Chapter 30: Seven Hundred Headlights
They counted the bikes at the junction the way they count cattle at the brand inspection โ two men with clickers. Seven hundred was the number they settled on, and nobody in the valley argued with it, because seven hundred was the number the run had promised the radio station, and the valley keeps its promises in public.
The memorial run leaves at dawn. That is the rule and the whole theology of it: you ride out of the dark and into the light, the way the year went, the way the man we ride for would have wanted any job done โ early, cold, and finished properly.
I rode my own bike in the middle of the pack. The green cruiser, who earned her name in February โ Fern, for the color and for being tougher than she looks โ settled into the hum of seven hundred engines like a voice finding its choir. I had a place in the formation, three rows behind the road captains. Around me: Dutch's nephew on his forgiving 250. Pruitt from Great Falls, who rides the run now with a silver emergency blanket folded in his saddlebag. Men and women from chapters I had never seen before October of last year and could not now imagine a season without. Behind me somewhere was a kid from Harlowton on his first run, riding his uncle's bike and his uncle's place in line, because in this valley the run is inherited like everything else that matters.
Hammer rode at the front. That was not negotiable, and believe me, the negotiation was attempted by professionals โ Rita made her case with a spreadsheet โ and he heard everyone out and then rode at the front anyway, because some arguments you win by being the last one still talking. His stiff leg sat on the peg the way it sits everywhere: not gracefully, not gladly, but there, present, accounted for. Alive. Alive because a girl in a dying wagon stopped in a ditch a year and some ago, when stopping was the stupidest, coldest, most expensive idea in the world, and did it anyway. He has never once said it. He rides at the front of seven hundred motorcycles at dawn in the cold blue light, and that is him saying it, at the volume he prefers.
Micah watched from the clubhouse porch with Rita, wrapped in a coat that used to be mine and a hat that used to be his father's, waving with both arms like he was flagging down a plane. His job โ self-appointed, vigorously defended โ is porch command: coffee counts, thermos inventory, and waving. Rita says he runs the porch like a small, kind border crossing. Everybody who comes up the steps gets waved in. Nobody gets waved past.
The valley at dawn is a thing I will not try to sell you. The light comes up blue and then bluer, the way cold has a color before it has a temperature. The headlights went on at the junction in a long rippling line, seven hundred of them, catching the frost on the fence wires, until the whole road was a string of small suns carried through the valley. From the middle of the pack you cannot see the front or the back of a thing like that. You can only see your stretch of it โ the bikes ahead, the bikes behind, the ditch running alongside white and quiet, doing nobody any harm today.
We passed mile marker 114 at the speed the run keeps past that stone, which is slower: Halloway speed, the speed of paying attention. Seven hundred engines eased down as one machine, and the granite tow hook went by on my right with the snow on it brushed clean โ Micah's doing, the day before, with a whisk broom and strong views about respect โ and a diner mint sat on top of the stone in the blue dawn, white on white, exactly where a boy had decided it belonged.
People ask me whether I would stop again. They ask it in the store, at the college, once at the DMV with Flo holding my paperwork. It is the wrong question and I have learned to answer it kindly anyway, because it comes from a kind place in people. The question is not whether I would stop. The question is whether a person gets to be the kind of creature who drives past โ and the answer, it turns out, was decided for me a long time before I had a license, by a man who left his whole philosophy in a ditch in two words of granite.
Everybody is somebody's person in a ditch, sooner or later. The ditch does not care what you drive or what you owe or what your paperwork says. It only asks the one question, and it asks it of everyone who comes down the road.
Stop.