Interim Twisted Roads Blog Post #214

Twisted Roads — the biker blog that brings you raw moto--adventure and romance like broken glass — publishes humorous editorial at length on Mondays and Thursdays. Yet life is simply too full of the good stuff to ignore the days in between. So from time to time, TW will publish interim blog posts of general interest, moto industry commentary, and other data, adhering to our uncompromising, yet thoroughly peculiar, editorial standards. Today we present:

The Twisted Road’s Motorcyclist’s Courtesy Test...

Biker’s have a reputation of being social Visigoths with short fuses, narrow perspectives, and appetites craving instant gratification for speed, sex, noise, whiskey (beer), danger and the kind of good times normally frowned upon by society in general and the police in particular. Yet thousands of conversations held with riders at rallies, on runs, and during bail hearings indicate most have a gentler side, not normally associated with hard, fast living.

Most riders defy the conclusions of conventional wisdom when it comes to being sensitive individuals, totally in tune with the world around them. For example, “Mother’s Day” remains the most traveled motorcycle holiday of the year, with many accessory shops reporting chromed gear sales — with mufflers, air filter covers, and even gas tanks — engraved to “Mom.” Likewise, tattoo parlors report skyrocketing sales of skin artwork with the word “Mother” prominent in the design on that day. (In many cases, the next word begins with the letter “F,” however.)

Now we are all familiar of the charity runs and the toy collection rides that are held by some of the gruffest and toughest riders on two wheels. But it’s time the general public got solid factual, inside data on sensitive biker behavior. The following survey was designed by Dr. Albert Hissingaz, of the Wilmington Institute of Hollistic Dry Cleaning, as the the ultimate measure of biker behavior. Readers are encouraged to take the poll, cutting and pasting their responses into the comments section at the end of this blog.

Two lucky respondents, chosen at random, will each receive a package of “Big Jim’s” Premium Chocolate Chip Cookies for their efforts.

Question #1:
You have been following a compact car, with Massachusetts plates, on a winding two-plane road for the last 87 miles. The posted speed limit is 45 miles per hour. On three occasions, when the double-yellow line became dotted, the driver ahead of you sped up just enough to prevent you from getting around him. You can see he is a middle-aged man, with thick glasses, and bushy eyebrows — the kind who is either a lecturing economist at Harvard or an actuary at an insurance company. The road is now straight, but with changes in elevation that warrant an endless double-yellow line. You know you can get around him, but there is no guardrail and the sudden shock of blowing past him might cause the driver to swerve and go off the cliff. You decide:

A) Just wait it out and play by the rules, despite the fact this little prick is exactly the kind of person who likes to impose his will on everyone else.

B) Blip your engine while flashing your lights, in hopes that he will wake up, come right, and wave you on... Otherwise, you will play by the rules.

C) Pull over at a pleasant vista; pour a nice cup of hot coffee from a Thermos; and give this jerk a 45-minute lead so you no longer have to think about him.

D) Use the back of your left hand to wipe the foam from your mouth... Wait until you have the very best view of the road ahead... Then blow past this guy, leaning on your Steble/Nautilus compact air horn (while running the mill to a screaming red line), glancing back in the mirror to see the car disappear into a ravine.


Question #2 (Men only)
You come out of a watering hole to discover that a woman, who happens to be a screamingly hot MILF, has placed her toddler on the seat of your $28,000 semi-custom bike, that is 4 days old. You would say:

A) “Excuse me, M’am. But that bike is very heavy and has hot parts on it. Your child could either be burned or crushed by it. I wouldn’t recommend putting the little guy on unattended motorcycles. Here... Let me get in the saddle and we can start it up for him.”

B) “M’am... I must ask you to consider how you’d respond to coming out of church or a town meeting meeting to find me sitting in your car. Now you wouldn’t like that very much, would you? I must ask you to regard this bike the same way.”

C) “Do you and this little guy have first names and cell phone numbers?”

D) “If that kid pisses himself on my custom leather seat both you and he are going to get a one-way trip to a taxidermist, and I don’t give a shit how hot looking you think you are.”

Question #3 (Women Only)
You have been in a local watering hole for the past two hours, chatting up some studly rider who happens to meet your nearly impossible criteria for a potential sperm donor. You look hot in your leathers and the deal is nearly closed, when in comes one of your closest girlfriends, wearing her tightest form-fitting ballistic gear. She is 5’4” tall, Asian, and oozes sensuality. She smiles at the stud, and your stock starts to drop. She heads toward the bathroom, and you follow (in the herding manner of women, who seem to piss best en masse). Once there, you:

A) Politely ask her to disappear as this guy is yours.

B) Drag her into a stall, make out passionately, and invite her back to the house the next night.

C) Pull the toilet seat off the can and smash her in the back of the head with it. After all, good friends should know when to stop being such good friends.


Question #4
You have parked your bike in a marked spot along the curb, where three other bikes are already parked. Yet you come back an hour later to find the other bikes gone, and a half electric/half goat-shit hybrid parked within an inch of your left side bag. The car is so close to your bike, that you cannot lift it from the side stand without having the bag contact the car’s bumper. You would:

A) Patiently wait for the owner of the car to return, so you could explain why parking like this was a bad idea.

B) Struggle to move the bike on the side stand — a fraction of an inch at a time — to ease it away from the car, so you can ride off. Then you leave a note on the car’s windscreen advising the driver that you now have his plate number, and soon his address, where you will meet him on a dark night.

C) Realizing that someone this stupid will not benefit from confrontation, you rip a page out of your road map, spread instant gasket cement (RTV) on one side, and glue it to the windscreen of the hybrid.

D) If it is dark, you do “C” above, then also urinate on the driver’s door handle.


Question #5
One of your riding friends deserves a special Christmas present... But you’re short on cash, having only $45 to spend. Furthermore, you could use a quick pick-me-up yourself, but have to take it out of that same $45. You would:

A) Buy a bottle of Michter’s American Whiskey and drink most of, saving your friend a shot.

B) Buy one ounce of BMW motorcycle touch-up paint and use it to paint your girlfriend’s toenails (if she’ll cook dinner wearing only that and perfume).

C) You buy two copies of Politically Correct Cigar Smoking For Social Terrorists — by Jack Riepe — at the special Christmas price of $45 for two books (plus S&H), and get them signed and autographed, and only pay the shipping and handling for one!

If you are ordering two books, the first is $30...
The second is $15 (the original cover price), with only $5 S&H.
The price of a single book is $30, plus $5 S&H

To Order Your Copy of “Politically Correct Cigar Smoking For Social Terrorists:”

Email your full name, address, and phone number to:
jack.riepe@gmail.com

Put: "Book Order" in the subject line.
Each book is shipped with an invoice and a stamped, pre-addressed payment envelope. Write a check, and slip it in the mailbox when the book arrives.

To Order A Gift Book For Someone Else:

Email your full name, address, and phone number to:
jack.riepe@gmail.com

Very Important: Also include the gift book’s recipient’s full name, (First and Last), and tell me something about them. (He or she plays golf... He/she rides a motorcycle... He/she hunts,... He/she smokes cheap cigars... Tell me something.) Your name will be included in the inscription on the book.

Books are shipped 1st class USPS within 24 hours of order, starting Wednesday, November 30th.

These are the last of the author’s authorized signed editions... Order yours today.

©Copyright Jack Riepe 2011


‘

Fate... A Motorcycle... And A Beautiful Woman In Cape May

My rider’s warning radar was up in a second... A target was moving up to the intersection ahead and bore all the earmarks of a potential collision. I could see a cell phone glued to an ear, the strong morning sun glinting off dark sunglasses, and a kind of preoccupation with life in general that did not include a red, BMW K75 rolling into a near-empty intersection. I could see other things too. The target had long dark hair, a dark sweater (that did not quite meet the tops her jeans, exposing a nicely-tanned navel), and dark jeans that did for her ass what the Louvré does for the Mona Lisa.

She was waiting to cross the street.

“Whoa, Big Red,” I said to the bike, dropping down a gear on the magnificent motorcycle known as “Fire Balls.”

I snicked the machine into a rolling neutral and brought it to a smooth halt 10 feet back from the crosswalk. With a smile that bloomed like an orchid in the tinted greenhouse of my Nolan flip-up Helmet, I gestured for her to cross.

She looked up from the cell phone, gave me a little wave (with a smile), and stepped off the curb without dropping a word in her conversation. She was half-way across before realizing there was no other traffic. There was no traffic, no movement, and no noise for the entire length of the street, which ran for 6 blocks in either direction. This was the last week of October in the seashore town of Cape May, New Jersey, when the ocean turns gray and the white caps ride the waves into the beach. The place was deserted. And now this woman was walking the model’s runway, demonstrating red hot hip action, as she sashayed across the street for an audience of one.

I have pulled this stunt before. It usually draws a bigger smile from appreciative ladies in supermarket parking lots. But this is Cape May... And anyone here in the off season is either a prominent member of the business community or a hotel owner. This woman had the imperious look of someone used to ordering servants to clean the horse manure from the stable floors, with their dinner bowls. (I had originally typed “horse shit” instead of “manure” in that last sentence, but it seemed disrespectful in a story about Cape May, NJ.)

She realized the true purpose of my gallantry and dismissed me with a roll of her eyes that gently rocked the motorcycle under my butt.

The K75 went into gear with the buttery-smooth clunk of steel on steel and I rode east until the Atlantic hove into view. Despite being nearly November, the temperature was in the low 70’s and more than a few tanned lovelies were soaking up the sun on the beach (wearing bikinis that had less substantive material than a report from Congress.) Local New Jersey color oozed from a hot dog wagon parked against the dunes, and I realized it has been years, maybe more than a decade, since I’ve had a real dirty-water Sabrett Hot Dog.

The Sabrett Hot Dog is in the global industry standard for all-beef tube steaks that are to be specifically cooked by being immersed in boiling water for hours, sometimes weeks, at a time. They are a slightly less than perfect hot dog shape, somewhat spicy brown in color, initially linked with string, and delicious. They are best ordered with the works (mustard, chili, sauteed onions, and a hint of relish), on a bun as soft as a debutante’s breast. (I initially typed in “debutante’s tit” for the last two words in the previous sentence, but changed my mind. I think living here in Cape May is beginning to affect me.)

The “dirty-water” dog designation comes from the thousands of pushcarts that sell these things in New York City every day. The word on the streets is that the Sabrett dog gets its unique flavor from being cooked in water that is only changed once or twice a year. (This isn’t true. I’ve have cooked them in perfectly fresh water with the same great results.) The Sabrett company also makes signature red cooked “sauteed onions” which cannot be duplicated. You can sometimes find both in local supermarkets.

The hot dog wagon was a beat-up van with a thatched roof that offered a half-dozen kinds of soft drinks and every conceivable snack. Two proprietors, “Rich” and “Dawn,” ran this concern like it was a cafe on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris. Glancing at the menu, a loaded dog ran $2.50, which is up substantially from the 25¢ I used to pay as a 10-year-old in my native Jersey City. (Then again a lap dance is up considerably from what I used to pay when I was a 10-year-old in Jersey City too.) But a pint-sized serving of Turkey Hill Iced Tea was marked at $3 bucks apiece. The most expensive thing about a pint container of commercially bottled iced tea is the opaque plastic container, which costs about 1.5¢ each.)

“Thank God my bike doesn’t run on Turkey Hill iced tea,” I thought. “It would cost $60 to fill the tank.”

Rich handed me the hot dog, ensconced in a napkin, like it was the Stanley Cup. He was right. Soaked with onions, kraut, chili, and mustard, it weighed about a pound. Yet a hot dog simmered in boiling water has no strength of its own, and it took two hands to get this to my gaping maw.

I had forgotten how good these tasted, and I had another.

In the meantime, I refreshed myself with a pure New Jersey dialect. There are several accents common to the Garden State, and none sound like music. My own, fostered in the ash pits and rendering plants of Jersey City (where they render souls of children into transparent political promises), is a cross between finger-nails dragging across a blackboard and wailing cats. A woman once told me, “It will never work between us because your accent clashes with all of my outfits.” (She now lives in Concord, Ma, where life in New England grinds the audible serifs from every “r”. I hope she reads this and dares to leave a comment.)

The nasal tone of Rick’s voice matched mine, and I felt like we were part of a vocal counter-cultural conspiracy. He spoke of the technical complexity of hot dogs, and the challenges of tube steak marketing in a soft economic environment... And I thought, “God, these folks are so right up my alley.”

Firing up the bike, I headed off to the lighthouse, which is best viewed from the main drag running along the beach. While this lighthouse is not the tallest I’ve ever seen, nor the one in the most dramatic setting, it is the most romantic. You can sit here at dusk, alone in the off-season, and watch the beacon fend off the darkness. The setting is absolutely exquisite when there is a moon, and the point behind the light is bathed in silver. But it was as black as pitch last night, and overcast. The light stood like a sentinel.

Above:) The top of the lighthouse at Cape May, NJ. This lighthouse is 5 minutes from my desk to the east. Photo compliments of Wikipedia.

Cape May is a small town where every other building is either historically significant, or maintained by elves. San Francisco has that famous stretch of Victorian houses standing against the reality of the distant skyline. Cape May created its own reality 100 years ago, and took pains to preserve it. Former US Presidents like Ulysses S. Grant and John Adams (I think) used to come here to fish, drink, and get laid. (Pretty much why anybody would come to the New Jersey shore.) But Cape May resisted the urge to trade character for ferris wheels, and as a result they now have the most priceless gem of a community on the the New Jersey coast.

The lighthouse is less than five minutes from where I’m living. And I had just turned the corner, headed in that direction, when the exquisite beauty introduced in the first paragraph once again readied herself to step in front of my bike. What the hell were the odds of this?

“Hot damn,” I thought. I was moving a little faster this time, and had to squeeze the binders a bit more aggressively as well as drop down a gear. As a result, “Fire Balls” squatted on the front forks with more drama. My stop looked less than spontaneous, and I gestured for her to cross.

Still on the damn phone (giving some poor guy hell, no doubt), she hesitated — and waved me on.

I couldn’t resist. I planted both legs on the pavement, and switched on the K75’s flashers.

The look on her face was priceless. She put one hand (the one without the phone) on her hip and glared. Then she crossed the street slowly, deliberately, and with unabashed contempt.

“This one is really hot for us,” I said to the motorcycle.

Once again, I clunked the bike into first and pulled away, giving the Steeble/Nautilus compact air horn the merest suggestion of a tap. The millisecond of the trilling blast was perfect salute from a bike that makes almost no noise. My next stop was the dunes on Delaware Bay. Better than 14 miles wide at this point, it is barely possible to see the other side of the bay with the naked eye.The Delaware salt marshes are usually shrouded in haze, or cloaked in mist, or hidden behind the curvature of the earth. At night, it is sometimes possible to see bright lights that appear to be just over the horizon. Delaware Bay is the major opening to the port of Philadelphia, and huge ships, as well as million sailboats, can be seen on this waterway. I dismounted the bike, amazed at how calm the water was on these beaches, and wondered why I never became the kind of person who longed to be on the sea. (I stood on this spot after returning from my brother’s place on Thanksgiving night, and stared into a sky that was filled with stars. In the instant I looked up, a shooting star rocketed overhead, falling to earth far to the west, over a state I left barely a month ago. “I hope that didn’t hit Bregstein’s garage,” I thought.)

Above) The dunes overlooking Delaware Bay, five minutes to the west from my desk. Photo by the author.

I was less than two blocks from the house, determined to go back and do some writing on a screenplay that promises to be my best work, when I noticed that same woman (with the astounding ass) going into a little café, with a front painted in Cinco De Mayo colors.

“This is fate,” I thought, pulling up outside. There was no curb. A bit of broken blacktop, punctuated with gravel, sported a bicycle rack outside. The rack supported four highly technical bicycles, of the type ridden by really thin muscular men, in Spandex, who carry spare inner tubes where their genitals would be. (I actually typed the words “micro dicks” for genitals in the last sentence, but decided against it. I really think it is the Cape May effect on me.)

I grabbed my computer bag from the right pannier on the odd shot that this place would have WiFi, and went inside. There were three guys and two women seated around a large table, having a discussion. I picked a table off to the side, made myself comfortable, and ordered coffee from a waitress who had the ugliest shoes I have ever seen outside of paratroop training camp. I noticed two things: none of this crowd were wearing Spandex and the woman I’d encountered three times that day was nowhere to be seen.

Then the ladies room door opened and she stepped out.

She had a body to kill for, and had I been a Visigoth and had this been the Fourth Century, I’d have been reaching for my ax. But she also had the most extraordinary face. It was hot, but not from some angles. It was pretty, sometimes. She reminded me of Franka Potente — the actress in the Bourne Identity. She was a big deal in this circle, as the crowd afforded her some deference.

Above:) Actress Franka Potente. Photo from Wikipedia

I fired up my computer and started to write this story. And I actually got lost in it, which occasionally happens to me. I had started out mildly interested in their dialogue, as each of these people was a writer, apparently. One had written a book about local architecture... One had produced a coloring book for kids, depicting local landmarks... One was a poet... Another wrote songs, but was not a musician. And the last was a reporter. No one in this group had the New Jersey accent I’d been listening to earlier in the day. In fact, they all pretty much sounded like the kind of folks who yell “catch,” and then spit when I’d cup my hands. Each was wearing “fashion” clothes, most with exposed labels — printed on unicorn eyelids. They spoke of the author’s “need to create” and then “forever influence reader discourse.” I was going to raise my hand and ask about the author’s “need to go fast on German motorcycles, to drink, and get laid — right after the check clears,” but I couldn’t think of way to bring it up in conversation.

They concluded their meeting and had begun drifting out. I was answering some correspondence about my monthly column in the BMW magazine, when a voice asked, “So what have you been madly typing away for three hours?”

It was not the voice I was hoping for.

It had been three hours and I had consumed 5 cups of coffee and two whole wheat pastries (that tasted like dessert in the first class lifeboat). The person who asked the question was the “poet,” a soft-spoken gentleman, who seemed genuinely interested in my new face.

“I write a monthly column for a magazine, and I felt so chummy here, I just made myself at home and filed my copy.”

“What magazine?” he asked, really interested now.

“It’s a German transportation monthly,” I said, “dealing with long-distance, low-impact, high-speed approaches to social activities.”

“Aaaaaaaaah,” he said, with a knowing nod that indicated otherwise.

Though I confined my response to his face, my peripheral vision kept searching hers. Being in the company of writers never meant much to me before (unless they had their fucking agents with them); but at this moment, I felt like saying something that would impress this woman. (I had decided that Franka Potete was screamingly hot.)

“I have a book out too,” I murmured.

“A book?”

“Yes...” I stammered, really reaching now. “It’s on men’s sensitivity.”

My former lover once remarked that I’d drag out some reference to my book whenever I got desperate for credibility. “And it cures depression too,” I added with a smirk.

The poet was Alex. He introduced the woman as “Lisa.”

I couldn’t t resist. “Jason Bourne,” I said, extending my hand.

Neither one of them batted an eye.

“Well we like to write and ride our bikes,” said Alex.

“Me too,” I replied. “Mine’s red.” (My helmet and jacket was outside. Neither one heard me pull up on the K75.)

I went back there a couple of days ago. I have since learned that everyone who has breakfast in this place rides a bicycle. I pulled up in a bright red Ford 150 pickup with a nuclear reactor under the hood. The truck has a 40-gallon gas tank that costs as much as the Greek national debt to fill — once. It cost me $11 to drive the 5 blocks from the house.

Once again, I sat down and popped open my laptop.

Lisa was there. “Hi, Jason,” she said without looking up from the local newspaper.

I have been living in Cape May a month, and I am well on the way to getting at least one woman to think of me as Jason Bourne. It won’t last. But it only has to happen once — when my riding buddies are here.

©Copyright Jack Riepe 2011
Written In Exile From Cape May, NJ

A Thanksgiving Story Of 1989...

Thanksgiving Day “1989” was wet and miserable, with the cold kind of November drizzle that doesn’t have the decency to become snow, nor the courtesy to yield to the ineffectual warmth of a mid-autumn sun. My hunting jacket was not quite soaked through, but my Austrian Loden pants were damp from the knees down. I carried a Browning A-5 12-gauge shotgun at port arms as I aimlessly moved through the brush, barely conscious of the task at hand. Technically speaking, I was hunting pheasants, without a dog, and without much hope of seeing anything on a day where forest life stays hunkered down against the elements. But the inside of my head was as bleak as my immediate surroundings and I was numb to my circumstances, as I walked aimlessly through fields and woods in the company of a beautiful, Belgian-crafted firearm.

All I could think of was getting the letter in the mail... The one that began: Riepe vs Riepe.

The first round of my first divorce knocked the wind out of me. I returned from a business trip to find the closets in the apartment empty. My wife, a former newspaper reporter and an accomplished writer in her own right, had taken our five-year-old daughter and fled to the sanctuary of her pit-bull of a mother. These were days of my early thirties, when I wrote for politicians and anyone who could guarantee the check would clear. This apparent lack of editorial ethic, coupled with other things (like a hair-trigger temper and the inability to see the other side of a philosophical argument) constituted my growing list of character flaws and genetic defects.

Yet as bad as things had apparently gotten, I didn’t think they were anywhere near the possibility of getting divorced. This was just one result of assuming that everyone on earth really thought like I did... Or that silence from the person closest to you means tacit agreement. But she was gone and there was a whole new set of rules in place for seeing my kid. This was going to be the first Thanksgiving — and the first really big holiday — on which my daughter would be shared between families. In an attempt to be magnanimous, I told Maryann that little Katherine could spent the holiday with her family.

Magnanimity does not come naturally to me, and I was sorry the instant I made the gesture. It felt like I was consigning some part of myself to a void that was to become a new unthinkable norm. My family used to be a lot closer than they are now, but that was when my mother was still the center of the universe. Each of her kids felt that unique gravitational pull that ended in a hot kitchen permeated with the aroma of holiday baking. It was my thought that at least half of many future Thanksgivings would start with Maryann, little Katherine, and myself stepping through the door, and completing the family circle around the table.

But now I would be arriving like a sprocket with missing teeth. Instead of showing up with the first grandchild, I would be the sole representative of domestic failure. And I couldn’t believe just how much I missed my daughter. My first thought was to spend the holiday alone, cooking for myself, in the apartment that held the relics of crashed dreams and the tokens of my inability to hold things together. A call to my mother quashed that.

“Don’t be an ass,” she laughed. “Jackie, you’re going to have to find a bright side to this. Here’s one... You’ll never have to spend another holiday with that desperate pain in the ass, Maureen, and that face she makes, like she’s smelling shit, every time you come into the room.” She was referring to my future former mother-in-law. “Just come down here... The sooner the better.”

My whole family lived in New Jersey then, and distance was relative. My mom’s house was inland from the shore, in Ocean county. (You could smell the Atlantic on most days, but you couldn’t hear it.) This put her 86-miles south of my place (on the Palisades, overlooking the Hudson). The horror of driving to the shore on the Jersey Turnpike (on Thanksgiving Day) was not to be seriously considered, and I left late the night before. The memory of some family traditions linger long after they have ceased to exist. I grew up on instant coffee... Yet on special occasions, my mom would set out an electric, chrome percolator, which brewed Folger’s coffee (just like the commercials). On this Thanksgiving day, the fragrance of hot coffee mingled with the aroma of coffee cake right out of the oven. And this was at 5am.

Yet despite the allure of sitting around sipping coffee in a warm kitchen, I felt I had to get out in the open... To release the doldrums that were nailing me to a cross of mental reality. It was barely first light when I carried my hunting gear out to car and headed off through the pine barrens. New Jersey is odd place. It has some of the ugliest open urban sores that you can imagine, yet harbors some of the most beautiful spots in the United States. These are Cape May, the countryside around Peapack-Gladstone, and some rare wildlife management units down in the pine barrens. It was to one one of these tracts deep in the scrub pine that I headed.

There were five or six other cars in the muddy parking area, and hunters —with the kind of dogs that point at pheasants in a highly accusatory manner — were heading out into fields planted in millet or other bird candy. They were all wearing florescent orange hunting gear that had LL Bean stamped all over it. I was wearing an old army fatigue jacket, under a bright orange New Jersey Department of Transportation vest I’d grabbed at a flea market for $2, and an orange watch cap. I had no dog and the other hunters looked at me like I was a bad joke.

“Fuck all you assholes,” I thought to myself, as I smiled and said, “Good morning.”

I had never been to this place before and just set out across a field that was loaded with knee-high underbrush. My mind was not exactly on the task at hand, and I might have left the shotgun at home for all the hunting I was doing. All I could think of was my first wife, and what my little girl was up to. She had a dog at her grandma’s... A huge golden retriever named “Duke,” who was like the dog world’s goodwill ambassador to humanity. At five-years-old, my daughter had the kind of personality that gave her the character of a circus midget. She could get into really good mischief, then amaze you with an observation that went far beyond her years.

I passed through several stands of hardwoods, wandered around some pines, and ended up in a sticker patch that must have covered three acres. Thorn bushes come in two varieties: the little ones that scratch skin, and the bigger ones, that scratch expensive Browning gunstocks. I had apparently located a thorn bush convention.

Surrounded by a sea of thorns, I sat on a rotting tree stump that was dead center in this maze of sharp edges. The rain started coming down in earnest and I felt as if my entire world was thorns and wet clothes. I must have sat there almost 20 minutes. I had long since ceased to hear the dog whistles of the other hunters, nor the cow bells on the collars of their dogs. I didn’t even know in what direction lay my Surburban, the first of five I would own.

But you can never tell what effect your troubles might have on the world around you, or when things might change. My odd behavior on the tree stump was annoying the living shit out of a huge cock-bird of a Chinese Ring Neck pleasant. He had a tail like a comet and an attention span shorter than mine. With that cackle peculiar to their species, he set off at a 40-mile-per-hour jog.

I was dumbfounded.

Then I started to chase him through the thorns like the late John Candy in one of his hysterical movies. I scratched my face, and my gun, and left my hat on a low-hanging branch. The pheasant was a sport, and cackled a taunt every now and again. He and I broke out into a clearing at the same time, and the bird sailed aloft with a final cackled obscenity. The Browning A5 (the BMW K75 of shotguns) barked once, and the cockbird was mine.

The other hunters were calling it a morning back in the parking lot. All they had to show for three hours of wading through the millet was a half-dozen smelly dogs and unfired firearms that would each require an hour of serious cleaning. I had a cockbird with a tail as long as a moose’s dick. I could feel their penetrating gazes, never congratulatory in New Jersey, as I put my stuff in the trunk.

My mother met me at the door.

“Did you catch anything,?” she asked.

“It’s not like fishing, Ma.”

Then she saw the pheasant.

“You shot a peacock,” she exclaimed. “How could you kill such a beautiful thing?”

“It pulled a knife on me,” I replied.

I cleaned and prepared the bird in the kitchen. My mother watched in fascination. It went into a much smaller roasting pan alongside the turkey in the oven.

“This will be done in less than an hour,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

I awoke three hours later. The house was filled with the mixed aromas of baking, roasting, and pots steaming on the stove. In the kitchen, my mother and sister had just about finished the pheasant, leaving me three ounces of meat.

“That was delicious,” said my mom.

It was the first and only time I’d shot something for Thanksgiving dinner, and almost missed it. But gone were the doldrums... And they didn’t come back for a long time.

I really gave thanks for that pheasant.

I hope all of my Twisted Roads readers who are celebrating Thanksgiving in the US today have a warm and special holiday. I hope their tables are full, and I hope their families are there to share in it.

©Copyright Jack Riepe 2011