Yesterday I promised I was going home and that I’d leave you alone.
My apologies but before I do, I want to talk about Ursula again. (I wrote about her a few days ago, the post is still up.) A friend messaged me and asked me if I liked her. He shouldn’t have had to ask. That he did is my fault. My bad writing. I wanted readers to like her. I like her very much. More than that, I admire her.
Ursula is not a victim but she is a sympathetic character. Her father abandoned her when she was in high school, married her off when she was sixteen. The first marriage went bad and she kept trying. In her third marriage, she was physically beaten. Using nothing but wits and grit (those quintessential American values we all pride ourselves on), she’s assembled an enviable life, a life of tranquility and peace surrounded by the animals she loves and trusts in a beautiful place. Finally, she’s safe.
She’s a born-again Christian and has those insufferable beliefs. But why wouldn’t she? The Christian right has aggressively courted her. They’ve given her difficult life context, a belief system, they’ve made her important. What have we, the liberal left, done for her? We’ve been failing for decades, abortion is irrelevant to her life and we lost that one anyway. Guns, she’s a woman who lives alone in the country, she has guns. Minimum wage, we haven’t touched that since what, 2007? What good have we done Ursula?
We don’t even talk to her. Remember, we’re democrats, we’re the “professional class” (thank you Bill and Hillary). Too bad there are not enough of us “professionals” to win elections. But no, Ursula is not our type and we’re going to criticize and belittle her until it’s we who are no longer relevant. Because Ursula is much of America today. She’s looking for a belief system because she needs one (we all need one). And because we on the left failed to provide one, she looked elsewhere. And we have the gall to call her a hypocrite for taking a few dollars a month in disability? That’s the least she deserves. After all, it’s we who abandoned her.
In our condescension, we imagine ourselves to be the intellectual elite, the smart people calling the shots and charting direction for the good of the little people. And the little people are sick of it. Because we’re not good at it. We don’t honor them or value them or, as I wrote above, even talk to them. We don’t provide aspiration and vision, we don’t project optimism and hope, we don’t paint a picture of a better tomorrow. And worst of all, we don’t deliver on whatever modest aspirations we do articulate. We’re losers. And nobody wants to be associated with losers, no matter how smart we imagine ourselves to be.
Reconsider your thoughts on Ursula. I’ll try to be a better writer.
Headed home. Before I do, I want to talk about my motorcycle, the Revival.
The Revival is a 2021 Harley Davidson motorcycle, a remake of the iconic 1969 Electra Glide, the classic Hog. Harley Davidson made 1500 of these bikes. Mine is number 1307, Lucky 13.
It’s a horrible touring motorcycle, it’s astonishing how bad it is. The seating position is that of an old-fashioned wooden school desk; feet flat, back straight, 90-degree angles at hips and knees. The impact of any and every pothole, expansion joint and lousy bit of asphalt is transmitted directly up your spine. And because your feet are forward of your hips, you can’t use your legs to protect your back. Bumps hurt.
It weighs 864 pounds. (roughly twice the weight of my BMW touring bike). Maneuvering the bike in and out of Waffle House parking lots and around gas pumps is risky and slow (and they’ve got those big plate glass windows at Waffle House so you’ve got an audience). And you can’t get off and push it around, as I routinely do with other motorcycles, because once that 864 pounds starts to shift from vertical, it gets heavy fast and you want a leg on either side to catch it.
It handles like the hog that it is; as you set up for a turn — freeway on-ramp, one of Tail of the Dragon’s 318 curves, whatever — you’re on the brakes early because slowing down takes a while, it tips into the turn slowly and reluctantly and waddles you up to the apex. As you pass the apex and try to straighten the bike up, it resists the pull on the bars and you struggle with it, you struggle until the double yellow line and oncoming traffic are getting uncomfortably close and the bike is again vertical, you then exhale and start getting ready for the next one. It’s got very little ground clearance, so you can’t lean it very far without dragging hard parts on the pavement.
It has 97 horsepower. For an 864-pound modern motorcycle, that’s way, way, way underpowered.
The Revival is the best touring bike I’ve ever owned. By far. It represents America at one of its finest hours, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Civil Rights, color TVs in walnut cabinets, shag carpeting. It’s good union jobs and a livable minimum wage. It’s the Camaro, the Mustang and the Coupe DeVille with white wall tires. It’s Janis, Grace, Jimi and John Fogerty. It’s Nixon before most people knew he was Nixon. Sure, we had Viet Nam, but the tide was turning and Walter Cronkite was on it. The Japanese motorcycle invasion had started but we didn’t know it, all we knew about Japan was that we’d beaten them in The War. America sat astride the Harley Davidson Electra Glide and the world with pride.
Fifty years later, people of America love the Electra Glide’s revival, the color, the lines, the stature, the heft, the Americanness of it. It can’t be defined by numbers or feel at the handlebars and butt, it’s defined by the woman in the parking lot who wants a picture, the black kid on the horse, the Iraqi immigrant, the woman with the prosthetic leg. The Revival is flawed and ridiculous and it’s us. And everyone wants to talk about it. And about themselves. Wandering these United States talking to people and retelling their stories, the Revival is perfect. The Revival is a celebration of us…
Two nights ago, I slept at Ursula’s house in Niota, Tennessee.
Ursula is a friend of a friend, she’s fifty-one, a thrice divorced born-again Christian who rides a Harley and has a prosthetic leg, she lost the leg in a motorcycle accident nine years ago. She breeds and raises birds; chickens, ducks, quail, song birds; pretty birds in an enormous variety of sizes, colors and plumage that strut and peck and cluck around her big fenced backyard. She’s also got three small dogs and a son who lives in Chicago.
Her first marriage was to a Navy man when she was 16. Her father was career Navy, divorced, and reassigned to Guam. She was going into her senior year in high school, she married so that she could stay in the States and finish school. They had her son. Her divorce two years ago was from a psychopath who beat her. I asked her about relationships, she adamantly has no interest.
Ursula
Ursula’s birds all have names and personalities that she describes with annoyance and affection. They come when she calls, they sit in her lap, take food from her hand, follow her around the yard. Lucky sits on her shoulder as she does chores. Her love is obvious, her conversations about them have the intelligence, confidence and syllables of science.
More beer and some colorado and our conversation changed from ducks to people. The sky is black, the stars bright, she’s got tiny lights strung on the coops and cages that twinkle, the air has cooled and has a soft touch. We argued about the nature of humans. I told her about friend of mine, Ron, who a few winters ago got a job as a union roofer. Ron was homeless, he didn’t have a vehicle or vehicle insurance or cold weather clothing or the most basic tools or money for lunch. And his cellphone was failing. But the job paid well and I lent him money and sold him an old company truck on credit. (Ron was killed a couple of years later by St. Paul Police.)
She argued that the help I gave Ron was crippling, that he needed to make his own way, that the lord placed a premium on personal endeavor, that any help, particularly government help, creates dependency and weakness. Ursula was defending her god. I’m an atheist.
Our argument approached vitriol and I began to worry about where I was going to spend the night. I was tired and I’d been drinking and I really didn’t want to get back on the motorcycle. Also, this is supposed to be a listening tour. I started talking about the beauty of the night sky and the colored lights on the cages, a change of subject she accepted without hesitation, and we went back to talking about birds and motorcycles. For breakfast, we shared an Amish-grown cantaloupe. The birds got the rinds.
Ursula receives SSI disability payments for her leg.
Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a group of Indian nations consisting of the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Muscogee and the Seminole (the “five civilized tribes”) were forcibly relocated from their ancestral homes in the southeastern United States to areas west of the Mississippi by the United States government. Along the way, thousands died of exposure, disease and starvation. Yesterday I rode parts of the Trail of Tears.
Covid killed Todd Yannayon last September. He was 59 years old. I stopped to take pictures of his abandoned store and Gina came out of her trailer. She lives alone across the Trail of Tears from the store with dogs and chickens. She lived in that trailer with Todd for 14 years. He was her fiancé.
Gina
She gave me a copy of Todd’s funeral program. It includes a picture of Todd on the motorcycle they rode together. She misses the riding. The program includes her as “girlfriend” in a list of kids, sibs, steps and in-laws. It includes a page dedicated to a poem that Todd wrote when he was in high school; Gina’s grief sits between two comas.
Funeral Program
The store includes five or six ancient wooden buildings deteriorating rapidly. She has asked his sons to help, they’re in their thirties and living their lives. It’s theirs, not hers, and they don’t have time but she lives across the road.
One of Todd Yannayan’s “stores”
There is barely noticeable concrete bridge that crosses a tiny stream just down the hill from the store. Gina lobbied the state and the bridge is now the Vincent “Todd” Yannahon Memorial Bridge.
Vincent “Todd” Yannayon Memorial Bridge
It was her willingness to be vulnerable with a stranger, her gentleness with the dogs, her overwhelming loneliness that make Gina such a wonderful subject to write about. She deserves better words than mine.
Luay is 46, an Iraqi immigrant. He came to the United States when he was 13 and has a heavy accent. He’s single and rides a Harley Davidson.
We were having lunch at separate tables. I gathered my silverware and menu and sat with him. He had a grilled chicken sandwich and four beers, I had a club sandwich and fries. We talked bikes and good rides and politics.
Luay voted Trump in ‘16, didn’t like Clinton; Biden in ‘20, didn’t like Trump’s violence. He’s disappointed in Biden, we’re spending billions of dollars in Ukraine and we have people in this country having to choose between “gasoline and toilet paper.”
I asked him about being single, he said he liked his freedom.
