Part two of a three-part series detailing my Motorcycle Odyssey of 2009.

After riding several hundred miles across the flats of Iowa, turning north onto the Great River Road in Western Wisconsin was like becoming giddily delirious. I just kept fighting to urge to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming for fear it would end abruptly.

It was my first time riding the route that parallels the Mississippi River from the Illinois border all the way to the Saint Croix River, though we were only on it between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. If it hadn’t been for the occasional signs telling me how far we had to ride, I’d have been convinced I’d slammed head-on into a semi and gone to motorcycle heaven. Every inch of the route offered majestic vistas overlooking the river, rolling hills, jutting cliffs or winding roads that were both challenging and rewarding to ride.

Weaving our way along the shoreline, banking, climbing, turning, occasionally leaning into the throttle on an exhilarating downhill stretch to pass the slower automobile traffic — I’m convinced that a good road and a motorcycle is the closest sensation there is to flying without the use of wings or drugs. By the time Cam and I stopped at a rest area on the banks of the river halfway to La Crosse, it was as much to shake our light-headedness as it was to eat lunch.

The rest area sat adjacent to one of the fascinating, massive lock and dam systems that dot the Mississippi River. In just one of several cases of fortuitous timing that populated the trip, we arrived just as the doors began to swing open to admit a gargantuan string of 15 barges and an accompanying tow-boat. We watched, awe-struck, as the tow pilot maneuvered the 600-foot apparatus into the lock with mere inches to either side as a margin of error. I respect the hell out of the kind of people that do that for a living and probably don’t even break a sweat in the process.

Holy effing Christ, that thing is huge!

Then, the massive steel doors swung shut behind it, and over the course of 20 minutes, the chain of barges rose the dozen feet to the next level of the river. With a bellow from the tug’s horn, the doors at the other end swung open. The earth shook as the massive engine roared to life again, and slowly, inevitably, the tug pulled out of the lock and continued upriver.

Best. 45 minutes. Of free entertainment. Ever.

Cam and I finished our PBJs (salvaged from our hotel’s continental breakfast that morning), refilled our water bottles and continued north. Within a few miles, we overtook the barge, now so tiny on the river below, but still moving inexorably northward. We whipped past like mosquitoes buzzing a buffalo.

While we did and saw a number of things more exciting than the Great River Road, I think it was, for me, the high point of the trip — hands down the best ride of my life. Even though I was cramping from a second consecutive 300-mile day in the saddle, shivering from the cold breeze off the river and clinging for dear life to the speeding machine whisking me northbound, I achieved complete relaxation in those majestic hills.

I tried to explain the Zen of Motorcycling a couple months back to a friend of mine who has never ridden. She asked me, understandably perplexed, what was so rewarding about sitting in a perpetual gale, balanced on two-wheels, muscles tensed for hours on end and pelted with bugs and debris while the concrete whizzes by like a belt sander mere inches from your extremities.

Up until this trip, I just knew I liked riding. Riding a thousand miles in four days helped me figure out why. The answer is the beautiful simplicity of the whole thing.

The ride.

Throughout the entire trip, I had one constant: my bike. Everything else around me — the scenery, the road, the people, the digs, the weather — everything on the trip was a variable except my bike, and it was divinely simple.

Compared to a car or a truck, a motorcycle is a simple machine. There are no airbags, no advanced suspension, no bucket seats, no seat belts, no air conditioning or radio or electric locks or crumple zones or stability controls. A motorcycle is the simplest form of a motorized vehicle — nothing but an engine, a gas tank, a drive shaft (or chain), two wheels, brakes, rudimentary suspension, something to sit on and something to hold onto.

If you were to take a car and start pulling the parts off until there was nothing left but the essentials needed to travel hundreds of miles in a day, you’d be left with a motorcycle.

Similarly, for the duration of the trip, I had to boil my life down to the necessities in order to get by on the open road. With only my saddle bags and a backpack to live out of, I could afford to pack only the barest of essentials. There was no room for a laptop, a DVD collection or a set of golf clubs. My only possessions for four days were some rain gear, a couple changes of clothes, a few maps and my cell phone — and even that was blessedly inaccessible on the road.

Liberated from most of my earthly possessions,  I felt like an open book, and light as air. I know it sounds stereotypical, but out there, it was just me, the bike and the open road. And the glorious part was I had nothing but time to contemplate that sensation.

Locked away in my full face helmet, but with a pair of ear plugs to mute the overpowering roar of the wind to a soothing white noise, I was alone in my head for 120 miles at a time. Not that staying balanced on a snarling machine as you twist along a challenging river route is easy. It requires a base kind of concentration and a good deal of skill, but it’s not Dostoevsky either. With my body physically occupied but absolutely no draw on the higher functions of my brain, I had a lot of time to think on the Motorcycle Odyssey.

And think I did. I contemplated, I mused, I mulled, I even soul-searched a little. And a thousand miles later, when I returned home, it was with a a sense of spiritual gratification that’s probably hard for most non-riders to fathom…that, and a slight sense of dread as to how I would cope with having an entire flat full of possessions to look after again. That was a little overwhelming for a day or two.

Our afternoon on the Great River Road did eventually come to an end with our arrival in La Crosse. We gassed up, then veered due north on Highway 93 toward Eau Claire. It was a fitting sequel to the river road, climbing, diving and banking among the lush bluffs of the driftless region’s northern boundary. We crossed miles at a time feeling we were the only vehicles on the road. As evening set in, we stopped at a scenic overlook, discussed our options, and Cam called ahead to a few folks he knows in Eau Claire to see if they could put us up or at least tell us where the good bars were.

By the time we arrived in the city proper an hour later, Cam’s voicemail did in fact offer a place to stay for the night by way of his track buddy Marc’s kid cousin. We met up, grabbed dinner, spent some time sitting in a front yard drinking beer and blowing things up, then headed to Water Street. I was talked into imbibing a house special mishmash of colorful liquor known as the “Delusion,” and after getting my eyes knocked crooked and hitting a few more bars, we packed it in and called it a night.

I spent the night in an epic battle with the couch from hell, trying to catch a few winks of sleep. I don’t know where the thing itself came from, but I was mildly suspicious it had been passed around from college house to college house since the eighties. It was only two cushions long — not nearly large enough for a five-foot-eleven fellow to stretch out on, but some piece of its sinking frame stuck up right in its middle, preventing me from curling up in a fetal position without being jabbed in the side.

I spent a half hour tossing and turning before I realized the two halves of the couch could be pulled apart. I promptly moved them a couple feet apart and stuffed enough pillows between so my posterior could sink down a foot and rest on them, allowing my torso to rest on one half of the couch and my legs the other. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t even really comfortable, but it allowed me to sleep until 6 AM, when the sun shone directly through the curtainless window to wake me. I rolled over, grabbed a random pair of aviator sunglasses from the coffee table and fell back asleep almost as soon as they touched my face.

All told, I was the most ridiculous sleeping sight in the western hemisphere that night. I sort of wish someone had taken a picture.

That morning, we awoke early, packed up the bikes and made the short jaunt northeast to Chippewa Falls, where we fulfilled a lifelong dream and toured the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewery. It was everything we’d hoped and more.

We tooled around downtown Chippewa Falls for a while, grabbed lunch, then headed due east on Highway 29, which some say is the dividing line between “north” and “very north” in Wisconsin. Our destination: Titletown.

Coming soon: the Pilgrimage, and the conclusion of the Motorcycle Odyssey.

Breakups can be some of the toughest situations to handle in terms of emotional distress.

We all deal with separation in different ways. Some people hole up solo with only a pint of ice cream and their thoughts, others go out and surround themselves with action, looking for any distraction they can find, and some folks find their peace in the solitary suffering of copious hours spent working out.

Almost comically, many of the girls I’ve dated have chosen the same method for moving beyond torpedoed relationships — they cut their hair short. I’ve never been able to determine whether this is akin to a final act of defiance (it’s no secret I’m a fan of long hair) or some sort of statement of personal affirmation. Either way, it’s a healthy means of dealing with an emotionally volatile situation. No one gets hurt, and it achieves the desired ends — a little peace of mind.

Me? I’m partial to a good old-fashioned bender when it comes to going on the rebound. It’s not that the alcohol helps me forget — it doesn’t. It’s that if I get good and liquored up, and make a few key poor choices, I’ve suddenly got bigger, more pressing problems on my hand than the ex I was worried about. It’s certainly not the most healthy means of dealing with the problem, but deal with it it does.

So I shouldn’t be the first to cast a stone when I see someone dealing with a bad breakup in what I perceive as an unhealthy way, but in the case of the woman, the auto mechanic and the “Brett Favre goat,” I feel justified in saying this lady ought to have had her head examined before she got her serpentine belt looked at.

If you haven’t seen the story yet, here’s what the AP had.

“WINONA, Minn. — A woman on her way to St. Paul really got the goat of auto repairman James Prusci. She went to Tires Plus in Winona Friday, wanting a belt replaced on her Chevy Malibu. While he was doing paperwork, she said she had a goat in her trunk. “A what?” he asked. She told him she planned to butcher it.

It was painted Minnesota Viking colors — purple and gold — with Brett Favre’s No. 4 shaved on its side. Favre made his Vikings debut Friday in a preseason game.

Prusci called animal control, which took the goat to a local vet. He was renamed Brett and placed in foster care.

Animal control officer Wendy Peterson said Monday the city attorney was reviewing the case for possible citations.“

Now all of us in Packer Nation have been wincing our way through the past week since Brett Favre made what may have been his worst decision since some of those throws he tried to make in his last game as a Packer, deciding to don the purple, gold and (utterly ridiculous) horned helmet of the Minnesota Vikings. Some of us have cussed him out, privately or oh-so-publicly, uttering things we’d never imagined we’d say about our venerable hall-of-famer. Others have even gone so far as to wonder whether the Packer organization ought to reconsider the decision to retire the quarterback’s iconic number in a state where “Favre” used to be synonymous with “Four.”

I’ve taken the split pretty hard myself, so I’ve done my share of trash-talking. I also have my plans in place to watch Favre get repeatedly introduced to the sod at Lambeau Field via Kampman, Hawk, Barnett and a whole host of other helpful folks, in what I’m hoping could be a productive catharsis on November first.

But much as an ex-girlfriend coping with her grief by hanging you and burning you in effigy ought to raise your eyebrows, a Packers fan hoping to sacrifice a proxy-Favre goat in order to appease her sense of hurt feelings probably warrants a cursory glance from the good folks at the happy farm.

We live in a special state here in Wisconsin.

As with most things, you don’t realize how special it is until you swap it for something else, only to find that something really sucks. For instance, I couldn’t have been much older than 18 when my folks, my sisters and I traveled to Branson, Missouri for a family reunion. We convened on the first night at a fairly impressive Mom and Pop steakhouse where the smell was just about good enough to knock you to the floor.

Salivating, we awaited the waitress’s arrival. Full of (almost) southern hospitality, she dropped napkins, bread baskets and drink menus in front of us, then pulled out a pen to take drink orders. My old man and I were jacked to see that on top of good service, the place offered an impressive tap beer list, including a family favorite from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Pops ordered a Honeyweiss, and I quickly followed suit.

“Can I see some ID,” the waitress asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, right,” Dad chuckled, and he and I quickly dug out our wallets and handed our driver’s licenses to the waitress so she could verify that we were father and son.

Now looking slightly perplexed, the waitress took them both, gave a cursory glance to my Dad’s, and then turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, we can’t serve you. You’re under 21.”

It was our turn to raise eyebrows now, and Dad interjected, “No, didn’t you see my license? He’s my son.”

“But the drinking age is 21,” the waitress responded.

“But I’m his father, and I’m telling you it’s okay,” Dad prodded, waiting for her to get it.

“But he’s not 21,” the waitress reiterated. A couple people at a nearby table turned to see what the commotion was.

“He’s my DAD, lady,” I sighed, getting all thirsty and exasperated.

“I’m going to be drinking with him,” Dad said, his own voice rising a little, “and I’m his father. I’m right here.”

At this point, we might as well have been speaking in Greek, and she could have been blathering in Swahili. The Abbot and Costello routine continued for a while longer before my Great Uncle, a Sconnie transplant in Virginia, politely explained that most states in the Union, Missouri among them, are not as enlightened as Wisconsin when it comes to the law’s take on kids drinking with their parents. Simmering, Dad ordered a beer and I ordered a water.

I haven’t spent a dime of my discretionary tourist’s dollars in the state of Missouri since then, and I’ll be damned if you ever catch me in that hellhole Branson again in my life. The Gateway to the West can cram it with walnuts too, for all I’m concerned.

You see, the right to throw one back with your folks is one of the wonderful little gems you’ll find in Wisconsin’s law books that makes riding out five months of frozen wasteland worth the while. While I didn’t do it often as a minor, and I certainly didn’t do it to excess, I look back on the times I enjoyed an adult beverage with my parents in a bar with a sort of misty-eyed reverence. It was a right of passage, and it certainly meant something every time, whether we were celebrating the close of a show with the local theater guild or toasting an academic accomplishment.

It’s an experience I hope to share with my kids decades from now, if the world is unfortunate enough to be cursed with my progeny.

But apparently State Senator Judy Robson never enjoyed any of those magic moments with her three children, because she’s proposed kneecapping Wisconsin’s drink-with-your-parents tradition, cutting it off for anyone under the age of 18. Frankly, the entire notion is ridiculous, because the drinking age should be 18 anyway, but that’s a fight for another day.

The neo-prohibitionists who are slowly gaining clout in Madison and in Wisconsin argue that children drinking with their parents gives kids the impression that drinking is a socially acceptable behavior. Well, it has been going on in our society for several millenia now.  What they fail to grasp is that children drinking responsibly with their parents gives kids the impression that drinking responsibly is a socially acceptable behavior, and that’s a good thing.

I come from a family of drinkers. We bat 1.000. Everyone drinks. On my dad’s side of the family, the preferred poison is scotch. On mom’s side, it’s gin. There’s a wide, deep-seated appreciation of various beers and wines on both sides of the family.

One of the memories I cherish most is sitting around after Christmas dinner with my Mom’s family, passing and pulling from a bottle of champagne and saying one thing we were looking forward to about the next year. At the end of the night, we all signed the bottle. I hope someone still has it somewhere.

I come from a family of drinkers, but there’s not a problem alcoholic in the bunch. No DUIs, no stints with AA, and no one inclined to swinging fists on a bender. We bat 1.000, because we learned to drink from the family, and we had sterling examples to follow. From an early age, before I grasped what alcohol was, I knew it wasn’t acceptable to drink and drive a car, it wasn’t okay to depend on alcohol and violence was an off-limits issue altogether.

That there are people who would try to take that learning and bonding experience away from my family is baffling.

Now granted, every family is different. Problem drinkers have kids too, but the notion that they’re pouring Jack down their kids’ throats is utterly ridiculous. There’s a term for that — it’s child abuse. And I’m willing to stake a lot that says the vast majority of parents don’t use Wisconsin’s unique laws to get their kids puking, or even stumbling, drunk. Changing the law would punish 99 percent of families for the actions of the lunatic fringe.

After all, a Wisconsin family withheld medical treatment from their dying daughter on religious grounds, but there’s no law that says parents can’t attempt to impart a faith upon their children. There are children who do irreparable damage to their bodies eating nothing but fast food and fatty snacks seven days a week, but there’s no law mandating parents feed their children five to nine servings of fruit and veggies a day.

Instead, there are laws for dealing with abusive or neglectful or insane parents, and it’s a damn good thing that they’re there. But it’ll be a cold day in hell when the government knows a damn sight more than most parents about raising their kids. I’ve seen how career politicians’ kids turn out. They don’t do any better than the rest of us.

So I’m hoping Senator Robson and her colleagues decide to abandon their regressive tack on the “issue” of children drinking with their parents at bars and decide to focus their efforts on something that actually poses a danger to Wisconsin… You know, like how we’re still the leading state in the nation when it comes to drunk driving?

I’ll leave you to ponder that… with this Weis family bonding moment: game day beer pong with three generations of Weis. That’s my sister and I versus our father and grandfather. Eat your heart out, Judy Robson.

My grandfather Neil Cook passed away Saturday after suffering a stroke last week. It took not one or two, but three brushes with death to finally fell this man. He had already notched a serious heart attack and another stroke within the last decade, neither of which any mere mortal had a right to survive.

He was a hero of sorts to me (all of my grandparents are), one of a number of inspiring figures I’m lucky enough to share bloodlines with, and I’m grateful for the 24 years and the individual moments I had along the way with him.

I was asked to speak at some point in his services tomorrow, so I sat down tonight, thought long and hard and tried to put some of my feelings to paper. This is an excerpt from what I plan to say. I know it’s not the usual fare for the blog, but it’s what’s on my mind.

“One of the last times I saw my Grandpa, he gave me a gift. Even if it weren’t for the timing of it, I would carry the moment with me for the rest of my life as an example of the essential Neil Cook.

It was a couple of months ago now, the weekend of Mike and Missy’s [my cousin and his wife] wedding, and of course everything was happening at once. While preparations were being set out at the church, a small contingent of us were sent to Neil and Phyllis’s apartment at the Renaissance [an assisted living home] to spend some quality time, help them get ready if needed, and then get them to the event itself.

We spent some time catching up, telling stories and the like, and then it was time to get ready and head out. It was then, with a deadline bearing down on us, that Grandpa told me he had something for me and asked me to follow him into the bedroom. He shuffled over to his sock drawer, and after rummaging around for a second, pulled out an old revolver… holstered, unloaded.

Well I recognized the thing in a split second. The gun’s a relic. It pre-dates World War Two. The first time I laid eyes on it was when I was probably 12 or 13, and after I watched Grandpa take a pot shot at a pesky squirrel that was “getting’ into the bird feeder” with it, I asked him to take me out shooting. So we went out with a couple of old tin cans, and I learned how to shoot a pistol with Grandpa.

This all flashed through my mind in a second as he offered it to me there in his bedroom at the Renaissance, and I thanked him, and then I said, “Grandpa, are you… allowed to keep guns here in assisted living?”

“No… I suppose they’d try to kick me out if they knew,” he said. And then he flashed that same, wry smirk I’d seen a hundred times before, but hadn’t seen for months.

And that’s how I’ll remember Neil Cook, and I hope you all will too – by that sideways stinker’s smirk, the one that let you know he was up to trouble. You’d see it right after he’d say something just to get a rise out of you, or beat your pants off at cards, or wander off to tinker with that old tractor without telling anyone where he was going. Neil Cook did it his way, and he liked it that way.

If you’d have asked him, he’d readily admit to being stubborn. He took a pride in it. His strong-headedness was the stuff of legends, but so was his strength as a person.

We’re talking about a man who laid the brick and stone that supports buildings… mighty structures that will stand for generations after he’s gone. Neil Cook was a man of single-minded purpose and depthless character, who I once watched scoff at the notion of leaving a job half-finished as a dangerous thunderstorm blew up around him because… “his mortar would set.” Unphased by the elements, he took an untamed, 100-acre parcel of wild land and bent it to his will, shaping it and nurturing it to his exact desires.

He was a steward of that land, and the land gave back whatever he asked of it.

With Phy as his wife, the two of them together built a family. And that may just be the greatest project he’s ever had a hand in. If you look at the dozens of pictures hanging here, you won’t find a one where he’s grinning wider than when he’s surrounded by his family. Unlike the buildings Neil erected, the love he and Phyllis cultivated continues to grow in the rich lives of their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. And unlike the forest he raised from seedlings, no storm will ever tear apart the roots of family he planted on that same land.

Because that same strength that ran through Neil’s veins runs in all of us: his family, his friends and anyone whose life he touched. It’s that strength we’ll turn to now, that love, to get by in his absence.”

I’ll be out of the loop again for a couple days this week to attend services up north, and then rumor has it life will settle back into normalcy.

Anyone who tells you there’s nothing interesting going on in Wisconsin’s hundreds of tiny little villages and towns has never lived in one of them. They’ve certainly never been to Cambria, Wisconsin.

While the political intrigue may not look like it does on TV, it’s just as complex and perplexing. Certainly, there are fewer people in the political arena than there are on Capitol Hill, but with a limited number of players, the tempers burn faster, the grudges last longer and the fight is always personal.

I had the privilege to spend quite a bit of time in Cambria for a previous job, and being a crank for conflict, I quickly developed a quiet affinity for what I would come to call “the most controversial little village in Wisconsin.” Sporting a robust population of 792, according to the old sign on the edge of town, I’m fairly certain the village would place in the top ten on a list of “municipalities in the US with the most contentious issues per capita.”

The latest tale out of Cambria to capture my attention was the sudden and thorough evisceration of the village’s police force by the Board of Trustees. Facing reportedly high levels of dissatisfaction among the populace with Police Chief Rick Nelson and his three part-time cops, the Village Board opted for amputation over the operation, dissolved the police department and fired the cops.

Critics of the move… well they said a lot of things, but among their concerns was a fear that Cambria would quickly come to resemble the Wild West. This a fear that an old source and friend of mine in the village now assures me was completely founded, due to a large population of Amish that live nearby and their “penchant for making trouble.”

The “problems” it seems have “escalated” in the weeks since Chief Nelson and his compatriots were sent west, and have come to include disturbances like loitering, graffiti (via paint and brush, mind you) and “ride-by tauntings.” In a manner reminiscent of a Civil War Diary, my Cambrian described for me in vivid detail, in an email, a recent skirmish between the two factions that had me rolling with laughter — on a day that I really needed it, too.

When I asked if I could re-publish his account, my source asked that I credit him as Norman Des Plume. As such, I have no reason to doubt his report is anything but factual and accurate.

“August 12, 2009

Tonight (as has become usual in the absence of ineffectual, effectively part-time police protection,) they began rolling into town just about sundown. The Amish tauntings began as the buggy battalion trotted its way onto Mary Street and continued as the lead buggy approached the end of the street nearest our house.

This time though, we were ready for them.

Suddenly and almost as one, we emerged from our houses. Brandishing the latest in high tech devices, (our iPods, our Zunes (not so great, actually,) our Blackberries and iPhones,) we began the counter-tauntings!

We’d brought to the battle their most lusted after of forbidden fruits. High! Freakin’! Tech!

Well, you could have knocked down a draft horse with a feather… The black-garbed brethren and sisters were struck dead dumb.

We all paused in our texting (and scandoulously, our sexting!,) our surfings and in our tweetings. We awaited their next move.

And. In a wave beginning with the lead buggy, the Amish womenfolk, in an obviously choreographed fashion, leaned from their buggies and one by one, EXPOSED THEIR BOSOMS! (Not so bad, actually…)

There was nothing for it but to retreat back into our homes in abject defeat. Check and mate.

Mark my words though, we’ll be ready for them the next time…..”