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ON THE FRONT LINES with Freak |
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ON THE ROAD WITH... FREAK 63rd
Annual Motorcycle Rally @ STURGIS, SOUTH DAKOTA –
8/3-9/03 You never want to
start a story in the emergency room of a hospital but that’s where we
were, staring at a small TV mounted in the corner above the coffee machine
watching Lethal Weapon 3 hoping
that our buddy Karl would be
okay. It was late Friday
night and if you had to find a plus side to the situation, I guess it
would have to be that it took five days for one of us to screw up.
Trae and I pulled out of Barrington at
midnight on Saturday 6/2 after wrapping up a Q-101 promotion for Miller and Harley-Davidson at this bar called
the Chicago Loop. We barreled
through Wisconsin and Minnesota under the cover of darkness and crossed
the Mississippi state line just as the sun started to fill the rear-view
mirror. With only NASCAR type
pit stops for junk food and gas, we hit Spearfish and found the place
we’d be calling home for the rest of the week just after six on Sunday
afternoon.
We unloaded the bikes
(yeah, we trailered them) just as the rest of the group returned from
lunch and immediately headed into town for some much needed relaxation.
We started Monday off
by roaring up into the Black Hills National Park entering via Spearfish
Canyon. The winding roads
took us past walls of rock that stretched hundreds of feet above, a far
cry from the towering walls of concrete and steel that surrounded me every
other morning as I make my way downtown to work.
Mile after mile we rode through fresh air and blue skies until we
reached our first pit stop tucked away on a small chunk of semi-flat land
by a fork in the road.
Cheyenne Crossing was
a log cabin with a restaurant/gift shop inside that seated roughly fifteen
but with the rally in town, some two hundred bikes jammed the gravel lot
and food was being digested as fast as it could be scraped from the
skillet. We grabbed a few
beers instead of waiting for chow and rolled on to Deadwood for more
booze. Downtown Deadwood was
as sea of motorcycles and parking was every-man-for-himself.
We regrouped at the Old #10 Saloon which is where “Wild”
Bill Hickock was gunned down and his chair, holster, and hand of cards
he was holding are still there on display.
More of a western museum than a bar, we stayed for a few before
moving on to Hill City and then Keystone.
We’d ingested quite
a few beers by now and figured some food would be in order to help keep us
level for the ride back home. We
finally came to rest at the Red Garter Saloon on the far western edge of
downtown Keystone. There we
continued to drink while wolfing down half-pound buffalo burgers that were
cooked to perfection.
Nine bars, over three
hundred miles, and several pounds of buffalo meat down and not only
hadn’t we hit Sturgis yet, it was only day one.
This continued
throughout the week as we criss-crossed Wyoming, Montana, and most of
South Dakota doing everything from rocky mountain oysters in back-road
saloons to witnessing the awe of Devil’s Tower, all the while consuming
vast amounts of alcohol.
It finally came to a
head on Friday night. We’d
been doing the tourist thing in Sturgis, buying gifts for friends back
home and, of course, drinking lots of beer.
We rolled out of town at sundown and blasted down I-90 to drop off
our loot and head into Deadwood to hit a casino.
Just two miles from
our exit, Karl’s 2002 bagger came loose rounding a curve but before he
could correct the problem, he hit an uneven seam between the bridge and
the road and in a matter of seconds was sliding down the road at over
eighty miles an hour.
The troopers arrived
before we could get the mess cleaned up ourselves and our bloodied friend
was tagged with a DUI, shoveled into an ambulance, and hauled away.
After what seemed like
an eternity, we were finally allowed to see him. He had lost twenty-five percent of his skin, broken his
wrist, and suffered a concussion in the wreck but overall was in pretty
good shape.
We had tempted fate all week long and came out ahead but with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, fate stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. |
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We
eventually got our asses in gear and cruised past the scenic Pactola
Reservoir and did the tourist photo-op at Mt. Rushmore before hitting Sic
Vic’s for a final drink and heading back into the sunset towards
Spearfish for dinner.