Thank you, Millennial Star, for your gracious introduction and for letting me write with you.
Riding a bicycle in Washington D.C. nudges me into a sidestream of metropolitan life that I would miss underground or in a car. I got to mark the opening of kayaking season on the Potomac as I rode across the Key Bridge every morning in late April. I saw—and sometimes tasted—the reawakening insect life swarming above the warm grass along the Mt. Vernon trail. And just within the past two weeks, I’ve noticed a man who sets up an easel at the base of the Memorial Bridge and dabs away at an increasingly lovely painting of the Washington Memorial.
I let myself believe that one day he’ll ask to paint my picture; he just hasn’t worked up the courage yet. But to date, the most exciting—and most poignant—episode in my continuing bike tour is the hundreds of thousands of Harley Davidsons I rode past on the Sunday before Memorial Day.
My first experience with swarms of Harley Davidsons and their steel-bestudded owners came a year ago at the Outer Banks when they clogged all two roads and overran all of the steak houses. My roommates and I gawked at them behind rolled-up windows in Carren’s Honda Civic, and I wondered a little at how America could host such an alien population. The weathered men and bleached-blond women seemed more like some species of armored insect than people I’d recognize as neighbors, coworkers, fellow baseball fans. When Carren and I saw them again that Sunday before Memorial Day, we were absolutely flabbergasted. While I effused, Carren immediately pulled out her cell phone.
“Hey Sam—you know that hog rally you thought you saw last night? Well they’re all here in the Pentagon parking lot—thousands of them!â€
Carren was driving me up to campus so I could pick up my Schwinn and ride it home, and we rhapsodized on the thousands of bikers all the way up to Georgetown.
“What are they doing, why did they come here?†I kept asking, and Carren only shrugged and said, “It’s a hog rally!â€
By the time I was riding back along the Potomac River, though, I was thinking of other things. It was Sunday; I was listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on my discman; and quite frankly, I was calculating how long it would take me to blow dry my hair and if I had time to go to choir. I heard the parade before I saw it. Crossing the George Washington Parkway and leaving behind the bucolic scene of cyclists and strollers along the Potomac River, I heard the sirens, the strident music, the trademark roar before I actually saw the slow-moving river of Harley Davidsons that filled all lanes of traffic on Route 27. The parade was headed up by a police car and two mammoth Harleys rigged up with an enormous American flag and an equally enormous POW flag. I found out later that the procession had been organized to commemorate Vietnam veterans and POWs; at that moment I just rode along in amazement and delight at this lucky spectacle. Some of the bikers nodded or waved at the sparse crowd watching from the bike path, and one bleached-blond woman held a boom box broadcasting “I’m Proud to be an American.†The crowd gave her scattered applause, but she, like her hundreds of helmeted compatriots, just looked straight ahead, solemn. There were hundreds of them riding ten wide across the highway. I rode slowly past them, trying carefully to taxonomize all the different varieties—the Harleys with trailers and dogs, the Harleys with sidecars and kids, the Harleys with 1950s fenders, and all of them, every single one, with patriotic paraphernalia draped on both bike and biker.
At the turn-off down into the acres and acres of Pentagon parking lot, I got off my bike and joined the spectators. Below me, a vast spread of Harleys waited in orderly lines for their turn to join the parade. I was still giddy with the novelty of it all, but after a few high-pitched messages left on my family’s answering machine, I calmed down and became more solemn myself. For 15 minutes I stood there watching. I stopped keeping track of the different species of bikers. I stopped trying to remember weird things to tell my roommates. I just watched as hundreds and hundreds of bikers sped past me, flags snapping, gunning their engines to get up the hill and be part of the parade.
Most often, I’m either suspicious or dismissive of patriotism. At the Fourth of July parade in Provo, I look at the rows of identical American Flag T-shirts on identical blond siblings, and I think about how much money Old Navy must make every year. When I get goose bumps at fireworks displays, I laugh at how susceptible I am to emotional manipulation. It’s not that I don’t love my country—I do, and I sincerely want to be sufficiently grateful—it’s just that I wonder how genuine most displays of patriotism are, and I worry that patriotism can bleed into arrogance, self-complacency, chauvinism. But I felt rebuked on that Harley Davidson Sunday. These highway warriors believed in something deeply enough to countenance the sneering curiosity of bystanders like me. Was I as brave in the things I believed? Yesterday, Flag Day, I rode home like always past the Pentagon. No Harleys, just the usual zip of traffic along Route 27. Convertibles with tops rolled back, lots of drivers inscrutable behind sunglasses. A Jeep honked at me as it passed by, and I straightened up and felt slightly more attractive as I bounced over the sidewalk and into the Pentagon parking lot. I was thinking about Visiting Teaching that night, class the next day, this post that I’d intended to finish before I left work. But I wish I had thought about those thousands of flags whipping along behind those thousands of Harleys. Because it seems to me that of anyone else, the bikers in that parade had earned the right to their patriotism.