SmArts

October 5-11, 2015

Bikes, blues, and a clash of cultures

By Molly Rector

Last week Fayetteville was (for lack of a more accurate word) invaded by hundreds upon hundreds of bikers. They came clad in leather vests, patches proudly proclaiming their loyalty to God and country, their boots wide, their long beards often plaited into unusual patterns. The annual gathering, a bike rally called Bikes, Blues & Barbecue, has always been, I’ll admit, a thing to which I’ve been resistant. I’m a person who likes quiet, and motorcycles are decidedly unquiet, especially when there are hundreds in the same place, carrying their owners to venues from which the sounds of amplified southern blues-rock pour.

I am definitely not a member of the intended audience for such a spectacle. But this year, I went anyway. And something unexpected happened: I had a blast. Seated at a picnic table in a favorite hang-out, a friend and I were having a conversation about her work (she’s a PhD candidate in literature), when four bikers asked if they could join us. The resulting conversation lasted more than an hour and covered all kinds of territory: from ocean vistas, to politics, to investment prospects, to (of course) poetry.

It was a clash of cultures, to say the least, but as we talked we were able to find points of overlap. One of the men, Amos, told me that he thinks of himself as a poet because he imagines poems while he’s riding, though he can never remember them once he stops. Another, Joey, couldn’t stop talking about a recent trip he’d taken across the country – how much he loved the time alone on the road.

Since then, I’ve been thinking that there’s almost nothing more wonderful than that particular kind of clash – the coming together of people who are, in most ways, utterly unlike one another (I doubt these men and I share a set of politics, for example, and they certainly don’t mind noise); people who are nonetheless willing to reach out and talk to each other, to find common ground, to enjoy the strange and beautiful condition that is being human together on this planet. To listen, to be in the moment, is an act of demystification: one learns how and why a person chooses to have a particular lifestyle, and in that way stereotypes diminish. No longer just the biker, or the college-type, we said goodbye with respect, rather than trepidation. And I promised Amos a poem.

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.