There was no question that I was going to get wet. I just couldn’t believe that my left foot was already waterlogged by 5 in the morning with my longest day yet on a motorcycle still stretched out in front of me. Just how long? How about tacking on 18 more hours to the 5 a.m. wet foot?
Insanity? Definitely. But in the end, I earned myself a framed certificate of achievement, a very trick new pin and a motorcycle license plate frame that both read “Iron Butt Association- World’s Toughest Motorcycle Riders”. You can’t buy this stuff at Walmart. You gotta earn it.
In August, 1997, I was at Reynold’s Motorsports parking lot in Gorham, Maine to witness the arrival of the 75 frazzled men and women who were the chosen ones in the Iron Butt Rally on the second of their 11 day, 11,000 mile race against the clock in motorcycling’s ultimate biennial long distance event. I agreed with my riding buddy, Alan McKinnon, that we had to do a 1,000 mile in 24 hour trip as a way of checking out whether the long distance thing is for us or not. I am drawn like a moth to the bright light of adventure and this was one that had the potential to vaporize me.
There turned out to be a few problems. First was planning enough light. We were going to try and do it last fall, but decided that it would be safer to wait for more daylight hours so we moved the date up to June 14. We found the official New England 1000 Rally master and 1997 Iron Butt participant, Ed Farrell, living near Augusta, Maine, who agreed to be awake at 4:30 am to check our speedometers and sign us in. We carried food and water to save time. Ed wished us luck. We needed it.
It had been a hellish night of non-sleep. The kids were back from college for the summer and they decided to have a mini-party on the very same night that dad went to bed at 8 PM. We have a small house, and noise carries. We also had a barky new puppy.
I was angry that my left foot was wet so soon. I failed to zip up the waterproof liner on the left leg of my Motoport Ultra II riding suit. This stuff happens in the dark. Worse were the wrong boots . A pair that I thought were waterproof weren’t. I have two pairs, and in the half-consciousness of 3:30 AM I grabbed the cheaper copies of the waterproof boots I really do own.
We headed northeast and reached Bangor at 5:45 AM. The sky was bright enough by now, but we had already seen two deer standing by the grass on the side of the road in the half light and two fingers on my right hand began their happy marriage to the brake lever of my BMW R1100 GS.
The next part of this report is not fiction. You can check the headlines of the Bangor Daily News for Monday June 15, 1998 - “Torrential Rains Drench N.E. States! More than 8 inches of rain had fallen in some areas of the state by Sunday evening, and the National Weather Service predicted a few more inches could fall by the end of the day. The storm produced ‘literally hundreds of accidents and disabled cars’, said state police Sgt. Paul Maloney. The storm was the worst bombardment since a downpour dumped 6 to 12 inches of rain on western Rhode Island in 1982 . The Kagamangus Highway through the White Mountains was reported closed by flooding. A state of emergency was declared in Boston.”
We ate a kind of a breakfast or lunch at 9 AM under the roof of an open pavilion on Route 2, after heading west across Maine and New Hampshire toward Vermont. It was a dry spot for 15 minutes. Here I changed into my one pair of spare dry socks, after shoving a pair of plastic bags between them and the sodden boots. From this point on, my electric vest was turned on for the rest of the trip. In June.
I was pleased that I wired my CD player into the electrical system of the bike. Listening to ten of my favorite CD’s a was a good move that helped me pass the time. I just don’t have that good a singing voice and usually can’t remember many of the words to the good stuff.
The rain was constant for the first 10 hours. At times the sky would brighten, and there even was one patch of blue in the east but it mostly deluged on us. We veered away from sections of flooded roadway on Route 2 and made Burlington, Vermont by noon, one hour behind the schedule my Automap computer travel mapping program laid out for me.
It was at this point that Alan’s BMW R80 RT was almost taken out by a woman in a white Taurus. He was just ahead of me in the far left lane, moving steadily past traffic. The Taurus began to turn into him, so he must have been in her blind spot as he was passing. They locked eyes, and his bike jolted, shuddered and righted itself. The Taurus veered right and fright revitalized both pairs of our adrenal glands as we headed south on Rt 89.
We hit the Massachusetts border at the 530 mile mark. One port-a-potty with a line of 6 led me over to the far side of a fenced area for urinary relief. Here I actually saw Alan's shadow for part of a minute until another rain squall poured down.
The rain morphed my Garmin GPS III into a mini-aquarium. I noticed that the display screen had a thin line running horizontally across the midline. Thinking it was some debris on the screen , I attempted to flick it off with my rain glove, but realized that I was just pushing the waterline around. The unit continued to function, but I was disappointed that I later lost all the trip data after I returned it for warrantee work.
The traffic increased and was at its worst in Connecticut. We exited I-95 after a short time in Rhode Island and headed for my mother’s house in Somerset, MA at mile 758.
I had called ahead and arranged a quick supper visit with her. She had a full meal laid out for us and tried her best to understand why we couldn’t spend the night, or why we weren't interested in taking a short cut to Route 24 up toward Boston, rather than head down toward Cape Cod to catch the end of Route 495. I explained that we were banging off the New England 1000, and needed to follow the preplanned route that would give us 1,000 miles to and from Ed’s house. It was our first and only sit down chance at food for the day, and I wolfed down my turkey chef salad with one hand while I held the phone and updated my brother on my progress and attitude with the other. I was still positive and upbeat now that the rest of the trip would be easy, because I had made it dozens of times since I moved to Maine in 1973.
I never really did have to fight falling asleep that much, but did experience visual hallucinations off and on for the last hour on I-95 nearing Augusta. The interplay of Alan’s red tail light, yellow protective vest, and residual water beads on my face shield at midnight created several forms of a dancing alien ahead of me on the highway. The strangeness of it all gripped my attention and considering the fact tht I used no mind altering chemicals, not even coffee, I’d say I received a temporary gift byproduct of extreme mental and physical exhaustion.
We finished at 12:15 AM with 1022 miles registered on the my GPS, with the notoriously optimistic BMW odometer reading 1032. I now have more personal treasures: a license plate frame, jacket pin, framed plaque, and yet another sweet meal at mom’s.

For much more information on long distance endurance riding visit the Iron Butt Association’s web page at http://www.ironbutt.com .