Road Hazard

We finally found some time for a ride today. It's been several weeks since I've been onboard the Harley. And Bill has only had a few solitary rides since we've been here. It certainly wasn't because the weather was lousy. It's not. It's even warmer today and was begging for one of the motorcycles to be ridden.

So we left Mr. Chuy on his honor in the house (he was a perfect gentleman-dog, thank you) and loaded up and headed to Globe. At first, we were going to ride the Deuce but we discovered the battery was less than full and it wouldn't turn the engine over, so Bill dashed upstairs to get the Road King's keys and we took it. I had time to unzip the liner out of the riding jacket and ended up leaving it half unzipped even up the hill. The air was more humid than usual and in the low Eighties, it felt soft and warm. Traffic was heavy going over the mountain into Miami and we got behind some Yahoo who must have thought he was leading a parade, drooping along about forty all the way down the hill with a great line of traffic behind him. There were ten wheelers and motorhomes along with cars and motorcycles in his parade. He kept up a slow progression and flashed his hazards all the way down the hill into Miami.

Once there, traffic split into two lanes and we found ourselves behind an impatient pickup pulling a trailer. At the second stop light, we found ourselves splashing across a liquid pool of what appeared to be cream colored latex paint. It splashed all over our bike and leathers before we knew what happened. Our first thought was that it was muddy water. It was so big it stretched clear across the double lane of traffic. But it was amazingly resilient.

It took two more miles before we found a car wash and pulled in to hose ourselves off. And once again were more amazed and upset when we found that the pressure hose and hot soapy water failed to budge the stuff! It was strewn up on the King's saddlbags, the undercarriage was practically solidly covered and the chrome exhaust pipes were thoroughly embedded with the stuff. It might as well have been cement for all it was going to get dislodged with a good pressure wash!

Both Bill's and my boots and lower part of our chaps were covered with it and Bill's jacket and helmet were messed up as well. Now, we were not only annoyed but upset as hell by what had happened.

"Isn't it illegal to dump paint?" I asked, plaintively, rubbing futilely at a spot on the seat.

"Not if you're not caught, I guess." Bill was pissed but he was being real good about it. I was raging for both of us! Tomorrow is his birthday and that's not how he wanted to spend it, scraping paint or plaster goo off his bike, one tiny speck at a time!

"I wonder how many other vehicles got plastered with it," I said. "There was a line of them."

"We'll go back and report it to the Miami police," Bill told me. "We probably won't be the only ones. In California, if this had happened, they would have closed the highway for a hazardous waste spill."

"Well, I find it hard to believe nobody knows anything about it! Paint this deep that gets splattered up on us this bad can't be an everyday occurrence!"

"It looks more like plaster the drywall guys use. Maybe a truck carrying a load splashed some out when they went through town. It's the color of thousands of houses down here though. They'll never be able to trace it down."

"The poor bike!" I mourned. Very darned little had been cleaned by the pressure hose. "But we better go report it."

It was almost an hour from the time we got 'splotched' until we returned to Miami to report it to the police. We were surprised to find the location of the 'crime' was only a block away from headquarters. And even more surprised to find that nobody else had reported it. A very obliging policeman walked across the street with us and inspected the bike. We told him in a rush what had happened and he had Bill fill out a property damage report. When Bill was almost finished,he suggested maybe we'd better try washing it off. We reminded him once again, that's what we had done immediately after it had happened and the damned stuff wasn't washing anywhere! He smiled and said he was sorry. Damned if he knew what the stuff was.

Well, it was a far cry from what would have happened in the Environmental Green Empire of California. And I've been touting Arizona these past two months for being such a free place to live, compared to the confines of California. So now, I guess I'll have to amend it a bit. Yes, Arizona is a freer place to live. But we spent the 'free' part of our afternoon trying to scrape paint off our chaps and leathers and cooling pipes of the Road King, and I gotta tell you: we're going to be riding around blending in with ninety per cent of the houses we see. This stuff ain't coming off!

Tattoos

I'm going to get a new tattoo in a couple of weeks and I am feeling conflicted as to where to put it. The design has not been a problem. I know what it is I want to have, but the where on my body is still under consideration. At the time I made my appointment, nearly four months ago, I figured I had plenty of time to come up with the 'where' but now that there are only days left before The Deed is Done I'm starting to worry I will find the right place.

My concern with tattoos probably started in childhood when tattooed bikers would come to our resort and be turned away by my grandfather. "Those Types" of people weren't welcomed in our family-style resort. Tattoos weren't a big problem in my childhood: fact is, there just weren't a lot of people who had them. Sometimes an uncle might sport a Marine emblem on a forearm and that was tacitly accepted. Anything else was mightily suspect.

So I guess I carried this Taboo Tattoo feature into adulthood. It never really bothered me too much. I didn't know that many folks who were tattooed and that was fine with me. My husband got his first ones around age forty when we began scuba diving. He got an angel fish on one arm and a dolphin on the other. They were smallish and didn't bother me too much. They only showed when he wore a tank top or swim trunks and that was usually when we were on a dive trip. It appeared that most divers had some sort of tattoos and sometimes at the end of a successful trip, the divers would show them off to each other.

Things changed when we got into Harleys. There, it seemed, everybody had a tattoo. We got to be close friends with Tom in the winter when he wore long sleeves and by spring it became apparent that his arms were gradually becoming full of tattoos. At first, I pretended not to notice his colorful pictures beginning to wind up his arms, but soon I was fascinated by each new picture he added each month. On a ride, complete strangers would walk up to him and admire his arms. It was a conversation opener and never failed to impress. Occasionally, we'd find somebody whose eyes would slide away from us as soon as they spied the tattoos. Yes, judgement was still out there. There was still some sort of 'stigma' attached to tattoos.

A couple of years after we met Tom, Bill decided he was going to get a tattoo, a big one, on his back. He searched out pictures for the perfect one and settled on a serene mermaid, her face averted as she floated poised over a good third of Bill's back. I thought it was awful big. I kept looking at the perfect smooth tanned expanse of his back and couldn't imagine how it would look with the turquoise and green mermaid superimposed over it. What if I didn't like it? Didn't matter, did it? She'd be there to stay for hell or high water! The day of his appointment came and I went along to the tattoo parlor. The artist, Dana, is a real bona fide artist, she just likes to work with skin rather than canvas. I think she could paint anything, she's that good. And let me tell you, she made that mermaid practically spring to life. But I couldn't stay there and watch it emerge. When the tattoo gun fired up, I bolted out of the shop and spent the next hour and a half walking around the mall, my stomach churning with worry over what was going on on Bill's back. I even (briefly) started to call Tom and read him the Riot Act for being an instigator of this tattoo business but I stopped myself before I did. I figured that made me look sort of like a crazy person. Which is what I felt like.

Well, like I said, the mermaid turned out perfectly. Bill was thrilled. He made another appointment and went back in a few months for a huge sea monster that appeared to be sneaking up on the unaware mermaid. Over the next year, he added fish, a terrific sea turtle, jelly fish and a sunken ship. His back is a true underwater scene.

So we became friends with the tattoo artist and I found myself making an appointment for a tattoo myself. She's a big fairy, covering a third of my upper back. She took two sessions to complete and I have to say the outlining of her wasn't near as painful as the coloring in. When I finished the last of her, I swore to myself that this would be it, my one and only.

Only now, three years later, I want another. It's not as large as the fairy and I'm sure (I hope) won't be as painful. But I'm conflicted where it should be put. Since it's not as large, it could go on my upper arm. And I've thought real hard about that. But... (and this BUT seems to be growing larger) it seems to me that women who sport upper arm tattoos appear to be Hard. And why that should be, I'm not entirely sure. In that regard, I feel like I'm six years old again and watching my grandpa turn the bikers away. And really, if I'm an old lady of nearly sixty, why shouldn't I get a tattoo on my upper arm? I know I'm not Hard. I am what I am at this age and if I have a tattoo there, why not? But... Okay, so there's the lower leg. That seems less Hard to me than the upper arm. But... I'm not sure I want a tattoo on my lower leg. I'm just not sure how it would look with a suit and heels, IF I should decide to wear a suit and heels, which I usually do not, BUT I might. What does it say about an old woman in her sixties and seventies going to church in a suit and heels and wearing a big tattoo on her lower leg? I don't know. I haven't decided. Now what I'll probably do is hide it. Hide it sort of the same way I hid the fairy on my back. It's not visible most of the time. I wear a halter top or backless top at a Harley function to get it noticed, usually. Oh, I think the last time some stranger called attention to it was when I was getting a Cat Scan and the two (men) attendants running the machine commented on it since I was wearing one of those open backed hospital gowns. No, where I'll probably put it is on my stomach. Then I can show it off with summer clothes or a swimsuit. I won't have to worry if I go sleeveless to a grocery store or wear that suit and heels to church what a stranger will think about a tattooed sixty year old woman.

But it might be nice to be edgey and push the envelope and watch people's eyes slide away from my face and make them wonder what kind of person I really am. Hmmmmm.... well, I still have a couple of weeks to make up my mind where that new tattoo will be put.

Confessions of a Snoop

Yes, it's true. I'm not really that nice person you thought I was. I'm human, too, and I let this not-so-nice side of me emerge this summer. We rode to Sturgis, you see. On the Harleys. With a group of four others. (The Sturgis Rally for those of you not in the Harley-know is a huge week long party for Harley enthusiasts held in the warm summer sun of South Dakota each August.) It was our first attendance and so we decided instead of roughing it at a campground, we would rent a house. Then we could attend the parties, see the sights and not have to rough it so much. We were accompanied by our best friends and an Aussie couple we met in Queensland several years ago and who fit us like a tee. The six of us were compaticos and we got along beautifully.

I found the house online. Evidently, folks in the Sturgis area like to get out of town if they aren't fond of motorcycles that first week of August. Some of them rent their homes out to Harley riding guests like us. There certainly were not enough hotel or motel rooms to go around. And... like I said, sleeping on the ground with a beer guzzling crowd of bikers didn't exactly sound like my idea of fun. Well, then, this house: It had it all. Four bedrooms. A family room. A living room. A kitchen to die for with a long work table/counter. It was in a little college town twenty miles away from Sturgis with the quaint name of Spearfish. Eagerly, I antipated our much touted trip to Sturgis through the dreary winter months last year.

The house didn't disappoint when we got there that Sunday afternoon. We claimed our bedrooms and then stripped the bikes of all our clothes and accessories and roared back into town to load up on groceries. The local Safeway turned out to be full of other bikers, (strangely... mostly Californians too) loading up on groceries for their rented houses. There was a run on sourdough bread when we got done, I could see.

That night, the first problem we ran into while Tom was fixing supper, was that there was no salad bowl. Leona and I opened and closed cupboards sure such an article was there, we just hadn't found it. But no, we never found one the whole week. Tom finally gave up and tossed our salad in a big roasting pan. But we found it odd.

The house was filled with photos, of vacations, nature and such. The walls were covered with them. There weren't a lot of people photos but we found few wedding photos on a bookshelf. Leona and I wondered what 'our family' looked like that had given up their house to us for the week, but there wasn't much evidence of them in the pictures left there. The second morning while using an exer-cycle upstairs, I looked over the bookcase. I had read the one and only book I brought with me (Listen, when you're vacationing on a Harley for three weeks and your entire wardrobe and make up and shoes! have to reside in one saddlebag, you don't get to lug along a lot of reading material!) and needed to find something more to read. I thought there might be a mystery lurking among the books or at the worst some bodice ripping romance novel. But the only tomes I found there besides textbooks were some ten and twenty year old Guideposts. So I had to go shopping for books in town for the rest of the trip.

On Wednesday night, when our friend Dee joined the group, Leona and I both confessed as to the mystery of the couple whose house we'd rented. There were no sponges in the kitchen, she washed with dish cloths. There were no novels in the house. There was no salad bowl. Did people really live there? We shared a laugh at how awful and snoopy we'd become.

It wasn't until we were ready to clear out the next Sunday that a bit of the mystery was solved. And it made me sort of sad. Dee and Tom left first before the crack of dawn. Leona and Greg were riding up into Montana and then Canada and got away at seven thirty. Bill and I were heading back to California to return to work and stayed an hour longer closing up the house and making sure things were clean. Before Leona left, she took me aside and said, "I'm sure the missus doesn't sleep in the master bedroom. Take a look in there. Only his shoes are in the closet." (The master bedroom had belonged to the Aussies that week.) And sure enough, when I snooped in there to make sure there were no toothpaste stains in the sink, only His shoes were there. Nothing of Hers.

I ducked into Tom and Dee's bedroom. Everything looked normal. But I hadn't noticed a bookshelf there. And there... on the bottom shelf was my mystery solved. Yes, she had liked books. A few of them anyway. High falutin' literature that looked like it had been bought three decades ago when she was in college. There were also a few tomes of photography. So She was the source of all the art on the walls. And last but certainly not least, a number of mixed volumes on weight loss, menopause and how to achieve a better self image. Poor lady! Had she claimed this bedroom as her refuge against the Battle of the Bulge and because she thought she was no longer attractive? It would certainly explain the several pieces of exercise equipment scattered through the house. I tiptoed out and shut the door. I felt like I'd violated her privacy. How would I like it if a group of bikers claimed my house for a week?

I'll tell you one thing though: If I should ever rent out my house for a week to a group of bikers or anybody else and you should happen to rent it, you'll find several salad bowls and a whole host of reading material, some lofty and some just entertaining.