Crazy, Baby

Departing the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally following a discussion about love with the Hells Angels motorcycle club, our weather app tapped me on the shoulder. It painted the coming storm as massive, multicolored amoebas slithering over the highway ahead as the fickle dice of the weather gods rattled and boomed in the distance. “Are you sure about this?” it silently asked.

Likewise staring into their phone’s radar screens, several riders nearby asked around to learn who was gearing up to brave the squalls and who would gamble instead on leaving quickly in a bid to outrun them. Planning our strategy, I peered once more at the furtive movements on the mobile radar app, scrying the future, and confirmed that the brewing tempest was bearing down to intercept our route. If we departed quickly and good fortune prevailed, however, I figured we’d easily escape, riding under its ragged edges and finding ourselves relaxing later at a pleasant, dry little Mexican restaurant across the Wyoming border, listening to mariachi music on the patio as the flashing thunderheads roiled the horizon behind us.

My prophecy failed to account, however, for the time needed to maneuver through several thousand bikers with the same ambition. Nor did it acknowledge that the wise never challenge Caesar, the ocean, or the weather. Taking too long to exit Sturgis and a little longer to belatedly pull over to gear up for storm riding as the first drops spattered across our faces and windscreens, we rode instead into the teeth of a monster. It crept upon us with a purring growl and spittle carried on winds that blustered at first, then grew friskier, batting the bikes about the highway with glee. Its playful paws then curled behind us as a tailwind that drove us under the dusky canopy of the storm before deeper darkness, crouching just behind the flanking hills, pounced with a blinding flash of sudden fury.

And the South Dakota sky exploded.

If you’ve ever wondered why flash photography is not allowed in a dark planetarium, the reasons are twofold. First, the image captured would simply be one of the white projection dome of the theater, as the sudden flare lit the white surface and washed out the projected images. The second is the sudden brilliant white flash in total darkness, slamming closed the pupils of every observer’s eyes faster than a country preacher’s lips over a burgeoning profanity, leaving the photographer at the mercy of dozens of blind and angry former stargazers. This could still be amusing when sitting in a comfy - and stationary - theater seat. Not so at seventy-five miles an hour on two wheels and a dark, dampening curve.

Then, the water fell.

There is a kind of rain that falls gently on fields, awakening scents of greenery and good wet earth. There are also harder rains that make creeks swell and quiet the world as birds and other wildlife take cover, leaving only the sounds of pattering of water on stone and pavement and the wavering, washing winds. This was neither. It was instead a miles-wide, sailor-drowning curtain of water that would have quailed the spirit of Moses himself - the kind of deluge that drives waves through the air and flattens living things to the ground, even the sturdiest of God’s creatures, such as mammoths, moose, and bikers. Blasts of hurricane-force winds rebounded off the hills, alternating the angles of their attacks, driving the bikes violently from one side of the highway to the next, only coincidentally keeping riders and machines upright. The sky lit up with fire and tempest, electrical strikes pummeling the Black Hills in every direction, with the concussions of their thunder riding the lightning itself. Then, behind me, over the roar of the engines and though Armageddon itself unfolded with my final prayers in this world resounding above the fury, what do I hear?

“Woo! Woo Hoo!”

There is something fundamentally wrong with that girl.

Water sluicing from the Harleys’ and our riding gear sodden, including rain suits never designed for full immersion, we gratefully surfed our bikes to relative safety under an overpass among another twenty or so of their kin. There, we bolted to the cover of the bridge’s girders for shelter, to ride out the storm, and to meet our fellow survivors. Two ladies, seriously underdressed, wept and clung to one another, glaring at their fellas as another rider poured the water from a Bluetooth-enabled helmet that crackled a bit and blew a puff of bluish smoke with its final breath. Several riders wrung out their leathers and cursed the heavens. One Seattle couple remarked that they had never seen rain like that, let alone ridden through it. My wife? She was still laughing, getting to know everyone’s names, and handing out our emergency candy bars with business cards. She discovered everyone’s hometowns, what kinds of dogs they had, and how far they’d ridden to get to this impromptu South Dakota Highway Department disaster shelter on the Interstate.

Funny thing, though. These folks may have initially stepped back and wondered whether insanity could be contagious. Yet, by the time the storm gods had passed their furious gaze to the next set of hills and towns, the celestial flood had waned to sprinkles, and mortals reemerged into the dwindling light, we had new friends, an interview with a native leatherworker, and the certainty that there will be stories told for years to come about the crazy woman who emerged from a biblical maelstrom, laughing and dripping as the sky flashed its immortal fury, and left folks laughing in turn as they sought dry, warm places to tell the tale.

One of the seeds for our Journeys to Love, and for our life’s work seeking love in America, is the number of times folks have asked us what keeps people together these days, a question at the heart of our search for love’s true nature: how and why do we find happily-ever-after in a world that seems determined to tear us all apart? We had no idea how to respond to that question, so we rode out to ask America herself about the answers. For my part, it’s tough to put into words just how and why I love this crazy woman so profoundly and with such fascination. But imagine, if you will, the roughest storms that life can present, the dark moments of spirit that we all sometimes know. And then imagine that you hear, above all the fury and precipitous danger of life’s storms…“Woo! Woo Hoo!”

That’s why.

Scotte Burns is a writer, speaker, and co-founder, with his wife Toni, of Journeys to Love, a multimedia quest to explore love’s origin, nature, and purpose through more than 100,000 miles of motorcycle travel across America.