Jeff

In September 2008, a few days before Hurricane Ike was to make landfall in Texas and Louisiana, I packed up the bike in Albuquerque, N.M., and pointed it toward the eye of the storm. I’d just gotten laid off from my newspaper reporter job and buried the cat I’d had for more than a decade in my girlfriend’s backyard. My stepdad was doing poorly in a hospital in Tampa, so I decided to visit him for a couple of weeks while staying at his apartment in a retirement community.

Mark

The first day on the road, after I passed the state line into Texas, the sky was black and the rain torrential. I met a fellow road dog at the first motel of the trip (I’d been planning to camp the whole way, but not in this stuff). Mark was a deeply religious fellow who’d once been an outlaw, a life he left after a motorcycle accident that left him crippled. His was the first motorbike I’d ever seen with a handicapped symbol on the plate, and he kept his Moses-style staff in a holder on his hand-tooled Harley. We rode and camped together for several days—on Day 2, we and other campers got kicked out of a national-park campground north of Houston because of the approaching hurricane. The first half of that day we spent in hurricane evacuation traffic. He had a wireless internet device that he used to keep us one step ahead of Ike. We rode at least 800 miles that day, winding up on a back road in the middle of Alabama at 4:30 in the morning looking for a campground that may or may not have existed. I called this one and sprang for a room back in the last town. We rode all the way to Florida together, then went our separate ways, but I’d see Mark twice more—once on that two-month trip, and once the following January, but that’s another story.

On the ride back to Albuquerque, I toured the devastation left by Ike. I ran out of gas in Louisiana because all the gas stations were either destroyed or out of gas. I was on a back road amid the destruction, considering my options, when a good old boy pulled up with a 5-gallon can of gas and, instead of taking the $20 bill I offered, told me to help out the next person I could.

I picked up a couple of nails that day, which another Harley friend I made pointed out the next day. I’d camped in the parking lot of a motel whose room were all taken by hurricane refugees, with the government picking up the bill. Jeff, 40, was on a brand-new Harley bagger and was on the road trying to figure out what to do with his life and also looking for construction work in post-hurricane Texas. The next day, Sunday, he rode ahead to a Harley shop in Baytown, TX, and called me back saying they didn’t have a tire for me but that they could order one. I didn’t know what to do for accommodations in the meantime, but when I got there (I had a slow leak, and filled up my tire at the gas station next door to the motel), the shop, which the owner also lived in with his wife and son, sat on a couple of green acres with a beautiful private lake behind it. I ended up living inside the shop for three weeks while working in the on-site machine shop and also picking scrap metal out of the ruins of homes at a scrap yard down in Galveston for 12 grueling hours a day in the boiling sun.

I’d been gone for just about two months by the time I got back home. I was glad to see the desert and mountains again.

Tom O'Connell