Editor’s Note: This essay from Marlow is about an epic trip around the four corners of the Continental United States. That complete account of life on two wheels is a work still in progress, and still takes our collective breath away.
–      Vic

Author’s Note: This new life frontier situation caused me to dig up and rewrite this 20+ year-old, dust-covered, motorcycle road journal entry.

-Marlow

Borders, Borderlands, Heartlands

This novel life space I find myself in is becoming my heartland as its heretofore hidden borderland spaces and boundaries rushed my way unannounced into my conscious being.  I will not be shocked into some type of subsistence frontier lifestyle.  No way of life in the shadows of despair for me and W.

I have been for most of my life a maker, producer, builder, and giver.  Within less than a year, I was faced with becoming a taker.  The significance of this cultural shift between creating and consuming is profound all around.

When I two-wheeled travelled our country’s midwestern and western borderlands and frontier boundaries, seeking fabled lands in which our country’s settlers’ time was spent, I was disabused of lotta ideas and myths, seeing our people completely off the track — busted towns and folks, rusted places that couldn’t make it back.   Farther and farther out the story was the same — former heartlands of which America the beautiful used to boast had gone to seed.

Sorta like me now.

Anyway, my motorcycling buddies and I stayed at cheap motels in these ghost towns.  Drinking Augustus’s blue elixir, taking showers and cooling down at the end of long days in the saddle and meeting, greeting and getting to know the land’s people and stories.

We’d seen miles upon miles of verdant places — wasted away down to barren soil and sand, former homes rotting stretching out across the land.  Desolation — where fat crows had once been, desert over no eagle dared to fly, and graveyards now decaying, no more burials, bowed heads or reddened eyes.

More miles of empty streets with endless strings of vacant store fronts than I care to remember.

More than once, one of us thought we’d heard a black crow squawk nevermore.

A horizon where dreams are no longer seen
Nothing but a repeated sameness of ragged, shuttered scenes
Treacherous things trap the remainees
Endless beguiling survival schemes that always fade
Gaunt and haggard folks toil alone and work like mules.

And we lone sundowners riding swiftly ever onward through it all.

As I was back then, these places were part of our great heartlands that had become borderlands, as they and their folk were hollowed out, and were becoming then borderline frontiers as all but a dwindling hardy or immobile few abandoned them.

In my rear-view mirror, I have seen that my new receding boundary was resolutely fixed; it was an impossibly thin membrane, phenomenal in length and height, but with no width.

I now viscerally know that when I crossed that boundary, things became quite different.

Onward. As always — Full Wide Open Throttle.

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