The Open Road

Americans tend to think of it in capital letters.

The Road is a path to new worlds, new people, adventure, and excitement. The Road can take you to oceans, mountains, deserts, and swamps. It can lead you around and through this magnificent land of ours. It offers smooth cruising and white-knuckle cliffside corkscrews. It's the route through old-growth forests and seedy downtowns, to monuments and burned-out neighborhoods, to waterfalls and bayous.

The Road is a legend peopled with wanderers, vagabonds, hoboes, and minstrels. It carried the Great Migration that saw some six million Blacks leave the South for Northern jobs and equality; it gave hope to three million Okies headed for the promised land of California; it's where you go if life becomes unbearable.

The spirit of The Road is best represented by one iconic machine: the motorcycle. Sturdy, agile, and fast, bikes are the ultimate statement of freedom. They're a way out, an escape. No other vehicle represents a quick getaway quite like the motorcycle.

It's estimated there are about 13 million motorcycles in the United States. We all probably have some stereotypical image of a biker, but considering that eight percent of American households own at least one bike, it's almost certainly wrong. Ask anybody which movie best typifies biker culture, and you'll get a range of "wild" answers from "The Wild One" to "The Wild Angels" to "Wild Hogs," and any others, and they'll all be right. Bikers come in all sizes, colors, races, genders, and socioeconomic strata.

Every August thousands of them gather in Sturgis, South Dakota. You remember South Dakota, right? The state governed by pro-Trump COVID-19 denier Kristi Noem where the Fool-in-Chief hired an audience to watch him read a fifth-grade history lesson about the presidents carved into Mount Rushmore before having a photo taken that appears to show him joining them.

But I digress. Governor Noem has imposed virtually no COVID-19 restrictions anywhere, so for 10 days beginning the day before yesterday Sturgis is going to be one huge viral swamp.

I've taken a couple of days off to research this year's event in order to avoid the trap of stereotyping, and I offer the following with reasonable certainty.

Yes, the biker community is heterogeneous, but this year's gathering is likely less so. The 80th Sturgis rally is now estimated to draw between 100,000 and 250,000 bikers and aficionados. That is a lot, but way down from last year's attendance of nearly half a million.

When throngs of people with a special interest are reduced, true believers are the distillate, and I expect the majority of Sturgis attendees are going to be hard-core freedom-loving bikers who aren't going to wear masks or observe COVID-19 precations generally. Sturgis is a party, with lots of drinking, drugs, back slapping, hugging, and sex. Crowds will be shoulder-to-shoulder at bars, concerts, and other rally events.

Sturgis is an international event, which means anyone infected there could pass the virus on to a great many people. Not surprisingly, a lot of attendees are Trump supporters. Why? It's not political. They identify with his "I'm number one," "take what you want" attitude and his incessant anger. Not a few of them, I suspect, are "Sons of Anarchy" wannabes.

Native American communities have closed roads that lead to Sturgis and banned rally traffic on or through their territories. I'm sure the residents of Sturgis wish they could do the same. They were overwhelmingly opposed to the rally this year. But the event brings a lot of income to area businesses. Money talks, and the city council listened.

Thanks to Governor Noem's laissez-faire policy and the city council's avarice, the 2020 Sturgis rally may be remembered less as a party and more as a visitation by the Grim Reaper.

I hope not. I really do. I love The Road, and would hate for anyone's experience of it to be tainted by disease. Still, those who live large and take unnecessary risks have to expect some payback.

Ride fast, party hard, suffer the consequences.


---Diogenes, 8/9/2020


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