RE-ENTRY Blues- 
	(published Motorcycle Tour and Travel magazine. Jan. '97, pp 32-33)

	I'm back.  Many of you readers have been following my previous columns about
preparing for my first-time trip up to Alaska.  When you last heard from me I
was in a damp tent  pitched in the West Fork Campground off the gravel Taylor
Highway about  seventeen miles outside of Chicken, Alaska.   
	I 'm having a very tough time of plugging back into my life after six weeks
and  fourteen thousand  miles on the road.  I did reach the point where I was
looking forward to getting home.  I can even prove it. My last day was a 720
mile ride from Sudbury, Ontario here to Lincolnville, Maine.   What I was
unprepared for was the fact that that while my body and mind werehere, my heart
and spirit were still on the road.
	The hugeness of the trip was too big to be contained in the maps, piles of
unsorted tourism literature and boxes of Fuji slides strewn across our house. 
Maybe I made a mistake when I bent over and kissed my motorcycle after I
dismounted in the garage.  I probably should have waited until my wife went back
into the house.  Or when I spent hours washing,  cleaning, and waxing the bike
over the first few days I was home.  I should have known to pay more attention
to the woman who payed the bills, took care of the kids, fixed what went wrong
and deal with all of  her mother's mounting medical problems while I was away.
	My friend Dave has been helping me fit back into the world.  Dave once rode
his bicycle across the United States, so he knows something about the forces of
two- wheeled travel.  He sent me a quote by Oliver Wendall Holmes,  "A mind that
is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions".     
	Rather than try and fit back into the old way of doing things, I've got the
chance to take this energy and channel it into new undertakings, and fresh
approaches to life.   Two examples follow:
	Before I left on the trip I had what I thought was a typical
motorcycle-human connection to my BMW motorcycle.  I thought it was a very good
machine and had amassed about 8,000 miles in the year and a-half that I owned
it.   I thought  it  would work out to be  be a good investment of my
hard-earned money.  Now, with 24,000 miles on the odometer, and scores of 600
miles days in the saddle, my relationship to this machine is genuine.  I find
myself respecting it's integrity, engineering, and reliability.  This  machine
sustained me in a incredible ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Arctic
oceans.  I carried me over hundreds of miles of choking dust,  over a 60 mile
gravel road built on an abandoned trainroad bed.  It chugged on through the
driving rain on the open praries of Saskatchewan, and silently rolled through a
quagmire of wet calcium chloride goop above the Arctic Circle in the Northwest
Territories. It was even smashed to the ground and broken on the Dempster
Highway in the Yukon. Just as I now share a unique bond with my traveling buddy
Alan, who also covered the same ground as me, do I find myself actually caring
about  my motorcycle.  
	When I got home, I immediately changed the oil and made a pilgrimage to my
local auto parts supplier where I purchased several spray bottles of cleaning
and polishing solvents for chrome, metal,  and plastic.  I wanted to make it
right for my incredible machine, and spent the better part of the next  two days
doing what was humanly possible to do in terms of erasing the ravages of the
elements.  When I rode my motorcycle to a meeting a couple of days later, 
fellows there who had seen the bike before remarked that it was cleaner than
ever before.  
	I am also thankful for the chance to have spent a night or two at the homes
of people that were complete strangers to me when I pulled into their driveways
in Anchorage (Alaska), Prince George(British Columbia),   and Billings, Montana.
 These people fed me, opened up their homes, garages, and toolboxes and 
provided me with the human connections that are now emerging as the lasting
highlights of my summer of '96.  Since I have come home I have decided to extend
the hospitality and help that others have given me to travelers in my neck of
the woods.  Nn one of the Internet motorcycling-related  lists that I subscribe
to I read about New Jersey Jim's upcoming trip to Labrador.  I e-mailed Jim some
tips gleaned  from previous trips to Labrador and Newfoundland.  Just this
morning I sent off three articles that I wrote on the area.	I hope Jim stops
by here on his way home.  It will be my way connecting with my Alaska/Yukon
trip.   Things are coming back together.  I have a burning desire to be back on
the road.