Easy Rider Lives

Dinner tonight was comprised of bean soup, sourdough bread and Merlot. Conversation wended its way to the past, way past. I started waxing poetic about my adventures riding my little Yamaha R5 350 cross country in 1974. I think the interview we heard on Public Radio with Dennis Hopper the day before had opened the floodgates.



The night I saw the classic movie Easy Rider, I knew I had to ride a motorcycle across the Mississippi River. The fact that I didn't actually own a motorcycle and had never driven one was irrelevant. It took a couple of years but I did fulfill both requirements. My college years came to an end and just after my last class of the last day of school, I hopped on my packed motorcycle and headed off. I didn't even stick around for graduation ceremonies.



I set off from Portland, OR with two hundred bucks in my pocket, camping gear and a Rand McNally Road Atlas. My intent was to spend the majority of my time on two lane blacktop and I succeeded admirably. Along the way I met other bike riders to pal up with now and again but most nights were spent solo. I perfected a novel way of finding camping spots. If there was no obvious, official campground I'd go to the local police station and ask for suggestions. I managed to have police cruisers check on me throughout the night on more than one occasion.

My traverse of the Mississippi was over a small bridge near Winona Wisconsin. It wasn't the spectacular span of the Huey P. Long bridge in New Orleans that Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson rode across in the movie but it was The River and the song If Six Was Nine played in my head all the same. Onward I rode to the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusettes where I found a little apartment just up the road from Alice's Restaurant (of Arlo Guthrie fame,) a converted church. Even though I finally had a college degree, I was still hunting for waitress jobs. I landed one and spent that summer in New England. When fall came, it was time to turn around. I stocked up on spark plugs and hit the road back to Oregon. Along the way I met up with Darby, a Cape Cod wanderer. We shared our cross country adventure, he in his Jeep and me on my two wheels.



So after dinner and before dessert, I dug out my old, old, old snapshots of this era in my life and decided to post this memory to share. I really need to do another Big Road Trip one day soon.