Tacking Into The Wind

The past few days, during discussions with my new GOE associates some thoughts have been percolating and it seems appropriate that I should put them down here.

This is an answer to Why GOE?

To most of the people I have been talking to lately this might seem a dumb question. Well, maybe not. All involved in the germination of this project have an understanding on some level in their own minds as to Why GOE? Some of these are complex, some simple, some from the intellect, some from the gut. Here, briefly stated, is my thought.

The American people want, whether they consciously know it or not, to be intimately connected with the “real” thing, by which I mean something greater than themselves as individuals. Duty, honor, truth, courage, crowned by liberty. Those are “real” things in the deepest most spiritual sense. Given proper leadership people will weld themselves to action that will rekindle these.

Everyone remembers the image of Pres. Bush, his arm around a grunged up firefighter standing on a pile of rubble at the WTC. All easily recall what he said that day and how a special kind of energy ran forth from that moment and instantly crossed the nation and informed a national purpose with a very special resolve. Where I live seemingly every vehicle and home instantly sprouted American flags.

An image like the one of which we speak, of course, awakens in our breast feelings that feed on these sentiments. People were first filled with dread, anger, fear, yes, even guilt and self loathing. But with one image, one simple phrase, these instantly gave way to courage, duty, honor and the like.

We literally swell up when duty calls and we can, following our conscience, find honor in a courageous act that further enshrines liberty in the hearts and minds of all who will follow her light.

A terrible resolve went forth that day and the world trembled at the thought of coming retribution. But, alas, this resolve has waned at the same pace as a diminishing national leadership. In this leadership vacuum opposing forces have taken the stage and pose an existential threat internally as grave as the external threat from Islamofascism.

It is the need to counter this internal threat that is the impetus for GOE. GOE is an answer to a need that is in the air for this kind of renewal.

Absent adequate leadership at the top we, the people, must provide it from the bottom. Our very existence as a nation depends on whether an enduring and terrible resolve to advance the cause of freedom can be rekindled.

The fire burns low precisely because, bombarded with negative images and associated negative tag lines, people become bewildered, lost, purposeless. People respond to images. It is in the fabric of our society. We are oriented to and from what we see. The failure of our leadership is in their inability to sustain the propagation of images and POSITIVE tag lines contrary to the daily drumbeat of the mainstream, liberal, defeatist, essentially soulless enemies of victory over tyranny. These are the blame America first crowd. All are apologists for those external threats of Islamofascism, Communism, and the like. They will fight for nothing. And, essentially are nothing in their nihilistic, atheistic solipsism. Their highest achievement in life is a kind of banal or vapid political correctness. This and their guilt and self loathing as seen in their perpetual anguish for minority rights becomes the apotheosis of their self invention as multiculturalists. What is lost is allegiance to something greater than the self. There is no “greater than the self”. The self, for the moonbat, is centered everywhere, bounded nowhere.

This is the enemy within. He is a statist, a fascist, but thinks, knows, those who oppose him are these things. Until he is utterly vanquished it will be difficult to face external threats.

Yesterday I read Aristides post Sociobiology and made a comment to which he made a reply:

John P. said…

…..

Wilson’s thought is rigorous to a degree that most of us never achieve and I am humbled by the reach of his intellect. My personal reaction is that one needs to appreciate the limitations of knowledge which I view as restricted by its contingency on existential matter. Knowledge can never be complete, all encompassing. No body of knowledge is ever going to fully and finally give absolute expression to reality. Like material things knowledge is limited to a participatory role. It may be so that whatever absolute truth, or beauty, if you like, exists is coextensive with all being but at the same time each instantiation of that truth or beauty conveys no meaning beyond itself because of the ubiquitous nature of the substratum. Thus it takes a leap of faith or “belief” to dig out the “metaphysical” reality.

To me and others before me the emergence and the appreciation of values such as consciousness, truth, beauty, wisdom, conscience, justice, liberty, love, courage, nobility, and the like are essential clues to the true purpose of life. These do not have an existence of their own. St. Thomas Aquinas, if my memory serves, characterized such entities as contingent on the existence of another. In this instance that would be mankind. My own thought, borrowing from LeComte DeNouy, is that these things are actually imbedded in existential matter and given the right set of circumstances come into being. Taking these into consideration it is not to subtle a leap of the intellect that these evolutes, fragile as they might be, nurtured by religious and philosophical traditions and, yes, political ideology too, are, as the ancient Greeks (Socrates) pointed out, mechanisms by which man has commerce with a divine reality. Or, to put it another way, they are facets of the divine by which G_d’s nature finds expression, and I might add, self awareness, through sentient beings. Life emerges from matter in order that the spark of consciousness will give rise to these divine qualities. I heard that the nuclear scientist is the atom’s mechanism for attaining self knowledge. Well, the universe perhaps is G_d’s way of seeing into his own nature.

Your insert regarding “…implications in the choice-migration to America..” provoked the thought that what is really at work in America is the evolution of the “Good” in a political mechanism that will tend to evolve and if it prevails impede the propagation of its antithesis, evil. Wilson, I suppose, might see this as mere tribalism. I don’t.

In a nutshell the Universe is self aware, operates heuristically in the sense that discovery IS the action of the unknown. And as far as Nietzsche’s void is concerned it is the great mystery of the real that out of nothing something does indeed come and passes back to its origin, the void. In a sense this accounts for the fact that knowledge can never be complete. How could you ever fill the void? Or, isn’t the void filled with every experience and simultaneously emptied? So, instead of taking the view that, as Samuel Beckett wrote in his “Waiting for Godot”, “They give birth astride graves, eh Didi?” one can alter the focus with a simple act of will. There is little reason not to rejoice in the fact that on the way to the void there is much to see and many wayfarers with whom to share the journey, such as Mr. Wilson.

1:04 PM

Aristides said…

John P.,

First, I’d like to thank you for your thoughtful post. In many ways your views mirror my own.

Nietzsche always claimed that the proper symbol for reason is Uroburos, the snake that inevitably twists back to bite its own tail. I think this is beyond any doubt, a consequence of the Void as both condition precedent and condition subsequent of being in time. As you noted.

But this is not so for finite things. Microcosms are immanently accessible to reason precisely because Genesis is already presupposed. It is true that knowledge, even of a microcosm, can never be complete; but it is also true that relevant understanding does not depend on completeness. This is a basic tenet of information theory, and a basic truth of the world. To be complete, a theory of cell division would have to account for quantum electrodynamics in addition to cellular and chemical phenomena. However, to be efficacious–i.e. to be known or cosmically self-aware, as you put it–it does not. Information can be compressed by dropping redundancy, and yet the signal still gets through. Cosmic self-awareness and its attendant actualizations still occur.

Therefore, I am very confident in the prospect of ultimately understanding Man as Microcosm, even if we can never truly know Man’s relation to the Void. A complete science of man is possible, though it is only recently back in favor. What’s held us back is not the inadequacy of reason but rather an extremely daunting level of surface complexity which stems from the combinatorial capacity of the human mind and its manifest behaviors. Of course, Science needs to acknowledge its limitations, but it must do so without discarding its confidence. So long as its method emulates evolution–which is procedurally congruent to science–its confidence is justified.

But fundamentally you are right. Science can tell us that man, to avoid a cognitive phenomenon called despair (what Qutb called the “hideous schizophrenia”), must self-elect a submission to a particular metanarrative or purpose (i.e. get faith in the Kierkegaardian sense); and it can tell us that a society, once it’s lost or exhausted a unity unto which it collectively submits (its soul in a Spenglerian sense), will eventually devolve and dissolve and factionalize around the quest for power.

What it can’t tell us is a universally correct metanarrative, and the right unity. In fact, it warns against them because both history and evolution are complex non-abelian processes–neither predictable nor static.

Four white doves. Three had pink rings around their eyes. Black eyes. One dove had a black ring around his. White doves, black eyes, blue, peerless sky. Spotless birds, and pure white, the frost white of a rose. A frost white felicity to shame the moon. And the abyss, the dark, dark deepness of the black eyes, jewels encircled, set in pink and black, standing on dainty pink feet in a little white church with a glass door.

The young lady opened the door and gently took one dove. I immediately had the sense that this God’s creature knew in some sense what was transpiring, its role in the unfolding of events this afternoon. There was only the flutter of the flags in the breeze to mark the time, a gentling backdrop to the sounds of grieving mothers, dads, sisters, brothers. The dove so gently held was paraded around the circle then a lady, Brian’s mother, I think, handed off the just folded flag, and carressing the dove to her breast she let it go with a tear and a kiss.

The bird flew straight away and immediately it’s three companions were set free. They quickly joined and flew, fluttering white sapphires in the peerless blue sky, circling the funeral rites below, and finding their bearing on the westering sun, they set off into the heavens, free spirits, liberated from the surly bonds of earth.

Rest in peace, Brian Kubik.

Laid to rest near Killeen, Texas.
August, 15, 2006
Died of wounds received in combat operations, Bagdad, Iraq.
He was 20 years old.
Patriot Guard Riders honored this American hero.

Here is a comment I posted on Tigerhawk.

The middle east circa July, 2006

If you have your ear to the ground and are in possession of a particular sensibility you can detect a certain tectonic shift in the march of time. The landscape has been slightly altered and the ebb and flow of events follow the slightly different contours of the terrain. The infrahuman forces of embodied evil, the satanic in nature, the death cult that is Islamofascism, collides spectacularly and openly with the life enhancing element again. Millions of souls are in the thrall of this metastasizing evil incarnate. They sacrifice their children as suicide bombers knowing subliminally that their opponents’ moral sensibilities recoil and tend to acquiesce to their demands just to make them stop their barbarism. “They give birth astride graves”.* And in the brief moment that life’s potential is folded into the cold eternal night they rejoice clutching and holding dear the darkness of their perverted god as it snuffs out the potential for apotheosis. The world has seldom seen more blatant flowering of evil. And the Israelis, having done, as their name implies, battle with G_d and joined forces with him, now, as in the recent past, are again at the spearhead of a world civilization teetering on the brink of a darkness void of the light of truth and liberty, the warmth of love, the sweet voice of understanding and knowledge and wisdom. My heart cries out for victory, for clear eyed leadership willing to take up the sword of righteousness and join battle with and utterly dam up and contain and destroy this tide. Never in the history of the planet has the choice been so clear. This is the eschatological unfolding of the apocalyptic flower of human history. This events the ultimate destiny of humanity’s total devastation or doom. You had better be on the right side for the sake of your immortal soul and the light of G_d seeking expression therein. Make the wrong choice and it is like trying to get to the west by going east. You can never arrive at your destination and merely tend to a certain direction.

The spin of planet earth in the infinite darkness of space allows a daily rekindling of life by the light of the sun. How far north from south on this very lighted thing we call home? The pole pins us to the firmament giving direction to all movement. Hence purpose and order. How far east from west? Infinity? Latitudinal alignment of destiny provides an infinite regress. A journey in this aspect is never completed. Opposing this is the Longitudinal path. Go far enough in this direction and you end up heading in an opposite direction. It is a function of spin. Time, too, has a spin. As time travelers we need to orient ourselves Longitudinally in time. Otherwise we can never fulfill our destiny, achieve true understanding of life’s meaning. If we loose this struggle with evil man’s opportunity to discover and properly align his efforts with truth as such will be set back thousands of years to the time when god’s were appeased through such things as child sacrifice. Remember the bible story of Abraham and his son Isaac? He is on the mountain, close to G_d, about to sacrifice his son in an act of worship when G_d stays his hand. This is a pivotal point in the evolution of man and Israel is the focal point. Compare that with the Islamic culture that still sacrifices their children. Not hard to see the choice here, if you are in possession of a particular sensibility. Can you find Polaris? Choose poorly and succumb to the long dimming of the light of truth in service of a dhimmitude in a perverted theocracy. This will be our lot as we find ourselves constrained to hopelessness and slavery.

* “Waiting for Godot”, Samuel Beckett

They give birth astride graves, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

And from Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more

Mike Strank
b. 1919 Jarabenia, Czechoslovakia.
d. 1945 Iwo Jima, Japan.

Their leader and Sergeant, it was Mike who got the order to climb Mt. Suribachi. Mike picked his “boys” and led them safely to the top. Mike explained to the boys that the larger flag had to be raised so that “every Marine on this cruddy island can see it.” It was Mike who gave the orders to find a pole, attach the flag and “put’er up!”

Continue reading about the “Flag Raisers” at http://www.iwojima.com/raising/raisingc.htm

And, when is the last time you carefully read this:

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

“You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others…It is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind…..” Sri Aurobindo

My bike is the blue green Beemer.

This is Brother Gary and wife and two grandchildren. To right is the inimitable “Top”. He drove a pickup pulling a trailer to rescue broken bikes. He was very outgoing and boisterous and I had the audacity to ask him whether he was called “Top” because he was a former First Sergeant or because he always spoke at the “top” of his voice. That took him back and I am lucky to have gotten away with my head intact.

Your humble author and brother and Chaplain Arnie.

Ditto.

Healing. In the background is another chaplain. The bearded guy. He is talking to an active duty Army Chaplain, who, in fact, was the Chaplain in chief for the run. His son is to his left. As far as I can tell they made the whole ride. The boy will not soon forget the “bonding” with dad.

On to the post for today.

Another Chaplain. Dan, from Pennsylvania whom I met in Williams, AZ one day out from Ontario. He almost daily checked me out, looked me in the eye real hard and said, “how are you doing”. Much appreciated Dan. When I took this picture Gary quipped that he learned how to fly in one of these birds. Noting that it was a slick (nomenclature for an unarmed Huey) I retorted that he was attracted to the craft because he too, back then, was a pretty “slick” dude.

Me and Gary at the Huey. You can just make out the manikens in the cockpit.

This was the first day I actually rode in formation. Our trek for today would cover 226 miles about half of yesterdays 400 miles. You think that 226 miles is nothing, but riding in formation, and I was lucky to get in the third or fourth rank of the second platoon, and maintaining the prescribed distance with the other riders requires constant attention and tiny adjustments of speed. The people in the back have the most trouble because of the accordion effect of the formation. Each variation in the speed of the lead riders, the adjustments of the followers to keep the pack dressed up, is amplified by the distance back in the pack. We usually rode two up, meaning side by side with two to three bikes length between ranks in the column. There were six platoons which changed in number daily. If there were 300 bikes each platoon would have about 50 bikes in it. The platoons each had leaders but the members of a given platoon were just the luck of the draw. This made it more difficult to develop unit cohesion and the like, and made it harder to get to know your fellow riders. On the other hand it would be a challenge to have everyone be in the same unit, though, I believe, it would be worth the trouble. This is the eighteenth run so it stands to reason that the organizers have pretty much worked out the major kinks and come up with the most efficient method of moving this many motorcycles across the country. Anyhow, you can never let go of the throttle and this increases the tension on the body a great deal. Riding a motorcycle is a kind of isometric exercise at any rate but not being able to relax your right arm really takes a toll after several days of several hundred mile days. For me this was my fifth day of motorcycling. I have heard of guys riding coast to coast in 50 hours in what is known as the “Iron Butt” contest. Maybe when I was young, but not now, no way Jose. This is truly a test of mind over matter for me and my fellow travelers and is a kind of self sacrifice for the stated purpose of keeping the focus of our people and their representatives on the sacrifices of veterans, on the prisoners of war and the killed in action as yet unaccounted for especially in Vietnam. It is indeed a high honor and a distinct privilege to participate in this homage to our comrades in arms past and present in the struggle for liberty.

So today we met, were served breakfast by our gracious hosts, the people of Williams, Arizona, and mounted our machines and rode east on I-40. If my memory serves we were in Gallup and headed into the Red Rock State Park by four p.m. or so. This is part of a larger region known as the painted desert and as early as A.D. 300 was inhabited by the Anasazi people. From 1700 the Navajo inhabited this region. Also, the Zuni and the Hopi people figure in the history here. The Conquistador Coronado, it is said, sought here for the Seven Cities of Cibola and the ancient sky city known as Acoma is nearby. This is supposedly sacred ground for these peoples. The ceremony in which we participated was called a gathering of the warriors and the gourd dance songs were the same as those of old. About fifty people sat in a ring on the floor of the natural amphitheatre and performed these songs. There was a flyover by a Pavhawk from Kirtland AFB. Tomorrow would bring another encounter with a helicopter. In an adjacent area we were treated to Navajo tacos which were ground meat on a large thick taco like bread topped with cheese and vegetables. One was all you could eat.

I sat next to a guy wearing an ancient green beret of the US Special Forces. He said he lived nearby and when I remarked how the beret looked like it might be original issue he said that it was presented him by President John F. Kennedy. The Special Forces were started by President Kennedy. This man had seen service in Vietnam, obviously. Brother was sitting across from me and to his right were Sizzmo and husband Terry. I had an opportunity again to remark that we deserved better leaders than we had and that there was not a strategy that would lead us to a clear cut victory over our current enemies and how this was how it was in Vietnam. The Green Beret said he had personal knowledge that when we got the word to pull out of Vietnam a team of Special Forces was poised in North Vietnam to enter Hanoi and overthrow the North Vietnamese government. I stated it was my understanding that the congress of the United States in ending funding for the South Vietnamese government was the final factor in ending our involvement. As is playing out now, those who sought, in the 1960s, to appease our enemies, with their allies in the mass media, eventually gained enough political power to have their way. Sizzmo and Terry had nothing to add to this conversation but the Green Beret and I seemed to be of one mind.

I left Red Rock a little earlier than brother and checked us into the Red Rock Inn in Gallup. The proprietors were Indian (from India). I always take this as a bad omen as my experience over the years is heavily weighted on the negative side when it comes to the way they manage their properties. It turned out to be not all that bad except that the clock was wrong which fact brother and I failed to correct. This had dire consequences next morning. Naturally, the Inn did not provide a computer for internet access. This should be standard, a PC in a public area that guests can use to check their email, etc. A lot of places have them, but a lot don’t too. They almost always tell you that there is wireless available in the room and to use your own laptop. My response was it is not really feasible to carry a laptop on a motorcycle. And there was no hot tub. Oh, my aching back. I didn’t bother looking for a masseuse this time. Slipped my mind, I guess.

In walking around the parking lot I spoke in passing to a gritty lady unpacking her Harley. Her nickname was “Skid”. I learned later that had a pejorative meaning. Interesting. She rode with us all the way, I believe. At least I saw her frequently and spoke to her on several occasions. One of the younger riders seemed to have snatched her up. Poor choice of words, I know! Also, I noticed three New Mexico Highway Patrol motor cycles. They were BMW “R” bikes, not sure which one, but similar to this.

Dinner having been seen to, showers had, voice mails checked, gear properly seen to, it was time to relax. Brother goes to bed at 2000 hrs or earlier, and till then we squabble and quibble over the TV remote. I think I was asleep by 2130 or so, which is too early for me, so, naturally I woke up early. I looked at the clock. It read 0545. I woke brother up cause this meant he was late and his cell phone alarm failed to go off. Well, might as well go downstairs and get us some coffee, right? There was no coffee, but I did see the clerk and bit my tongue so I would not snap her head off for the oversight. I went back upstairs and brother was looking at the TV to check the time and said the clock was wrong, that it was really 0445. Oh! That explains it all, why it is still dark out. Well, OK. That is what you get for making me go to bed so early! We were already up, too late to go back to sleep now. I made coffee in the room. Brother got around and was gone in 15 minutes as usual. He needed to be with his fellow road guards.

I got it together and packed my gear in my own good time and checked us out of the motel. Saw Skid again. Really tough looking, weathered face, skinny. I suspect if she stood sideways and stuck out her tongue she could pass for a zipper. While packing my bike and readying my communications gear, I wanted to monitor the road guards today on the FRS/GMRS radio, channel one, the New Mexico HP guys came down and left just when a fourth member of their group rode up. Turns out they were our escorts and would be with us most of the way across New Mexico. Later, I tried to take their picture as we were gathering back at Red Rock for the mandatory morning confab, but brother’s camera wouldn’t work. He had asked me to take pictures, a task laid on him by his wife, and I certainly tried, but for every ten or fifteen tries I think I got one picture. Hopefully he will get these few successes to me and I will be able to post them here eventually.

While we were meeting, an Indian (medicine man? shaman?) was going around with a feather thing, it had about 20 feathers in it, they looked like hawk feathers of some kind, and “blessing”, or putting a spell of protection on some of the riders. He went down the ranks of bikes touching each one and mumbling incantations with his head down. This was thoughtful and a further example of the kindred spirit the veterans on the run had with the Indians of Red Rock. I suspect he was Navajo but have no way of knowing though I spoke to him. He said he was the brother of the master of ceremonies of yesterdays gathering of the warriors. He was a veteran and while he did not say so I have a strong suspicion that he had been WIA as he walked with a limp. I hoped he had put a good “spell” on my K1100.

Well, I have gone on long enough now. I’m sure you are tired. I am. Let me figure out the links thing for this post and put it up on the net. This journal is a far cry, I know, from a truly elegant travel log I only have so much time and energy to devote to this project and am doing it completely from memory. I didn’t make any notes along the way and didn’t even have the intention to do this on my return to netnationhood. I have fancied that it might be interesting to do a journal while traveling. I like the genre. The first travel book I can recall reading was John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. Charley was his dog. I really enjoyed it. John and Charley traveled from East to West across the whole USA, as I recall. I don’t have the book to refresh my memory but I do remember enjoying it as much as, say, his Grapes of Wrath. Excuse the digression.

So, tomorrow we go to Angel Fire and brother and I spend the night in the splendiferous Gold Pan motel while the main force stays at the main resort in Angel Fire. Those poor suckers don’t know what they missed. See you.

The Mojave desert is more than 25,000 square miles and covers parts of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Interstate 40 traverses the Mojave West to East, and intersects with I-15 in Barstow, California. After arriving in Ontario and registering for the run (they give you a ribbon to tie to your bike, a wrist band, and for new people, a FNG pin) I was unable to establish communication with my brother and elected to spend the night in Barstow. I stayed at the Days Inn, which was OK, at least I was able to procure a downstairs room on the end which makes it easy to move baggage back and forth and with the window shades open I could keep a close eye on the bike. But a walk around town made me think I could have easily made a better choice of accommodations. I saw one of the motels Lilek had published a photo of on his blog, the Stardust Motel. (OK, the sign is the same, but the state is different. Oops! But you get the idea.) Would have been interesting to spend the night there. The clerk at the Days Inn bordered on surly. She was overweight and possessed of a downright sour disposition. To get even I used the pristine white towels to clean my bike. Also staying at the motel were a couple of truckers. I talked to one at length. He was waiting for a cab by the office and had this plywood contraption with a satellite radio, a Citizen’s Band radio, a CD player, and so forth, built into it. He did not have his own truck but worked for a company that moved him from vehicle to vehicle. This device allowed him to carry his electronic creature comforts with him when he changed tractors. He too was a biker. He said he had two bikes one being a Gold Wing. I asked him about the current CB protocols explaining that I was having trouble getting truckers to talk to me. It has been years since I used a CB radio. Used to have one in my Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce convertible. I thought truckers might prefer talking among themselves but he disabused me of that notion. We decided that my little hand held Cobra HH 38 that I have adapted to the bike’s communications was probably not putting out a strong enough signal. He suggested that I needed to check the ground.

I walked out the door of my room a little later at the exact same time that my neighbors were leaving their room. First I encountered an astonishingly beautiful young black lady, about 25 or so. She gave me a friendly greeting. Real nice. Following her out of the room was a US Army Sergeant very nattily dressed in desert cammies. He was garrisoned nearby, he said. We shook hands and I thanked him for his service to our country. They got into a beautiful black (what else) Cadillac Escalade and drove away. Maybe they were indulging in a little afternoon love fest. I don’t know. When I was a buck sergeant in the Army my pay would barely support the old VW bug I banged around Europe in. Things have really changed. I think it was his car. At least he took the driver’s seat.

Later that evening I got to talk to my brother. I would meet up with the group today or latest that evening in Williams, Arizona, the first overnight. He said they would be through around ten a.m. on the 17th. The next day.

After a late meal from Subway I hit the sack and caught a few “Z”s.

Next morning I had time to kill. Getting up at sevenish I needed something to do till ten. That is when I walked down Main street into town. 0945 I was sitting on the bike at the on ramp to I-40 poised for today’s ride. I waited for 20 minutes but didn’t see any bikers to speak of so I eased onto the highway and rode a few miles, took the access road and putted slowly along a mile or so to the next overpass where I stationed myself over the middle of the Eastbound lane. And waited. Maybe ten minutes later a group of ten bikes or so, and a car pulling a trailer, clearly connected with the RFTW group, passed under me. OK, I thought, these are the outriders and the main body of three hundred bikes will be along shortly. I waited another ten minutes before giving up and setting out on my own. Thinking they might be ahead of me I twisted hard on the throttle and tried catching them. I ran for an hour or so at speeds up to 110 MPH before giving up then settled down to a comfortable five or so above the speed limit (70).

Several hours later way out into the Mojave something was brewing. It is a rare thing in the desert when it rains. And for all the time and torment of heat and aridity that holds back the rain, when the storm finally breaks it is with a profligate ferocity that speaks of long pent up dormant forces yearning to burst forth, and they did. Darkening skies, hail, wind, tear and rend the earth amid punctuations of thunder and lightening. The storm blew in from the North. It was a fast mover crossing my path and I was canting, tacking into the wind. It was so hot before the storm and I was in such a hurry to try to avoid the main force that I didn’t bother to stop to put on my rain gear. The coming cool air was delicious in spite of the blowing dirt and the plant debris sweeping the road. I must have collided with over thirty tumbleweeds which, when you hit them at speed, burst into smithereens. It is dangerous to try to dodge them so I just crouched into the back of the fairing as close as possible and rode on. Not far into the storm there was, in the center median, a West bound half of a double wide trailer home on it’s side and I could see that the truckers had slowed down considerably in order to better control their rigs in the wind. Most were much heavier than the overturned trailer and only suffered being swerved back and forth. So I got wet, but it was a welcome cool down, and it only took about fourty miles to dry completely out. Later, at the motel, I learned that the state police had shut down the interstate to trucking for awhile during this storm.

It wasn’t long after this that the road began its climb out of the desert and I was riding through pine forests as I approached Williams, AZ. It was about three p.m. when I checked into the Fairfield Inn using my brother’s reservation.

After unloading the bike and having a shower I went down to look for a car wash and met Pastor Dan in the breezeway of the motel. He was from Pennsylvania and had ridden his Harley out to join the run in which he would participate as a chaplain. We rode into Williams where he spotted the car wash for me and then we identified the VFW where the main group would meet for dinner after parading through town. Pastor Dan and I talked about several things and he confirmed that chaplains in military service were not permitted to pray in Jesus name which fact I find highly disturbing. I told him that I had read a report of a chaplain who having defied this regulation was being brought up before a court martial. He was able to confirm this. This is an abomination. Personally I would just as soon “pray” in Buddha’s name, but that is beside the point. This is a Christian nation. The whole of Western culture is founded on Christian values and only an idiot would fail to recognize that Christians are tolerant people by and large and perfectly able to live and function in a secular society. To deny our past this way is the worst kind of revisionist crap.

The group came in about six p.m. There was a parade and the townspeople turned out in force to wave flags and applaud and make their friendly greetings known. The group had gotten a late start, something that would plague us all the way across the country. The VFW served us a great BBQ dinner, there was beer, of which I had none, and there were about 230 bikes. I hooked up with my brother and we sat down with Paul, a friend of his from Colorado, and Will from I forget where. I saw and spoke to Paul and Will almost daily from then on. Of course we were all Vietnam veterans but I was different because 99% of the riders wore black, rode Harleys, and had their gear festooned with patches, pins, all kinds of detritus of the military/Harley biker life. I immediately, almost, told brother that I didn’t really fit in with this group. But I tried. I noticed pretty soon that the pins/patches were really touchstones and conversation starters. I did wear a NRA hat and that alone started several conversations for me.

Brother said I needed to meet someone. He pointed out a lady with a pony tail standing on the stairs across the way passing out beads. I walked over and introduced myself and asked about the beads. Sizzmo was her name, and, no, she would not sell me any beads, but would trade me a hug for them. OK. She was really nice, had met her husband, a Vietnam vet, in a foxhole in Iraq. I met him later in Salina, Kansas. His name was Terry. Sizzmo had a little speech that she thought Vietnam veterans were the most important people alive, or words to that effect, that it was her mission to help make up for the lack of appreciation they received on coming home from that war, and to that end she made and passed out these little beads fashioned in the same configuration of colors as the Vietnam service ribbon. There are red beads in this matching the red in the ribbon. Hers, she said, were heart shaped, denoting her affection for. This speech of hers of course brought a few tears to my eyes but I recovered quickly from the emotions of the moment and launched into my own speech that we had actually won the Vietnam war and that more importantly the best way to pay homage to old soldiers is to give active support to those fighting today’s conflicts and that this war on Islamofacism was far and away more important in the total scheme than the Vietnam war being that Islamism is a graver threat than Communism, which, by the time of Vietnam, while it still maintained some of its fervor, was mainly peopled by cynics out to cash in on the movement, not so much interested in the driving ideology as a world view but as a dogma with which to enslave. Well, she started to back away quite early in this outburst of mine. Hey! She opened the door, I ran in! I don’t think this fit her scenario one bit. “Here, take the beads. Give me the hug. Thank you for your service. Welcome home. Sorry, gotta go grab the next old vet and make him cry.” Wham! Bam! Thank you m’am! Anyway, I gave this speech several times with some variation during the trek East. Brother got the best/worst of it. I was on a roll, you see. I spoke to Sizzmo several times. She avoided me till one day, at the check in at the motel in Salina, when I met her husband, she warmed to me again. I was joking with her, calling her the “bead” lady. Later I got a picture taken with her which I hope to post at some time. Meanwhile here she is with another subject.

It was a cool evening at that elevation. I looked around for a masseuse but could not find one and the motel had not yet opened the hot tub. My back was killing me. I told brother that we should get a travel trailer and three or four massage tables and staffed with twenty something female masseuses take it on next year’s run.

Next, Gallup New Mexico, Red Rock, Navajo gourd dance and Navajo tacos