GREENVILLE, N.C. — Traveling alone to visit my mother in east Tennessee on Father's Day weekend, I decided to go the way my dad might have gone — on a motorcycle.
My father did a lot of motorcycle riding in his 40s, possibly the manifestation of a midlife crisis. When I was 13 and going through the usual crises that boys suffer around that age, Dad sensed that it would do us both some good to suffer together for a few days.
We suffered on a 1970 Honda 350 all the way from Johnson City, Tenn., to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Our bonding was facilitated by the body-numbing vibration that only a high-revving, two-cylinder Japanese engine can provide.
As if that amount of suffering were not sufficient, a rain cloud — apparently traveling the same route — hit us with wind and water during the entire journey southward.
But as I mentioned in a column a few weeks ago, the time my father spent with me on that long and miserable ride was among the greatest gifts he ever gave to me.
Dad left us late last year, and I thought that riding one of his old motorcycles to Tennessee would be a nice way to remember our trip together 35 years ago.
It's about 350 miles from Greenville, N.C., to Johnson City, which is about the same distance Dad and I rode on the first leg of our trip before stopping for the night in Statesboro, Ga.
Dad's old 350 would go about 100 miles on a tank of gas. The old 450 I was riding the other night will do the same, but I stopped at 80-mile intervals. I didn't need fuel that often so much as I needed to regain the feeling in my lower extremities.
A Honda 450 offers about as much two-cylinder vibration as a 350, and my hind parts contain no more cushioning today than they did 35 years ago.
Whenever Dad and I talked about our trip, the thing he remembered most was how I couldn't resist making a few laps alone around the motel parking lot each time we stopped for the night. After all those miles as a passenger, I had a craving for controlling the throttle.
I can still see him on the motel balcony in Fort Lauderdale, resting his weary hands on the railing and shaking his head in disbelief as I rode past.
Refueling in Winston-Salem the other night — about the halfway point to my mother's house — I understood why my father was so amazed by my youthful exuberance after so many miles of riding.
I took some Ibuprofen and wondered how we could have possibly survived that long, exhausting ride without anti-inflammatory drugs.
Before rolling into my mother's driveway at 2 a.m., I spent the last 80 miles or so trying to determine how I might avoid riding that motorcycle back home.
As I parked the bike beside Dad's old pickup truck, the answer was revealed to me.
Two days later, cruising home in Dad's old pickup with his old motorcycle riding in the bed behind me, I saw a clear vision of my father standing again at that motel railing in Fort Lauderdale.
Only this time his head was nodding.
Mark Rutledge writes for The Daily Reflector in Greenville, N.C. E-mail mrutledge(at)coxnc.com.
