heaven’s highways
“Do you think I need to take rain gear?”
I directed the question to James, who was busy cleaning his windscreen with Bon Ami.
He didn’t reply, so I answered myself.
“Nah,” I said. “it’s going to be sunny where we’re going.”
I took James’ lack of response as agreement on the fact that it would be sunny. I pulled my rolled-up rain jacket out of my saddle bag and carried it back into the garage. I was trying to make room for my mesh in case it should become too warm for my three-season Twisted Sister jacket – I love that name even though I was never fond of the band.
Every motorcycle rider in the world knows what happens when you leave your rain gear behind (#SpoilerAlert), but the (very bearable) showers didn’t start until halfway through our loop and ended about two-thirds of the way home so, meh. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been except for the brief downpour just before Foymount.
Our original plan was to ride from Almonte to Dwight through Algonquin park, stay overnight and then ride back the next day. Rolling in the Ontario Highlands is like riding a little bit of heaven – joyful and transcending.
“Looks like the weekend plan isn’t going to work,” James had informed me the night before in a messenger call.
“Why not?” I had been looking forward to the short trip.
“Rain,” he replied. “It’s going to be everywhere we planned to go.”
“But my forecast says sunny.” I wasn’t going down without a fight.“Sunny here. But not there.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, we can ride here then.”
“Yep, we can.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
It started to spit a bit as we approached Bancroft and three in-a-hurry BMW riders passed us without so much as a cursory tip of their helmets in acknowledgement when we let them safely pass us one-by-one while we were all stuck behind a slow-moving yellow pick-up truck.
Some folks have no manners.
All of the other one hundred riders we crossed paths with over the course of the day (yeah, we counted them) waved or nodded in greeting as we briefly shared the same stretch of road. The vast majority of riders, regardless of their preferred style of bike, respect each other, our community and what it means to be a motorcyclist. A minority don’t.
We had intended to include Letterkenny to Quadeville and then to Foymount but had to forego that because of time (I don’t ride in the dark). So, we continued on the 66 through Brudenell onto the 512 (where we experienced a downpour) to Foymount.
Had we done Letterkenny, the route would have looked like this (https://maps.app.goo.gl/zhXGqtQESXAB32WF9) :
Our ride drew to a tragic end when we stopped at the Bogie General Story and someone told us the road had been closed at the bottom of Centennial Lake because a rider had died only a couple of hours before in a crash.
We rode the remaining hour back to Almonte in relative silence. Maybe because we’d been chatting all day and had nothing more to say. Maybe because there was nothing to say after the news we’d just been told.
I learned the rider’s name, Kyle Tapp, a couple of days later. Apparently, he was relatively new to motorcycling and was only twenty-seven years old. Forty-one years my junior. Too young to die on a beautiful autumn afternoon.
The consolation is that it never rains and the roads are always good where Kyle is now.
I hope he finds joy on heaven’s highways.
© 2024 Susan Macaulay. I invite you to share my poetry and posts widely, but please do not reprint, reblog or copy and paste them in their entirety without my permission. Thank you.
