Sometimes things come up in life that knock you off your spot. We get preoccupied by what we are doing and often forget the value in the thing itself.
Recently I had an occurrence of just this variety and it came, as it usually does, from the strangest encounter.
So I’m on a dreaded deadline and hustling to my least favorite mode of transportation, an airplane. Since it was a Southwest flight and their boarding practices are the same as a grade school bus, “all seats taken, move to the back,” I was in less than a great mood. There in the back of the plane, an old man stood in the middle of the aisle. ‘C’mon pap,’ I thought to myself, until he noticed me, excused himself into the seat and let me pass. I threw my stuff in and he made a comment in politeness to which I respectfully answered. Nothing strange there, but within the next five minutes, we would become so deep in conversation that he changed seats to be beside me and we never stopped for that entire four hour flight.
It turns out that the old boy was the son of a farmer. At a young age, he had learned to fly so he could perform the daily rituals of dusting the crops. He went on to become a pilot for the Air Force which would then lead him into active service in Vietnam then to Top Gun School. From there he continued on to be a Top Gun teacher and then even taught other Top Gun instructors.
In our short time together, this seventy-some year old man shared some of his greatest stories of what I can only tell you had to have been an amazing life. He told me about times that he was sure he was going to die in the air, to other times that students of his did some of the dumbest things possible behind the controls of a plane. Toward the end of his career he would even be involved in developing a super fighter plane for the Air Force that put him in front of congressional appropriations’ committees. This man went from a farm crop dusting biplane to standing in front of congress asking for millions in R&D for the armed service. What a life, but not one that had anything to do with motorcycles, so why did we end up making such a connection? Simply this.
As he began to tell me about himself, I would in turn share things about my life with the motorcycle. By the middle of our conversation, we agreed that if you put ten motorheads in a room of ten thousand people, they would eventually congregate to one part of the room in order to talk about the speed freak issue of the day. This was the deal with me and the old boy on the plane. The rush that he got from doing what he did in his life was the only thing that filled that survival dynamic; the speed of sound and beyond. Of course we shared something; we were men with an obsession for the machines that we love. It didn’t matter if it was a motorcycle, hot rod car or jet fighter; speed is the ultimate aphrodisiac, the greatest lover, and the darkest mistress in the life of a man. He knew it and I knew it; ya gotta respect that common bond.
