Bones of the Machina
Thick morning mist hung suspended, greying the air between black spruce and white birch as I hopped on the motorcycle and joined the empty dirt roadways that led to a gas station a few miles away. When I reached the pavement I found another motorist: a fellow motorcyclist that sat a top an old cruiser that had been converted into a trike. He waved at me as he passed by in the same direction I was headed. I pulled in behind him and together we traveled down Farmer’s Loop through the morning mist. It was an ethereal experience, flowing through misted autumn air with another rider on deserted roads. He stopped at the gas station too, and when I emerged outside again after getting coffee I found a bunch more cruisers had arrived in the lot. Their club was going for a ride, and on my way out of the lot they all waved at me. I love motorcycle culture here - in the short riding season we all wave to each other, regardless of the type of bike one rides. In the Lower 48 there are tribes of crotch rockets and cruisers, and they don’t usually mingle.
Winter is coming and it’ll bring the riding season to an end soon though. Damn, Alaska winters are a real bitch too. The foliage is already aging as we do - becoming withered and scarred and stiff.
But I love Alaska. I spent today writing and researching the history here, and then made it out to Chatanika for sunset where I visited the skeleton of an old gold dredge overlooking an excavated lake. A few years back a visitor had pulled on one of the chains on the dredge, which caused a spark to jump off it and start a fire and incinerated its skin. Now its steel bones stand exposed in the subarctic air.
It’s amazing that such a machine would be here, even if only from the 1950’s. In an earlier time the Athabaskan would have been scared of the grand machines of their time - steamboats that breathed smoke and fire and were altogether different from anything that had come before them. They were the harbingers of industry, spiritual ancestors of machines like this one.