Another Archival Delight from the Blue Ride Journal about the world of Riding

Wind

I fly low, a noisy bird moving through the world. I’m in it but not of it. My mouth is full of wind and my hair snaps like flags where it escapes from my helmet; my ears burn with the buffet and boom of the air around me. Air that is not a breeze but a bully, air that doesn’t slide but air that pounds and slaps and knocks me around on the back of my motorcycle.

The wind surprised me when I met it the first time on the road. It stiff armed me and left my cheeks cold and my nose burning inside like I’d inhaled hot ashes. I didn’t really take the wind seriously until I headed out across the prairies; I’d only flirted with it before then. The wind on the prairie blows hard and long, like a living spirit out there with you on the road.

A long day’s ride across a gold summer prairie will bring cold fingers of icy air in the morning that tease and pull your pants loose from your legs and invites the wind in to fondle and freeze your ankles. Your eyes tear and your nose aches from the cold and about the time you adjust to the chilly embrace the day’s wind warms and the layers come off one at a time in a sort of wind assisted strip tease. At each stop you lose another piece of gear; first the leather chaps, then the jacket, then the warm sweatshirt. By afternoon you are hot, down to a tee shirt and jeans with eyes that burn from the insistent hair dryer heat of the wind on your face. Your nose burns inside up to your eyebrows with the dry heat. When you stop for gas or a cold drink you hunt for the Vaseline, Chapstick or Carmex, anything greasy in the way of lip balm that you can squish out of a tube and smear on your mouth and use to coat the inside of your nose. Attractively greased up with Vaseline from your chin to your eyebrows you hit the road again, only to discover that now when a bug hits it sticks to the grease.

By early afternoon you are just about hammered by the freight train of wind. You have on your goggles that shut out the wind from the sides so your eyes stop tearing, your nose is full of Vaseline and dead bugs and you have put in your foam earplugs. Sort of like three monkeys in one go--see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. In this case it’s more like feel no wind, smell no wind and hear no wind. When you get the pain factor caused by hours in the blistering wind under control, you start to notice other things.

Things like when you ride down into a draw or a little valley the wind stops for a few seconds. You notice immediately that when you come out the other side it has changed course and is now pounding you sideways from the other direction, causing a handlebar clenching moment while you compute the new angle of lean you will be taking. I started learning the wind on my first epic ride to Sturgis.

My road partners were three firemen, who have been riding for years. Add to this the notion that firemen are, shall we say, different? These are people who enjoy running into burning buildings when the rest of us are running out—and they like it. They are not exactly ‘adrenaline junkies ‘as the phrase goes, but they do tend to live life at a level ratcheted up a notch from the rest of us and they are fairly nonchalant about the tough stuff.

On our jaunt across the country when we hit the prairies and the endless winds the stories started. As a brand new green-gilled, wet-behind-the-ears motorcyclist my eyes got bigger and my stomach got tighter with each Paul Bunyanesque tale. Horrific stories of riding in wind so strong bikes were blown across three lanes of freeway and into oncoming traffic. I heard about winds that were so blustery bikers rolled down the road tipped over to the point they could drag a hand on the pavement if they’d wanted to. I heard about headwinds so fierce your bike wouldn’t go over 20 miles an hour and tailwinds that blew you along all over the road willy-nilly like yesterday’s newspaper. I gritted my teeth and thought to myself, while adding more grease layers to my chapped face and bug collection, “Oh goody, one more novitiate terror for my list, I’ll add this one on right behind tightly wound mountain roads and gravel driveways.”

After the first ‘Windsday’ I wasn’t scared any longer, I was just cranky and irritated from the ceaseless blowing. I did get shoved all over the road when the breeze suddenly changed hats and came from the other direction; I endured headwinds, tailwinds, and side winds. One spot in South Dakota was so windy we were all leaned to the left so far it looked like we were going around a banked corner. This happened to be on a stretch of road that’s flat as a flounder and straight as a stick right to the horizon. It doesn’t feel like you are riding tipped to one side. You don’t realize it until you look at the string of riders ahead of you and realize everyone’s riding at a bizarre and drunken looking angle strung out in a line ahead of you.

Like most of the novice terrors, this one required riding through it and out the other side. Motorcycles don’t have reverse for a reason; you just have to keep going forward. You come to realize if you ride, you ride with the wind. Sometimes you ride on it and sometimes it rides on you but I have learned to always carry a few pairs of those foam earplugs stuffed in a pocket somewhere. Oh, and get used to calling the wind Mariah. She’s not going anywhere.