A patriotic bike rally is like ….
I could crow about how great it is to be mountain biking again on well-attended-to singletrack out at Standing Rocks near Amherst and within Hartman Creek State Park outside Waupaca. But after taking a slow-motion header on the former, and being unfamiliar with an additional mile of trail at the latter, I’m still pedaling cautiously. With my goal to run a PR marathon less than four weeks from now, I don’t need to risk serious injury.
Still, it’s amazing to pull into a full parking lot at Standing Rocks and then not encounter another soul over more than an hour of trail riding. We’re out there in force but yet able to enjoy the sport in relative isolation and at our own speed.
Contrast that scene with the average mass motorcycle rally, such as the one Garrison Keillor encountered in Washington, D.C., this past Memorial Day weekend :
“A patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti; the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer irritation of the thing. … No wonder the Current Occupant welcomed them with open arms at the White House, put on a black leather vest, and gave a manly speech about how he’d just ‘choppered in’ and saw the horde ‘cranking up their machines’ and he thanked them for being so patriotic. They are his kind of guys, full of bluster, giving off noxious fumes, and when they leave town, nobody misses them.”
Read the rest of Keillor’s column here.
If you want to read more expressions of displeasure with the exhaust fumes, violence and lewd behavior that tend to accompany motorcycle rallies, check out this story from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Many of the posted comments are from local residents as sick of these events as the city council.
Don’t worry: Posting this is not an indication I’m branching out from bashing quad riders of public trails to tsk-tsking hog riders on city streets (let alone straying well outside the upper Midwest). The latter group have more than enough of their own foes. I’ll stick primarily to defending quieter, self-propelled forest folk ’round these parts.
But I can’t help but add to the din of protest against obnoxious motorheads whereever they raise their … er … motorheads.
– Joel Patenaude