Day 40 in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.
Today Nathan and I took a motorcycle ride out west of town into the foothills past Carter Lake and up to where the public road ends at Pinewood Reservoir. The hairpin turns up (and back down!) the mountain make for a slightly too-exhilarating ride for my taste, but it’s worth it for this view.
And yes, that’s snow! There isn’t any left in Loveland from last week’s storm, but it’s still hanging around at slightly higher elevations.
Day seventeen in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.
We love the lunch buffet at Nepal’s in Estes Park – plenty for hungry vegetarians, and the naan is so good. Unfortunately since last October and until this coming Memorial Day, Highway 34 from Loveland to Estes through Big Thompson Canyon has been closed. Which means we have to go quite a bit out of our way through Longmont and Lyons on Highway 36 to get back around to Estes Park.
But today we took the time on a beautiful spring day and made a motorcycle ride of it.
This riverwalk through Estes Park is a beautiful way to get around town away from the noisy street traffic. That’s Nepal’s in the background. And that’s one satisfied Nepal’s lunch buffet customer in the foreground.
Just across the street from Nepal’s, further down the riverwalk. Once we saw some guys tubing down this river, when it was higher and flowing even faster than this.
Minnesota motorcycle season started shockingly early in 2012. So after a couple years of borrowing or renting motorcycles for the occasional day trip with my Boomer biker parents, Nathan and I decided that 2012 was the year to buy one for ourselves. In March – yes, March! – on a sunny, warm spring day, we brought home a 2002 Yamaha Virago 250. Black, shiny, classic.
And we rode. Friday night dates, weekend rambles, and one four-day getaway to the North Shore, just the two of us, the road, the green earth, the wide living sky, the water and the trees, the friendly towns and quaint cafes.
There are many drug-free ways to free the mind, to unwind the soul and dip in a refreshing stream of ideas and impressions. But I have found nothing that compares to riding on the back of a motorcycle behind my best beloved, my denim-clad knees cutting into the clean wind, my booted feet resting solidly on the pegs. Riding with Nathan is a delightful blend of solitude and togetherness.
This year, we followed a dream that led us west, away from free and easy childcare (namely, our parents), towards climbing mountain roads – and therefore, away from child-free rides on a low-powered motorcycle, towards Nathan riding solo or with one of the kids on the bigger dual-purpose bike he recently bought.
So this week we pulled the Virago out of the garage to take some photos and make a Craigslist ad. Together we shined it up with soft cloths, and I said I felt sad. But as we talked and remembered that we had only bought the bike last year, I was comforted to realize how well we spent that time. We packed a lot of memories into that riding season, and I know we won’t sell them with the motorcycle.
In the future, only a few years from now when the kids are a little older, the two of us will probably ride regularly together again. And then, if we are still living in Colorado, our Friday night rides will be more majestic and adventurous than back roads through farm fields and prairie.
But whatever the future holds, farewell to the Virago means farewell to a chapter in our lives. A profoundly good and well-lived chapter, one I will read again from time to time in my memories, the photos we took, even the songs and poems I wrote in that larger-than-life, incredibly long Minnesota motorcycling season of 2012.
I posted a rough recording of one of those songs here. And below, a poem. (Instructional moment for non-bikers: in rude and sexist biker lingo, riding on the back of a motorcycle is called “riding bitch.”)
Riding Bitch, Refined
7/12/12 Julia Tindall Bloom
Viewed from the back of a bike
The world is poetry
Cows are bovine mother figures
The road is a ribbon
Every sparrow is joy embodied.
The retiree on his riding lawnmower
Is turning over Keats or Kerouac in his fertile mind
And the biker with whom we just traded the low sign
Is rolling through The Moldau in his memory
Because nothing else would do
As a soundtrack for this movie.
Note: I think I always associate Bedrich Smetana’s The Moldau with the road (even though it’s about a river) because my dad played it in our car’s cassette player when I was young and we were traveling. Here’s a link.
It’s April in Minnesota and our green breathing earth is covered with snow. But I still believe . . .
Lyrics:
Everywhere we look it seems that
Everyone has better things
to say to one another than the things we tell each other
Everything feels old and faded
Like those jeans that were your favorite
The ones with patches like the patches we’ve made for each other
but then we go
Out on the road
with the wind in our clothes
the sky overhead
and the green breathing earth
all around us
Every time it rains I tell myself
That somewhere something’s growing
And when I step outside tomorrow the world will be so clean
Every day you look at me like
Everything is new and though
I can’t believe, I still believe, I hold you in my arms
and then we go
Out on the road
with the wind in our clothes
the sky overhead
and the green breathing earth
all around us
Julia Bloom 