Editor’s note: In these middle aged riders’ view, the staggering velocity of the 20th century was not just historically weird. It had been unsettling.

Second Editor’s Note: Marlow’s tale of the Four Corners has been with me for several years. I am a firm believer that the saga of that epic ride on two wheels is one of the most poignant expressions of life and aging I have ever read. In deference to the integrity of Marlow’s narrative, I have been posting these chapters direct to the Socotra website with an eye to compiling them as a stand-alone book when Marlow considers the time to be right. It is his story, not mine, but I wanted to share with you Marlow’s thoughts about the power of nature this morning. It reminds me powerfully of a story that Uncle Dick the bomber pilot told of his last mission over Germany with the Mighty Eighth: they could see the target slowly rise on the horizon before them as they flew east from Anglia, and approached a seething cauldron of fire above the synthetic fuel plant that was assigned as Buzzin Betsy’s target that day: a blackhead of angry flashing energy on the nose ahead, the storm cloud of high explosive energy rising until it encompassed the whole universe, turning the final approach with the Norden Bombsite guiding the four engined bomber from the IP, and then, finally, the bombs are away and the B-17 leaps skyward in relief, and Dick could grab the controls back and jink wildly away from the high explosive hell above the target. Marlow will show you this morning how much more powerful our earth can be all on her own.

– Vic

Man had gone from horse-drawn plows and 40 year lifespans, to mid-century mushroom cloud blooms over two Asian cities, followed by worldwide jet travel for the masses and 80 year life spans in the blink of an eye. Could man survive these gains’ sudden reversal?

Their former military occupations had made them seek to be ready for any and all worst-case conditions. What they had seen thus far on their ride through the desolate back country were faint suggestions that such a reversal might be near, if not underway.

Perhaps they were becoming fearful that they were unprepared for their own survival during such a reversion. Was the only way for man to gain some control of his specie’s mad trajectory to question and test the many fundamental assumptions underlying civilized urban life? More than just learning how to deal with these things was required. They had to instinctively know how to react.

In this light, fear could be a powerful and useful survival tool. Consequently, they rode their fears like fast horses.

Their path that day was about to run through a terrain filled with vicious life-or-death conditions and unforeseeable danger.
– Marlow journal entry

Since they appeared on the American scene during the late 1940s, Baby Boomer generation members have tried to live at the edges. Life has lots of edges with many being negative, truly crazy or self-destructive. Living or even visiting there can exact a heavy price for the privilege. Many of them, especially the thrill seekers, paid the ultimate price like Jimi Hendrix.

Life had repeatedly revealed to the riders that a bright line separated average folk from the winners. Successful people tended to be quite edgy about what they do. Their achievements came from an abiding willingness to focus on the edge part, not the middle part of life’s endeavors whether it was quality, customer service, costs etc.

Due to his native risk tolerance, Marlow was an edgeling — one who gravitated towards the edges. Regrettably this penchant led him and the group into a spot of trouble this day.

——————-

After chatting up other bikers both foreign and domestic at the base of the Devil’s Tower and allowing their bikes to dry off a bit after the earlier thundershower, the trio headed out en route big sky country.

Their luck held as they avoided many a thunderhead as the temperatures dropped from the mid 80s into the high 60s. Crossing over the third and final state border for the day, they entered that state’s southeasternmost corner. Needing only one more tankful of premium to complete the day’s riding, they gassed up their bikes at a small Sinclair gas station in Alzada.

Upon discovering that Marlow and Augustus were retired military, the station attendant informed them that the town, whose name meant powerful and complete, was briefly in the news in 1997 when a B-1 bomber crashed nearby.

As they rode north along US 212, there were scads of large hay rolls in the fields. One enterprising farmer has stacked his rolls and arranged them in various architectural shapes and designs. They should have stopped several times to photograph these creations, one of which bore a striking resemblance to the Stonehenge monoliths. The threatening skies, however, spurred the riders to keep moving.

Less than five minutes after they passed the last of this farmer’s artful creations, Marlow was hit square in his begoggled left eye by a huge flying insect. The force of the impact snapped his head back. His vision was obscured. When he finally scraped his goggles clear of the huge locust’s carcass and guts, they unwittingly rolled through the portico of the Devil’s Cathedral.

With eyesight restored. Marlow saw in the distance more storm clouds. As the road meandered, they appeared to shift from one side of their intended course to the other, so they pressed on. While not entirely harmless, these clouds appeared to contain no lightning (see Augustus’s photo below).

After these clouds had shifted back and forth two more times as the road twisted and turned, they crested a hill and entered a bowl-like depression in the landscape. At that very same moment, they had these thoughts when Mother Nature revealed a black-as-night, boiling cauldron directly along their path:

Marlow to himself: “These storms are normally small in diameter. We should be able to ride through it in five minutes or so.”

Rex remarked over his CB: “Looks like we’re about to enter the abyss.”

Augustus responded: “No shit.”

As they passed through the cathedral’s narthex and vestibule, they strangely felt no temperature drop. They naively took that as a good sign that the storm would be weak and small. The lightning strikes increased somewhat in frequency in the distance. To their good fortune the bolts seemed to remain miles away from their track based on the time it took their rumbles to arrive at their ears.

No more than ninety seconds later as they passed by the first few rows of the church’s rear pews, the storm lashed out and started smashing them hard. Quartering wind gusts of 40 MPH hit them from both sides, big rain drops pounded them and lightning strikes became near continuous and cacophonously close.

Marlow had already slowed their pace from 75 MPH to 60, when the hail started in earnest. They were dead center in the nave now.

The hail swiftly grew larger in diameter and intensity. With each passing tenth of a mile it increased from pea sized to dime, nickel, and then quarter. Their pace slackened to 40 and then 30 MPH.

Microburst downdrafts in excess of 100 MPH shook and threw them about in this dingy keep. The nave’s walls and columns were now visible — coal black and white lightening striped. This unholy house was made of poisonous, reeking black-copper slag. It was a Dantesque mine shaft.

When a series of wind blasts rocked them instantly 20 feet back and forth across the narrow road, Marlow had had enough. He switched his flashers on, hastily commenced braking and brought the pack to a halt.

They were on the altar.

They placed their heads down on their gas tanks and hung onto their bikes. Recurring wind explosions jarringly levered their 1000 pound heavy bikes almost over the edge of the road into the deep water-filled ditches below. The hail was now occasionally half dollar sized and swiftly accumulating to over an inch in depth underneath their boots. This exacerbated their inability to remain upright against the winds.

In between these bursts, they peaked at the design of the Devil’s place of worship. It was everything opposite of gothic but with a structure nonetheless. In the place of pretty windows of stained and painted glass given by rich patricians in their own honor were gaping holes of darkness from which sprang howls from hell. Flying buttresses of lightening supported a vaulted ceiling that leaned and strained at malevolently mad angles as Gaudi’s cathedral did in Barcelona.

Their curiosity came at a cost – the beast scourged their faces. Was the Devil preparing them for a ritual on his altar? Perhaps.

Wicked wind down blast energies and lightning strikes struck them dumb and filled them with an almighty fear. Twice these microbursts pulsed the hail so hard against the pavement that it looked like bucketsful of diamonds were being thrown upwards at their faces.

The thunder claps were arriving near coincidently with the skybolt fire flashes, rolling and reverberating through the infernal church’s side aisles. They were parked, kickstands down, on the right edge of the raised bermless road. Several times after a blindingly close, white flash strike, there was the fresh scent of ozone in the air. Their drenched hair tried to stand up on its ends.

What happened next can only be described as serial acts of divine mercy.

Traveling in the opposite direction, an unmarked, semi-tractor and trailer slowly appeared and silently glided up next to them. Its halt was accompanied by a softly eerie screeching. Its presence provided them momentary respite from the wind blasts and hail pulverization. Its faceless driver rolled down his window and shouted,

“You can ride this out in my cab”

They dejectedly shouted back into the howling winds, “No, but thanks.”

Without the riders correcting for the wind blasts, the wind gusts would have pushed their unmoored bikes over into the ditch.

The trucker tarried a bit longer before gradually moving southward again.

A large RV approached them from the rear and stopped just behind them, illuminating their near field of view. With this limited protection, they could now better ascertain the waxing and waning of the storm. The hail size and intensity lessened but was replaced by a rainfall hammering that equaled what one experiences under a roaring waterfall.

Still in the murk, they tentatively rose up from their saddles to console and consult with one another, when a state trooper appeared from behind the RV.

“You better move along if you don’t want to be hit by lightning.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” Augustus muttered softly.

After gathering themselves, they remounted and exited the storm after just two more miles of riding. It took the remaining 100 miles to partially dry out and reach the day’s destination of Miles City.

———————–

Cable TV’s Weather Channel science told them later that evening that they had been drenched, pummeled, and nearly electrocuted multiple times by a supercell thunderstorm.

The riders disagreed.

In their minds, Mother Nature specially creates these temporary edifices in a forge of the depraved when she feels the need to teach humans not to mess around with her. They visited one such satanic house of worship that Sunday afternoon.

After exiting that mineral world hell hole, they felt soft, squidgy, alien, and near blind and deaf. They were dripping, panting and shell shocked for a long time after. Despite a local diner’s supper of comfort food, they had trouble falling asleep for hours that night despite repeated doses of Augustus’s blue elixir.

Marlow was up well past 2 AM contemplating and writing about these five short minutes of terror.

Even now Marlow still experiences an odd exhilaration when he recalls those brief moments. He remains peculiarly entranced by this evil tunnel’s white gold veins of bright fire and its smells of Old Testament stone that hadn’t felt air or seen light for more than a billion years.

Perhaps the gods’ reasons for their surprise call to church were simple. If the root of all evil is the love of money, then this worship hole was where the demons planted the taproot that day. Was their sin of a bargain basement variety, a quotidian avarice for a digital camera found in the port-a-potty at the Devils’ Tower?

Who knows? All that they truly know is that they were blessed not to have self-sacrificed themselves on the Devil’s Cathedral altar table with its blinding skybolts and fire fountains.

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