Relative Motion.

- My younger brother John and I took a motorcycle trip to upstate P.A. along Route 6.

***

"It's full immersion ; like learning a language by moving to that country."

***

After about an hour at 75 m.p.h. the motorcycle decides to sell some psychotropics to your limbic system.
The wind which perpetually makes its way up into your helmet begins to orchestrate and incite elaborate gang warfare with rival pressure gradients on your eardrum that would make soccer rioters at a Roma/Lazio final blush ; so now instead of the wind, a voice like the sound of many waters.

***

The light refracts off of the visor in such a way that you're convinced you are part of a sacred parabolic function that extends infinitely, and infinitely closer to the author of creation. The endless corridor of earth/tree, road/sky dissolves into a miasma of peyote proportions and you're reminded of why you wanted to forget and forgot about what happened in class when you were 12.
And then you come to, and hunker down for a moment : scared that you actually forgot about where you were, let alone the intrinsic danger of riding a motor with two wheels, loaded with camping equipment along serpentine country roads at breakneck speeds next to a younger brother who, you're sure, is convinced he will never die, somehow.

***

The Photos won't capture the essential quality of this.
In lieu, some narrated silent films:

Pine tree, Route 6, Strip Mined Mountain Facade.
"The night I smashed my face up in Italy, I could feel the old pagan gods, those demons of antiquity after me. It started at the statues of Castor and Pollux, the twins, I'm a Gemini, I ran to the temple of Mars, the owl of Minerva flew overheard, at midnight."

A Wendy's on South 44.
"Well I think I have the most winning little man-boobs."


Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon.
"Some sorry sons-a-bitches in those black and whites on the information board actually put a railroad through this thing? To grunt and sweat under a weary life, wow, what the hell did Shakespeare know about working under early industrial conditions in some godforsaken canyon in the woods? Pretty though. John wants to take a picture."

An oil chip road that descends into a wide left turn around a sheer wall of limestone, shale and granite. Two motorcyclists lean into the horizon as in some wild Turner painting, if he had lived in this century. The road hugs the foot of a mountain on the left and drops at a sharp angle on the right before it quickly becomes a straight fall of approx. 100 feet. The overcast sky and abandoned coal mines and steel mills which punctuate the landscape like scattered tombstones imbue the vista with a preternatural cool and gives both riders a feeling that they have survived something, somehow, in ways they can neither codify nor comprehend.
"Whoa."


***

For about an hour after a long day of riding you're caught between two worlds, resurrected not yet ascended, You reply to simple direct questions with vague and near mystical answers. They are answers really, to your spaced out interpretation of what was asked, not the actual question.

***

"Do you want to get some beans?"
"I know what you mean, man."