NDN (pronounced En Dee En) was a short-lived road nickname that was bestowed upon me during one of my earliest, long distance, two-wheeling trips as I motorcycled the back roads as a light brown buffalo man in black leather in the dustier regions of the great plains.
Given to me in Kansas, it stood for No Direction kNown. As I was a devotee of Hunter S. Thompson’s works, I quietly styled myself as one of God’s prototypes — never intended for mass production — so this call sign made sense. With an appetite for drink, food, and high speed handlebar freak-time, NDN was a mostly respectable, hard-working DC beltway type during those pre-meme times.
On the road for reasons still unknown NDN attracted the company of carnival geeks, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, the corpulent, the French, the verbose, and the ambiguously perverse. To this day, if I drink enough top shelf bourbon to hallucinate, I claim divine visions from those travels of great primeval beasts and assorted lesser creatures roaring once more to remind the world of their long ago presence; these normally fade into a misty obscurity of anecdote while I sleep the booze off.
I distinctly recall that some of the besotted carnies may have shot at me or at least in my general direction in a mostly harmless sporting fashion, after I gave them jolly-sounding pirate nicknames while we bourbonized ourselves around a 55-gallon barrel campfire. They falsely accused me of trying to be too hip, since my road name didn’t require vowels. I claimed innocence as they were unaware that nicknames are never chosen by the bearer but are bestowed by others, who may or may not like or approve of you.
Nonetheless, their occasional ill-conceived violence was more than a fair trade for their company during my exploring the valleys, rivers, mountains and two-street-wide towns, established by some hopelessly lost, hungry and out of money European immigrants before the 1900s dawned. While we broke bread in red checked picnic tabled diners on local farm food, they would feast on my asphalt tales.
They in turn would regale me with stories of primitive and frenetic energy. They were eccentric and their tales wandered from wild countercultural events to decadent things beyond anything I had ever read about or seen in my travels over the seven seas but with such rich detail that made them a little less unreliable. I thought then and still do now that maybe half of what they told me was true. Had I driven up in a late model rental sedan wearing a polo shirt, I doubt I would have heard any of it. Grimy biker attire and a road dirt patinaed face made them talk. Ordering freshly made, local fruit pie for the table would seal the deal for an afternoon or evening of continuing conversation.
Just last week I unearthed long buried evidence of a visit to one such old, German immigrant, small town that was reached late one afternoon several hours after crossing on an old, cable-pulled rustbucket ferry across the still wildly flowing waters of that spring’s late melt. The place’s best eatery was a taqueria whose music was a strange mix of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, mariachi and Bach.
While scarfing down tacos, the sun dive-bombed down over the hills. The place’s neon signs came on shining patron faces with green and orange Jello-tinted light, as we talked of doing 115+ MPH on straight roads with no stop lights, no traffic and no hidden radar cops waiting in ambush to arrest a journeyman while some lady started making frozen daiquiris — not on the menu, mind you — behind the counter. After priest-less, rum-fueled confessions of past venial, mortal, carnal, minor and major wrongs were shared without resolution, penance or forgiveness, the locals left first, the pop-up tavern closed, and I exited sometime before midnight into chilled plains air knowing that NDN was no longer in America.
Before turning in, I pondered whether my East coast blood was too thin for this strange frontier of outlaws; or, maybe I was not able to properly explain myself given its cool, dry climate. Despite the passage of time and diminished recall, I swear that I saw an old timey sign on that ferry-ride afternoon that said “Welcome to Montana.”
Decades later here are a last few thoughts on those experiences: (1) these brief plains exposures were life-changing; (2) I grew to love the sweet and sour personalities, the sounds and the smells of plains life stripped down to its basic elements; (3) when I return back out there, my hair stands on end, and I want to dance; (4) one thing to avoid — snakes — some seemingly stand on their tails and move at about 30mph over short distances.
Sorry …. this is where these recovered NDN memories tail off.
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