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

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Tag: dakar

  • Crush Washers and the Yoda Way

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    In the lead up to the ride north, trip preparation anxiety has invaded my sleep and I can’t wait to get on the road. Few setbacks this week, nothing a few days won’t fix… like Tom Petty said “the waiting is the hardest part”. 

    Most mornings at casa de Labradors either a dog nose boops me or a cat walks on my head about four, then my head begins to spin for a few hours with questions like…

    Q: How many times have I reused the crush washer on the engine oil drain plug? Crap, how many times can you reuse the crush washer on a twin spark 650 Rotax single? Is there a BMW dealer on the way who will have a crush washer in stock? Can I get to that dealer without me having to go in or through some big city for a copper washer you can’t get at a hardware store? Are you really willing to gamble your engine shitting the bed above the Arctic Circle on reusing a two dollar crush washer? Are you willing, for two dollars, to risk north of Coldfoot an expensive and potentially hazardous complication to the trip and a miserable end to a fundraiser for a worthy cause? 

    A: Go figure out this freakin crush washer thing so you can sleep dumbass…

    Keith wrote in newsletters (available on the ALS Northwest website at https://alsnorthwest.org/keiths-village-newsletter/ ) about how he coped with his ALS diagnosis, and how he came to grips with his grief over the loss of his ability to do the simple things he previously took for granted, like riding his motorcycle, through speaking with a counsellor and adopting what he called the Yoda Way, found in the second edition. 

    Here’s what he said… classic Tao of Keith. 

    “DO, OR DO NOT”

    “The Yoda Way applies to whatever choice is directly in front of me right now. I can choose to do something, or choose to forgo it. I give myself permission to select either option. Having made the choice, I can move on. I stay in the present and there is little regret over not doing something. Of course there are times when I will be sad about choosing Do Not. But it’s far better to make the choice and then move forward with life than to sit around moping about how bad things are.”

    In other words, go buy that freakin crush washer… 

    By the time I’d ran through 64 traumatic engine failure/bear attack scenarios the BMW dealer in Eugene was open and a quick phone call confirmed they had an oil filter kit (including the freakin crush washer) in stock. Then came more decisions… $15 in shipping or $15 in gas? 200 miles on the bike or several days of waiting? Don’t threaten me with a good time, dogs went in their crates and I was off on the bike…

    I rode down through the back roads, got my parts and was riding home when I stopped to take a break and noticed that the bike and I were about to have a moment, a milestone… 

    A cool one…

    A quick check of the odometer showed the bike had 99,987 miles on it. I got it with 88,000 some odd miles on it. Keith bought it second hand with 10,000 (?) miles on it then put (don’t quote me here) 70,000 (or so) miles on it riding it to the south end of the map on his South On A Bike trip before shipping it back to Los Angles and riding it home, then he rode it around even after his diagnosis with ALS for a while. By the time I got the Dakar and started running around on it other bikes would have been rebuilt several times or in a junkyard. This thing had reliability designed into it from the factory. The 650 Dakar has been the platform of choice for riders who have or are currently circling the globe for a good reason, and Keith’s choice for riding to the end of the map. I thought it’d be a cool thing if it ticked over 100,00 miles on the trip, but that crush washer…

    I pulled off the highway onto a back road and rode slowly until the odometer showed 99,999 miles. I figured “odds are pretty good I’ll never see that again” so I took a picture. Then I started taking some video while riding… don’t worry, I’ve got things to hold phones and cameras other than my teeth for the trip and this was a good opportunity to train a bit for filming the trip (fight like you train, train like you fight). When it turned over from 99,999 to 0 we stopped and took some more pictures. Like I said before, I talk to machines, and after the photo session I lavished it with praise for several miles as we rode home… “Who’s a great bike? Ya, du bist! Wunderbar Churmahnn ehngineering ya? Du bist so schön und stark!” 3 years in the Army in Germany in the 80s and I can still remember enough German to sound like a tool.

    It didn’t grow another number on the odometer like some of my cars did when they went over 100,000 miles. I don’t know if BMW didn’t expect them to last this long when they designed the digital odometer but here we are. And it seemed pretty happy! Charged up hills, zipped right along… we both felt pretty good. I’d imagine Keith would be happy too, he’d have came to the party and wore a silly hat and drank champagne if I’d thrown one… 

    In a state of proud parent like glee I posted on a Facebook group for BMW Dakar owners pics of the odometer and the responses were overwhelmingly positive. “It’s just now broke in” or “it’s a new bike now” and “not to sound competitive but mine has…” no trolls, no politics, nobody trying to sell me anything. Kinda like an online birthday party for the Dakar with (as we speak) 50 plus well-wishers…

    But it’s what was said in the comments and replies that I’m finding solace to my pre trip anxiety in, and those simple statements reinforce things Keith said about the bike: “it’s not uncommon for them to run forever if you keep changing the oil” and “Rotax makes airplane engines, it’s a big deal when those fail because it’s bad when things fall from the sky so they make good stuff”. 

    As I contemplate riding a bike where the odometer has turned over to new bike territory I’m not gonna lie… I’m consciously anxious because there’s a lot that could go wrong. I’ve been planning this for a while, reverse engineering scenarios and timelines, planning and packing redundancies in gear and capabilities because I want this to go well and not be too miserable… a little misery builds character and should be great Instagram /Youtube content, right? But no battle plan survives the first shot being fired. This bike has been there and back, but I’ve never owned a bike with this many miles on it or even seen a motorcycle odometer with 0 miles on it… hell, even the new bikes I’ve bought came with more than 0 miles because some salesman or mechanic got to them before me. New is relative, it means new to you. In motorcycles and other stuff…

    It takes some discipline and bearing to stay positive in the face of adversity, I learned that in the infantry and hanging out with Keith. I had some truly inspiring bosses in the military, guys who would say stuff like “lead, follow or get out of the way” or “there’s always something you can do” and as a 19 year old grunt those words didn’t have the meaning then they do now. And a sense of humor helps too… When things got extra exceptionally silly or grim in the military usually we’d just laugh as a coping mechanism. When things would get really cold, wet and awful I would often whip out my favorite Igor line shamelessly stolen from the movie Young Frankenstein and modify it to fit our current misery: 

    Bet I whip that one out on the trip more than once…

    You’re in charge of your head at the end of the day. Those silly ass motivational posters of kittens that say “Attitude makes the difference” are right…

    But I can choose to freak out about riding north on this bike or not; it’s up to me, it’s in my control and freakin out never helps… ask an old hippy. And even if you have a bad day and freak out a bit it helps to remember that at the end of the day you’re technically not Superman. Even he had a kryptonite… give yourself some grace, you probably earned it. 

    The road ahead will be long and bumpy (so I’ll be checking the torque on bolts), there may be wolves at the tent door (I’ll have bear spray which prolly works on wolves) but this trip is not the first ascent of Everest or like when I ran the first (flipless) descent of a whitewater run in Washington….it’s nothing other people haven’t done before. On Instagram I saw a swell example of “just because you can” where somebody drove a Ferrari 308 like Magnum PI had up to Deadhorse a few years ago, so how bad could those roads be anyway? In a way, I’ll have a lot of people with me even if I’m riding alone on this trip. I never liked the idea of “people following me” but on social media and with the blog I hope you do. And in an “are you not entertained” kind of way I hope you like what you see and read enough that you’ll donate to a good cause that supports a lot of people in need (https://secure.alsnorthwest.org/site/TR?px=1030621&fr_id=1100&pg=personal ) in memory of a good man and his motorcycle who didn’t get to make this trip but are with me every mile. 

    Before and during the ride I can try to sleep soundly with the solace that comes from embracing the Yoda Way of Do or Do Not.

    And a fresh crush washer, that was two bucks well spent…