Jim

Jim

At a rest stop the day before, I had lost my helmet. There had been a massive rain storm. After I had come out of it, I stopped to gather my wits and put on whatever warm dry stuff I had. Being discombobulated from the trouncing I just experienced, I had driven off without my helmet.

Under normal circumstances, this would not have been that big of a deal. I generally rode without a helmet, but I would be crossing the Washington line that day. They had helmet laws.

I woke up early from a decent little campsite, thinking about my situation.

There were a couple of towns up ahead and I would check and see what I might find.

I rode for about a half hour before hitting the reserve tank, which would get me about 20 miles.

There was a placard for gas at the next exit. I rolled into a dusty station. Cobwebs hanging in the windows, the pumps looking skeletal.

I had a cell phone with me. It was essentially useless in most situations, owing to being early on the technology and my carrier having no coverage west of the Mississippi. The mountains also decimated any chance of connection.

I was messing with it, seeing if I could get a sense of how far I might actually be from the next stop, wondering if I should dig my atlas out of my ruck sack.

Out of the mountains behind the gas station, a man walked into the parking lot and asked if I was looking for gas. A rugged dude with a basket full of tomatoes, his beard thick from many seasons; gnarled from wilderness, manual labor, and a northern climate. Patchwork clothes, surely Goodwill finds all nicked and tattered, topped with his unruly head of hair and unseen eyes behind sunglasses.

I said I was.

“That place hasn’t been open for a decade. I have some gas back at the house I use for the mowers if ya wanna follow me back there. It’s across the street.” He said his name was Jim and

I followed him.

It was a smallish town nestled between the mountains. Houses uniquely cared for, many past their prime, an aging and forgotten part of America slowly being reclaimed by the wilderness. A thing not specific to this part of the world, but no less in its frequency.

We talked for about 45 minutes, him telling me the history of himself and in turn the history of the town.

It was where he had grown. The house we stood in front of was where he had been a boy. He had worked in the mines pulling the wealth from the ground for other people. He spoke about years in Missoula and back home, the fissure in family and time’s reckoning on a population fleeing or fled and the few brave, stubborn or stuck left behind.

If there is one truth I have learned that benefited me maybe the most: To temper your own self promotion for the sake of others’ stories is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself. Fill yourself with other people’s stories. And your story becomes infinitely more interesting.

I said my goodbyes, my heart humming with the openness between strangers after a random meeting and nearly 2000 miles.

A lot of highway miles on a bike can hit you pretty hard. The wind, the grind, the body hunched; your focus unconsciously sharpened for 500 miles. The landscape proves no friend in the inevitable monotony of beauty that sadly must come.

I was just sick as a dog still. Waves of nausea and pain in the joints and a weird itching under the skin, the shingles a relentless distraction. But my talk with Jim had lightened the heaviness of my body predicament.

The next exit down was Wallace. It’s a town that fared much better than its sibling city. It’s downtown, the two-story brick store fronts that are the model of small town America for cities of a certain size. The thing the west has ample amounts of is space and the architecture takes advantage of that fact. Bigger sidewalks and streets. Large dining rooms and waiting rooms and parking lots.

Wallace is also nuzzled in the valley that connects Mullin and swaddles Rt 90.

It was still early. The town was shimmering in the morning light, deserted and peaceful. The streets, silent. No one anywhere. The snow would not come for another month.

The only person who seemed to be up and about was a man outside a store front, sweeping his front sidewalk, middleaged, tallish, and round but not overly in either description. I circled back after passing. As luck would have it, it was a second hand store and they did in fact have a helmet.

I talked to the man for about a half hour as the town woke up around us . He continued the story Jim had started, characters and histories filling in the colors in the periphery of this vision. Populating this part of the world for a traveling stranger.

I bought a definitely not a street legal helmet for a very reasonable 2 dollars and 30 cents.

I bid my new acquaintance goodby and made my way further west.

It was not yet nine. I needed oil for the bike. The guy told me the next town down had a Yamaha mechanic and dealership.

The bike I was riding was definitely looking like The Beverly Hillbillies. The guitar sat straight up like a sail off the sissy bar, my clothes and camping supplies all tucked and rolled in the back of the saddle. The sight of it excited a certain kind of person and propelled them to conversation and question. As almost compulsion.

The older gentleman behind the counter at the dealership was that kind of person. He continued the greater conversation that started that morning. That may have started at the beginning of everything. He saw the bike and asked the questions. The questions turned to narration. He told me about his youth racing bikes. His travels on motorcycles back when the world was a bit wilder and the roads not always paved.

I was there for about an hour, swapping war stories of glory and miscalculations.

I left him there, heading west, crying my eyes out for the beauty of everything; knowing the world was better than it thought it was.

The photograph above was taken in 2024 I think. I still see Jim from time to time when I am out the way and time permits it.