This is, perhaps surprisingly, a perfect size for a bike show.
A friend called me up one Friday a few months ago and asked if I wanted to go for a Sunday ride in the Kansas Flint Hills, to the Volland Store – despite the fact that it’s in a virtual ghost town, miles from anywhere, it’s now an art gallery that holds a small but lovely vintage motorcycle show.
“I’ve mapped out a route that looks interesting,” he said. That takes some doing, if you’re heading west on a day-ride from Kansas City.
We started out on K-32. On the way to Lawrence, the road followed the track of a massive tornado that blew through early last summer. Although it was on the ground for miles, it luckily avoided any heavily populated areas, and no one was killed. People are rebuilding. Huge trees that were snapped off halfway up the trunk and stripped of any branches smaller than your arm greened back up.
It was a fine fall day, but cool enough to make me wish I’d added a windproof layer under my Roadcrafter. I was grateful that the Ducati’s previous owner had fitted aftermarket grip warmers; I ran them at full strength.
Just outside Lawrence we hung a left on K-40, the backroad to Topeka. We passed by Lecompton (billboard: “The birthplace of the Civil War”) and a boarded up strip joint (sign: ‘Town Knockers Gentlemen’s Club’.) In Topeka, we hopped on the slab, riding eight miles on the very first bit of Interstate Highway ever made.
My pal turned his Africa Twin south, onto miles of what another friend, Salvo Pennisi, would call ‘strada bianca’; hard-packed calciferous dirt with a skiff of loose gravel. His Honda rolled on chunky dual-sport tires; I have Dunlop Roadsmart IIIs on my air-cooled Multistrada. It was a useful reminder for me to loosen my grip and let the bike have its head a little.
A bunch of small black birds were having a dust-bath in the road, and as my friend approached they flew up, along with many more that erupted out of the grass. Hundreds of them whirled – left or right? – too late to form a consensus, the flock split in two, parted by our motorcycles. It would have happened the same way in a car I suppose, but somehow being on a motorcycle connects you a little more to the landscape you’re passing though.
The Flint Hills were colonized pretty early, and those first farmers built with what they had on hand: stone. Beautiful old barns, houses, schools, and churches remain. They were built to last centuries, but the people have gone.
The Volland Store holds a charming and carefully curated motorcycle show for one weekend, every fall.
Blink, and you’ll miss Volland, which is about 200 yards off a little road that must be one of the most technical stretches of asphalt in Kansas. The bike show was brilliant. My friend and I agreed that a well-curated dozen or 20 bikes was more to our taste than some hipster extravaganza.
On the way back, we passed another motorcyclist who had what appeared to be a fun-fur pumpkin soft sculpture covering his crash helmet. At least, I think that’s what it was. We were in Kansas, though, so it could have been a guy wearing a hollowed-out pumpkin on his head for whatever reason.
Although it was too late in the day for coffee, we stopped for a tea back in Lawrence.
“Maybe there will be some cute hippie girls working in this one,” said my friend, by way of justifying his choice of café. (No such luck.) Still, as one-day rides from KC go, I suppose it was a ten out of 10. My friend had done everything he could to raise my mood, and he did. A little.
Some of you may have read an old essay of mine, in which I explained how motorcycles saved my life the first time
Back in 2012, on the occasion of Thanksgiving, I wrote…
Our sport is dangerous; that's not news. I wasn't one of those riders who thought, It won't happen to me. I thought about danger often. It was never dying that scared me, it was not dying that scared me. I've got some expensive Ti components (and I'm missing some cognitive functions; if you tell me your phone number, I have to write it down one digit at a time) but so far, I've come off lightly.
In fact, I'm able to enjoy simple physical pleasures not in spite of motorcycles and motorcycle racing, but because of it. It's not just that motorcycles haven't killed me (yes, I'm touching wood as I type this.) Motorcycles actually kept me alive.
I've never really told this story in much detail, but 30-some years ago, when I was a club racer up in Canada, I got sick. I had some kind of autoimmune disorder, which depending on which doctor I asked was either lupus masquerading as rheumatoid arthritis or vice versa.
You know the expression, 'off the charts'? My white counts were literally off the charts. I got a graphic output after one lab test and the bar graph went off the edge of the page. When I finally got in to see a specialist, after a long wait, he looked up from that lab result and said, “I wouldn't have been surprised to see you come in in a wheelchair.”
I was lucky that when it came on, I was in outstanding physical condition; I'd been training hard my whole adult life. I had a lot to lose before I'd ever be incapacitated. And, typical of people with lupus, I found that while it was painful and utterly exhausting to keep working out, the harder I trained the less I felt the symptoms. Still, I could only slow – not reverse – the course of the disease.
Month by month and year by year, I lost strength and range of motion in virtually every part of my body. It was frustrating because I was club racing and learning to ride better, but I couldn't really capitalize on it. I had to be super-careful not to crash; the drugs I was taking made the risks of injury much higher and besides, just getting out of bed in the morning already hurt like hell. By the time I raced in the TT, in 2002, I was careful not to let my friends see how hard I had to struggle just to get into my leathers or let them know that I'd almost bleed out from a shaving nick. And after that... It was as if my body had been holding out just to let me live out that dream, because in the next year, symptoms took a turn for the worse.
During that year of precipitous physical decline, I found myself wondering, At what point would in not be worth living? My life had, for decades, been defined more by physicality than intellectuality or spirituality. I decided that at the point where I couldn't wipe my own butt, I didn't want to live. Let me tell you, it was seriously depressing and I frequently rehearsed, in my mind, a hunting accident.
Through that period, I really wanted to finish my memoir, Riding Man, and I was grateful that I could at least type. But the thing that kept me going was that I could still ride motorcycles. Maybe not well, or nearly at the level I once had ridden; getting a leg over the saddle was a real trick. You really don't need Too Much Information on this so I won't go into detail, but even though there days when I wasn't flexible enough to reach my butt, I still put in 1,000 kilometers in the alps, unearthing the story of Pierlucio 'Spadino' Tinazzi, the hero of the Mont Blanc Tunnel fire.
So I put off the hunting accident.
Before I reached that point, I found a doctor who changed my drug regimen to one that worked way better, at least in the short-to-medium term. The drugs I was taking were literally toxic – one of them is used to kill cancer cells in chemotherapy – but they radically improved my life. Once they really kicked in, I could ride OK. I could cycle and swim and, as before, the harder I trained the better I felt. For the first time in over a decade, I started to feel better and better, not worse and worse.
After a year and half in France, I moved back to North America, to San Diego. I started working at Motorcyclist, had health coverage for a while, and found a new specialist. By that point, I was an expert on lupus and rheumatoid arthritis myself, and we had a long discussion about which of those two diseases affected me. It didn't really matter, since I had a treatment that worked for the time being, and in any case, neither disease is curable.
After all that stuff, a miracle happened
My cool job fell apart, I got divorced and remarried a woman, Mary, that I adored. And I started to feel not just better, but... good.
My doctor and I developed a plan to wean me off drugs and, for the first time in well over a decade, my blood tests started to look... normal. I don't use the phrase 'miracle’ to describe my remission; that would be too strong. But my doctor – a very experienced rheumatologist – got a little teary when he said, “Don't call me again unless you get sick.”
The miracle was meeting Mary. And I know this much for certain: The thing that kept me alive long enough to meet her was my determination to stay healthy enough to ride motorcycles. The weights, the cycling, swimming, yoga; the glucosamine sulfate, the 30,000 aspirin, the prednisone, the methotrexate... all that stuff wasn't to ward off pain and depression and slow the progress of some mystery disease, it was, “This is what you have to do to ride.”
You know those idiots in the German-inspired half-helmets who wear those “Live to ride, ride to live” patches? Well, for me that was literal truth.
There was another great thing about marrying Mary
To be clear, I’ve never regretted falling in love with motorcycles, or becoming a motorcycle racer – even though those choices cost me a fortune, and hurt me. I’ve never even regretted quitting a great career and selling everything I owned to fund a one-shot ride at the Isle of Man TT.
I used to regret a shitload of other bad decisions, but those regrets vanished when I met Mary. I rationalized all the selfish, immature, rash choices; all the “start over, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 life changes; the whole crazy life track I’d been on suddenly made sense – every bad decision turned out to be justified – because it led me to her. In hindsight, she made me look like a genius.
As my friend and I sat outside at a café table, a bunch of kids walked past and asked us, “Are those your dirt bikes?”
I looked over at mine and realized that it had such a patina of white dust on it that it almost did look like a dirt bike. It was certainly a dirty bike.
There was a reason my friend lured me out. He knew that two weeks earlier, Mary told me that she was leaving
I was (am) fucking devastated. No, of course it hadn’t been a completely perfect ten years of marriage; if it was, she wouldn’t have decided to leave me. But it was ten years of worship, from me. Imagine how many times, in ten years, she left my field of view. Every single time she reentered my line of sight, I had to catch my breath.
One of my first thoughts was, What will I tell my mom – she’s a fragile 93 year-old who loves Mary like a daughter.
Then one of my second thoughts was, I just won’t tell her. But a third thought was, I’m not a very good actor and my mom certainly could live for years.
So I told my mom, and although she was brave on the phone, my family back in Calgary told me that after we hung up, she shattered into bits. In hindsight, maybe I should have waited a couple of months and told her in person, “Look, you can see I’m fine,” whether it was true or not. I think I’m a good enough actor to pull off that one sentence.
Meanwhile, my friends here in Kansas City are supportive; so is my family, though they’re far flung, and being the one that needs to be looked-out for is getting very old. I’m working out. I’m pitching stories. I’ve still got several film projects I’m trying to move along. I’m trying to get stuck into a new piece of long-form writing. I am doing what I can to try to create a situation – for me, in my life – that makes me curious to see where it will lead next.
If I reach that point, it may be because motorcycles will save me again; it’s possible. I mean, that ride to Volland helped. A little.
If you want to help, too, I can think of a few good ways.
You could buy a book. Or send me a hot tip. Suggest a great, overlooked motorcycle story that makes you think, “Some journalist should cover that!” I’ve turned on Comments for this post which is a good way to reach me, but you can also ‘at’ me on Twitter, where I’m @Backmarker.
My work is pretty solitary, which is not good at a time like this. So if you’ve loved something I’ve written, email me. That never gets old.
Jim Van Eman examines a 1903 Erie, built by the Streifthau Mfg. Co, in Middletown OH.