Electraglide

  I lit out of Orchard City, Colorado, on a black Electraglide Harley.  Orchard City isn’t really a town, much less a city.  It’s the kind of place where you have to watch out for gravel on the blacktop because none of the side roads are paved.  Anyway, Scotty and Becky live in Orchard City, so I stop by whenever I can, and we visit and work on motorcycles and share life, and I’ve been visiting long enough that I have a lot of friends in that part of the country.

            I cut out of there about 9AM.  I had a denim shirt on and my jeans.  It was cool enough, because it was early, but not cold because I’d burned off a lot of altitude the day before coming across McClure Pass out of Aspen and Carbondale.  There’s a curious pocket of sweet humidity, just a touch, right in that part of the Western Slope in the early autumn.  It’s curious because the rest of Colorado doesn’t have any humidity, but the stretch there by Olathe, between Delta and Montrose, has just enough to grow that famous sweet corn that they do; and I looked out across the almost-dewy rows in the clear sunshine as the bike and I found our rhythm and the tires warmed up to the road.

            I came out of Montrose there where the highway curves back to the East, and I’d put my coat on against the wind and the clouds building over the mountains.  I screwed on the throttle a little bit and blasted through the welcoming, rolling flatness of the Uncompahgre River country near Ridgeway.  It’s kind of a sweet, rolling little breaks country whose whole purpose seems to be to smooth the transition between the gently sloping farms of the Western Slope and the startling ruggedness of the Western San Juans, which rise like a battlement there, above Ouray sitting like a jewel in its jagged little slot of a box canyon.  That little stretch of the Uncompahgre is almost mesmerizing the way it blends the welcoming gold of the winter wheat with the soft green of the cottonwood leaves.  It’s the kind of place you get the feeling it’d just be great to be a deer - to be built for running and have time to forage.

            Few things are built for running like a Harley, so I soon arrive in Ouray, and I stop to use the bathroom there in one of the prettiest public parks in the world, right between the hot springs complex and some newer condos, across Mineral Creek from an old trailer park, and looking North at a big mountain face that rises right from the road so steep that the trees grow sideways out of their roots just to stay upright.

            I leather up and grab a handful, leaning the bike into the graceful switchbacks of Red Mountain Pass just hard enough to get a couple of sparks from the footboards every now and then.  I blow by a slow armada of campers and pickups towing trailers – hunting season’s pilgrimage – staying in the left lane until I pass them all, and taking great satisfaction from rolling on the throttle to glue the rear end down as I accelerate out of the lower pass’s upper turns with no one ahead of me on the road. 

            Mineral Creek is yellow ochre the whole way up with God knows what in it, but Red Mountain is true to its name, looking down on me like a giant incarnation of Dr. King’s “red hills of Georgia” in the misty, windy distance.  I run hard across the grassy stretch of river flat by the old miners’ cabins, fast - like 80 – in the top of fourth gear, and life, and my past, and my future seem to be in balance, as the country reminds me of where I’ve been and who, and who I am now and why.

            The hunters mostly pass me in the upper switchbacks when I have to stop to put my rain pants on, but I’ve already got what I came for, and now I’m just travelling.