North On A Bike. A fundraiser ride for ALS Northwest to Deadhorse Alaska.

I think better when I’m moving, always have…

On a motorcycle, if you have any business riding one, you have to be hyper aware of your surroundings or you won’t last long. You have to be constantly aware of the road ahead, what drivers may do, the feel and sound of your bike. On a motorcycle you additionally become intensely aware of your own body. This state of being leads to what psychologists refer to as a ‘flow state,’ a absorption in the present that leads to an altered sense of time and self.

When you get used to the flow state, every moment that you’re not feeling that you’re waiting for the next time you feel it. Looking forward to it, wishing for it…

Now imagine that you spent several years in that state on your motorcycle, then a disease with no cure promised to rob you not only of your ability to ride but your ability to move your body, eat and breathe. It wouldn’t kill you quickly, it just degrades your body slowly until something external to the disease killed you.

My friend Keith died from complications associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It initially affects the nervous system’s ability to control voluntary muscle movements which degrades your ability to move and walk, eventually it affects the muscles that control breathing, as well as chewing and swallowing food. There’s no cure. It’s going to kill you and take its time doing it. 

And it obviously stops you from riding a motorcycle. 

If you’ve ever been in the flow state before, either on a bike, in a sports-car, while skiing, surfing, sailing, fly fishing… any activity where you’re so in the now that time stands still and nothing else is happening or matters the prospect of losing that would be devastating. Couple that with the prospect of a slow journey to death and as you might imagine you’d find out what you were really made of and who your friends were. 

Keith was into motorcycles his whole life, as I have been. You go through phases in bikes. You start out on mini bikes, ride dirt bikes until you are old enough to legally ride on roads. Then you have options… stick with dirt bikes you can ride on the road, maybe have a few dalliances with choppers or fast bikes. You’ll figure out a way you prefer to get into that flow state. 

As Keith, myself and many others have found adventure bikes became their flow state source. Adventure bikes are a subset of motorcycling culture, bikes that are designed, built and then individually modified to transport the rider on adventures. They can handle days of riding with loads of camping gear that enables you to get multiple doses of that flow state on trips to far away lands or just down the road.

Before Keith came down with ALS he took some time off work and rode his bike down through Mexico, Central and South America. He rode on and around the PanAmerican Highway to Ushuaia, which is located on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago of Argentina at the southernmost tip of South America. It’s essentially the “End of the World”, as far south as you can go on roads in the Americas. It took a couple years. 

He told me once that in retrospect he thinks he started noticing the initial symptoms of ALS toward the end of his trip but chalked those feelings up to having put 70,000 odd miles on his BMW F650GS Dakar motorcycle. He just thought he was tired from riding his bike for the length of the map of South America. Unfortunately he was wrong….

I’d known Keith for years, he worked with my wife and I and I followed his trip progress via his blog (South On A Bike, unfortunately no longer on the internet) and Facebook wishing I was on the trip. Upon his return and diagnosis he set to preparing himself for his new challenges. One of the things that amazed me about Keith and how he dealt so positively with his ALS was his outlook that it was, as he said,” just another problem to solve, just like fixing the bike or dealing with problems on the road. I’m experienced…” He faced his new reality bravely. He had good days and bad days, and he found out who his friends were and always was extremely grateful for the help he had to have.

One day a bunch of us were working on his driveway so he could drive his chair down it and he noticed me looking at his bike. We started talking about it, the trip and what he was going to do with it. He “wanted to find it a good home”. I’d been off of bikes for years and I remember saying that it’d be a great bike for me to throw some gear and a fly rod on and disappear on for days fly fishing with. He said “that’d be good for you” and that good home for the bike eventually wound up being my garage. 

I don’t know if it was obvious or not, but following the most recent pandemic like a lot of people I just wasn’t myself. I struggled to leave the house, didn’t want to do stuff that I used to do to find my “flow state” like fly fishing, backpacking or traveling. Before Covid I’d disappear for days on end chasing trout or the next adventure, but after a year of lockdowns I just wasn’t myself. Between some antidepressants, anti anxiety meds and even some counseling I figured out that I wasn’t completely broken, just beat up. 

Kind of like the bike it turned out…

The bike needed work. Tires, a new battery, wind shield and clutch and although Keith and I disagreed on this I thought it needed a really good bath. Keith was one to spend his time riding his bike, not polishing it. He said “we’ll fix it, you’ll be my hands” When we started working on it we found dirt, dust, rocks and dead bugs of several grades and colors deposited in nooks and crannies that had came home with him from the jungles of Central America and from the Atacama Desert in Peru. We joked that Atacama locktite was holding some of it together probably. 

Although he had a bike lift and tools to mount tires easily he made me change the tires “like if you’re on the side of the road, because one day you will be”(how right he turned out to be). I didn’t just get a bike, I also got a subscription to my own private help phone line with a years of experience keeping it running and riding. I’d call and Keith would answer saying “Dakar tech support, this is Keith…” and if he was having a good day the answers to my questions came with stories. He had a lotta good days… He also seemed really happy that his riding boots and gloves fit me so those came with the bike, along with a bunch of tools and spare parts that “you’re gonna need where you’re going”. 

I asked him once if he thought it was still reliable with all those miles on it and he said “I chose it carefully, it’ll run forever if you take good care of it. I’d ride it ride back to Patagonia tomorrow if I wasn’t in this chair”. Since the bike had already been as far south as it could go I asked “how far north can you ride?” He’d already thought of the trip, and his concise answer was laid out in miles, oil changes, distances between fuel stops, how many back tires and how many days of camping above the Arctic Circle on the Alaskan Dalton Highway it would take. “That’d be a cool trip” he said. 

I started going on rides, each longer than the last. I dropped it but it didn’t matter, it had been dropped before and was set up to take some abuse with aftermarket crash bars, hand guards… Unlike other bikes I’d had it wasn’t meant to be polished, it was meant to be ridden… to carry you to new places. Mile by mile and trip by trip I got my bike mojo back, and with every mile I got a bit more comfortable on it. We got to know each other better on rides to fish in Idaho, the Upper John Day River, the Steens Mountains and a really wet trip up to Cape Flattery, the northwestern most point in the contiguous United States. I started to find my flow state again, started looking forward to the next big ride. 

I started driving Keith to medical appointments, helping out around his house with some of the work he couldn’t do. One day we were talking and I said I’d like to do do a fundraiser for the ALS society someday around that Alaska trip, because they’d been good to him to which he said “eh, just go ride your motorcycle”.

Someday is now…

He’d always said that when the time came he’d avail himself of the opportunity to leave on his own terms like his father had done through Oregon’s Right to Die assisted suicide laws. When I asked when that would be he said “when I can’t eat a cheeseburger anymore”. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but those words turned out to be some of our last. 

I was on a hot summer ride up to Portland to see a friend’s father who was in memory care. My wife called me and told me that he’d died the night before in his sleep. I got off the phone and walked over to the bike and told it what had happened. I know that sounds silly, but my dad had been a fighter pilot and around our house you talked to cars and bikes and they got names. I grew up believing that if you took good care of a machine it’d take good care of you, and after I told the bike about Keith I promised I’d take good care of it and we’d keep going on rides as long as we could. I half expected it not to start, but I put the key in and it fired right up and has ever since. Could be German engineering and good maintenance, could be soul…

Now I’ve told it that since we’re both getting pretty old and we’re both kinda beat up that we’ve got one more big ride to do. We’re riding to Deadhorse on the Caribou, Cassiar, Alaska and Dalton Highways and maybe up the Demster Highway to to the Arctic Ocean in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territory Canada , I’ll see how sick we are of awful roads we are after going to Deadhorse. And because I said I would and words to dying friends matter we’re doing the trip as a fundraiser for ALS Northwest. 

We’ll be camping the whole way, and you can come along through Facebook, Instagram and blog posts. We’ll post pics, videos and stories from the road and you can tag along through social media, it’s one of the good things social media can do. You don’t have to sleep on the ground, ride through the mud and possibly snow or the eruption of Mount Spurr near Anchorage (which could happen soon), or camp with 3 species of grumpy bears that live along the way. And it won’t cost you a thing, although I’d hope that you’d find it in your heart and wallet to make a donation through a secure fundraising apparatus in place with ALS Northwest in memory of Keith. At a time when funding into ALS is threatened to be cut by 60%, I’d hope though that you’d take the opportunity to donate money to ALS Northwest towards finding a cure and the support that ALS Northwest provides to those stricken with a currently incurable disease. You certainly can tag along on the trip for free, you go ahead and do what you think is right. 

Donate here http://secure.alsnorthwest.org/goto/NorthOnABike2025

Ride on, see ya on the road

Screenshot

The kindness of strangers

Written by

jonathanandrewbenson

in

This blog entry finds me at Yukon Camp on the Dalton Highway, broken down waiting for a tow truck. I’m fine, this is about the best place I could be waiting. Wifi, showers, indoor plumbing, and the most helpful people… I’m finding that to be a trend. 

Earlier I wrote about getting a front tube from a guy when I needed one. And that experience surprised me and was deeply moving…. I didn’t expect it. I’m pretty independent, I don’t like to burden others with my troubles so when I contemplated, packed, prepared and started this trip I always figured I’d be on my own… and I packed accordingly. Extra parts, tools, food, gas, camping and riding gear for the Arctic and a return trip in summer conditions. Fast forward a couple weeks from when a guy named Thomas gifted me a front tire tube and I’m beginning to think most people are pretty decent…

Shortly after crossing in the Canada, I was camped in the rain,freezing after a really wet few days on the bike in Washington and coming into BC. Not long after I got my soggy tent set up a couple pulled up in the spot next to me in a refurbished school bus. I walked over and I said “you rhino lined your bus with forest service green rhino liner, that’s super cool” and the guy said “you picked that color first thing, you and I are gonna get along just fine” and he was right.  

They were on their way to Alaska for the summer, and I hung out with those guys, their dogs, and their kid that evening out of the rain under their awning, which was everything I needed that night. They fed me, we had beers and talked about the bike, the fundraiser trip, Keith’s South On A Bike trip, kids, weddings, funerals…a lot of topics.  We swapped numbers, I look forward to seeing them again when they head south.

Next day I was in Prince William, BC. It seems like every time I have to go through a big town it rains, everybody else knows where they’re going in a hurry but I’m trying to figure out where I’m going in the rain on a heavy bike with knobby tires. Prince William is the biggest town in the neighborhood, so of course the weather went worse and it started to hail. Good sized hail too, bouncing off my visor bouncing off my windshield, hail that makes you say ouch. I ducked into the first place I could find with a porch, which turned out to be a liquor store. I had no intention of shopping…

It was about lunchtime, I was standing out there trying to thaw and yellow Toyota Prius taxi pulls up and the driver almost hits the bike. This 40-year-old guy piles out of the passenger side of the taxi looking like every skateboarder from the 90s with his baseball hat on sideways, black sweatpants and black sweatshirt…

The guy runs in the liquor store and he grabs a pint of vodka and a Gatorade, comes outside where I’m standing next to the garbage can, takes a big swig of the Gatorade, pours in the vodka and fills it up… then he takes another big swig and pours in the rest of the vodka and throws the vodka bottle away. He looks at me,looks at the bike. He looks back at me and says “is that your motorcycle”and I smiled and said “why yes it is”. I guess being in ice splattered leathers was his best clue. 

He says “boy, I wish I could travel like that. Just take off on the open road be free.” I said “well, it certainly has its moments… I mean it’s hailing right?” He says “oh yeah”, and we talk for a while about Canada, about the road and I told him about the ALS fundraiser and gave him a sticker. He says “hey, I gotta be going, you travel safe eh (one of my first “eh’s” in Canada). I really wish I could go on a trip like that…” I said “well you only get so many days, you should buy a motorcycle.” He said as he got into his taxi “I would have to have a drivers license first”. I smiled and said “At least you’re starting out your day with a nutritious lunch” he laughed and said “yeah I gotta go back to work. Be safe…”

In Canada even the drunks are friendly…

Earlier in Cache Creek, BC I was looking for an ATM and I dumped the bike. Put my foot down, slipped in some gravel and it was on it’s side, my foot was trapped briefly under the pannier box and I’m sure to passer by’s it looked awful. After I got free, I was just about to start unloading it to make it light enough to lift when a guy came screeching into a halt in his truck.  Out hops the biggest Canadian I’ve seen yet and he says “you OK? Here, let’s get this thing on its feet…. Looks like you need some help. I ride a KTM 890”. So we lifted the bike back on its feet, I gave him a sticker and told him about the trip and I was on my way. He was exactly the heavy lift capability I needed right then and there.

Fast forward a couple days and I was riding up the Cassiar Highway. After a wet and cold 10 hour day on the bike I got to the campground I was aiming for all day. That was where the nicest Canadian provincial park ranger in the world told me “I have the worst news for you… you can’t camp here because we have bear trouble. There’s a mama grizzly bear and two cubs, we’re not letting people camp in tents and we’re about to close the park”.  I gave her a sticker and told her about the ride,  she seemed genuinely sad that she had to boot me out of her park, but I get it: rules are rules and nobody wants somebody getting digested in their park. As I left the cubs were showing off for the cameras scratching their butts on the sign for the park. 

Next park was 2 1/2 hours and several bear sightings away but the camp itself was bear free, on a beautiful lake and that park ranger was super nice as well… I told her about the trip, the fundraiser. She immediately put the sticker on her clipboard. We spent a half hour talking about winters in Baja, stand up paddle surfing… thinking warm thoughts helped after a wet and cold day.  

Next day I was looking for a gas station in Iskut BC, one of those Canadian towns that might have a hundred residents but has a hockey arena that’ll seat a thousand people. I stopped at what I thought was a hotel (because I read the sign), put the side stand down and the side stand sunk in the sandy gravel and the bike fell again. This time it wasn’t just on its side, it was on its side propped up by its side stand so it was trying to be upside down a little bit, which is usually bad for pouring oil out of your motorcycle… and not a great look. 

I started wrestling to get the motorcycle at least on its side, then I started taking off the heavy bags so I could lift it. The tiniest Canadian native woman comes over with her little dog (who tried to pee on my bike immediately) and she says “do you need some help?”I said “yeah, do you have a goalie or a forward hanging out someplace? I saw you have a big hockey arena.” 

She said she didn’t have any hockey players around and she insisted that she helped me lift the bike. I hope I did most of the lifting… I must’ve looked pretty flustered by the end of all this because she said “you look like you need a break and a cup of coffee, let’s go sit down. I don’t get to talk to many people.” A coffee break was exactly what I needed. The hotel wasn’t a hotel anymore… We talked for over a half hour as her little dog alternated between trying to pee on my bike, my helmet and having his way with his dog bed…

Next night found me near Whitehorse at Yukon Motorcycle Park, where I ran into a French motorcyclist heading for Tuktoyaktuk on his Yamaha Tenere 1200 he’d shipped from Europe.  We traded road stories, he showed me his impressive drone photography… once again either he and I were of a similar mind or people in Canada were just super nice. 

Next day I turned onto the Alaska Canada Highway, that was one of those bucket list things for me on this trip. Between Canadian Customs and the American border on the Alaska Canada Highway is about 30 km of nothing.. that’s where  I found a guy and his bike broken down on the side of the road. 

Durring Covid I had a 500 plus day Duolingo Spanish streak going, but afterwards and  in preparing for this trip I let that learning slide… it would have been another thing to pack that would have been smart.

The guy I found spoke mostly Spanish, was named Macca Calaverras and was from Mexico. He was broken down on the side of the road miles from help, best I could make out his chain had come off but he wasn’t worried. He’d taken off a long while back on one of those motorcycles you see for sale at grocery stores in Mexico (which I assume don’t have a great parts dealer network) and rode down to Argentina and was now headed north. He didn’t have goretex gear, I didn’t really see a tent or sleeping bag lashed on, but he did have a very nice sombrerro on top carefully tied on so it wouldn’t get crushed. His extra tires looked more bald than the ones on his bike. I told him my bike had 100,000 miles on it, he said “si, muy… mine has 24,000”. 

We got his tools out, which wasn’t many, and loosened his axle nut (which wasn’t super tight)… motorcycle chains come off because they’re out of adjustment or the parts are worn out. Macca’s rear sprocket looked more like a saw blade than the square shaped teeth the chain is meant to be able to grab onto. But he wasn’t worried… he was pretty happy that somebody had shown up who knew how to (sorta) fix it and somebody could take his picture. We swapped stickers, I just didn’t have enough Spanish to explain about the fundraiser ride for ALS Northwest. He really seemed to like the sticker.

We got the chain back on, he said “ok, you can go, I’ll be fine.” I asked if he had enough gas, if he had any food or water… he brushed it off. He said “My friends were worried that I’d be travelling alone… but I’m not. No, I travel with God and my new friends I meet like you.” He insisted I be on my way…

I don’t know if that sprocket had another day left in it. I couldn’t remember (or never got to the right Duolingo level for motorcycle travel) the word for sprocket or torque, which seemed important (and I forgot I had Google Translate). I don’t know if he made it to, through or over the border and through the next long ways to Tok Alaska, where he’d never find a rear sprocket for a 250cc chopper motorcycle you could buy at WalMart in Baja. But he wasn’t worried, and he’d gotten to the Yukon Territory on a bike that cost less than my phone…

Keith (my friend I got the bike from who died from ALS and that the fundraiser ride is in memory of) used to say that “when something breaks you just get to make new friends”, and Macca may be the true embodiment of that. Macca had decided to go for a ride, or as Keith would say “just go ride your motorcycle”, and wasn’t worried about extra gas cans or satellite communications, bears or cold. He was stoked I took his picture with his own camera…  

I hope he made out ok, but somehow I kinda think things work out for Macca because there he was, far from home with barely enough tools to put his chain back on and his biggest concern was “who’ll take my picture as I fix this”. 

After a few days resting up with family in Fairbanks, changing out the front and rear tires, some brake pads and doing a sort/cull of my gear  and sleeping in a dark room on a real bed I took off for the Dalton Highway. Just getting to the start of the Dalton meant riding through miles of muddy road construction, more mud than I’d planned for. By the time I reached the Dalton Highway sign the radiator was clogged with mud. I cleaned it out as best I could, but between the long steep hills and the infamous Dalton Highway mud and rough surface my radiator developed a crack. It started to bleed out, I stopped once and filled it from my drinking water, barely making it to Yukon Camp, where the Dalton Highway crosses the Yukon River. 

Yukon Camp is a cross between a hotel, gas station, cafe and oil/mining base camp next to a boat ramp. Trucks stop for a rest, travelers stop for gas. I walked into the cafe covered in mud and the sweetest older lady who seemed to be in charge said “oh my god, what happened to you?” All I could come up with was “guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen somebody on a motorcycle, am I the first this year?” She nodded… 

I drew a bit of a crowd, started handing out stickers, explaining about the fundraiser ride for ALS Awareness month and answering questions. She said as I handed her a sticker “ALS is such a horrible thing, you make yourself at home”. She showed me where I could set up my tent, shower… When somebody tells me to make myself at home I usually don’t take it as being weapons free to do as I please. I said I’d get onto fixing my bike in the morning and thanked them for a nice spot to break down. It was pretty lucky to break down next to the only indoor plumbing, electricity and wifi for over a hundred miles…

Yesterday I tried several ways to fix the radiator, but nothing worked. The leak isn’t slow enough to ride back to Fairbanks where I can wait for a new radiator to get shipped in. If I’m super lucky the dealer (yes, there’s a BMW dealer in Fairbanks, so you can enjoy your motorcycle 4 months out of the year)will have a line on one. 

Currently I’m waiting for a tow… I just finished reading Jupiter’s Travells by Ted Simon, first guy to ride around the world. He was factory sponsored in 1972 by Triumph and Lucas Electrics (better known as “Lucas, The Prince of Darkness”). Towards the end of the book he was in India and had to wait for an electrical part and a rear sprocket for a month. I’m broke down in one of the two cheapest places to break down on the Dalton Highway, and the cheaper of 3 places to get towed from. Things could be much worse…

But I am constantly amazed by the kindness of strangers on this trip. In fact, I’ve yet to run into anyone unfriendly… I’m sure they’re out there, maybe it’s how you’re perceived when you tell somebody you’re trying to raise money for a charity or follow through on a promise to a friend who died… I dunno. 

There’s lots worse places I could be than surrounded by the kindness of strangers… This ride will change a guy.

 

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