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If only my brother and his family had also been there!
The Road to Delight
We had another of the spring’s clear, mild Saturdays. Dad suggested that we take a motorcycle picnic. He certainly did not have to twist my arm. Mom went along with the idea as well.
Dad and I went outside and polished up his Kawasaki Vulcan and the little no-name Chinese scooter. We then rode into town to fuel the bikes and get some cold soft drinks. As we exited the grocery store, a man commented on how we looked like we were about to take a ride. We told him about our plans. He told us to be safe. Bikes do attract attention.
Back home Mom had prepared a picnic lunch. The lunch and drinks went into two soft-sided cooler bags. Dad and I secured these to the pillion seat of the scooter. My camera bag fit into the scooter’s luggage box. Mom would naturally ride behind Dad on the Kawasaki. We said goodbye to Mom and Dad’s dog and headed out.
We rode down tertiary highways and county roads beneath cloudless blue skies. Temperatures in the upper seventies made perfect shirt-sleeve weather, though Mom and I wore light jackets to protect from the breeze. Now and then we met others on bikes. They usually waved at us. I had never felt like a member of the motorcycle riding fraternity before that day.
Sometimes Mom or Dad would point at some feature to the side of the road. Horses were as always one of Mom’s favorite sights. Dad carefully avoided the rough spots in the road to give Mom the best possible ride. We were in no big hurry. Now and then Dad had us pull over to let some impatient-looking vehicle pass. At one point he stopped for no immediately-apparent reason. It turned out that he and Mom had spotted some unusual cone flowers beside the road. Dad took the opportunity to make sure the lunch was still secured behind me.
Our destination was an old former church camp ground that we had visited before. As we approached it we saw that someone was already there. Dad did not stop. A little further on he did stop and said that we would double back to a road we had recently passed.
I had never gone down this road before. The maps I had seen told me that there was a settlement there. I was not prepared for how big and dense this settlement was. Usually little roads like this have only a few houses dotted here and there. This stretch had dozens of houses and trailers that I had never seen before.
The road came out onto a highway near the river. As we crossed the river on the highway bridge, Mom observed cars down by the water. Dad decided to see if there was a good way nearby to get down to the river so that we could picnic there. I did not hear any of this conversation, of course. I just saw Dad veer suddenly down a turnoff to the left. I trustingly followed.
The turnoff turned out not to be a road. It was a primitive track two deep ruts wide. The ruts were lined with slippery sand and gravel, mud, puddles, and clusters of rocks. We bounced down the steep track at little more than a walk, giving the throttles almost no gas, legs extended to keep from laying over. I began to wish I had brought an older pair of shoes. It was the sort of track one usually rode trail bikes on—and we were attempting it on a big street machine and a commuter scooter.
After a bit Dad decided to stop and turn around. Mom carefully dismounted and walked back out of the way. I backed up to give Dad room. He began gingerly moving forward and backward, up on one trailside bank and then on the other, turning just a bit each time. I was impressed by how he turned the huge bike around on a trail barely wider than the bike was long. After he squeezed by I manhandled my own ride around.
Mom got back on behind Dad and we headed uphill toward the road. I realized too late that I had run into the rougher of the two ruts. With no way of getting over, I gunned the engine a bit to bounce over obstacles and hoped for the best. We made it up to the road safely.
At this point we were not many miles from the town of Delight. We decided to go there and try the picnic tables we had seen near the school on an earlier visit. Getting there meant spending more time on the secondary highway than Dad had planned. The scooter I rode could only cruise at about fifty miles per hour. Still, it was a pretty day. The road was not too busy. We took off for Delight. The scooter’s little engine buzzed like a hornet as it wound itself up to highway speed.
In Delight we found the covered picnic tables by the school unoccupied. After the ride we had had, we felt that we had earned lunch. The air around the shaded tables felt wonderful.
After lunch I took my camera and roamed around the school grounds. Most small-town K-12 schools concentrate all the rooms into two or three buildings. The Delight school had clearly grown incrementally, with a number of small buildings of different vintages separated by grassy yards. It looked rather like a tiny college campus. The oldest building had a corner stone stating that it had been erected by the WPA in 1940. Nearby, a tiny anemometer spun in the breeze on the vocational agri building. An outside office door bore the name of Mr. Lamb, apparently the agri or shop teacher. It also had pictures of sheep by his name.
We loaded back up and swung by the grocery store to buy some more of that honey-roasted peanut butter that Dad has trouble finding near home. On a table just inside the door lay a brand-new rifle. It was being raffled by a local hunting club, with tickets going for a dollar or six chances for five. I hoped that no riff-raff would enter the rifle raffle.
We returned home the way we had come (minus the detour near the river, of course). On our way back along the densely-settled road we saw a number of people outside here and there, playing, sitting out, or working. Mom waved at them as we went by and got a few waves in return.
We found the campground where we had originally intended to picnic deserted. We stopped, stretched our legs, and got a drink of water. Long-distance cycle rides can dehydrate one surprisingly fast. We found some spiderwort flowers that were unlike the ones we usually saw. Dad crossed the road and looked in a large hollow tree there to see whether any animals lived in it. He pointed out minute bits of hair around the hollow that I would never have noticed. Dad would have made a great naturalist.
The trip back home continued without incident, apart from an uncomfortably near miss when a huge buzzard took off across the road right in front of Mom and Dad. After we got back home Dad and I fixed a flat tire on one of the cars. Later that evening we all ate out and rode around (not on motorcycles this time) admiring the countryside in the evening sunlight. It was beautiful, but it did not match the ride we had had that day.
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The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
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