Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Around the Clubhouse Turn
MOST PEOPLE DON'T
die one day. Failures accumulate: teeth, kidneys, gall bladder, appendix,
uterus, ovaries, prostate, joints, pancreas, colon, gums, heart, lungs, skin—like a fire sale,
everything must go. A man can feel wrung out at thirty-five if he's sunburned, windbent, beer-
funked, broke and indebted. One day in the charter trade, a fat man came up the stern ladder
in apparent pulmonary complexity. He was twenty-something and breathing hard.
“Are you in trouble?” I asked.
“No,” replied his diamond-studded wife. “He's not used to so much exercise.” He'd snorkeled
seven minutes. At a hundred forty pounds with no body fat I sometimes swam an open ocean
mile just to blow off steam, so I was wealthy next to the guy ten years younger who couldn't
even see his peepee. But at the grocery store he could fill a cart with anything he wanted—two
carts—and I couldn't, until I could. Hungry people generally live longer, but hungry isn't happy,
and pangs become chronic. Or maybe a growing appetite was the first symptom of crazy youth
fading away.
At a social event, an interviewer asked George Burns at ninety-seven if he was glad to be
there. Sure it was a setup, a good one. George Burns twirled his cigar. “At my age you're glad to
be anywhere.” He lived to a hundred, but how much had he seen pass away as he still quipped
with the best of them? Inventory tends to shrink on friends, abilities and what will last. What's
the compensation?
Laying it over in a sweep and farther over into a curve connects the world to the self,
matches speed with angle, balances centrifugal force keeping the bike up and centripetal force
holding it to the road. Thoughts are gyroscopic, mortality and acceleration engage in sweet
symbiosis, up and out on a gentle twist, goosing reality to seventy-five at four grand.
Into the straightaway the cosmic/mechanical interface clarifies life. Memory fragments
tumble with simple labels: youth, aging and the time in between and maybe what's left and how
much. Painfully obvious to aging persons is the complexity of maintenance, till it's easy to spec-
ulate on what component will fail and take you out.
The 90s opened on a new Sturgis. Harley had a Sturgis in '83 to debut the Kevlar belt as
secondary drive—the belt that turns the back wheel, in this case replacing the chain. No Stur-
gis followed till '91. It looked like a Sportster or Super Glide with external shocks, and like a
Sturgis, black and orange with the big engine. It prototyped the Dyna series, attempting agility
in a heavy cruiser.
