The Big Stupid

A Coast-to-Coast Journey

by Charlie Steinman

As some of you may know, recently Terry (from Halifax), myself, and Bob (from Corpus Christi) endeavored to ride from Seattle out on the West Coast . . . to Halifax, Nova Scotia, far out on the East Coast.  5,000 miles.  14 days in the saddle.  No Interstates.  Only secondary roads.

The idea of the ride was hatched by Terry as usual. He’s our “Big Picture” thinker. Although we three spend a lot of time riding big Beemers, and Terry has a penchant for Milwaukee Iron, Terry has the notion of promoting the idea that a “specialty motorcycle” is not at all necessary to have fun on two wheels, and that the longest journey is possible on whatever machine happens to be in the garage.

It takes me about one-second to see the fun, and Bob about the same, although being a medical doctor, he has people who actually depend on him. It takes Bob a while to untie those bonds, but untie them he has. I think he has stayed mostly untied, at least spiritually. A long journey can do that to a rider.

So for this journey from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, Terry and I settle on riding Kawasaki Ninjas 250's.  Bob is riding a Yamaha 250 dirt bike. Yeah, that's right.  A 250 dirt bike/motard bike.  Terry and I are stupid.  Bob is really stupid.  At least he puts road tires on it.

Together, we are The Three Amigos and we are riding: The Big Stupid.

So after shipping our bikes to Seattle, we all fly to Seattle on a Friday in early September, timed to avoid the tourists in the High Places.

Saturday is Day One.

Day One involves getting from Seattle, out to the actual West Coast, which is about 140 miles to the west of Seattle, in the wrong direction.  So we do that, ride over to a tiny beach town called Westport, dip our boots into the Pacific Ocean, and then we start riding East.

Westport Beach, Washington:

We ride over three coastal mountain ranges that day.  Fantastic day in the saddle.  Do about 400 miles total.  Now we're over at Yakima, in the rain shadow of those three mountain ranges.
It's like Albuquerque in Yakima, Washington.  Who knew Washington State had a desert?
Awesome riding out on that coast.  You West Coast guys have all the fun.

Day Two.

We plan to go a little more East and then turn south and run the length of the Rockies until we hit the latitude of Kansas.

We're now almost exactly 800 miles into this.

I've never had a day of riding like this in my life.

Rt. 12 up the Snake River gorge, and then the Clearwater River gorge is 200 miles of road heaven.   Way better than 72 virgins.  This is where I want to go when I die. White water river on one side.  Steep canyon wall on the other.  On and on and on and on for hours.  The lower, western section is desert mountains.  Dry.  Rocky.  About the 2/3 of the way up the canyon the trees begin to grow in patches on the canyon walls.  Quickly becomes dense high-forest up both sides of the canyon.  Ponderosa Pine.  Towering over the roadway.

On and on and on and on.

200 miles of canyon tight sweepers.  Left then right then left then right, following the winding river.  A rhythm beat by a million years of water, eroding solid rock, the bones of a planet.
And it's empty wilderness. For 200 miles.

Posted at 35 mph to 55 mph.  We traverse it at 55 to 85. 

Honestly.  I weep.

Day Three is filled with nature acting upon us. After a morning of huge, vast beauty (and strangely just at the famous location and photo-op where Forrest Gump stopped his running), around mid-day we ride beneath the approaching eastern edge of a Huge Storm.  A high plains storm as black as night at the base, and touching the ionosphere at its top.  200 miles wide.  Crosswinds at 70 mph pour out of the base of that storm. Sweep around us.  Thousands of tumbleweeds begin running across the highway for miles around us.  We are within It.  Rain.  And then the cold comes.  Hail. Cold.  Cold dropping from the top of that storm.  25,000 feet of altitude cold.  That damn wet cold . . . I don't want to think about that right now . . . We ride for a couple more hours as far we could in that rain and that damn cold until at sunset Bob finds us a tiny lonely lodge at a crossroads between mountain ranges.  They have alcohol in that lodge.  Yes, that they do.

Day Four sees us pull into Vernal, Utah after a day of riding through the biggest country imaginable.  In fact it's too big to imagine.  The sky IS bigger.  The day starts out (of course) in cold and fog.  The cold and fog and low clouds hug that gigantic country like a slow cold snail.  We ride through it.  On and on.  Mountains.  Ranges.  Crest a rise and there are another 30 miles, 50 miles of mountains.  Dry, baked wind-burned high prairie.  Feels like the praire, but it's not.  It's just the enormous top of a flat mountain range at 8,000 feet.  The horizon gets close, a lip, an edge and it's down, down, down, 10 miles of down, back and forth, gulleys, bare open exposed rock, down, down, back and forth, the sky gets far away up betwen jagged edges, then another white-water river, follow the river, slowly up, up and up, sweeping back and forth mile upon mile, the sky gets closer and closer, 20 miles, 80 miles the river gets smaller, dive up a steep ravine and the final grade, the river's gone, back and forth steeper and steeper, the sky is very close, roll on over a slow rounded crest and there's that huge sky yet again, dry baked wind-burned praire.  Feels like the praire,, but it's not.  Another enormous top of a range . . .

Day Five.

How do I love thee . . . let me count the ways.

Vernal, Utah to Ouray, Colorado to Durango, Colorado.

Many of you may have ridden the Ouray to Durango road.  This winding rising and falling ribbon of roadway can be amply described with only two words:  Ecstasy and Fear.

The Ecstasy is obvious:  it's right there in the tight winding sections up high, and the wide-open sweeping sections down low.  The Ecstasy is in the 6,000 foot elevation changes.

The Fear is obvious:  No guard-railings.  2,000 foot falls off of shear cliffs into thin air on one side of the roadway ribbon or the other.  A long wait and a brutal sudden death are the return for any errors.

So pull on your helmet, and take a cup of Ecstacy and a cup of Fear, add some gasoline, and roll them up into a mouth-watering biscuit of goodness, spread on a little mountain storm with rain and hail and wind and a big dollop of that soaked-to-the-bone damn mountain cold . . . and you've got yourself a big dish of moto-dessert.  Happy riding pie.  Cake-and-eat-it too good to be true highway to heaven:  Ouray to Durango.

Don't kid yourselves with your favorite personal riding route.  The Mother of all Riding Routes is the Ouray to Durango road.

Our Day Five.  1,976 miles now under the wheels.

Day Six

Durango Colorado, to Garden City, Kansas

The ride starts like the previous five days . . . big mountains, sweepers, cliffs, runaway grades.  But as we drift east out of Colorado, the landscape starts to open up, the jagged peaks spread away, and after climbing and dropping away through two more passes, we are running on a high (8,000') mesa between distant mountains far to the north and south.  The mountains grow less and more distant and the mesa begins to drop.  It drops for 50 miles.

I am hypnotized and dazed for a while, staring at that double-yellow line for hour after hour.  I look up and out, focus on the horizon, and realize that the horizon is a long, long, ways away.  Curvature of the Earth ways away. We had left the mountains and mesas behind and have run out on the high flat plain of eastern Colorado and western Kansas.  This is an ocean of dirt and scrub.  A sea without waves.  And the road runs straight ahead, so far ahead, vanishing into the hazy line between sky and earth.  The sky has actually gotten bigger.

So we ride that plain for about 100 miles.  Take some action video.  Stop on the side of the road to snap a few photos . . .

The Silence out there is palpable.  One speaks in whispers.  The only natural sounds are the sounds that wind makes through the bushes and grasses and around your eardrums.  Only the wind.

I don’t feel welcome out there.  Want to keep moving almost immediately.  It's not a welcoming place.  It's a place where humans don't seem to venture permanently.  I don't remember seeing more than a handful of utility buildings out there rotting under that sun in a 100 miles, and no sign of habitation.  Maybe a few thousand cattle living free.  The ranchers pretending that they're ranching the place.  But they're not really.

It's a place of that sky, the wind, the cruel sun, a couple species of dry plants and grasses, a few insects, some reptiles, likely some snakes . . . and the coyotes.

And the occasional passing truck or automobile or motorcyclist roaring wheels through.  Hurriedly passing through.  Hoping to pass through.  Glad when it's over.

It's not a welcoming place.

Then comes Kansas.

Day Seven

Garden City, Kansas, to Independence, Missouri (386 miles)


Day Eight

Independence, Missouri, to Evansville, Indiana (398 miles)

Day Nine

Evansville, Indiana, to Charleston, West Virginia. (349 miles) entirely in the pouring rain.

I've lumped all of the above days together because this is the portion of the trip that occurred just after we realize that we have burned way too much time being awestruck in the western mountains, and we were at least two (2) days behind the schedule that we needed to keep, so we switch to the superslab for three (3) days.  Three (3) long and brutal days that I don't really want to repeat anytime soon.

I've been pondering several things as a result of our experience of riding Day 7 through Day 9, basically across America's agricultural heartland:

1)  Humanity has learned to farm and to produce food crops and cattle crops on a scale that is hard for a non-farming person to fathom.  It truly takes a stretch of the mind to wrap a grip around this.  We saw plowed, planted, and harvested fields that are measured in square miles . . . multiple square miles (640 acres = one (1) square mile).  This is industrial farming, plain and simple.  The human and cultural and business organization that has to go into that kind of operation dwarfs anything that NASA has done.  It dwarfs every single other thing that our culture does.  Think of the timing of planting and harvesting 1,000 farms growing 1,000 acres of corn apiece: what a huge economic decision it is to harvest such a volume and tonnage of corn.  I mean . . . where does all of that corn go?  All at once.  How does it all go?

2)  As a culture we are absolutely, completely, totally dependant for our very lives on diesel fuel and gasoline and the vast, inter-connected industrial complex behind manufacturing and maintaining and fueling the machines that harvest and transport and process these huge crops.  We lose that fuel and we just don't get inconvenienced in our daily commute to work . . . we will starve.  As a Nation, we will starve.  I'm talking hunger and murder . . . chaos like the world has yet to see.  Just saying . . .

3)  Who can live out on these vast farms and do this kind of work for a living?  I mean what kind of man thinks in terms of 10,000 acre farms, farms that stretch over the horizon?  What an incredible specialist that man must be.  Hugely skilled.  Any schmoe off the street who decides to be a farmer . . . that schmoe ain't farming in Kansas, or Missouri.

4)  A Ninja 250 is SO way not the instrument of choice when crossing prairies on the superslab.

5)  I've met the finest people of my life on BMW motorcycles.

Two of the very few things that I can recall about our three (3) days crossing America's agricultural heartland, aside from the size of the thing, is the Bryant's barbecue we eat in Kansas City, and our breakfast in our friend Mike and Millie's beautiful home.  When you're out on the road, the warmth and humanity of a home is a good thing.

The rest is mostly a blur of roaring highways, diners, fuel stops, and hotel rooms.

. . . with the exception of on the third day, entering my home State of West Virginia.  This is a part of the country that is so . . . gentle.  The rain that we are riding through is soft.  The rain blowing into my helmet tastes good.  The air smells good.  The hills and trees and grasses and forest undergrowth all seem to glow with a health and happiness . . .


Day 10 through 14 are a blur to me now. That peculiar madness that comes over all travelers when the journey’s end is in sight creeps into each of us. We smell the end. Nova Scotia is in the trees and in the air. We breathe an eastern air and that air leads down to the Atlantic, and over to Halifax. We cross Pennsylvania and New York and Vermont and New Hampshire with little thought. We ride not as tourists, but with the singular purpose of seeing the Ocean. We know that each stream and river now flowing beside the road will see that Ocean.

I have to say something about this part of the trip though. For me the best riding day of the entire trip, even better than the Durango Road, is the day we spend traversing West Virginia from Charleston, through Maryland, and into Pennsylvania.

That day starts in a steady rain in a motel parking lot and the rain continues for the entire day falling softly along the stony rivers and across winding ridgelines. A soft rain falls that day that feeds the trees and the lush undergrowth of the miles of mountain woodlands, and mile after mile of steeply rolling dairy farms. For a man now living on the edge of the desert in Texas, and even after the days of storms and rains and hail out on the prairie, the rain that day is salvation. The green overhung tight mountain roads of that day are a smooth ribbon of joy incarnate.

The roads in this region have their own rhythm borne of the shape of the ancient eroded mountains and the winding rivers carving those mountains, just as the roads in the Rockies have their own rhythm . . . and scale. The rhythms of the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains are as unique to the region as the climate and the plant life . . . and the people. Know that region, and it isn’t strange that one of our most enduring American subcultures was borne and nurtured and still continues up in the high places and deep ravines of Appalachia.

And of course this is my own region, place of my birth. Until grown to manhood, it’s the only place I knew, my entire world. The rhythms of those mountains and rivers and streams are my rhythms. Before that day riding through those rhythms I had sensed a growing whisper in my ear of those mountains and that rhythm, a whisper of Home, candle-flame drawn.

I think after a long journey of many years and many miles, some men eventually find who they were when they were 9-years-old.

Old Orchard Beach, Maine:

Okay. So here's the Number Two Word of Wisdom that I've taken from our happy little adventure. Size matters. Don’t believe what she tells you, it really does.

Riding a Ninja 250 around town is fantastic. It gets like 70 miles to the gallon. It's tiny and fits anywhere. It runs like a scalded dog. Mine is annoyingly loud. I love it.

But riding a screaming-loud Ninja 250 from coast to coast, 350 miles per day for 13 straight days, then up half the length of Nova Scotia on the 14th day . . . truly is Stupid.

Especially if you are past your “Seventh set of Seven Years” as the Buddhists say, when you go Long . . . go Big.

That said . . . the Number One Word of Wisdom that we three riders each have taken from our happy little adventure is that almost always, with any Journey, Stupid is good. A nine-year-old child carries far more wisdom than most elders, for every nine-year-old child knows in his bones that the Adventure is All, that the Journey is All, and the How doesn’t matter one whit.

The Three Amigos

This feature originally appeared in December 2009 - Updated: 12/12/09