Somewhere on Route 66 . . .

I’m exhausted and in pain but it’s the kind of pain that feels really good.   I’ve been out since dawn riding my motorcycle on old Rt. 66, through the various tiny farm towns that dot the map every twenty miles or so, trying to clear my mind and perform penance on my body of all the detritus of this past week.  Exhausting and painful because riding Miss Lucinda is a physical act.  She’s a bare bones bobber, flat black, loud and low to the ground, with no wind screen for protection against Oklahoma wind and road grit and pesky bugs.  Any speed above 55mph wrenches my head and neck and body backwards that to let go of the handlebars would be to fly off the back.  Her seat is hard, and my bony ass hurts very much.  Riding Lucinda is a singular pursuit that takes all my concentration and a fair amount of physical stamina.  But the end result is usually a detoxification of the mind and aching body . . . a prolonged meditation and reorganization. 

As I came up around a bend near Chandler, I saw the most amazing metallic glimmer . . . a silvery sphere capped with the scales of shiny sheet-metal fragments.  I pulled off the road and was greeted by a man selling cantaloupes and watermelons from an old Dodge pickup.  He said it was a barn that a man built sixty years ago to store hay and grain and that he chose the design because he thought it would survive a tornado.  The melon farmer went on to say that the old man was right . . . that a few years after he built the barn it took a direct hit from a tornado and survived.  But that tragically a few years later the old man died in its entrance in a forklift accident, right where I was standing.   

"asleep at the wheel" singing "rt. 66":

http://youtu.be/vifUaZQL8pc