Last summer--how can it already be that long ago?--I traveled to the National.
What's "the National"? And of what nation do we speak?
Read on.
This is the unexpurgated version of a piece that appeared in Motorcyclist magazine.
And these are two of my favorite photos taken by my pal Joe Sokohl; used here by kind permission.
Now, excuse me while I go pack to go to another rally.
I am in
northern Pennsylvania on one of the oldest
highways in America,
the transcontinental U.S. 6, doing what I love best: eating a luggage-smashed
peanut butter and jelly while sitting on the curb at a gas station in the
company of the vehicle that brought me here.
I am scribbling in a notebook a few of the six hundred - odd thoughts
that occurred to me during the past 140 miles (tank limit), and also on why I
seem compelled to do this mainly when I sit on a curb, looking at my
motorcycle. Through it also; air is its
heart. A bike is both solid and
insubstantial. I write that down too, as it occurs to me it’s a good metaphor
for pretty much everything.
And it
makes strange sense, because I am making for a gathering that is simultaneously
as unlikely as chance can make anything, and as absolute as familial blood: the
41st annual national rally of those who ride the motorcycle
conceived in 1920 by three World War I veterans of Italy’s Corpo Aeronautico
Militaire and built in a village perched on the rocky shore of Lake Como. Then there is the fact that we are meeting
to pledge allegiance to our small-town Moto Guzzis in a village in the Virginia foothills of the Shenandoah, Buena
Vista. If that isn’t a
little weird, I don’t know what is.
Guzzisti
are themselves a peculiar lot—a bit like the air-cooled V-twin itself, maybe,
an engine about as refined as a tractor’s but curiously gorgeous too—and in the
decades I have known them I have compiled the riders’ Identi-Kit: in descending
order, their livelihoods are most likely to be engineer, IT, photographer,
pilot, musician, and academic. They are
“independent thinkers,” and they are a veritable portrait of middle-class America (with
the exception of Billy Joel). An owner
of one of Mandello del Lario’s output is most likely to retorque his own bolts,
possibly wearing a tee that reads “Moto Guzzi: Going Out of Business Since
1921.”
I know
motorcyclists who have never been to a rally, but I don’t understand them. A rally is a combination community barbecue,
mutual need society, and tent revival. A rally on the calendar is the
motorcyclist’s ritual call to prayer, his
muezzin. From May through September,
hundreds of regional rallies convene various tribes, which will each attract a
couple hundred; it is the nationals that are the big deal. BMW’s is an industrial-scale shindig with
hundreds of vendors and a full docket of seminars and tours for its 10,000
attendees. For Moto Guzzi, which is
lucky to sell 600 production units a year in the U.S., four hundred diehards will
converge. This year the factory will
send neither demo bikes nor even a representative, perhaps in memory of 2007’s
disastrous rally in Houston,
Minnesota: a flash flood swept
away their entire fleet not to mention the semi they came on, along with much
else. A rally is the usual ride, writ
large: Four days and hundreds of miles; four nights of beer, bourbon, mediocre
potato salad, campfires and campfire tales; four hundred buddies, not
four. We will meet whatever comes—pain
or pleasure, or usually both—together.
The banner hung from the park pavilion’s rafters proclaims a truth. Moto
Guzzi: A World of Friends.
On the
first day of two I need to get there, I choose the back roads that my bike—a
1986 650cc Lario—prefers over “the slab,” the anonymous interstate that gets
you somewhere without letting you know just how. I am traveling old-school, with tent and
sleeping bag strapped to the seat, paper maps, and a route cribsheet in the
vinyl map pocket of my tankbag to read while riding and therefore invariably
misread. I had to make a guess at the
junction of I-180: lo, it does not in fact run north-south as it does in my
road atlas. OK, then, West. I had a fifty-fifty chance of being
right. I have never won the lottery,
either.
But I chose
right, in a way, the way of the journey.
On the phone to friends waiting that evening for me at a Comfort Inn in Maryland, I report the
good news: I have discovered an amazing road in Pennsyltucky (as it is called, presaging
the next day’s dive into the real South).
Route 74 from Port Royal to Carlisle
exceeds every criterion of goodness the motorcyclist asks—little traffic,
uncountable curves, scenic surprise.
Then there is the bad news: I had to go a hundred miles out of my way to
find it. No matter. As a famous long-distance rider I know says,
“There is no such thing as a bad day on a motorcycle.” I would eat a grocery-store meal in the room
when I got there, after the rest had returned from their pub dinner. For some reason, my notion of what
constitutes excellent grub reverses itself on a motorcycle trip.
The good
day/bad day switch occurred to Tom from Massachusetts
the next day. We were finally on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the legendary road
that always inspires a prayer to dual gods: the one in charge of providing an
asphalt dancing partner who never steps on your toes and can seemingly waltz
all night, and the one who permitted us to safely wade into socialist waters
long enough for the WPA to build an unprecedented temporal museum of culture
and geography the length of a road. Tom
dropped out of sight in our rearview mirrors, and when we doubled back to find
him at a scenic overlook, he announced that the main seal on his lovingly
restored 1973 Eldorado had given way.
It’s not a Moto Guzzi event without leakage.
It is also
not a Guzzi event without the selflessness of the brotherhood’s bond becoming
manifest. Tom got on the phone to a fellow sixty miles away who immediately
agreed to come with a truck; once at the rally, the Eldo traded places on
another rallygoer’s trailer with his Norge (named after the Guzzi that in 1928
accomplished 4,000 km to the Arctic Circle).
Tom would head home at the end of the weekend on a fully functional
late-model machine, a kindness extended simply because both men had, one day,
found the same object of an outwardly inscrutable affection.
As we
pulled in to the rally grounds at Glen Maury Park, my long anticipation of
arrival—and to me, a rally is as much about expectation as it is about being
there—insured that all I could see were the tents massed along the treeline,
the people moving back and forth between their sites and the bathrooms, the
pavilion like Valhalla on the hill ahead, bikes passing us on the drive as they
headed for ice, or for a ride on the fabled roads of Virginia. Who might I meet again, after years that
would seem as moments? It was only later, after I had unpacked and furled the
tent, that I even noticed the park was dominated by Paxton House, an imposing antebellum
mansion. This gathering, from all
corners of a united republic, of fans of a European motorcycle few have heard
of would be overseen by the ghost of a Confederate general.
In his
honor, perhaps, or maybe just because they’re tasty, that night we enjoyed mint
juleps by the light of tentside tiki torches.
In honor of no one but global warming, the next day we sought refuge
from the excoriating heat (102 and counting) in a pool below Panther Falls,
attained by carefully negotiating three miles of steep downhill gravel
road. And that night, all hell broke
loose.
After
dinner, the time of commingling and chat, beer drinking and good-natured
complaint, someone walked over, smartphone in hand. “Folks, there’s a big storm headed our
way. About fifteen minutes.” The radar showed a dense green mass, admixed
with angry yellow and orange, stretching from southern Ohio
to Tennessee
and moving east. Within ten minutes,
rallygoers had assisted everyone in battening down tents and bringing bikes
under the pavilion’s roof. Then we
waited for the show to begin. Some
thoughtful person had left a box of Cheezits on a table, which we devoured
while watching lightning shear the night sky and trees bend under the force of
brutal winds. The storm was a derecho, and when it had passed, it was revealed
as one of the most destructive storms in American history. We had felt strangely calm. Everything was going to be all right, or
would be made so later. Guzzi people are
good at fixing things.
The next
day brought departure. A friend
familiar with local roads saw me on my way by leading a private tour, and that
is when we saw the storm’s full aftermath: great trees snapped in half, wires
festooning pavement. He found what was
certainly the state’s only craft brewery with enough generator to power both
air-conditioner and pizza oven.
Afterward I said goodbye. I was
headed north, home, alone.
But a
motorcyclist knows this is not how it will always be: alone. Next year we will
be rally-bound again. There will be new
expectation. New affiliations. And a new date on the calendar on which to
fix an anticipatory pin, every year.
When we come together, and when we arrive.
{Photos: Joe Sokohl}
