Suburbs like back country places cannot exist without roads. Country roads were and remain about connections while suburban ones are about isolated islands of safety and quiet away from the perceived peril and noise of the inner urban city.

For many motorcycle riders, suburban roads lead to boring houses with boring lawns and a boring life, hemmed in by suburban isolation. And that was where and why the inexorable call of the wild of back country blue highways came in for them. Absent trees, rivers, glens, glades, wildlife and real life, suburban dwelling riders have no hidden spaces where intrinsic human behaviors flourish and tests of wilderness merit and knowledge may be met and passed.

Suburbia’s monumental security and sameness is not just obscured by the night. Its false promises are stripped away by the darkness. Nighttime is a place of stark truths. The same streets one drives in the day, the same front yards and backyards and schoolyards, the half-finished streets that go nowhere are not just different at night but are revealed as just as dangerous and just as foreboding as the back country roads.

These bikers riding was not just a search for magic, myth, or touristing a world in which they rediscovered the real rules. Yes, they were at the beginning of their road wanderings susceptible to the myth and legend of the American roadscape. But that didn’t last their serial encounters with the hard and dangerous realities of the back country.

They didn’t initially realize how these experiences helped them gain back lost tribesmen skills, awareness and instincts of their distant pasts as well become better and more responsible and creative adults.

The end of these dangerous roads did not frighten them nor did its nature. They had no twists, no turns or hairpins, nothing was obscured even momentarily. The view was clear of its end somewhere beyond its horizon point.

Not knowing which way they would turn at their ends, let alone what lay beyond them did not matter. They were free from the demands of youth for certainty, security from violence and basic need not to mention the preening need of a satisfying and flourishing life.

These rides permitted them through a smidgen of stupid and large dollops of sheer luck to recapture the thrumming vibrations of their lost tribal spaces and source waters.

Each was thankful to have learned that these surviving adulthood friends did not forsake him when he led the others astray. Wild and risk taking still retained a prideful place in life.

Roaring along the asphalt during those days and nights comes back to them with every burning hot wind gust that strikes their faces during a dry summer afternoon or anytime they allow themselves the pleasure of sitting on a porch during a bad thunderstorm to feel its chill winds, hear the thunder bolt strikes, smell the lightening ozone and have the hair on their necks stand on end, knowing that the seat of their pants will come up dry but they will fly along safely above or around the dangers that lurk in hiding from them along life’s way. They lean back on the porch gliders of their suburban homes, never, ever, wanting to go back inside the house.

– Marlow journal entry a decade later

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