There’s a saying I like. It goes: There are only two types of days for riding motorcycles. Good ones and great ones. And if it’s minus-three and sheeting rain, it’s just a good day.
I use it whenever some dweeb wobbles over to me when I am standing under a service station awning, soaking wet, my blood frozen to jelly in my veins, and says with a grin on his idiot face: “Not much fun on a bike, aye?”
He naturally expects me to agree with him. He certainly doesn’t expect to discover I am actually deeply in love with what I do. And once, in the bad old days when I was heaps less approachable – but would nonetheless get approached – my reply would have been “Go fuck yourself”, it’s now more usually the Good Day and Great Day thing. Both responses blow their little minds.
But just how great can a ride on a bike really be?
Quite frankly, it can be transcendental. It can be so great it changes you in some fundamental way, which you might not recognise initially because it’s just such a massive sensory overload you need time to process it. Then when you do, it stays with you forever. It becomes part of your DNA.
Runs like that are rare. I’ve ridden several million kilometres in fifty years, and I have had maybe a dozen such rides. Rides so ineffably perfect in every conceivable way, you know their like can never come again. You may get another great one, or even a few, but a run like that one? Nah. It can never be like that again.
And in terms of affirmation, when you truly ‘get’ that this motorcycle business is really all you need to be fulfilled – indeed blessed – as a human being, runs like that cannot be beaten. They must, perforce, be rare. That is precisely what makes them so wondrous.
When this run happened, I had already been riding for about ten years. I was already heavily infected by motorcycling. All I wanted to do was ride bikes and have adventures and shit.
I was the veteran of a many Bathurst Easter Races, a heap of rallies, countless runs with my mates, my work commute was 120-km per day, I did not own a car and had no plans to ever own one, and I was clocking up at least 80-100,000 kms per year.
I was also on my first Harley, and my fifth bike in a series, and well down the road to blood-sworn anti-socialism, crazy hot bitches, and even crazier mates. My life was an endless succession of massive emotional highs and commensurate lows, and I embraced it and lived it with a passion that has never left me to this day. I drank all the Kool-Aid there was, then made more of it, and drank that too.
My motorcycle mythology was powerful. I had been reading – Hell, “devouring” might be a better word – endless tales of riding in magazines. That was back when magazines employed people who could write, and it was that writing that burned itself into my teenage brain and flavoured the Kool-Aid I’d started to drink. Two Wheels, AMCN, Revs, Easyriders, Iron Horse – I absorbed them all. I would even shoplift them if I lacked the money to buy them. And I guess the one I loved the most was Easyriders. Its stories captivated me. That motorcycle outlaw ethos is a hell of a drug. The brilliantly-written tales, insanely evocative and powerful, simply enchanted me. They were my fucken Creation myth, I guess.
I wanted to live that. I wanted to be that. So, I became that. Never under-estimate what sheer force of will can accomplish. At seventeen, I may not have been the hard, mean-eyed, bearded and tattooed sumbitch howling along the highways that I was reading about, but I worked at it until I was. Even at that age, I somehow knew the world would never stop telling me I was just “not enough”. So I became iron-resolved to make myself more than enough.
Fast-forward a few years, and in my mid-twenties, I was well down the road to this blessed perdition. I had acquired a bunch of mates as insane, or even more insane, than me. We were awash with insanely hot girls – not constantly – but in fairly regular quantities. This fact alone re-enforced the utter righteousness of what we were doing.
Our bikes were kinda shitty because they were being constantly ridden, and ridden hard, and we didn’t have a lot of money, so shit was forever exploding or falling off. But we were literally living the dream – our dream. I had become the fucking myth.
The whole paradigm was so unspeakably great, it took a very special run to make it transcendental. Here I was thinking that this shit was as good as it got, and then I went on this run, and everything before and after it just never tasted the same again.
It was summer, and we were heading north, along the coast of New South Wales. There was a dozen of us, and we had no particular destination and no clear agenda other than to ride the earth and have adventures and shit, like I said earlier. We would stop when we felt like it, or when something fell off someone’s bike, or when the then-rare police car felt we needed to be booked for something or needed to look at our helmet exemptions. Yes, those were the days when you could ride without a helmet if you had the right piece of paper. And if you’ve never done big miles without a helmet, you should shut the fuck up and do them before you start ignorantly braying about “safety” and shit. You don’t know what you’re missing. And if you hadn’t yet guessed, “safety” was not a thing anyone I knew on a bike could even spell.
The weather was stunning. It was early summer, and the roads were not yet packed with families on holiday. We rode in a close pack of thunder; a metallic storm of both utter invincibility and total vulnerability – and that’s a cup so few sip from.
We turned off the highway somewhere near Macksville and headed for Taylors Arm, where the fabled Pub With No Beer was said to be. None of us had ever been, and we could honestly think of no better place to go. Surely it had beer despite what the song declared.
As we crossed the creek that runs next to the pub and started gearing down, what we saw still freaks me out. The pub, if you don’t know, sits in a beautiful green-grassed valley, and back then it had a large open area next to it. That was also covered in green grass, and on this day, it was full of people, and there was a band playing. We had lucked upon some kind of local festival, and I was thinking our arrival would go one of two ways. Either it would be beaut, or the police would arrive and it would be a different kind of beaut.
None of us much cared either way. When you’re wired how we were, we played whatever cards were deal to us, and we always bet big.
As it turned out, the people there, many of who were what would today be called “alternative”, but were really just hinterland hippies, and thus our weird allies in anti-socialism. Unless we actually impaled one of them and wore his skin as a cloak, they were not going to call the cops just because some bikies had arrived. It was quite a different world back then.
We parked the bikes, and as my mates started wandering around, I stood there and took in the scene. Before we had arrived it looked like some bucolic throwback to the Summer of Love. Lots of girls, a teepee, blokes strumming guitars on a small makeshift stage, some other bloke fishing, groups lazing around on spread blankets, smiling, the smell of marijuana flavouring the air…
With the addition of our Harleys, it was a fucken Dave Mann painting. Look him up if you don’t know who he is, or have never looked at an Easyriders magazine. His art was what we all thought we looked like when we’d drank enough beer, snorted enough gak, and our girlfriends were getting their tits out.
In short order we had acquired beer, rolled a few fat numbers, and were most genially disposed to the world at large. None of us perceived any threats, so none of us were feeling prickly or ill-tempered. In my experience, the only time people like us ever started busting shit up was when fools wanted to find out if bikies really were as tough as we looked. And of course they found the fuck out.
But here? It was fucking Pan’s Arcadia with a bunch of Harleys parked in the middle of it.
And it just got better, which you might find hard to believe. Like, so far, it had ticked all my boxes. Then a few of the blokes came out of the pub carrying a polystyrene esky that had been filled with beer and ice. They plonked it down where a few of us were sitting listening to a seriously good cover of Ring of Fire, and one of them said: “You won’t fucken believe what’s in that pub.”
“The Swedish National Girls Beach Volleyball team?” I grinned. For all I knew that may well have been the case, given how utterly wondrous everything else here was.
“Oh, it’s better than that,” my mate said. “The publican, who gave us this esky for the beer we’d bought, has three daughters. They are the barmaids. The eldest one is 23.”
“Don’t lie, fucker,” I said. “Making up shit like that is cruel.”
“Go see for yourself,” he grinned.
So I did. And when I walked into the pub, there were indeed three girls behind the bar, and they were all smiles and welcomes, and quite unreasonably attractive. I’m a sucker for girls in skintight jeans, little crop-tops, and lots of hair – and these three were all of that. My fucken Dave Mann painting just got better.
That afternoon and evening will forever stay with me. We ate trout hauled out of the creek after befriending the fisherman – Dan his name was – by giving him a joint to smoke and a beer to drink. A few of us got up to sing with the band, to wild applause. I remember dancing with one of the publican’s daughters, and I wasn’t the only one. And Lord, could those girls dance, despite being partnered with clumsy tattooed bears. They smelled impossibly good, laughed like tinkling fountains, and threw their arms around our necks at every opportunity.
I walked off at one stage to catch my breath and felt utterly removed from the world as I looked upon that scene. What impossible benison was taking place here? How had we been blessed with this? Surely, none of us could have been worthy of such a thing? Were the cops suddenly going to arrive and start beating us with batons?
I had never seen my mates more well-behaved or indeed happier. It’s like we all understood what was happening was so special, if any of us did something untoward, the spell would be broken. And none of us wanted that.
At one stage the publican himself came down and brought us all some more beer, on the house. We paid him for it anyway. He told us we were welcome to stay the night, and we could camp pretty much wherever we liked. His girls would keep the pub open and keep serving us alcohol until we thought it was bedtime. I asked him if he was really an undercover cop and if this was some kind of elaborate sting operation that would see us all in chains by dawn. He laughed so genuinely, it caught me off-guard. I am by nature a suspicious cuss, but no matter how I considered our situation, I could find nothing amiss.
That night, most of the people who’d been on the grass went home. Dan the fisherman stayed, and a few others with him. They were all locals from the nearby hills, and utterly devoted to a carefree life. The girls there had not worn a bra in years, and were entirely casual about their boobs popping out now and then. They were lots of fun to dance with, as you can imagine.
Now you can probably understand that people like us don’t normally let our guards down to the point where we think it’s OK to dance. Every concert I had ever been to up until then with my mates and our girls, involved the girls dancing like Persian sluts, while we stood around supervising them and maybe now and again nodding with the music for a few beats. We were far too cool and menacing to be doing any dancing.
But on that astonishing afternoon and evening, we danced like no-one was watching. We sang some too. We drank beer, we smoked dope. We took girls for short rides on our bikes. We told stories and listened intently as stories were told to us.
It dawned on me at one stage that I was actually living what I had always wanted to live. A passionate and atavistic existence, informed entirely by the riding of stupid motorcycles to different places, was what I had always aimed for, even while knowing I had romanticised this shit in my head and was only ever gonna get the odd glimpse of anything like that. And then here I was, here we all were, living some kind of sorcerous and fabled ‘other’ existence.
The publican’s daughters were genuinely hot. And way friendlier than any of us could have expected. The other girls there were also cute, in that crazy hippy way that can be cute or hideous, depending on the girl. The blokes were all genuine and honest. They did not appear to be scared of us, but they treated us with a degree of respect we had only ever known once we’d busted a few heads. We didn’t lay a finger on any of them, and we did nothing any of the girls did not encourage or indeed initiate.
What can I tell you? I find it hard to believe myself. But that’s how it was. And that’s why this run is seared into my memory until the day I die. I can close my eyes and relive it when I choose. It still makes me smile. Why would it not? Such times are granted to very few, I would think. Certainly, they are unicorn-rare for people like me.
What bonds people are mutually-shared experiences – good ones and bad ones. We get through the tough times together and we rejoice as one when the times are good. But when good becomes great, and everything falls into place, and if you’d scripted it you’d know people would not believe you…well, then it’s beyond special, isn’t it? It is truly transcendental.
We rode out of there the next day, our heads literally buzzing. I had drunk far too much the night before – and we all had, but none of us seemed to have much of a hangover. It’s like whatever spell had been cast on us was still in effect.
I don’t remember the ride home. I’m sure someone broke down at some stage, and I’m certain we were stopped by the cops at some stage. But nothing sticks in my mind.
Interestingly, my mates and I never talked much about that run. It was almost as if speaking of it would cheapen it, or even pop the bubble we had placed it in. Sure, now and again it would come up and one of us would remember something from that run, and we would all laugh and smile.
We obviously tried to do it again the next year. Of course we did. But the publican had gone, and the new publican told us he’d immediately call the cops if we caused any shit. So, we caused some shit and left before the cops got there.
Since that day, I have had a few more “great” runs. I do a lot of miles, I have never had boring mates, and the odds do occasionally produce some immensely epic experiences.
But nothing like that weekend at Taylors Arm has ever happened again. And that’s probably good. If shit like that happened all the time, I think you’d lose yourself. And you may never find your way back. It’s like you will never ever enjoy cocaine as much as you do the first time you do cocaine. You sure think you will, so you keep doing it until your sinuses collapse and your brain turns into glue. It is a pointless pursuit in that regard.
Just as trying to re-create that weekend was pointless. Can’t be done, won’t be done, and I have made my peace with that. I found my way back. But it’s not like I won’t go looking now and again, is it?
