Well, as fate would have
it (and the fates, unbeknown to us, were about
to have a great old time
at our expense), the storm appeared to be breaking
up, at least in the Prairie
du Chien area, by about 8 p.m., so it was then
we decided to make a dash
for La Crosse. The fates were waiting--about
three miles north of town
on highway 35, when it started to rain. For the
next two hours, on a trip
that normally would take a little more than
half of that, we rode through
the rain, thunder and lightning at about 45
miles per hour, and were
literally the only bike on the road. Traffic was light
(thankee, Lord, for small
favors), but unfortunately most of it was
coming at us from the opposite
direction. I was immediately reminded of two
things we had discussed
last week on the list: don't ride in a lightning storm
because when you're soaking
wet, you make an excellent conduit for an
electrical charge, and two,
visibility gets tough when there's rain
on the windshield and headlights
in your face, even when you've just done
your windscreen with a good
coat of carnauba wax. We did have our rain
gear--which, I must say,
kept us perfectly warm and dry, at least from
our necks down to our ankles.
That kept us from getting sopped, thereby
(perhaps) holding the lightning
at bay, but if you've ever been out in a
good lightning storm, try
one some time while you're running exposed
between towering bluffs
one side and the Mississippi River on the other.
Quite a rush. As for the
headlights, that was a bitch. I had on my
goggles over my eye glasses,
with the hood of the rain jacket on over a leather
baseball cap pulled down
over my eyes, so that kept most of the rain out
of my peepers, but as for
trying to see over the windshield, no such luck.
Instead, I took to peering
around it whenever there were cars in my face,
which was all too often,
much as I could tell.
Okay, so we finally pull
into La Crosse and commence to look for the
motel, which, naturally,
was not where the dumkopf who gave us directions had
placed it. Around 10:30,
after circling back and forth and finally
getting a tip from a checkout
girl who was closing down a supermarket in a mall,
we pulled up to the office
to find nobody there. There was a message on the
wall, however, telling late
arriving guests to call a number, which we
did, only to be told--and
here's where it really gets good--that neither our
credit card nor our home
phone number had checked out when they checked
them after we phoned in
our reservation the day before, so they wrote our
call off as a hoax and instead
rented the room to somebody else.
No shit. And no rooms, for that matter, anywhere else in La Crosse.
At this point, then, we really
had two choices. I should have taken the
first, which would have
been to head back down the river 60 miles into
the teeth of the storm,
and call upon the good graces of friends we have who
live in Prairie du Chien.
Actually, had I known earlier that our motel
room wasn't waiting, I never
would have left Prairie du Chien in the first
place, opting instead for
the hospitality of the friends.
But no. Instead I went for
the second choice, which, in effect, was to
say to the little woman,
"Screw it, let's go back to Madison."
This commenced the next leg
of our harrowing ride--down 106 miles of
interstate through six counties
lashed by windstorms and rain, making a
grand total of nine counties
we'd covered since 11 a.m. that morning, all
of them under tornado and
severe storm warnings some time or other during
the day. To this I would
add (and those of you who have read my ramblings
before may remember in Wisconsin
our intimate relationship with the
deer), we were traveling
through the highest concentration of deer in the state,
the largest chunk of a 1.4
million herd. To the credit of the buggers, we
saw only two--one lying
dead on the meridian grass, a fresh kill judging
from the color of the blood
on the highway, still red, and a live one who
stood there on the other
side and watched us cooly as we motored by, no
doubt another solid testimony
to the effectiveness of my deer whistles
mounted 11 inches apart
on either side of my headlight.
I hate riding I-94 at night,
even under ideal weather conditions, because
of the goddamn deer. I always
end up feeling like a fighter pilot, one
eye on the road, the other
peeled tensely for Bandits and Zekes.
We pulled off the interstate
briefly, still looking for a motel room, at
each of the first four burgs
we passed--Sparta, Tomah, Camp Douglas and
Mauston--but at each stop,
no such luck. It was around 12:30, 1 o'clock
when we pulled in to a truck
stop near Mauston and sat down to have
coffee, soup and cherry
pie, when in through the door walks this highway
patrolman and sits down
in the booth behind me. That's when we heard about him and
his cruiser getting blown
across two lanes of highway, with the tail-end
of the storm front hot on
our trail and registering gusts of 60 mph wind.
The cop, by the way, had
ridden bikes "until 1985--probably logged a
half-million miles," he
claimed, and had "owned them all at one time or
another, including the Harleys."
He wouldn't have a Harley today, he
said, and commenced to rattle
off a list of characteristics that would no go
over well in Milwaukee,
not in the least "the vibrations that leave your hands
numb after 50 or 60 miles."
A Gold Wing, he said, was the best bike he'd
ever owned, and with that,
he went back into the night. He never did come
right out and tell me we
were crazy to be out on the highway; I think he
figured we knew that already
but really didn't have much of a choice.
We didn't, actually, except
maybe to stay there in the truck stop and
drink coffee for the next
five hours until daylight, or whenever it got around
to stop raining, whichever
came first.
Actually, back at Camp Douglas,
sitting in the lot of another
fully-booked hotel, I had
suggested to the little woman that we just leave the bike in
the parking lot, then crawl
up under the branches of a big fir tree that
sat next to the place in
the yard. With our rain gear on, I figured, plus
the leafy foliage, we could
have copped a decent snooze, which at that
point we were beginning
to desperately need. I was getting foggy, my
wrists and right arm were
aching, I had a cramp in my right leg, and the little
woman had pains in her arthritic
and surgically repaired shoulder and
neck.
Instead, though, I put some
analgesic pain cream on my wrists and we each
popped an 800 mg Ibuprofen
and went on from there.
We damn near made it home
without further incident, following a short
stretch at one more rest
stop, but about 10 miles north of Madison along
came the worst gusts of
the entire trip. I can't tell you the mph, but
whatever it was, it started
to blow us off to our left into the passing
lane, then drove us back
toward the opposite shoulder and basically
picked us up and shook us
like a terrier does to a rat. "Don't you think we
ought to get off?" advised
the little woman, hanging over my shoulder while I
lay there over the tank.
Yup, yup--no argument from me. So we copped a break,
because at that point we
were within several hundred feet of the next
exit, which happened to
be for Sun Prairie and Waunakee, Madison suburbs
connected by state highway
19. We waited out the worst of the gusts at
another truck stop, then
sneaked the last few miles via 19 and 51 into
town.
