JANESVILLE — Note to self: Push car off cliff.
Buy orange bandanna and ride around on a Harley-Davidson looking totally hot.
OK, maybe not totally hot, but at least less like a dork.
At noon Saturday, more than 1,500 motorcycles roared out of the Kutter Harley-Davidson/Buell and on to Rock County’s roads for the annual MDA Tub Run.
This year, organizers hope to raise more than $165,000 for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
It’s a nice fundraiser.
I got to wear a bandanna that made me 20 degrees cooler—that’s cooler as in less dorky, not cooler as in temperature.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Last week, editor/tyrant Herr Sid Schwartz thought it would be a good idea if I rode in the Tub Run on the back of some stranger’s motorcycle; a request that’s the equivalent of asking Barbara Bush to take up snowboarding.
So Kutter Harley-Davidson marketing director Lucy Anderson put an orange bandanna on my head and arranged for me to ride at the head of the line with Kutter’s general manager Gary Sinks.
I think the editor wanted descriptions of rumbling engines and country scenery.
What he’ll get is a transformation.
Here’s what happens: You get on the bike and you feel like an ordinary woman who stopped doing nutty stuff in about 1983.
Then, 20 minutes into the ride, when you’re roaring down Avalon Road listening to the music of the engines, you realize that everything has become startlingly new again. The greens in the corn and soybean fields look surprisingly crisp. The sky isn’t blue, it’s luminescent.
And when you drive by Morton Farms and see John and Kathy Morton sitting sedately in lawn chairs, you have to resist the urge to grin and stick out your tongue.
I decided to wave, just in case they misunderstood.
They didn’t recognize me in my orange bandanna.
And then, by the time you’re going by Ken Leutey’s farm near Clinton—or maybe it was the Clelands’ farm—you begin thinking how totally hot your husband would look on a Road King Classic.
OK, maybe not totally hot, but less like a harried dairy and livestock agent who is so exhausted at the end of the day that he routinely falls asleep in his recliner while watching television westerns.
At one point during the ride, I shouted to Sinks, “This is awesome.”
And he said, “Yeah, there really aren’t any words to describe it.”
It’s true, there aren’t any words.
When we got off the bike at Preservation Park, Sinks talked briefly about how the community came together to make the event work—volunteers, police from all over the county and the corporate sponsors.
“And it’s all for the kids,” Sinks said.
Perhaps those are the most important words of all.
So never mind the editors. Never mind the laundry. Never mind life’s creeping routines that slowly transform you into an invisible person, another one of those 40-somethings who is dutiful at work and goes to bed at 10 p.m.
Put on your orange bandanna and ride.
And if it’s for a good cause, well then that’s even better.
