterranean hunting effort. The machine looked unmanned, and could have been, except for the relentless movement of its singular task. Grit from a hundred million years of decay found its way into the creases in my face, burning my eyes, powdering me through my jeans.

The intense heat conspired with the other desert conditions to underscore the bleakness of the bombed out terrain. Small insects, love-bugs mostly, began blowing in black and orange sheets across the road. Unable to fly against the wind, the bugs were driven to mate and die at the whims of the breezes. Love-bugs have a short life, mating in flight and mostly dying on the windshields of tourists as they cross Florida. The bugs started exploding against me. Two at a time, their tiny bodies shattered as they hit my face. Each time one hit unprotected skin, there would be a sting and then I could feel a spot of coolness as they vaporized. The remains threatened to block my vision as my glasses got covered in little black wings and entrails.

Just then I saw three other bikes. They were pushing hard coming from the opposite direction. The three were major American made, custom rigs. All three riders were dressed in official Harley gear from head to toe. One of the guy's helmet was painted the same teal color as his tanks and fenders. I knew they were riding in the same bug storm that I was experiencing. These were the quintessential Rolex riders that are the subject of much derision within the true biker community, but here they were, ten miles back of sunset. This was no parade. There was no audience. No one to see any our shiny machines.

Cruising on their decked out rub (rich urban biker) machines, with grim smiles, jaws clenched, they nodded and waved as we passed. These guys were solidly in their fifties, had probably made a bunch of money in the stock market or maybe they were lawyers, or work in banks. Looked down upon by those men and women who ride Billy-bike-wannabees mainly because they haven't saved up enough money for anything more reliable than an old shovel-head Harley with a gazillion miles on it since the last top end job. I guess to some, I fit that category too. I figured that two wheels is two wheels no matter what. I started hoping for rain as my arms turned redder by the minute from the blazing sun.

I had to stop for a minute to clear off my glasses. I pulled over on the edge of a chemical company plant access road. I saw the processing plant off in the distance. The building was mostly girders and tanks. Grey or faded black in color, coated with a fine layer of dust and corrosive chemicals. Smoke and steam rose from the industrial complex. All the factory lights were on and twinkled brightly in the midday sun, little dots of yet more heat and light.

I cranked it back up and thoughts turned to my own father. Today would have been his 96^th birthday. As a cop on a Harley, he had ridden roads like this on two wheels back in the nineteen twenties. He told me once that he had ridden Indians but always went back to Harleys. It was one of those things that did not mean much at the time, but it came back right then. I figured that I was not fifty miles from where he rode once, from where he rests today. I heel shifted up the gears into fifth, pretending for a moment, to work the mechanisms like they probably did "back then". Bugs continued to splash off my glasses. I smiled as I twisted back the throttle.