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NEWS, WEATHER, and SPORTS

June, 2013

Shunpikers in the Shadowlands

 

Bavarian Waltz

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

Before our first few motorcycle rides on the Clockwork Angels tour of Britain, in May, 2013, I would ask Brutus about the next day, maybe how far the ride was. As usual, outside the U.S., he had done all the route planning, and booked the destinations. It would all be a surprise to me, and that was fine—we had traveled together like that for about seventeen years, so there were no doubts. I would simply follow the route he had programmed on my GPS—Brutus the navigator, me the helmsman.

 

But just as I liked to have some notion of the next day’s weather, to know how to dress (of critical importance on a motorcycle), it was good to have some idea of the shape of the ride, to know how to prepare myself mentally, and guide our pace.

 

However, in answer to my query, Brutus would just nod his head thoughtfully, and say, “It will be . . . a full day.”

Soon that became a joke between us, understanding that the day’s journey had nothing to do with distance. On many rides, in the mountains of Wales, Scotland, or the Yorkshire Dales, say, we could easily spend seven hours puttering around little singletrack lanes, yet with the necessarily slow pace, and frequent photo stops, we typically covered less than 200 miles in that “full day.”

 

That was all very well, naturally, and at the end of those long rides, several in the rain (always making a long day longer), we would settle into some luxurious country hotel, and clink our glasses with a laugh, saying, “To another full day.” Still, after ten of those full days, and five shows (at least equally “full”), I decided I would like to have an empty day.

 

Brutus and I were discussing what to do after the overnight ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam. We had a rare, second day off before the show, so—where should we ride? Holland has some pretty countryside, Belgium some good riding in the Ardennes Mountains and along its rivers, and twice before Bruges had been an enjoyable destination. However, my answer was, “You know what? Let’s go . . . nowhere.”

After the ferry’s morning arrival, we checked into a stylish little hotel in Amsterdam, overlooking a postcard-perfect canal, and just stayed there. The previous week, a British publication called Motorcycle News had requested something from me about riding between the U.K. shows—anything from an interview to a ride-along to a short story. Maybe 700 words, they suggested, with a photo or two. So I pecked away at that for a few hours—the only time I had ever written about a journey in the middle of it, so my impressions and memories of the highlights were sharp and alive. The story quickly grew into 1800 words and eight photographs, and I was pleased when the paper said they loved it, and would run it that way.

 

“Drummer With a Singletrack Mind” will appear in this department shortly after its print début. The title plays on the name Brits give to one-lane roads: “singletracks”—as in a previous story about riding in the U.K., “Singletrack Minds in the Sceptered Isle.” Brutus and I love exploring the countryside and villages on those lonely little lanes. “Shunpiking,” we call it—and although that word goes back centuries, it seems to need reviving. While working on the story, I asked an experienced British motorcyclist if riders and readers would know what shunpiking was, and I was surprised when he said they wouldn’t. At the risk of being repetitive, but at the same time happy to be a “booster” for this worthy mode of travel, I will once more share the definition from an early story collected in Far and Away, “Shunpikin’ it Old Skool.”

 

Shunpiking in Germany

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

The delightful term “shunpiker” goes back about 500 years, to a time when British roads were lawless, especially at night, prowled by highwaymen and footpads. Villages blockaded their entry roads with a long pole—a pike—stretched across them. Around the same time, toll roads were invented, and a similar pike blocked the way until travelers paid their fee, when the pike would be turned—hence “turnpike.”

 

In those days, travelers who deliberately avoided toll roads called themselves “shunpikers.” Lately, the term has been adopted by drivers and riders who deliberately avoid all major roads.

 

 

Der Zigzags

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

That would describe Brutus and me, all right.

 

I am also pleased to be able to begin this story in Amsterdam, after the British run, because on that previous attempt to write about Europe, “Singletrack Minds in the Sceptered Isle,” I had stopped at the end of the British travels, promising to pick up the Continental European part later. I never did—but I guess I am now.

 

And referring back to another theme from a previous story, “Nothing is ever just one thing,” there are infinite degrees of shunpiking. Muddy, lumpy trails through the forest, narrow lanes pinched between hedges or stone walls, and sweeping ribbons of pavement that lay sinuously over hills and valleys—all are a shunpiker’s delight.

Roads no one travels unless they live on them.

 

Shunpiking in Europe is generally more extreme than in North America, mainly because of the greater number of singletrack roads available. (Though North America has far more unpaved roads.) The other big difference shunpikers enjoy in Europe is the destinations. In North America, it is unusual for a fabulous ride to lead to a fantastic destination, save perhaps in the national parks, but in the Old World, luxurious accommodations with fine restaurants are an attraction in themselves.

 

So planning ahead is important, and Brutus is a master at it—because he understands that when you are plotting a route, you are tracing your future life across that map. You are truly sowing what you will reap, and those squiggles and dots represent the environment that on a given day you will inhabit, move through, and savor—that you will live.

 

Rothenburg, Germany

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

After a full day’s travel through northern Bavaria that we later agreed was Germany’s best motorcycling (as illustrated in all of the previous riding photos), second only to the Alps, Brutus’s researches led him—and thus us—to this picturesque town in Bavaria. Rothenburg is regarded as the best-preserved medieval walled city in Europe, and it is very much a tourist showplace. During World War II, Rothenburg escaped the worst of the bombs and artillery that devastated other German cities only because of one of history’s quirks. A high-ranking American general was aware of the city’s history and beauty, and ordered it spared. (A similar sentiment saved Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, and an equally historic and picturesque city. Before the war, an American general had spent his honeymoon in Kyoto, and so aimed the bombers at places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead. In a further historical twist, Brutus and I saw busloads of Japanese tour groups in Rothenburg, drawn there because it was the setting for a popular animated series, Sugar the Little Snow Fairy.)

In these times, it seems pointless to expend words and images on a celebrated attraction—interested readers can go see for themselves with a few keystrokes—but the countryside and villages remain the province of the real-time traveler, and so too does what I might call “living history.”

 

With that in mind, I wish I could simply report that Brutus and I had some “interesting” rides across Germany and Poland, and that the weather was fine.

 

However, when you travel in places with long and tragic, even brutal, histories, it is impossible not to feel something—a perceived darkness that evokes the “Shadowlands” of the title. Apposite to George Santayana’s chestnut, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” is the reality that those who do remember the past are condemned to relive it. Traveling in parts of the world with dark histories, you tend to see shadows everywhere—in this case, shadows of the swastika and hammer and sickle.

 

In my childhood of the ’50s and early ’60s, World War II was fresh in the world’s memory, and we saw it dramatized constantly, in prime-time shows like “Combat!” and “Twelve O’Clock High,” and even more so in dozens of war movies seen at the Saturday afternoon matinees, and on the weekend double-feature late shows on TV.

 

As for the Cold War, it was now—the all-pervasive background to my childhood, and fairly terrifying to live through. During the anxious and potentially apocalyptic days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, I was ten, so not much aware of global politics. However, I watched my father prepare an emergency shelter in the basement of our suburban split-level—a pathetic-but-telling attempt at preparation for the nuclear attack everyone feared. In our kitchen, I overheard the neighboring dads discussing the Russians, and how they would surely bomb Niagara Falls because of the hydroelectric generators. Niagara Falls was fifteen miles away.

 

Thuringia, Former East Germany

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

In the early ’90s, just after the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the dominoes of all Eastern Europe, I wrote the lyrics for a song called “Heresy,” about the bittersweet end to all that. I hadn’t even heard the song for maybe twenty years, and I don’t think we ever played it live, but the lyrics and vocal lines were echoing in my helmet all through those rides. One verse particularly addressed the weight under which the whole world had lived—nuclear annihilation, or “Mutually Assured Destruction” (apt acronym).

 

It seemed—and seems—outrageous that the entire planet endured decades of anxiety, not to mention all the stunted lives in these Shadowlands, under the totalitarian boot-heel, for the sake of some misguided ideology. (Someday, I trust, the same will be said about religion.)

 

All around this great big world/ All the crap we had to take

Bombs and basement fallout shelters/ All our lives at stake

The bloody revolution/ All the warheads in its wake

All the fear and suffering/ All a big mistake?

All those wasted years

All those precious, wasted years

Who will pay?

 

George Santayana offered another quote that still resonates loudly in our world today, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

From Rothenburg, Brutus and I started out on the “Romantische Strasse”—Romantic Road—which connects some picturesque towns and castles in Southern Germany, ending at Mad King Ludwig’s ultimate fantasy castle, Neuschwanstein. Riding north toward the show in Cologne (German spelling Köln), we enjoyed a few hours of shunpiking, following winding little roads past dark green forests and swollen brown rivers. But, with far to go to work that day, we eventually had to surrender to a lengthy stretch of autobahn. We did not love it.

The inside lane was a solid freight train of trucks traveling at about 60 mph, while the outside lane was much faster, even sometimes “unlimited.” So big Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, and Porsches came racing up from behind at well over 100. Our motorcycles, and especially our tires, were oriented toward sport and adventure riding, and were not comfortable above 90 mph. We were caught between the traffic’s natural flow—pulling out to pass a truck through its turbulent wake, wrestling for control, and at the same time keeping an eye on our mirrors at all times. The road was straight and dull, yet the mood was tense and loud—not our kind of thing at all. But as with American interstates, sometimes it was a price worth paying.

 

The next morning we awoke on the bus at what appeared to be the usual “motorway services” (truck stop) on an autobahn. However, when I opened the blinds to check out the day’s weather, I noticed unusual details. All around us stood tall metal watchtowers, and the modern Shell gas pumps were sheltered under a vast canopy of much greater age and less sleek design. Old gray and dowdy-looking buildings of poured concrete were painted with large, weathered letters reading “ZOLL.” (Customs.)

 

With a chill, I realized we were looking at another kind of “walled city” from the past—from another kind of hyper-medieval era, the Cold War. We were on the former East German autobahn near Eisenach, for many years one of only three crossing points by road between the savagely divided parts of the country.

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

Writing about a time that is nearly unimaginable now, the venerable travel writer Jan Morris observed, “Traveling from west to east through [the inner German border] was like entering a drab and disturbing dream, peopled by all the ogres of totalitarianism, a half-lit world of shabby resentments, where anything could be done to you, I used to feel, without anybody ever hearing of it, and your every step was dogged by watchful eyes and mechanisms.”

 

Over the next few days, as Brutus and I traveled through the former East Germany and then into Poland, everything I saw was colored with the lenses of that shadowy history—what those places had endured, and what the people who lived there had done, what had been done to them, and what they had been denied.

Again, verses from “Heresy” kept playing in my helmet, as once more I felt the emotions stirred by the sudden fall of Eastern Europe.

 

(At least three things I never thought would happen in my lifetime: peace in Northern Ireland, the end of apartheid, and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.)

 

Sonnenschein zu Dresden

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

All around that dull gray world/ From Moscow to Berlin

People storm the barricades/ Walls go tumbling in

The counter-revolution/ People smiling through their tears

Who can give them back their lives/ And all those wasted years

All those precious wasted years—Who will pay?

 

Twenty years later, I still felt that sense of injustice and anger. Because these people are still paying, literally with their lives, while the villains and ideologues who laid them all low were allowed to play hero while secretly commiting unspeakably horrible crimes against humanity—against so many individual humans.

 

“Everyone is equal,” they insisted—but those few were obviously much more equal than the masses.

 

Like Prohibition, the rise and fall of communism is sometimes written off as a “Noble Experiment,” but any way you look at it, collectivism is precisely the opposite of noble. (Once I wondered about the fanatics behind both communism and fascism, “Were they evil psychopaths or just misguided morons?” I decided it was a mix of both—the deadliest combination in history.)

 

Riding through so many backroads and villages in the former East Germany, and spending the night in Dresden, there is no doubt things are better now—yet they still lag behind their compatriots in the former West Germany.

And if the former Karl-Marx-Stadt is now back to Chemnitz, I was still genuinely surprised—even appalled—to ride into the former East Berlin along Karl-Marx-Strasse. Likewise on a previous tour, when Brutus and I crossed out of a ride through Poland at Frankfurt (the secondary one, on the Oder), and my eyes widened to see their main street still named after Karl Marx. These days you don’t see any Hitler or Stalin streets, and Leningrad is back to St. Petersburg, yet it’s a safe bet that no individual in history has been the cause of so much slaughter and suffering as Karl Marx.

 

(His only competition might be the imaginary ones, the Deities—referred to by Marx and his buddy Friedrich Engels as “the opiate of the masses.” If you ask me, it’s more like the crystal meth of the masses.)

 

 

River in Flood, Southern Germany

 

 

In the spring of 2013, the international media were reporting about the severe floods in Southern Germany, and friend Craiggie wrote to Brutus and me from South Pasadena, California, to warn us about the situation. We were fortunate that our routes were not affected, but riding into Dresden, we witnessed another kind of human unification against a common enemy—great numbers of citizens joining together not to fight against another group of people, but against Nature and “global weirding.”

 

Through Dresden’s “Centrum,” along the banks of the Elbe River, we rode past many thousands of people—mostly students, it seemed—working in relays to unload, pass, and stack sandbags, from army trucks and even regular delivery vans, to build temporary levees above the pavement. Other people in the streets pushed carts filled with large bottles of drinking water and other emergency supplies. With the river level so high, the bridge arches were far too shallow for the rivercraft to pass beneath them, so the tourboats and barges were trapped between, tied to drowned quays and wharves.

 

At our hotel, we were told that the city’s flood wall was nine meters high, and the waters were currently at eight-and-a-half meters. We would not be able to park our motorcycles in the hotel’s underground garage, but would have to leave them on the street. (We didn’t mind that convenience—one disadvantage of riding into older European cities is that the parking can often be distant; in Rothenburg, the lot for the Herrnschlösschen Hotel was many blocks away, and we had to have a car pick us up, then take us there again in the morning.)

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

After dressing up for dinner at the hotel’s fine restaurant, Brutus and I took an evening stroll in the city’s vast central area, which was in the process of being redeveloped into something like its former glory. Dresden’s heart seemed less baroque and “stagy” than Munich or Vienna, and less frenetic and edgy than Berlin—more like a plaza in a Southern European city. Sidewalk cafés overlooked a vast cobbled pedestrian area, the surrounding buildings splendidly illuminated, all centered on an enormous cathedral, the Frauenkirche. (It had lain in ruins, as a monument, from 1945 through the Soviet era, until its restoration in the early 2000s.)

 

We sat at one of the outdoor cafés and enjoyed a cognac, and marveled at how the city had rebounded not only from the Soviet doldrums, but from total annihilation in the infamous Firebombing of Dresden. Near the end of World War II, in February, 1945, British and American aircraft dropped thousands of tons of explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden. The entire central city was destroyed, and 25,000 civilians were killed.

Once again, interested readers are invited to look further into that story, which is not without controversy (as usual, victors write the history), and especially to view some of the harrowing photographs taken after the bombing. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) evokes his experience in Dresden then, as a prisoner of war, and in the introduction to a later edition of the book, he wrote, “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.”

 

The Third Man

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

The second verse of “Heresy” describes the rise of Eastern Europe, and especially places like Dresden, from both the ashes of war and the Soviet concrete and rust.

 

All around that dull gray world/ Of ideology

People storm the marketplace/ And buy up fantasy

The counter-revolution/ At the counter of a store

People buy the things they want/ And borrow for a little more

All those wasted years/ All those precious, wasted years

Who will pay?

 

In 1991, just a year or so after Reunification, I traveled through a good bit of the former East Germany, with eyes wide open. It absolutely was that “dull gray world” I described in the first verse of “Heresy,” and the hints of returning color stood out almost garishly—cheap plastic articles in shop windows, fresh coats of paint on scattered houses in the villages, and brightly-colored older Volkswagens and smaller BMWs in used-car lots among the homely, smoky Trabants. (An East German make universally acknowledged as one of the worst cars ever made, with its two-stroke engine and body panels of “Duroplast”—not much stronger than cardboard—Trabants are absent from the roads now, and will soon exist only in museums. As artifacts—not art!)

By 2013, almost twenty years later, the transformation of East Germany was all but complete. They still lagged slightly behind the West in development and prosperity, but the gap is closing, and most clearly the flair is back in life again.

 

But how awful to reflect that fully two generations of people there—the people, middle-aged and older, that I saw on the roads all day, and often waved to in passing—had to endure that repression, had to have their lives so impeded, and for the young, such a limited prospect for their futures.

 

The chorus of “Heresy” offers what is perhaps the necessary resignation,

 

Do we have to be forgiving at last?

What else can we do?

Do we have to say goodbye to the past?

Yes, I guess we do

 

Eastern German Byway

 

 

 

http://www.neilpeart.net/news/june_2013/thumbs/b_in_poland.jpg

Polish Byway

 

If East Germany has regained much of its prosperity and joie de vivre in the past twenty years, Poland, alas, has not been so fortunate. On a previous tour Brutus and I had ridden through a small part of Poland, and hadn’t been impressed, but figured that taste was too limited a “sample” to form any worthwhile impressions. This time we covered quite a lot more territory, riding all day through the villages and countryside, and even along some seaside resorts in the direction of the port of Gdynia, where we would catch an overnight ferry to Sweden.

 

We viewed the country the way we experience everywhere we visit, by the backroads, farmlands, villages, and small towns, and at the end of that day, the best Brutus and I could say was . . . the weather was nice.

 

We passed through miles of rather scruffy farmland and pulpwood tree plantations, all in ordered rows of a single species. Those vast tree farms had been planted about fifty or sixty years ago, so during the communist era—maybe to keep the soldiers busy enough not to be launching coups d’état.

As in much of Northern Europe, wind turbines were sprouting everywhere, and that could be considered an admirable sign of modernization. To the eye of this beholder, those gigantic white propellers do not add to a landscape’s beauty—but that is why they are most often placed where the landscape does not possess much beauty. The farms and villages were charmless, drably painted and without much in the way of parks, gardens, or decorations—save for the signature stork nests, great bundles of sticks built on platforms erected by the community, because a nesting stork is considered to be good luck.

 

And the roads—the all-important roads—were just terrible. Not only when they were supposed to be terrible, understanding that as shunpikers we often seek out the roughest and most remote roads (and we weren’t disappointed there)—but even the major secondary roads, what would be called “A” roads in Britain or state highways in the U.S., were bone-jarringly rough.

 

Some of the country lanes that obviously dated from the communist era were literally hand-made—concrete blocks laid in parallel tracks across the countryside. No doubt another make-work program for a sluggish economy, like the pulpwood tree plantations. (I always remember bicycling through China in the mid ’80s, and seeing nine workers in the middle of the road on their hands and knees, painting the white lines, with different size brushes for outlining and filling them in. At least those nine people had jobs, I guess.)

 

Shunpiker in Poland

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

 

And talk about Shadowlands . . . oh, Poland, poor Poland—tragically sited between the warlike pincers of Russia and Germany. (Something like a Mexican president said about his country, “Poor Mexico—so far from God, and so close to the United States.”)

 

My bandmate Geddy’s parents met as youngsters at Auschwitz, and he told me once how his mother recalled that when they were finally freed—after ninety per cent of Poland’s Jews had been exterminated—they were certain they must be the last people alive on Earth. Because if they had endured so much horror, and the world had allowed that to happen, how could anyone else have survived?

 

That notion inspired our song “Red Sector A,” with the lines, “Are we the last ones left alive?/ Are we the only human beings to survive?” The title gives the song a whiff of science fiction, which perhaps makes it seem less grim than the true history it relates, and that is fine with me. (In a now delicious irony, “Red Sector A” was the name of our viewing area as guests at the launch of the first Space Shuttle, Columbia, in 1981.)

 

A memoir by another female survivor of Auschwitz filled in more details, like how if anyone appeared too ill or feeble to work, they would be sent straight to the gas chambers. So even in that dehumanized nightmare, people showed “grace under pressure,” and tried to help each other appear “healthy.” (“For my father and my brother, it’s too late/ But I must help my mother stand up straight.”)

 

So as I rode through those Polish villages, I imagined those horrific times, the Jews being rounded up—or willingly surrendered by the local authorities—to be sent to their deaths in the Final Solution. Like the time Brutus and I spent a day visiting several of the World War One battlefields of France and Belgium, the stories that haunted us during our travels in Eastern Germany and Poland felt increasingly dark and heavy, and we were glad to board the overnight ferry to Sweden.

 

Gdynia, Poland

 

Photo by Michael Mosbach

 

 

 

And at last we can move on to happier, brighter subjects—like overnight ferry rides. Brutus and I just love those! Like the boat from Newcastle to Amsterdam, the Baltic ferries usually run overnight, so we could have “a full day” on the motorcycles, and get to the port by mid-afternoon. I never mind the waiting time, catching up on journal notes and the Sunday New York Times crossword saved from the previous Saturday’s International Herald Tribune, but you never know when Yellow Vest Man is going to appear and signal you to move—when you will have to quickly rearrange your belongings and riding gear, fire up the bike and get moving, to keep your place in line and not hold up others. Maybe you’ll ride a few hundred yards to where another Yellow Vest Man signals you to stop. That often happened three separate times, and even then you wouldn’t know if the motorcycles would be loaded first, or last. So the boarding process reminded me of one definition of soldiering—“long hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer panic.”

 

Once the bikes were safely tied down in the hold, though, we could check into our cabins and enjoy a pleasant dinner and the deepest sleep I have ever known—something about the low-frequency vibrations, or the sea air, I don’t know, but it’s certainly an effective soporific for this traveler.

 

For the price of a cheap flight and an average hotel, we traveled in luxury and pleasure—and for a few Euros more, Brutus booked us cabins in “Commodore” or “Panorama” class, with views over the bow of the ship. The word “posh” derives from British people traveling by ship, preferring “port out, starboard home” for cabins with the best views, so we were better than posh. And the restaurants were usually pretty good, too.

 

After breakfast (one ship waking its passengers one hour before arrival with Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” playing over the ship’s PA—that was kind of nice), we hauled our luggage to the car decks (sometimes waiting a little too long there—though the camaraderie, and anonymity, among fellow riders could be sweet), then rode out into another “full day.”

 

Waiting to Debark

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

 

Being off the boat and away on the shunpikers’ roads of Sweden and Finland brings me to a delicate subject—European driving standards versus their lack in North America. See, in four European tours now, Brutus and I have ridden thousands of miles of all kinds of roads, and not once—not one single time—have we encountered a driver who cut us off, flipped us off, ran us off, or did anything unexpected. No one has ever failed to use his or her turn indicators. (A bumper sticker I saw, “Jesus Would Have Used Turn Signals.”) And I seriously mean not a single exception—not one discourteous or unsafe move ever menaced our well-being on the road.

 

You could not survive a single day on the roads of Canada or the United States without having something ugly happen. Often many things.

 

Of course, Americans hate to hear that anything European might be at all superior, and Europeans are the same, in other ways. They may admire American blue jeans, rock and roll, jazz, action movies, and Route 66, but tend to generalize American people as morbidly obese, gun-toting religious fanatics. (A stereotype that’s only maybe fifty per cent true!)

 

That same half of the American population views Europeans as snooty, suspicious, snail-eating socialists. (Again, only half-right!)

 

But for all of these people on both sides of the Atlantic who have never seen the places or people they disparage, there’s a worthy quote from St. Augustine, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

 

I have also long admired a West African saying, “The one who does not travel knows only his mother’s cooking.”

 

On the theme of road manners, that wisdom might be amended to, “The one who does not travel knows only his father’s driving.”

 

One theory I consider likely is that Europeans lived communally for thousands of years, in which almost everyone was born, lived, and died among the same small group of people. So courtesy and responsibility were necessary. No one could get along without their neighbors, except aristocrats (who still sometimes simply chose such behavior as being more, well, aristocratic). Perhaps such social habits survived into modern times, when those medieval peasants and merchants began driving cars.

 

North America’s peoples came together in a much different way, arriving in small groups from widely-varying cultures, to places that were transitory and crude. Other individuals they encountered were all strangers—to be judged with suspicion, prickly hostility, and hair-trigger retaliation. And that is how they drive.

 

Swedish Backroad

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

 

Apart from quaint scenes like the above, and the area around the pretty island of Öland we visited on the Time Machine tour, the countryside of Southern Sweden is much like that of Southern Ontario, where I grew up, so maybe a little too familiar looking. We had some pleasant rides there, especially on the unpaved logging roads (much of Scandinavia, like large parts of Canada, is covered in vast stands of single-species pulpwood—though on an infinitely larger scale than Poland), and some paved backroads that were enjoyable enough, but straight and scenically . . . familiar. We didn’t stop too often for photographs.

 

Not having mentioned any of the actual shows yet, the one in Sweden provides an exceptional example. The arena concerts in the U.K, Amsterdam, and Germany had gone very well, the audiences enthusiastic, and we thought we were playing okay. The string section continued to be an uplifting presence, musically and socially. However, this was something far outside our usual performance routine—headlining one night of a huge three-day festival called Sweden Rocks. Bands were playing all day on three or four different stages, more-or-less continuously, so there would be no sound check. Our show would start a couple of hours later than usual, and instead of our two sets with intermission, we would play one long set, about two hours—and we would play to 35,000 people. That was a little overwhelming to contemplate, but I didn’t really have a sense of that crowd from the stage—with all the barricades and photo pits, even the closest people were farther away than usual. I really like to see people’s faces—to see them smiling, singing along, getting excited—but still, it was an impressive sea of humanity.

 

Photo by John Arrowsmith

 

 

 

After another pleasant morning of shunpiking around Sweden, Brutus and I caught our third overnight ferry, from Stockholm to Turku, Finland. The ride through the city, certainly one of Europe’s prettiest, was gorgeous on that warm sunny day, and while waiting at the ferry dock, I had a transcendent experience. Because of the ten-hour time difference between Central Europe and Southern California, I had been able to have fairly regular video chats with three-and-a-half-year-old Olivia in late afternoons, when it was early morning at home. That day, sitting on my bike on its centerstand and working on the previous weekend’s crossword, I received a text from Carrie saying that Olivia wanted to see Daddy. I texted back that we were waiting for a ferry, and didn’t have Wifi. She replied, “Aren’t you always waiting for a ferry?”

 

Ha ha. It was really only the third time, but I felt bad that Olivia wanted to see me, and I couldn’t make it happen. I was determined to try to connect with her. The Wifi hotspot on Brutus’s phone didn’t work, but we picked up a signal from a nearby hotel’s free network. I gave it a try, and it worked!

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

 

Usually my comment about modern gadgetry is, “Technology is never as smart as it thinks it is,” but when I saw Olivia’s smiling face on the little iPad screen perched on the tankbag of my motorcycle on a ferry dock in Sweden, I said to Brutus, “Now this is the way technology is supposed to work!”

 

I could show Olivia all around the harbor and the other boats, and even had Brutus take a photo of the scene on my cell phone, so I could send it to her and give her “the whole picture.”

Other passengers standing around were also delighted to hear Olivia belt out “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at full volume.

 

Finnish Backroad

 

Photo by Brutus

 

 

 

Brutus and I had ridden in Finland twice before, but both encounters were brief and rainy. This time we had a dry and mostly bright day, plus a masterpiece of a route by Brutus that included all the good kinds of shunpikers’ roads—from logging tracks to lightly-traveled, nicely winding backroads through the rural countryside and mixed woodlands. (Forests cover three-quarters of Finland, though what we saw were second or third growth—but still, the trees were mixed somewhat “naturally” as opposed to the single-species plantations of Central Planning.) Among the familiar spruce, pine, and birch trees, I occasionally noticed a different kind of conifer, dark and drooping with graceful, gestural branches. As best I can deduce (just try to learn the name of one tree in the forests of Finland!), they were Finnish spruce, a variant of the Siberian species. In any case, just that one unfamiliar and attractive tree gave the woodlands of Finland a more exotic atmosphere.

 

Wildflowers were plentiful along the roadsides, seemingly scattered deliberately, as country people do. Yellow and white blossoms were most common, which seems typical everywhere, but there were bright splashes of red, like poppies. I was especially attracted to the multi-colored lupins, in pink, lavender, and purple spears, and asked Brutus to ride through one scene for me a couple of times. (Michael would have called me terrible names for that.)

 

Brutus Among the Lupins

 

 

 

At such a northerly latitude, the growing season is brief but intense—summers are short, but the days are long, essentially giving twenty-four hours of light. The trees, pastures, and wildflowers around us seemed positively swollen with burgeoning life and color. It was now early June, and even at midnight, the sky was not completely dark. As in Northern Canada, only in winter do those people dwell in the Shadowlands.

 

But it’s a place we all pass through, some of us more than once, and Brutus and I had both survived some seriously dark times and trials. Often—like our journeys—we had shared them. Over the past year or two, Brutus had been through a particularly bad time, health-wise—cancer (stupid cancer, I insist it should always be prefaced), perhaps life’s ultimate Shadowlands. (Though grief would be close.) After multiple surgeries, therapies, and a dodgy prognosis, this European tour was Brutus’s first big motorcycle journey—so it represented a crucial “test” for him, a test of his future Quality of Life.

 

Without saying anything, I was a little anxious about his ability to handle it (serious traveling is hard work—like what Paul Theroux said, “When I come back from a journey, I haven’t had a vacation; I need a vacation”), and of course Brutus’s concern, and perhaps fear, ran deeper—all the way down.

 

A lot was riding on this tour, spoken and not, and as the days went by, I was happy and relieved to see Brutus making it—keeping up with me, and enjoying the ride. Out of all our darkness, he and I had emerged purified, ennobled, and enlightened—we knew how to appreciate life.

Riding into Helsinki for the final European show, after 5,314 kilometers, 3,321 miles, Brutus and I were a couple of happy shunpikers, riding out of the Shadowlands and into the light.

 

Photo by Brutus

Edited by Tombstone Mountain
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hcm

hcm

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For being the most private Neil seems to give us the most insight to his thoughts and feelings.

 

I love this stuff because I will likely never make it to most of these places.

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Tombstone Mountain

Tombstone Mountain

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For being the most private Neil seems to give us the most insight to his thoughts and feelings.

 

I love this stuff because I will likely never make it to most of these places.

It would be very interesting if Ged or Alex did the same kind of cool journal thing. Wonder if they're ever going to write a book about their life experience with Rush?
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Lorraine

Lorraine

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Another great read. I really appreciate the idea that Neil shares his life with the fans.

 

I put myself on his mailing list, but I never get any notifications.

 

Do you think he knows who I really am???? :outtahere:

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Bluefunk

Bluefunk

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I put myself on his mailing list, but I never get any notifications.

 

Do you think he knows who I really am???? :outtahere:

Hehe, I thought it was just me!

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Lorraine

Lorraine

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I put myself on his mailing list, but I never get any notifications.

 

Do you think he knows who I really am???? :outtahere:

Hehe, I thought it was just me!

 

We'll have to bring this to Neil's immediate attention. No doubt he will get right on it and rectify things.

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hcm

hcm

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Well thanks to his blog I found out he had lunch like 2 doors down from where I work. I even said to my husband that I saw 2 bmw cycles go by and jokingly said "I bet that is Neil headed to the next show"
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