7
We are all fully aware of how being on a motorcycle makes you feel more "one with nature", or intimately more a part of what's around you, thanks in part to the sights, smells, temperature, the feeling of the air rushing past, and more, as you ride.
There are certain places that I've been on the bike that just seem to stick with me, however. Some of those places are just so different from my everyday life, memories of them will pop up unexpectedly and for no real reason years later. Maybe it was because of the feeling like I'm a stranger in a strange land, or maybe it has something to do with the sights and smells, or sometimes it's just nostalgia. All I know is that there are places out there in the world that I've ridden through, or things I've seen or experienced, that had a big enough impact on me, that made me feel like I'm no longer in the America I know, that I will think of them randomly after years.
One of the memories I always seem to come back to is when my buddy and I rode mostly back roads from southern NH down to NC. I built a route looking for the curviest roads I could find along the way. We rode through NY, VT, PA, MD, WV, VA and NC, a lot of which was out in the middle of nowhere. The route was not built was gas in mind, I figured we'd find it along the way, and that sometimes proved difficult; a few times I had to put in low octane to get to the next gas station for premium.
Riding out in the countryside in MD and WV is nothing like riding in the countryside in the northeast. The hills are like rollercoasters, pavement goes every which way into the middle of nowhere, and there is so much obvious poverty that we are usually oblivious to up in the northeast (as an aside, it's surprising how much pavement there is when some of those areas are so impoverished). Here's an example of what we'd see riding in the hilly countryside of MD:
What continually comes back to me, though, is riding through a small town called Luke, MD. Looking it up on Wikipedia, the 2020 census puts the population at 85. But what struck me was the fact that the entire town was almost literally one huge factory in a valley in the middle of a bunch of mountains. You can see it from street view here.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4734...7i13312!8i6656
You could see the smoke from the stacks from a few miles outside of town, and then suddenly we were hit by the smell - it reeked of propane, or rotten eggs throughout. And then when we turned off on to WV46, it just became all woods and beautiful country side again, with very few homes (what was there was extremely run down) but plenty of churches every few miles.
I think what struck me the most was within a few miles of that town, we stopped at a little hole in the wall gas station in the middle of nowhere WV (right here actually), and as we're gassing up a beat to hell minivan with two parents and their 8-ish year old pulls in they hop out. The kid, who has a cast on his leg and some pretty ragged clothes, is interested in my bike and asks about it, so I tell him all about it and let him check it out (his mother wasn't too keen on him touching it). and that's when I notice that he's literally wearing newspaper shoes on both feet.
Riding through that town and seeing that kid wearing newspaper shoes just stuck with me all these years, and whenever I think about the rides I've been on, that always bubbles up to the surface.