Motorcycle Diary

In the summer of 1968 I rode my tiny, aging (pitiful, really) Honda 160cc motorcycle across southern Kansas and up through eastern Colorado to Boulder, chasing Faye Knappenberger, a girl who I had become infatuated with and who had moved to Boulder to begin her freshman year at the University of Colorado. It was one of the stupidest things I’ve probably ever done, but certainly didn’t seem so at the time. (I was then at the height of my stupid period. It lasted for a couple of decades.) My motorcycle couldn’t go over about 50 mph, and I had to put oil in it at every fill-up. About 40 miles west of Wichita, near Kingman, on US54, I was overtaken by my grandparents – a surprise that I only later realized was very much a planned encounter (by them, and probably my parents) – and they took me into Kingman and bought me lunch. I spent that night camping out in my one-person pup-tent in a campground somewhere around Garden City on US50, stark as I recall, with no lake or trees or much of anything except the bare ground – or maybe that was just the way I was feeling at the time.

Somehow I made it to Boulder late the next day. Faye had already, after only a couple of weeks, slid into a college life that didn’t have much room for me. I was allowed to stay in her apartment, on my own, but all I remember was going to sleep each night listening to her roommate and boyfriend having noisy sex through the too-thin wall between our rooms. I don’t know where Faye was. Off somewhere else, probably with someone else, though I was my usual oblivious. She did let me drive her Austin Healy 3000 (only coincidentally yellow like my miserable Honda 160). One of my only memories of my two weeks or so there was pulling up to a grocery store in the 3000 and waiting in the parking lot, listening to the radio until Simon and Garfunkle’s “Cecelia” stopped playing (“Cecelia, you’re breaking my heart / You’re shaking my confidence daily”). I had no idea at the time why the song resonated. I spent most of my time alone at The Sink bar (a hippy dive back then, pretty much mainstream today), eating French fries and drinking beer, the only affordable meal on a daily basis.

At some point – too late, of course – I realized I was neither needed nor wanted. Faye had a whole new cadre of college friends (and probably lovers) of which I, the drop-out, wasn’t a part. One day I left. I don’t know if I even told Faye or if she even knew. I’m pretty sure she didn’t care. I never heard from or about her again. I filled the gas tank of my appropriately pathetic Honda 160 and headed down US36 to Denver and merged onto I-70E. My gas mileage was better than my oil mileage, and somewhere around Limon, in eastern Colorado, a desolate landscape, the piston in my motorcycle seized, a sonic clanging of metal on metal and a cloud of black smoke, and I was suddenly stranded on the shoulder of the interstate. Somehow I got myself and the bike into Limon, Colorado. I phoned my parents (collect) in Wichita. They could have – and probably should have – told me to work it out for myself. Instead, they rented a U-Haul trailer and headed out west to Limon. They spent the night in Oakley, in western Kansas. I spent the night in Limon, in a 1950s motel of half a dozen rooms, having dinner at an adjoining café, next to a filling station, the only establishments on that barren desert prairie. There was no radio or TV in the motel. I stayed up late, drinking water, all I had, and reading the whole of the book of Ecclesiastes (thank you, Gideons): “In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be” (11:3).

The mechanic showed me the remains of the piston from my dead Honda 160. It looked like a mangled, burned, melted, metallic Rorschach test. I tried to take some meaning from it. I couldn’t.