I love to ride in the early mornings for all of these reasons. The day that I left PA was an average July day, the sun rose large and red and the buggies got on the roads early. I kissed my parents and rode south west towards whatever it was the God had in store for me. The morning air seemed like it was ducted in from Eden.
I tried to listen to the CD's from Metropolitan Jonah but the way that it was skipping was making it impossible for me to understand it. I really didn't like being "wired" on the motorcycle anyway. I like listening to the bike and letting it work its magic in me. I was very happy that the bike was running well, it wasn't leaking oil and I was on my way. A very wise counselor once told me that I needed to do three important things in order to recharge.
1. Go to a place where no one knows you.
2. Go to a place where you have no responsibility.
3. Go to a place where no one can reach you.
The moment that I pulled on my helmet that morning I entered all three places at one time. I felt that over the next ten days or two weeks I would get the bulk of my sabbatical work done. I had been decompressing since the first week of July, now I had a lot of investigating to do.
Really, the Spirit of God had to do the investigating. My work was to stay in the process of opening new doors and allowing him into new places in my heart. My work was really to stop thinking about the spiritual path and make a more concerted effort to walk on it. I do that very well on the motorcycle.
There is something about a Harley that seems to sync with my body and slows me down. I feel like I begin to hibernate when I am on the bike, going into some kind of suspended animation where my vitals slow down and I enter some kind of a zone. This doesn't happen on a four cylinder sport bike. When I am on a fast motorcycle my adrenaline glands are constantly pouting fresh juice into my blood stream and I get off the bike exhausted. The Harley is different. She has a cadence that has been made famous and that V-Twin engine shakes in its rubber mounted frame just enough to let me know it is there and it becomes the Metronome for my day.
This is what makes mechanical problems on the Harley seem magnified. When you are in that state you can almost sense that something is wrong with the bike. It happened in New York a couple weeks before. I was riding and in the happy place when something seemed to let loose...just a little. It was really an indiscernible tremor that went through the bike that brought me up to operating speed. Then it happened again only this time it was a little more obvious. The next time I twisted the throttle the bike began to shake and buck like something from the rodeo.
I was alongside of a semi and it was all that I could do to wrestle the Harley to the side of the road and get her stopped. Now that was an adrenaline rush. It was hot and I was hotter. I didn't know what had just happened. It felt like something in the front end had loosened and it set up a near "tank slapper." I wasn't far from an exit so the bike and I limped off and I found a bit of shade in some New York neighborhood to try to see the problem. I looked for obvious things but found nothing. After doing all that I could and blessing the front end of the bike I tried her again. Don't ask me why, nothing was repaired but I rode away very slowly.
Things seemed ok. The bike seemed fine. Back to her correct tempo. I got back on the highway and accellerated carefully, slowly. 20, 25, 30, 35 all was well...when I got to 40 I felt that same small twinge that I had felt the first time and so I stopped accelerating and kept the throttle at 40mph. Now that is a little slow, especially on a highway filled with guys making their living moving stuff from one place to another in big trucks. When they went by me the wind swirled in a way that made me feel powerless. They were not happy that something as small as my bike and I were taking up a whole lane and only going 40mph. I didn't blame them. I wasn't any happier about it.
I thought I would try a little more speed and it worked for a few minutes until all hell broke loose and the mad bull was back underneath me trying to pitch me to the shoulder of the road. I held on, slowed down and cruised to an exit and into a gas station. After I turned into the station the bike began to get really grabby, power was there and then it wasn't, it began to make a squealing noise that was really disheartening. I thought that I had burned out my clutch (while this was incorrect it did prove to be quite prophetic) and I shut her down and coasted into some shade at the front of the station.
I looked in the Harley Atlas and found the nearest shop. Batavia NY, only a few miles away, well that was something anyway. Funny isn't it that Harley prints their own atlas with all of the shops clearly marked and their telephone numbers clearly listed...hmmmmmm.... I talked to the chief mechanic and described my situation complete with hand gestures that he couldn't see and sounds that he couldn't understand. Stan told me to go over to the bike and look at the drive belt...well, there is the problem...oh, boy, half the teeth on the serpentine drive belt were missing. I thought that was pretty impressive of Stan. These little twinges I had felt was the rear drive pulley shedding teeth off of my drive belt. I thought, "Oh, that's not so bad, a drive belt is like a chain and I just need a new one of those...I could do that myself. That is not what Stan thought, this is not going to be cheap Stan said, and he was right.
But, that was weeks ago and now on this day the bike was running like she should and I was in a very very good place trying to help the Spirit open up some rooms that needed his help. Then the shifter fell off. Well, it din't really fall off, it just stripped so that it was rotating on a shaft that it shouldn't have been rotating on and it was useless to me like this. The funny thing about it was that I figured all this out while doing a U turn on the highway because I had been going the wrong way for 20 miles. It was an interesting U turn with no shifter...oh good more semi's I thought to myself.
20 miles later I was back to the exit where I got on the highway and got off there because there was an abandoned gas station with shade and room to try to figure out the shifter issue. I wondered if this was going to be something that I would have to do every day, that is, fix something. I wondered how I could hear from God when I was hot and getting greasy and mad at the guy who sold me this motorcycle and looking for an aluminum can on the side of the road to cut up for shifter shims..I wondered why Stan didn't see this coming, he seemed to know everything about Harleys!
This was feeling a little bit too much like regular life. I didn't want regular life, I was on Sabbatical and this was not supposed to be that. I have had plenty of regular life and I was ready for some Sabbatical life. Actually, I wasn't yet ready for Sabbatical life, I later realized. I was still too busy thinking about this and that to realize that it was these kinds of judgments that kept most of the doors that I was trying to open for the Spirit, closed and locked.
I actually don't remember exactly how I felt after I got the shifter rigged back up and got on my way, I just remember that was a miserable day. It was hot, I wasn't making very good time and I was only in Maryland. This didn't feel like a Sabbatical, although I didn't know what it was supposed to feel like. I was not happy and I think that I told God something about it and wondered when I was going to have some spiritual experiences.
No comments:
Post a Comment