Sharing the road
For nine days, I drove along with bikers on their way to Milwaukee. Now, I miss them.
Not three seconds after John Olin, Harley-Davidson CFO, introduced himself to me in front of about a dozen riders, he said, “You know this trip would be more fun without you here. There would be a lot more drugs and orgies.”
Mortified, I looked at my friend. You told him?
Two days prior, I had received an urgent “Call home” text while my friend Majsan Bostrom and I were at a taco place in San Diego. My 71-year-old father was worried about the nine-day road trip I was about to take, reporting on bikers headed to Milwaukee to celebrate the 115th anniversary of Harley-Davidson.
“He thinks you’re going to get all caught up in drugs and orgies,” my mom said.
“Involuntarily, of course.”
Mom, these aren’t the Hell’s Angels.
The thing is, I was worried, too, but for different reasons. When the 2,286mile trip started Aug. 21, I didn’t know what to expect. I don’t ride a bike. Would I ever feel part of this group — which included Bill Davidson and Karen Davidson, the great-grandkids of co-founder William A. Davidson — while following along in a rental car?
Would Majsan and I screw up some sort of highway protocol and get yelled at or ditched?
In our 2018 blue Mustang convertible, would we get pegged as Thelma and Louise, the mid-life escapists in the 1991 feminist film? Yes, that happened before we even left San Diego. As a California rider named Banana said, you don’t pick your road name — you get one.
By the time I met Olin in Gallup, N.M., on the second day, I started to relax a little. Riders that night were sitting around a fire on a hotel patio. Led by Bill Davidson, the group sang “Happy Birthday” over the phone to the 17-year-old daughter of one of the guys on the trip.
These people took riding seriously, but not themselves. I don’t know why it surprised me, but the glam, elegant Karen Davidson, creative head for Harley’s MotorClothes, pumped her own gas at every fuel stop. During a one-day layover in Kansas City, Mo., Bill Davidson hand-washed his own bike. Olin, an Indiana University graduate, listens to John Mellencamp while riding; his favorite motorcycle movie is “Terminator.”
The rest of the riders were just as down-to-earth. During the 335-mile trip from Kansas City to Springfield, Ill., Tommy Korkos, a plastic surgeon from Milwaukee, turned out for the ride in head-to-toe white. Riders joked that he looked like an ice cream man or hospital orderly.
“When you’re on a long trip like this, you have to have a ‘white outfit day,’” Korkos said. “It changes up the routine. It creates conversation.”
A loose cow, and a mattress
If there were orgies during this trip, I wasn’t invited. The closest thing was the Twister City dealership party in Park City, Kansas, where women in chaps posed for photos. And if there were drugs, I didn’t see them — I just saw riders having beers in hotel bars after the day’s journey ended.
At the Doubletree Oklahoma City on Aug. 24, I encountered the now-legendary Jorge Morena, who led a group of five riders from Medillin, Colombia, to the U.S. In Nicaragua, a loose cow sent him flying sideways off his bike. When he showed up in Oklahoma, some 20 days into his trip, his Harley had a dangling turn signal and no windshield.
When I ran into him again, last Tuesday at the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Ill., he had more bruises and a cast on his broken wrist. This time, he had been nailed by a mattress that flew off the back of a pickup on I-44 East near the Tulsa International Airport exit. The crash caused a multicar accident; a police report was taken.
Morena’s bike was destroyed. But his spirit was not. He was now driving a Ford rental car and insisted he was “very good.”
“A cow tries to stop him from Milwaukee, he still goes on,” said William Bolivar, a friend of Morena’s and the general manager of the Harley dealership in Medillin, Colombia. “A mattress tries to stop him, he still goes on.
“This man is going to make it to the parade no matter what.”
Playing dress-up
While the scenery changed along the route — mighty saguaros in Arizona, breathtaking mesas in New Mexico, cornfields in Illinois — the day’s rituals didn’t. Kickstands were usually up by 8 a.m., with a lunch stop at a local diner or Harley dealership.
Because the ride was so regimented, there was little time for sightseeing. In Topeka, Kan., Bill Davidson and Karen Davidson paid an emotional visit to the Evel Knievel Museum; growing up, the two knew the daredevil rider who died in 2007.
In Hannibal, Mo., while riders ate at Becky Thatcher’s Diner, Harley execs sneaked down to the Mark Twain Riverboat office and talked the white-haired captain into guiding a surprise, lastminute cruise for everyone.
In the evenings, dealerships in the stopover cities hosted welcome parties with food trucks and live music.
At the Worth Harley-Davidson dealership in Kansas City, Mo., Karen Davidson took the time to give me and my friend a Harley makeover, picking items from the classic 1903 collection. We were just playing dress-up, but that didn’t matter — Harley shapes its lifestyle brands to target different tastes, styles and demographics. Of course, they want you to buy a bike, and they hope clothes could be an entry point.
Instagram followers? Who cares?
When Majsan and I first pulled up to the San Diego Harley-Davidson dealership on Morena Boulevard on the morning of Aug. 21, we had envisioned dozens of riders. Instead we traveled the country with a core group of about 15, led by ride captain JT Hasley, national H.O.G. manager, and his wife, Rebecca.
One of the first riders I noticed was Sean “Speedy” Donahue. He was hard to miss, with his skinny jeans, incredible tattoo sleeves – and two cameramen and a sound tech capturing nearly his every move.
Speedy, 30, is an Austin, Texasbased adventure and motorsports photographer and social-media influencer who has 105,000 Instagram followers. Joyride Productions, working for Harley, was documenting his first touring ride.
“I thought he was the intern,” said Curtis May, a 66-year-old rider and retired refinery worker from Beaumont, Texas. (May later praised Speedy’s riding ability.)
Speedy learned pretty quickly how little his social-media influence rated with riders. On the morning the ride launched, he and his crew were setting up their shot in the San Diego dealership parking lot. The riders took off without them.
“We got left in the dust,” he said, laughing. “It’s taken me days to figure out that these guys are just into what they do — they’re here to do this job and this job is to get to Milwaukee and they’re going to crunch through it.”
Speedy said he was intimidated by the older riders at first. But one of the first people he became friends with was Ted Poston, a 58-year-old general contractor from Los Angeles who describes riding as a “freedom blast.”
Poston only wore a helmet in states that require them. He sometimes took off on his own, rejoining the group midday or at night with tales of his adventures — like the time he ran into a random, long-haired motorcyclist who had
“A cow tries to stop him from Milwaukee, he still goes on. A mattress tries to stop him, he still goes on. This man is going to make it to the parade no matter what.” William Bolivar, a friend of Jorge Morena’s and the general manager of the Harley dealership in Medillin, Colombia
just lost part of his ring finger in a bike accident and was bleeding at a Shell station in Oklahoma. The guy refused medical treatment, as well as the shot of whiskey that Poston said he offered him.
“Ted was one of the first people I interviewed,” Speedy said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this guy has 1,001 stories. This is going to be interesting.’
“He doesn’t wear a helmet, and he just books it — he’ll go with the group if he wants to, but some days he doesn’t want to. That says a lot about him and his passion for motorcycling. He wants to enjoy it for himself.”
It’s over and I’m tired. Yet, oddly ... sad
These riders were so different from each other, I couldn’t imagine them existing concurrently in the same time zone, let alone spending nine intense days and nights together. But over time, I saw similarities.
Some had started riding to work through pain or grief. In early 2017, Alejandro Garrido, a 25-year-old Harley #FindYourFreedom intern, was suffering severe headaches, tremors and dizziness, caused by a head injury he sustained while training at a police academy based at Eastern Florida State College in Melbourne, Florida.
“I thought of killing myself,” he said. “I thought, you know, there’s nothing to look forward to. This is going to be my life forever, and what’s the point?”
While undergoing physical therapy, he got back on the motorcycle he had bought at age 22.
“Something inside of me told me you’ve got to keep going because your life is going to mean something for someone else,” he said.
Rebecca Hasley, a 49-year-old global procurement officer, got her motorcycle license after her mother died in 2000, at age 59, following a brief battle with lung cancer.
“While she was dying, she told me, ‘Don’t be afraid to live,’” Hasley said.
I had expected profound reasons for why these riders took this nearly 2,300mile journey — similar to why hikers do the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. But for most, it was not that complicated. Along the way, I kept bugging Paul Lathrop, a 50-year-old rider from Iowa City, to share his best moment from the ride.
Finally, about 90 miles outside Milwaukee, he said: “I still don’t know what my favorite part of this trip is. There could be something around the corner that could just blow everything else way.”
When we finally did land at the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee on Aug. 29, it felt anticlimactic, even with the warm greetings and big hugs from family patriarch Willie G. Davidson, his wife, Nancy, and friends and family members of the other riders. San Diego, the launch site, felt both three months and three minutes ago. It was strange to imagine not hanging out with these people every day, though I wanted to get home to my 12-year-old daughter and my own bed.
“As you ride with these people, you look out for them, you protect them,” Korkos, the Milwaukee plastic surgeon, said. “Once you get home and the ride breaks up, there’s an emotional letdown.
“I told Karen (Davidson) today, ‘I’m going to look to my right as I’m riding down Blue Mountain Road tomorrow and you’re not going to be by my side.’”
The night before, an earnest-looking man in his 30s had sat down next to me at the hotel bar at the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Ill., where all the riders, even the sometimes-rogue ones, were spending the final evening together. I was drinking a glass of white wine and jotting down notes.
“Are you part of that motorcycle gang?” he said.
I laughed and started to shake my head.
But then I thought about it. “Yes. Actually, I think I am.”