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