I was up late Saturday night until 1:00 a.m. You may ask what does a guy do other than watch television until that time of night. Well your right, I was doing that but not off the "Big Tube" but on "You Tube". I am a multi-tasker of sort. Matter of fact my job requires intensive multi-tasking, keyboarding, searching, talking, analyzing and more in all at the same time. I do Client Representation work in Social Services in a call center. Sometimes I handle as many as 80 calls a day! So I was multi-tasking last night. I had the Big Tube on, but the sound muted, I was watching and listening to cuts from my favorite television show on You Tube, while downloading some of them and sending URL links in email to friends and family of my interest. I was watching clips of my all time favorite show in the 60's, a show short lived, but excellent in most content, a show that produced my childhood dream of riding a motorcycle and cruising the U.S.A. The show, "THEN CAME BRONSON", a series starring, the soft spoken, excellent singer-actor- Michael Parks. Here's a guy through life's tragedy, quits his job, and heads out on an adventure on a motorcycle across the U.S.A.
We all love stories of adventure, meeting people of different character, experiecing danger, love, and more. We wouldnt love the stories of Huck Finn, or the Lord of the Ring trilogies if that were not true, but we do. The show " Then Came Bronson" had it all. The main character was a man on a "mission to find God", I guess you could say, he even had the now known symbol on his 1969 Harley Sportster, the "all seeing Eye of God", which we have grown custom to look at on our dollar bills.
This wasn't a story about conspiracies, government gone crazy, or any of the things, I often find interesting to read today. This was the story which encompasses all men's dreams to go on an adventure. To cast care to the wind, and ride the wind, " to go where some man have gone before, but very few". These men are the men that have left behind multiple volumes of written and photographic works. Men who dare to get on the back of a two wheeled machines, horses, trains, planes,cars and even on foot and head out on that "Lone Lonesome Highway".
"Lone Lonesome Highway", just happens to be the theme song of the show, and was a hit for Michael Parks, with the groupies of this show, I being one of them.
I bought all of his record albums back then, but where they are today, I know not!
The show inspired me it stirred that need for adventure but mostly my love of motorcycles. The cowboy of today's "Iron Horse".
My first motorcycle I owned at age 15, it was an old Honda 90, that I stripped the leg windbreakers off of and adventured every where I could go in Texas.
Then after the dimurge of this bike, blown engine, it would be years before I could buy another one, but I continued to ride friends bikes and more until I could acquire another "horse".
My next one was on old Cimmatti 125, two stroke Bike, I believe of Italian origin.
I rode it to and from work in Florida before I married in 1974. Riding that motorcycle was a trip, just trying to keep the gas and oil mixture right, so you wouldn't conk out on the highway, with a cloud of black smoke surrouding you. It didnt have a auto mixer, you had to measure it in to the gasoline, shake and stir and pour it in, and hope she would ride right.
I don't recall what happened to that Bike, it's in the junk yard somewhere in my old memories.
Then in 1977, I bought a new Yamaha 500 XT, part Dirt Bike, part Road Bike.
I rode the heck out of the thing, I learned to dirt bike, jump, ride wheelies, crash and recover, run out of gas, fix bike flats, change the chain and more. I even took a road trip on it. Graduating in 1977 in Tyler from a Junior College, I went on to go to the University there to teach school, but tired the first semester, and my wife and sold a lot off and decided to return to the mountains and deserts of New Mexico. My wife drove the car and I took my first long haul ride of over 1200 miles to New Mexico on the back of my Yamaha! I can say by the time, I starting running that Bike on the Tarantula 400 track out there, that I was pretty much an expert Bike rider! I had rode through all kinds of weather, and conditions.
Then due to bad times and times of poverty and no work, I lost that bike to the "repo man". A sad day when she was taken off by two idiots who couldnt even start it. I had to show them how to even get the thing going so they could drive it off into the sunset, barely
What a beauty she was though, the old girl had taught me to ride like a pro..
Then the day came years later I finally got my hands on a Honda 450, that was in a friends garage in a box, torn down. I traded an old Buick I owned to him in exhange for a box full of unknown parts.. I built the Bike, put it back together, one bolt at a time, and then had it tuned out by a Biker shop guy I had met buying parts for her. She ran beautiful again and looked like new bike, all but the seat, and I had to eventually buy a new one. The bike got the adventure of being rode once up through northern New Mexico, as I had the neatest little tow gear built to go on my car hitch, where I could set the front wheel up in a rig attached to a ball hitch it was basically an upside down fender made of steel just the right size for the front wheel to rest in, you had to undo the bike chain drive you could take her with you on vacation trips. On this one occassion we had driven to northern New Mexico where I toured up and around Bandelier, the desert and mountains near Santa Fe and Los Alamos. I rode her hard for a couple of years until I moved to Houston, Texas where riding in traffic there with a small engine on a motorcycle was akin to SUICIDE! So she set on my porch for near a year and half whereby finally I sold her off when I returned to New Mexico, because I couldnt tow it with a U-Haul full of household goods and clothing. I think my cousin sent me $400.00 for her.
Then in 1988, I had moved from Aspen, Colordado to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, I bought 3 dirt bikes off my brother in law. They were all in the 250's range, One was a Honda, another a Yamaha and the last was a Suzuki. I rode those through the mountains and worked on them constantly they were in bad dis-repair, but all the same they gave me and my visiting cousin, some real fun, in the mountain terrain around my home in Glenwood Springs. I sold those bikes off eventually and then traded a 1977 Chevrolet Nova to my brother in law for a Honda 1977 CB 750. I bought the Bike on the day I was moving from Colorado back to Texas, I rode the Bike through the Eisenhower Tunnel over Vail Pass 12,500 foot elevation, through ice and snow, slipping and a sliding, through two snow storms one in Colorado and one in New Mexico. I rode the Bike for years more after that while living in Tyler, Texas again, until one morning, I woke up to find my drunken neighbor had his car parked right on top of her. She was dead. No more to go anywhere, I kept that Bike until just a few years ago, my present wife (first is deceased) sold her for $50.00. The old 750 had not run in years, nor had I tried to fix her.
Then came 2004, I bought a brand new Honda 750, rode it for a year, but I wasnt the skinny child I once was, and it just didnt have the humphf I needed to get up and go in highway conditions. I traded it in, and bought a brand new 2004 Honda VTX 1800cc monster, and I am in love again! I have driven her some short trips and one to Amarillo, Texas, and then in 2009, I talked one of my best friends into getting a motorcycle, a Honda 650 for him to learn to ride. Learn he did!
In May 2009, we hauled our motorcycles to New Mexico by trailer. We decided to do the "Wild Hog" trip and being housed in Albuquerque while visiting my parents, we ventured out and drove, to Madrid, New Mexico, up to Sandia peak, then we drove to Santa Fe and more. For one week we took an adventure, no cares, no worries, just riding the wind and the open spaces of the west. This is the life, of adventure but still didnt come to be the "Then Came Bronson, experience.
If you never saw the show, you missed out. This was the show, that inspired my drive to ride and to tour, and to love motorcycles!
I still dream of that "Then Came Bronson" experience, I am even planning for it, but with a slight change, I am praying to see my retirement in 6 years, and then I am getting on the back of whatever Bike I may have or can acquire at that time, and for the first six months of retirement, I am hitting the road again but this time with no final destination in mind other than "perhaps coming home" at the end of my adventure.
I want to ride to the west coast, up the coast and across America to the east coast and then back through the South to return to Texas. I want to document it, with video and still photographs, journal and blog it, so my readers can follow me as I take that adventure we all dream of as children- to be free to the wind, to go where some may have gone but very few, and to discover America again, myself, and others.
That is what "Then Came Bronson" stirs within everyone that watched the show, the dream to fly across America, free as an Eagle in the wind.
Now, that I have talked about the freedom of adventures on a motorcycle, the greatest adventure I ever started on, was my one with Christ.
I am now 56 years old and came to Christ at age 6, and it is an adventure of the Spirit, that requires nothing more than trust in Him. It has been wonderous, and full of danger, intrigue, love, and loss of things on this earth but gain of eternal things. However, the dream to still adventure across the highways of America is still in my blood. This time, though I won't be looking for God like Bronson was, there won't be a decal of the "eye of God" to carry me, but I will be carrying God with me into my adventure, to share my life experience with friends, family and others I might meet on the the trip, but all the same it will be my "Then Came Bronson" experience I dreamed of in 1969, it will be lived by me, not in television but in reality. This is my yet unfulfilled dream and that is to take my Apostolic Journey, and see the many I have loved in this world, and share with them the documentary of my most important adventure yet.."LIFE IN CHRIST"! To share the True gospel of Jesus Christ with all that I know, because it will be Christ in me, on the back of that motorcycle traveling the wind, and highway. It won't be a Long Lonesome Highway, because where I am He will be. If there is one lesson you learn as a Christian, is whereever, and whenever, if you are in Christ and He is in you, He is there!
If you get the opportunity, watch the old clips on You Tube, do a Google search for the show, and enjoy, I know I did, and because my reminicing of that old show, it stirred that need for me to take one more adventure. I pray before I leave on the great adventure to be with the Lord, and that is to travel on my Bike across America free and in the wind.
See the show clips if you can read the story outlines, and get that desire once more stirred in you. Once that happens, come join me on this great adventure of the Spirit, and perhaps and some years to come, you can join me on my ride, and then the best part of it all is you will join me on that final adventure into the heavenlies with Christ for eternity, where we will live out those childhood dreams forever with Him! It will be the consummation of the greatest adventure and story ever told and it will be entitled, and "Then Came Jesus"!
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