The Ride Report

I went on a couple of runs on Sunday with some friends that had us dipping our toes in both extremes of the biker world.

First up was a charity ride for a sick kid that we went on as a favor to a friend. I’ve been on a lot of rides like this over the years and it’s always an adventure when you get a couple hundred people together who only put a few hundred miles on their bikes each year and have little or no experience riding in a group. You can pretty much bet that someone will get hurt before the day is over (and someone did, I heard — with a kid on the back) and all you can do is hope it isn’t you or one of your friends. “Clusterfuck” is the word some might use to describe these rides, but I don’t use that kind of rough language. They’re a gosh-darned adventure is all I’ll say. This ride was different — it was scarier than most.

I’m not going to take the time to go into detail about all the things that were wrong about how this ride was organized and led, the short version is: we went far too slowly on the freeway, we stopped for some red lights but blew through others, the route took us through a friggin’ residential neighborhood — I can only assume so we could ride past some organizer’s house, and once we finally got into the hills where there was some decent riding the guys up front went through some of the turns so slowly that I swear they put their feet down.

The “adventure” at the intersections was what got to me the most (after the 5 mph twisties, that is). We had a line of around 100 bikes in the column, but the guys up front obviously weren’t thinking about the back of the pack. They stopped for lights that turned red for them, but motored on obliviously through lights that were going to change right after they went through. That led to the riders behind them running the light to keep the pack together, and the riders behind them, and so on and so on, so that you had a long stream of riders riding through red lights with cross-traffic trying to cut through. It was dangerous as hell.

But there was something else about the ride that was just … off. Early on the route had us circling a prison of some kind. It looked like it had been closed, so I didn’t think too much about it. But further on we ended up at another prison, this one in obvious operation. And then we turned and went down a service road leading into the prison. And then we went through some kind of access-controlled entrance. And then we went into and around the prison staff’s parking lot. And then we went down a service road right next to the yard, with inmates stopping their basketball games and weightlifting to turn and watch us go by. Holy crap, what I thought was supposed to be a short ride through the hills had turned into a total “what the fuck am I doing here?” tour of Cell Block Six. It was the weirdest fucking ride I’ve ever been on.

It wasn’t until we finally got to the ride’s conclusion that the full realization of what was up hit me. I don’t know how I’d missed it, considering that the words were printed on the back of every single run T-shirt they were selling, but the ride was sponsored by the Department of Corrections. Prison guards! And I found out later that the fucking warden was the guy leading the ride! Unbelievable. If we had known who was behind it, I don’t think we would have done the ride.

Following that “adventure,” we went to a fundraiser party being thrown by a support club for one of our local power clubs. There was plenty of law enforcement in evidence at this event too, only this time they weren’t being friendly about it. There was a police car stationed just opposite the driveway entrance to the parking lot, with the officer, arms crossed, watching everyone roll in. There were two police cars stationed on the hill overlooking the parking lot, where I think they were filming or taking pictures. There was only one road leading in and out of the roadhouse the party took place at, and both on the way in and the way out we passed several police cars with bikers pulled over. As we passed them on the way in I saw one of the officers scrambling to get out a digital camera and take pictures of us as we rolled by. It was full-press police harassment, the usual for the club we were there to see.

So Sunday was an interesting day, in terms of the contrast of how we were treated at the two different events. On the first one, we were paraded through a prison by the guys who ran the joint, and at the second were harassed by the guys who want to put us all in the first one. Good times, good times…

Oh well, at least I got to ride, about 230 miles on the day. Here’s my GPS track for the day showing how we went to bumfuck and back:

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