A Son’s Eulogy for His Biker Father

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we returned to our American Stories. Up next, a story from Taylor Brown that originally appeared in the Garden and Gun magazine, entitled “Two for the Road”: a son’s eulogy for his father, or, in this case, his biker father. Here’s Taylor Brown with his eulogy.

00:00:36
Speaker 2: My first big time riding his prized Wide Glide: I drop it in this parking lot. We were on these back roads in North Florida, somewhere — just pine trees and straight roads, tar snakes — and we had stopped for gas, and he said, “Do you want to ride it?” And so I said, “Oh, heck, yeah, you know, I want to ride it!” So I was pretty excited. I was on a, on a, you know, a much smaller, lighter, less powerful bike, so riding his, uh, was a big treat. So, beautiful bike, you know, crow. He had modified it to be much more powerful. It was really neat bike. So we, we ride, you know, for a while, and we pull into this, uh, I think it was an old gas station, and it had a gravel lot. And, you know, I’m pretty excited, and I stick my foot out, you know, to prop the bike up as we stop, and my heel just starts slipping on the gravel. And it was one of those things. Sometimes these things happen almost in slow motion, and, you know, this is a big, six-hundred-pound bike, and it starts to just heel over, and I have not got the kick to stand down in time, and I just feel it. You know, there’s nothing I can do past a certain point. I’m not strong enough to hold it up, so I drop it. Obviously, there’s going to be some scratches and dents and all that kind of stuff.

00:01:51
Speaker 3: And I look at him.

00:01:51
Speaker 2: My biggest worry is, you know, the way — how he’s going to react. You know, I feel just ashamed. And he looks at me and he says, “It happens to the best of us.” What a difficult thing to remember in the heat of the moment, and to say to your son when he has just dropped your prize motorcycle! I could tell that it wasn’t necessarily even easy for him to say that. He was frustrated, the bike being dropped, but that’s not how he reacted. And that was something that, you know, I think probably my biggest lesson from him was something that I learned that day and has stuck with me because it came back again and again. It is that sometimes character requires you to place what is…

00:02:40
Speaker 3: difficult over what is easy.

00:02:42
Speaker 2: And I just really saw it that day that really, you know, stood stuck with me. He was born on the Fourth of July, and that always kind of meant something to me. I’m not sure why, you know, when we’d hear fireworks on Fourth of July, he’d say it was first birthday, and until I got a little bit older, that’s what I really thought. And he was the kind of man to me that that was no surprise that there would be fireworks for him.

00:03:13
Speaker 3: I was probably…

00:03:14
Speaker 2: about five when he got his first motorcycle he’d had since I’d been around, and he got this Harley-Davidson Sportster. And, you know, so much of my childhood was wedged on the back seat of it. I grew up on this little place called Saint Simon’s Island, and around dusk a lot of nights, we would get on his bike, and I would sit on the back seat, and we would do what we called “the loop” around the island. We would do the same route and hit the same spots where we’d go over this causeway, and we’d see the marsh when the sun was going down, and we’d go through the Tunneled Oaks, and we would go through what they call the Village, which is down where the fishing pier is. And he would always go in this little alley between a couple of the bars and wrap the throttle, and so, so much of my childhood grew up attached to that motorcycle. It was really through the motorcycle that I think that he found the bridge to really connect. You know, he worked so much when I was a younger kid up until around high school, and around the time I was in late middle school, high school, he was really, I could just tell. He made such an effort to connect, and we did it through motorcycles. In late 2016, we built kind of our first motorcycle together, and we called it Blitzen because we built it over Christmas, and it had these big chrome handlebars that looked like antlers, and it was the tank was kind of this dark red color that reminded me of Santa’s Sleigh. And I started doing these long rides on that bike solo, and my dad had always done these long rides, sometimes on the weekend. When he was sixty-seven, he rode nine thousand miles all around the country.

00:04:50
Speaker 3: I hadn’t done a lot of that on my own.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: And it was really when I started riding the bike long distance solo, exploring those back roads, that I really understood what he found in doing that. It made me understand him so much better, understand, I think, really the workings of his soul and heart and what moved him and what he found out there. It’s like I found the same thing that he had found out on the road. It’s hard to describe, right? Of course, there’s all these words that we can put around it. Is it free — the freedom of the road? Is it discovery? That’s part of it. But I think that it’s, it really is something else. It’s, it just lets your soul loose a little bit. All the anxieties and the fears and the doubts, just when you’re out there riding, they tend to just blow away. I’m not sure exactly how it happens. Maybe it’s because you have to be so aware of your surroundings. You are on a motorcycle — I think, uniquely vulnerable.

00:05:45
Speaker 3: You are closer to death.

00:05:53
Speaker 2: I had started on a long motorcycle ride down to New Orleans. I was actually going down to visit his sister, my Aunt Mary Anne, and I decided to come down south and stay with my parents for one night. I met my dad in Savannah, and we had lunch, and we had a drink up on the, one of the hotel bars that looks over all the, all the river traffic in Savannah. It was just a really special day. And then that night at home he helped me come up with my route for the rest of the way to New Orleans.

00:06:22
Speaker 3: And this was not using Google Maps, you know.

00:06:24
Speaker 2: He had all these old atlases that had dog-eared pages that he’d used again and again to plan his trips from long before the days of, you know, Global Positioning Systems and smartphones and all those things. And we wrote out the directions actually on note cards I put in a sandwich bag and kept in my pocket. So that morning, I took off, took off. It was a misty morning, and I headed south on Highway Seventeen. I stopped for gas that afternoon, and my dad had ridden to lunch down the same highway, down Highway Seventeen, to a little diner called Stephen’s right over the Georgia-Florida line. And he’d actually sent me a picture of a model car they had on display at the diner.

00:07:02
Speaker 3: It was a 1940 Ford Coupe.

00:07:05
Speaker 2: And that’s a very special car to us because it kind of stars in my novel, “Gods of Howell Mountain.”

00:07:12
Speaker 3: It’s this bootlegger’s…

00:07:13
Speaker 2: car and one of the most popular cars for bootlegging in the early stock car racing days. And my dad and I had gone to car shows to actually go see these cars as part of research for that book. I don’t think I had a chance to reply back, and I just kept going along my way, and I got a call from my Mom, and I could tell immediately that something had happened. We didn’t have a lot of details, but she knew that he had been on his way back from lunch on Highway Seventeen, that same stretch of highway that I’d ridden just a few hours earlier, and a concrete truck had pulled out in front of him. And I went to the airport to rent a car to drive home. Certainly, I wasn’t going to ride the motorcycle back at this time. It would take too long, and I didn’t want my Mom worried. And I was at the airport renting a car in Tallahassee, and Mom called and said that he was gone.

00:08:02
Speaker 3: He hadn’t made it.

00:08:03
Speaker 2: And I was standing outside, and it was about sunset, and the sky was lit up, just fire-colored, and I thought of all these trips, motorcycle trips that my dad had taken down to Florida. He used to love to go to a place called Cedar Key, another place called, uh, Hudson, and he would go to the Gulf Coast where you could see the sun go down over the water, and he would send me photos of a sky that looked just like that. And I had this feeling that he was gone, but he would always be with me.

00:08:33
Speaker 3: And I saw him in that sky.

00:08:35
Speaker 2: It always felt like there was some extra connection with us, and that, you know, I’d ridden that same motorcycle down that same road that day.

00:08:43
Speaker 3: I was on a long ride of my own.

00:08:45
Speaker 2: I was doing all the things that he taught me, you know, and I couldn’t help but feel that, you know, he was always going to be not too distant. I think that there are men who want to be like their fathers and men who don’t. And I’ve never had any question of which one I am.

00:09:06
Speaker 1: And what a beautiful story by Taylor Brown! By the way, you learned everything about his father when the boy, the young man, dropped Dad’s precious, precious Wide Glide. “My biggest lesson,” he said, “that I learned from him was on that day: Sometimes character requires you to put something difficult over something easy,” and it would have been really easy to yell at his boy. A eulogy to my biker father on our American Stories.