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"There's this Negro man," he said, pronouncing the word knee-grow in two heavy syllables, "drivin' a Goldwing with some white lady. They're goin' to Canada, too."

He took the nozzle from me and hung it on the pump, then adjusted his black Jack Daniel's whisky cap. His palms were thick with calluses, his fingers gnarled from arthritis.

"You'll see 'em, I guess," he said. "Ain't too many Negroes ridin' motorcycles."

I could just hear him describing me to the next biker who stopped in.

"There's this blond gal," he'd say, "goin' to Canada riding a Russian motorcycle. You'll see her, I guess. Ain't too many gals riding around on Russian motorcycles."

And I did meet Danny and Michele, on the Vancouver Island ferry on our way back to the mainland.

"I heard about you," I told them, and they laughed.

"Yeah, I bet," said Michele. "We are famous all over the United States and Canada."

They lived in Jackson, Mississippi, and were on a two-week vacation.

"Jackson?" I said, bug-eyed, assuming it must be tough for a mixed-race couple like them to live there.

"Well, it's my home," said Danny. He spoke in a soft southern drawl and looked me straight in the eye behind wire rimmed glasses. "And racism doesn't bother me... people think what they think, and you know, it's their right, in America."

I looked at him again. I didn't believe him for a second, but his gaze was steady. I had the feeling that he'd said that very same phrase many times before.

Michele nodded. "Sometimes it's hard, but you know, we have two beautiful girls. I call them my 'cafe au lait' girls."

Michele is Danny's opposite; blond, blue-eyed, and a nonstop talker in a rapid, accented English. They'd met in Germany, while Danny was in the army. Now Danny is a high school ROTC instructor, and Michele works for an electronics company.

We sat in one of the Vancouver Island Ferry's luxurious lobbies overlooking the water. The chairs were upholstered blue, the carpet blue with green swirls. The Bay of San Juan de Feucha passed by the windows like a nature documentary playing on a bank of TVs in an appliance store.

They'd been an amazing number of miles, skimming national parks and rushing along freeways.

"I could ride all day," Danny told me. "And we sometimes do. But often that's because we don't have the kind of time that you do. And we're pushing it a little hard some days."

We walked up to the observation deck on the roof of the ferry. Vancouver Island was hidden from view by the scattering of other, smaller islands, most of them uninhabited.

"I'm proud of my wife," he added. Michele was chatting with another woman on the observation deck. "I wish she would learn to ride. She's held up very well on this trip, for long hours. But if she'd learn to ride I know she'd like it so much better."

"I could learn to ride," Michele told me later. "But Danny's bikes are so big. I need something smaller." She laughed and added, "I'm afraid to get another bike because when Danny gets a bike he never sells it. So we'll have it forever."

We looked over the railing to the sea and Danny said they should have skipped Vancouver Island. I knew what he meant. It was too large to explore in a short time, and Victoria had the ambiance of a movie set: pretty and expensive, but without a personality of its own.

"How many miles are you doing a day?" Danny asked.

I told him I didn't know. "I ride anywhere between 4 and 12 hours, whatever it works out to be," I answered.

The amount of miles I ride doesn't really matter to me. Actually, I'm afraid that if I started counting and keeping track, the number of miles would become more important than what I see on my way. But Danny likes the miles.

"He could ride forever," said Michele, and rolled her eyes.

"No, I can't ride forever," said Danny, and joked, "I only wish I could ride forever." They both laughed.

Danny started talking about tours he'd taken, and day trips. He said he'd start in the morning and do as much as 400 miles before he'd come home in the afternoon.

"In Germany my friends and I used to ride for long stretches of time, just to see how long we could ride without going crazy, 'cause, you know, you can go crazy after a while, and the road seems to go on forever, just a line in the middle... it takes stamina, and discipline, and you have to be strong mentally and physically. Some people think riding is nothing, but they don't know, not until they try it."

"I don't ride enough any more," he continued. "I'm on a year-round schedule at work, and of course we have the girls at home. They're staying with family while we're gone."

"How is it, teaching ROTC to high school students?" I asked.

"I like teenagers -- and I'll tell you, I'm glad I have girls because if the girls in my classes are any indication of the future, the next generation will be run by women. The boys are just lazy, getting by, while the girls are the go-getters. They're the leaders in everything."

Danny and Michele's two girls are pre-teenagers. "Do they have a hard time?" I asked.

Michele said no. "They're sharp, you know," she responded in her slightly German, slightly Mississippi accent. "They've learned to deal."

I guessed that she meant they'd learned to deal with the racism at school. But Jackson, I kept thinking. It must be intolerable. Unless they're extremely pretty. I looked at Danny and Michele. Danny is a handsome man -- tall, with dark skin and nice features. Michelle is pretty -- tall, slender, with very light skin... they must be very pretty girls. Tall, cafe au lait girls.

I had to admire them. It is easy to be attracted to the exotic opposite. But it seems to me that to make a life with someone so extremely physically and culturally different takes special determination, and an unusually strong awareness of the love and respect necessary to be a couple.

"Where are you going next?" asked Michelle.

We were all going to Ossoyos, but I was taking backroads and they were taking the highway. When it was time to go we said our goodbyes, and that maybe we'd see each other in Ossoyos.

I stopped to eat at a fruitstand in the flatlands and then headed up the Canadian Rockies, which from the flats seemed an impenetrable wall of rock and pine trees.

I stopped at the "last chance" gas station, and a couple on a Goldwing waved and beeped, and pulled up next to me. It was Danny and Michele.

"What are you doing here?" I asked. I had imagined they'd be way ahead of me.

"There was a traffic jam, and a horrible ride around Vancouver. We couldn't even see anything," said Michele.

"We're going to lunch now," said Danny. "Would you like to join us? Then maybe we could ride together."

I thought about those steep hills, their Goldwing and my Ural, and Danny's obsession with miles. I'd definitely hold them up. We decided that I'd go ahead and they'd catch up, and we'd ride together after the long uphill stretch. We couldn't lose each other since there was only one road through the mountains. And I'd already had my lunch at the fruitstand.

It was a good choice. The Ural chugged up the steep hills at between 40 and 45 mph. I'd changed the needle clips in the carbs on Vancouver Island, so I was a little worried I'd have to do it again before I reached the top, as the air became thinner and the bike ran leaner.

I installed myself a little way behind a camper going about my speed and relaxed, enjoying the views of sheer rock cliffs and pine trees from dizzying heights.

I coasted down the other side of the Rockies until I saw a river. I parked the Ural so that Danny and Michele could see it from the road and went for a swim. The water was ice cold but shallow, and noisy from rushing over the smooth, round rocks. This was a roadside rest area, but the noise of the water and the thicket of pine trees isolated me from traffic. I stretched out to dry on a large flat rock and felt miles from civilization.

Danny and Michele caught up to me in Princeton, where we gassed up and continued down the east side of the rockies. And then in front of us the road smoothed itself into a ribbon of gray asphalt following the contours of bare dry hills. It was like the ribbon from a gift that has been untied and floats gently to the ground, landing in smooth curves and undulations. It made for roller coaster riding through scrub and sagebrush that in daytime would have baked us in the sun. But it was evening and the sun was setting behind the western hills that turned orange as I rode along. The Ural flew, and I was just along for the ride. As we coasted down a hill I let out a loud "yahoo!" and stretched my left arm high into the air. In my mirror I saw Danny and Michele put their arms up in answer.

This is what it's all about... roads like this... evenings like this. It's like having wings, it's like being buoyant, not bound by the laws of gravity. The air was cool and dry. The color of the sky was streaked with blood red, then orange, then pink sherbet, then a blue that deepened each time I looked at it.

I wanted it to last forever.

I was flying downhill and the Ural's horn beeped like the Roadrunner cartoon character: "beep beep, beeeeeeep, eeep, eep beeeeee. Nwueeeeeeep."

In Ossoyos we pulled into a Shell station to gas up before we looked for a campground. "Fantastic ride," said Danny.

Michele looked at the ground and said, "Oh, look, is that you leaking something?"

Shit.

Gas tank number two.

After a night on the edge of Lake Ossoyos, Michele and Danny said good-bye. "We're sorry to leave you," said Michele. "Visit us in Jackson," she said, and they rode away.

There was no answer when I called Randy, the Ural mechanic. His kids were with their grandmother at Disneyland, and I'd remembered that he'd told me he was taking one of his last weekends as a free man to do a major ride. Then I tried Bob Gerend, the owner of Ural in Seattle. He was on the road at a motorcycle show. Finally I called Bob's partner, Tom Lynott, at home.

"Can't you get somebody to weld it?" he said. "Bobette and I have a wedding shower to go to."

But neither of the welders in town did gas tanks.

"I'd rather not," said the first welder. "I've already blown off my knee doing a job like that."

The other one just laughed, and shook his head.

The next evening while I was making dinner at my picnic table between a retired couple in a fancy trailer and a young family in a large tent, Tom and Bobette arrived. They got out of their white car, smiling, as if I would be happy to see them. Okay, so I'm ungrateful, but Tom was wearing white tennis shorts and a t-shirt that looked pressed. Nobody who is going to fix a machine wears white tennis shorts. I guess I should have been happy to get a new gas tank, but I wanted Randy. He'd be wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, ready to find the problem. There was something wrong with the connection between the frame and the tank. I had been more than willing to wait until the next day, for Randy to come and fix it for good, or at least to tell me what to do. But it looked like I had no choice.

Tom and I surrounded the bolt with rubber washers as I tried to explain that replacing the tank wouldn't work, that it would happen again soon.

"Well, we'll put more rubber washers on, to cushion it," Tom said.

I tried to think of what Randy would do at this point, and picked another bolt from Bobette's outstretched palm. Her long nails were polished, and gleamed over the tips of her fingers.

Randy might have put more washers on it too. Or maybe he'd just cushion the bottom of it with something, and strap it down with a bungee cord. But there was a bracket underneath that would bump, and probably crack it even earlier. I was stumped.

"Maybe Randy has an idea for a solution," Tom continued. "We'll talk about it as soon as he comes in tomorrow."

Yeah, right, I thought. Like that was going to help me now. Maybe I'd get a few hundred miles. Maybe a thousand. And I'd be a lot farther away from Randy then.

I had to hand it to Tom and Bobette for coming, though. They were getting married the next weekend, and had driven seven hours to get the new tank to me. Why was I being so ungrateful? I felt guilty about it, but I also felt an ominous sense of impending disaster.

When we were done, they rushed off. I looked at the gas tank. I knew it would crack again. I just didn't know when.

I left at 9:00 the next morning. Just out of Ossoyos a cop raced by, siren blasting. I jumped, and had to pull over just to catch my breath. I realized that I was tense about the gas tank and about the carburetors. The bike had been difficult to start for some reason. I thought maybe it was the clip settings in the carburetor. They needed to be set a notch lower, but I was reluctant to adjust them. Laziness, and lack of confidence.

The road ascended slowly, and the engine gulped for more gas. I kept checking for a leak, looking at the top of the air filter. There wasn't one. But I'd have to adjust those clips. I wondered about the heat, and worried a little about vapor lock and paid no attention to the scenery.

The cop had been racing to the scene of an accident.

"No injuries," said the guy holding the stop sign. "But it'll be a while."

I pulled over beside him and adjusted the level of the clips on the needles. He asked a lot of questions.

"Good for you," he said, when I confirmed that, yes, I was traveling alone.

"I'm at the Western hotel in Grand Forks later, if you want a shower and a rest," he offered.

It was an easy offer to refuse.

I rode on into the hills again, slowing at the entrance to a small town. I glanced down and saw what I had been expecting -- gas pooling in the lid of the air filter. I turned off the engine and rolled to a stop.

"Welcome to Greenwood," a sign read. "The Smallest City in British Columbia."

Index | Dispatch 9