Where I grew up, the Memorial Day run was once a big event on the biker calendar, and it appears it has made a comeback. I was down there this weekend, helping my parents with some outdoors chores, and could easily hear the steady rumble of the departure of this year’s event yesterday afternoon. My parents’ refuge is perched above the river valley, which funnels the sound upward to us, so even though we were more than a mile away, we easily heard the procession.
Memorial Day, 2013.
Later, as I sat on the front swing, I could hear the return of the parade of bikes from the 52-mile route and the band playing covers of Lynrd Skynrd and the like. The Memorial Day Run 2013 is an even bigger and more organized event than these annual runs were nearly 35 years ago when I started riding. But today (even then, really), participating in a slow-moving 52-mile procession is not my idea of fun. Instead, I did a very different and personal kind of Memorial Day run.
After taking care of family business, I rode a few miles out of my way today before heading home and stopped at the cemetery where my grandparents and my great aunt and great uncle, who were like my third set of grandparents, are buried. As hard as it is to believe, my great uncle has been gone more than 30 years now. He was a World War II vet, part of that generation that went off to war, came home and never talked about it. That’s just the way it was then.
The morning clouds thinned out as I sat by the four graves, next to what was a small evergreen planted when my great uncle died. It now towers far too tall for its environs. Even though there were more people than usual, the cemetery was still a quiet place. Far different from the open-pipe roar and raucous retro rock ‘n’ roll of the day before. Certainly a long way from the quarter-million-bike showing that Rolling Thunder has become, descending each Memorial Day on Washington, D.C.
But don’t be mistaken about where this is going.
I’m not here to criticize those other Memorial Day runs. I’m not here to suggest that my way, of using my motorcycle more often than not to escape the crowds, rather than to become part of a bigger one, is the “better” way or the “right” way.
Just the opposite.
With just about every day I feel a greater need for more live-and-let-live attitude in this world and in our country, less bludgeoning of each other with ideologies and our certainties of how others should be living their lives. It doesn’t change much whether you’re talking about Congress or motorcyclists. We still revert to the hard wiring of ancient hunter-gather ancestors, banding together for protection against those others, those strangers we don’t know or understand and certainly don’t trust. We motorcyclists should know better, because almost all of us think of ourselves as individualists, yet we dress alike, ride with people who ride the same kinds of bikes and make fun of the others (“pirates” or “Power Rangers”). As if we had the kind of clout that would allow us to subdivide ourselves into warring factions with impunity.
So while I hope never to find myself in the massive, slow-moving procession of a traditional Memorial Day run, I recognize that’s heaven for some, who would no doubt consider my solitary travels, which give me such joy, to be tragically sad. We all should ride our own ride, a truism on more than one level of meaning.
Whether you ride fast or slow, ride on dirt or asphalt, ride in the biggest crowd you can find or ride to escape it, I hope you had a great Memorial Day run.
