Two Wheels West

You never know what you’ll find out about people. For most of his life Dad has known an older man in town named Buddy. Recently in conversation he learned something about Buddy that he had never known before. It seems that back in 1942, when Buddy was in his mid-teens, he had made a trip from Arkansas to California. On a motorcycle.

Buddy had an uncle in California who had arranged to purchase two bikes—a Harley and an Indian—in Arkansas for resale in California. With a war on and civilian automobile production ended for the duration, anything on wheels had become a valuable commodity. A motorcycle had the further attraction of using less rationed gasoline. The uncle had to get the goods to California. Two guys in Arkansas who wanted to head out that way to look for war work agreed to ferry the bikes. Buddy and another teenage friend of his went along as well.

They set off with gas ration cards, gas money—and not much else. They couldn’t afford to stay in motels. They had very little money for food. They didn’t even have any camping gear. The plan was simply to sleep under the stars beside the road at night. If one of the bikes broke down far from home…well, they just had to hope that didn’t happen.

Buddy remembers feeling very hungry along the way, since they could seldom afford to eat. They did manage to come up with money for one night in a motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Otherwise they slept wherever they could find a handy place to lie down.

As the days passed they grew more and more fatigued from hard riding in the heat, sleeping rough, and lack of meals. One day, while crossing a stretch of desert, they stopped to take a nap in a primitive roadside shelter. After a while the two teens bounced back and were all ready to go. Their older companions wanted to sleep longer. So the teens sneaked out and took off on one of the bikes.

As they rode they had a big laugh over the little trick they had played on their companions. Then it occurred to them that the other guys had all the ration cards and gas money. What if something happened and they lost track of each other and weren’t reunited? By the time the others found them, they were glad to see them again.

At some point one of the bikes experienced a snapped throttle cable. One of the guys repaired it with a cable borrowed from a car. The repair resulted in a throttle that could no longer be controlled as well as before. That’s not something you want to deal with on a motorcycle. But it kept them rolling, and that was what mattered.

The quartet took right at a week to reach the uncle’s place in California. Buddy recalls that his aunt sat the famished bikers down to one of the best meals they had ever had. Then the guys went to work in some of the region’s burgeoning war material plants.

The demand for labor was so great that the plants would take anyone with two hands. So this teenager soon got a job with few questions asked. It paid a dollar and a half an hour, the sort of wage Buddy could never have imagined making at home. For a few weeks all went beautifully.

Then Buddy got a letter from his mother instructing him to come back home to go to school. Buddy objected. Why should he mess with finishing school when he was already making good money? Then his mother sent another letter threatening to report him to the police as a runaway. Buddy realized that he couldn’t fight city hall and got a ticket back to Arkansas.

As far as I know, he has lived there ever since. But he still has those memories of that fantastic journey to California. To hear him talk, it must have been a blast, hunger, rough accommodations and all. A trip like that took a spirit of adventure that few seem to have today.

People like Buddy won’t be with us for a great many more years. It’s important that they tell us the stories they have to tell while they still can—and that we listen. How many stories have already been lost? Mom already wishes after hearing Buddy’s tale that she had heard her own father talk more about the similar journeys he made as a youth in the 1920s. Who knows what he could have told us?

Recently at church Dad and I talked about Buddy’s story with a biker in Dad’s congregation (Yes, some bikers go to churches. Some, like Dad, even pastor them!). He told us that he knew for a fact about others who had made motorcycle journeys west in the old days. Some of them were even women. I’d love to know their stories too.

An adventure like that makes all the difference in the way one sees the world, and the happier people in life have thrown caution to the wind at some point.
When you combine a reckless road trip with a basic need like finding a way to make a living, you get my kind of life, so I loved this and wish we had lots more of the impressions along the way. But you have to go out and HAVE some feelings or it's just words, huh?

I, too, occasionally remember we need to be getting old timers' stories down before that world is lost to dust.

I've got my guitar handy...I think I'm going to see what song is here from this story.

I'd be interested to see what you come up with!

In a recent story I wrote I imagined each principal character with a different theme song, although the songs didn't actually figure in the story.

That's a neat idea!
I'll bet it could be applied within a song, too: different riffs as different characters?
I'm just about to get in over my head!
I will, if I get something solid! It really started compelling me again while running the other night...I need to wrap up a story to get my music hat on fully, but hopefully that's done tonight!

Have some art! http://ceaseill.blogspot.com/2010/02/ar ... nvass.html

Who is the woman in the picture? I'm not someone who knows much about judging art, but I think you've captured an interesting, vaguely Mona Lisa-ish expression there.

I've heard of a number of different schemes that writers have used to establish things about their characters. For example, the original Scooby Doo characters could be seen as corresponding to the five senses:

Shaggy=taste (always hungry, always trying weird flavor combinations)
Scooby=smell (he's a dog, after all--and taste and smell are allied, just as Shag and Scoob are best buddies)
Fred=hearing (he's the group's leader and spokesman)
Velma=sight (she's the one who spots the most clues--and she's vulnerable to loss of sight)
Daphne=touch (a touchy-feely person who often grabs Fred's arm or Velma's shoulder when startled)

I've not worried too much about this sort of thing with characters I've developed, but as I wrote that one recent story I began associating some of them with songs. And then I found myself imagining "theme" songs for each of them. I'm doing another story now with some of the same characters and trying to do the same thing. It might suggest qualities to include in the characters.