Yellow Lines and the Dashes In Between
"There has never
yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease
whose name is worth remembering." ~Theodore
Roosevelt
We've all been to the
cemetery and seen the names there etched on the
gravestones. Yeah, we glance at the names and we feel
sad, but we often overlook the most relevant part of
the engraving; the dash. That lonesome little mark
there between the dates. It doesn't look like much,
but the dash is the most meaningful symbol there,
because for me, it's not the day you were born or the
day you finally kick it that matters most in life,
it's how you fill the time between those two dates,
from start to finish. The dash represents the journey
and the entirety of one's life.
The Rider's Rights
movement took some serious hits in 2006. We lost a
great many folks to other (free) states, exhaustion,
attrition, accidents and also illness. The most
devastating and irreplaceable loss for me was that of
Karen Bolin. Karen was the President of the Motorcycle
Rider's Foundation, and we lost her to cancer. Though
Karen and I had never met in person, we'd been avid
pen-pals for the past few years. I liked Karen so
much, we'd often talk on the phone, which is an
absolute rarity for me, since most of you know I just
don't do the phone thing.
"And in the
end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's
the life in your years." ~ Abraham Lincoln.
In one of my past
articles, "Primal Ice Cream Therapy", I
reminisced about the many ice cream sundries I'd
enjoyed over the years after long rides, and mentioned
the well deserved root beer floats I used to score in
the tiny town of Greybull, Wyoming. Population; 1,815.
Well, Karen found that article somewhere and called me
up to say that we must be the only two people in the
entire universe who knew where Greybull, Wyoming was.
So, it was purely
Karen's fault when I actually spent the night in
Greybull for the first time ever on my annual
pilgrimage to Sturgis, SD this past year. Greybull was
always nothing more than a gas stop for me in years
past, but I gotta say, after staying there, it was one
of my very most favorite-ist memories of the entire
trip. For starters, the hotel prices were far better
than anything in Cody or Sheridan and we actually had
enough money left over to buy a nice dinner right
across the street from the hotel at a place called,
Lisa's. Visit www.lisaswesterncuisine.com. It was
pretty good. After dinner, I jumped on the Wild
Child's pillion and in a daring role reversal, she
rode me all over town, all 400 pounds worth of gorilla
that I am, up and down every paved side street in that
tiny little town. The residents had never seen such a
spectacle. We saw everything there was to see and then
just had to stop at the local A&W Root Beer stand
for dessert, the place I wrote about in the article.
Have ya' ever tried to ride and eat ice cream at the
same time? Try it.
"A useless
life is an early death." ~Goethe.
The nice old couple
running the history museum in the center of town
stayed open late, just for us. Visit www.wyshs.org/mus-greybull.htm.
Technically, they closed at 8 pm and we showed up at
8:10. They let us in to look around, and didn't mind a
bit. Besides, they were too busy playing solitaire on
their computer, feelin' frisky...way out there in the
middle of nowhere. We were probably their only
customers all day. Wild Child bought $8 bucks worth of
post cards from 'em just because they were so nice. It
was probably their biggest sale of the month. It was a
wonderful museum, chock full of historical photos of
the Chimney Rock area and it's plentitude of dinosaur
bones.
Greybull is near an
even lesser known town named, Shell, which should be
re-named "Bones" since it's the virtual
epicenter of "Dinosaur Country", thick in
Jurassic history. On our journey toward the Bighorn
Mountains, we braved the treacherous gravel parking
lot at Dirty Annie's Country Store to visit a huge
tent housing an incredible replica of the most
complete Allosaurus skeleton of all time, plopped
right out of the dirt just a little ways down the
road. A small group of science types are trying to
raise enough money to put up a museum out there. Visit
www.geo-sciences.com/center.htm. The little scientist
lady who took our picture with the big bag of bones
was, believe it or not, completely enthralled by the
Wild Child; a woman riding her own motorcycle across
the country, bold, brazen and helmet free.
Subsequently, there seemed to be a lot more questions
from the scientists for us, than there were dinosaur
questions for them. I already knew all that stuff
anyways, since I was a dino-nerd as a child. Toward
the end of our stay, I just about had that
paleontologist lady strapped to the back of my bike,
destined for Sturgis, before her husband stepped in
with the donation jar! Nothing kills a good time
quicker than the scent of an empty money jar. We
dropped some green in the jar and moved on.
"Some people
are so afraid to die that they never begin to
live." ~Henry Van Dyke
Karen not only inspired
me to ride more, she also inspired me to do more to
preserve our sport for future generations. She always
encouraged me to hang in there when I felt the
movement wasn't going as it should. She would always
take the time to explain things to me so that I could
share with others and make motorcycle riders a much
smarter lot. She's the reason my "Mining
Political Gold from Motorcycle Awareness Month"
article was on the front cover of the MRF Reports
during Motorcycle Awareness Month in 2006. She asked
for some simple "words of wisdom" and I sent
her an article that I considered to be a "throw
away." Well, Karen liked it so much, she sent it
to Moto-Journalist God, Fred Rau, and he liked it
enough to want it on the front cover. Of course, my
pen name caused Fred a great deal of stress, and we
fought back and forth about it before he finally
surmised that the MRF is, afterall, a private
organization, and that as Editor, he could pretty much
print whatever he wanted.
I don't have heroes. There are
people I respect, and the really good people, I simply
try to mimic. Karen was inimitable, and someone I can
only emulate, because they just don't make 'em like
her anymore. It's gonna take twenty good people to
replace her, and if those twenty folks don't report
for duty real soon, the rest of us are gonna have to
buck up and work that much harder to see the work
done. Karen will be sorely missed, as a leader and as
a friend. As I keep rolling on down that big road
toward my first million miles….I'll fondly think of
Karen when I'm out there cheating time, in a hurry as
always to get to that next no-name town on a bumpy
stretch of highway, my mind lost in the blur of the
yellow lines as they pass me by, and filling that big
fat dash from my own life with what matters most;
MILES. Karen's passing has had a profound influence on
my final destination…and ya' know what? She made me
realize; What's the hurry?
"The fear of death
follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully
is prepared to die at any time." ~Mark Twain
Karen requested that in lieu of
flowers, a donation be sent to the National Cervical
Cancer Coalition, 6520 Platt Avenue #693, West Hills,
CA 91307. www.nccc-online.org. Karen's concern and
hope was that every woman be tested regularly.
Copyright
© 2007 Splatt. Reproduction permitted with
attribution
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