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COPYRIGHT 2002 Ehlert Publishing Group
MY FAVORITE WOMAN, my be-yootiful daughter, my artist-hearted Leah, can she be 19 already? I'm afraid it is so. Seems like yesterday she was four and making those great watercolor flowers, and I was much older, doing very stupid things like riding up Piuma Road with her laughing helmetless in my lap. Given Mommy's mood at the time, it's amazing we both survived that period. Voila, we did, and now at last, to my everlasting gratitude, she wants to go for a real motorcycle ride with Daddy. Imagine, with me, her aging, cranky father, she chooses to be for the entire measure of her spring vacation, when she could be partying instead with her friends in idyllic Santa Barbara, California. God, I've never been happier.
MY NOTIONS ARE FUNDAMENTAL as I plot this tour. I want to go back to Mitchell, Oregon, a small town in the center of the state I rode through in less than a minute a few years ago. Yet Mitchell remains burnished in my memory like something from Norman Rockwell's vanishing America, a place requiring return. Then there is the matter of that huge empty quarter that is southeast Oregon upon which I have never ridden, but heard fetching tales of its beauty from a traveling salesman on his way back to Portland, the long way. The view of Steens Mountain from the Alvord Desert, he told me, requires a look. I've never forgotten his understatement.
So one gray April afternoon here in Bieber, California, with falling skies and temperatures pregnant with winter's prompt return, when the locals watched Leah and I prepare the Gold Wing for flight north and muttered localese like, "What, they nuts? When the weather's taking a dump like this?", we ignored conventional wisdom and took off, I privately concerned only that Leah hadn't...
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