The International Fellowship of Motorcycling Rotarians takes on the West.
Each day starts with a riders’ meeting, at the end of which Christoph Schwarz – a member of the Rotary Club of Koblenz-Mittelrhein, Germany, wearing a vest with assorted patches and a “Director” tag – leads a group of bikers in a bloodcurdling chant:
“Töff. Töff. Töff. Hurray!”
“Töff. Töff. Töff. Hurray!”
Are they saying “tough-tough?” I ask for a translation. In Swiss German, Töff is the word for “motorcycle.” According to these outlaws, it’s also the sound a motorcycle makes. I think, “This trip could be interesting.” I am the only American in a group of Swiss and German Rotarians.
We are standing beside a gleaming row of steel stallions – Heritage Softails, Road Kings, and Electra Glides, a couple of tons of chrome bearing the Harley name. Engines roar to life, leather-clad men and women swing into the saddle, fire up, and the 2014 Harley Tour of the Wild West moves out. The itinerary, printed on the back of a T-shirt, is a 10-day loop that will traverse Pikes Peak, Independence Pass, Aspen, Mesa Verde, Monument Valley, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and Bryce Canyon, Arches, and Rocky Mountain national parks. We are the “Wild Bunch.” Well, almost.
Rotary members lead double lives. About 31,513 Rotarians in 180 countries belong to 63 Rotary Fellowships, organized around a shared passion. There are groups devoted to the quiet and the contemplative – bird-watching, quilting, old cars, fishing, rare books, chess. And there are action-oriented groups – Rotarians bound by an interest in flying, skiing, scuba diving. The International Fellowship of Motorcycling Rotarians (IFMR) is the second-largest fellowship (behind yachting), numbering 2,107 members in 25 countries. The German/Austrian/Swiss chapter, the sponsor of this ride, has more than 400 members.
Dave Ingerson and Tony Moyle started the fellowship in Australia in 1992 with a simple idea: Rotarians who were passionate about motorcycles could find like-minded people to join them on short rides and the occasional international adventure. They would do what all Rotarians do: share inside information about local conditions and culture, forge new friendships, and have absurd amounts of fun.
According to the IFMR Australia website, the concept of a fellowship devoted to motorcycles met some resistance. A district governor in Japan asserted that motorcycles were a young person’s toy. He was wrong: Our group ranges in age from 37 to 73.
When a tourist spots the herd of Harleys in a parking lot, he tries to figure them out: “Let me guess. You’re all dentists and lawyers.”
“No,” I say. “They are Rotarians.”
This wild bunch boasts four PhDs. Two of the riders have tattoos. One – Markus Reucher, of the Rotary Club of Saarbrücken-St. Johann, Germany – has an earring. The group includes retired electrical engineers, aviation troubleshooters, quality control managers, computer executives, and a veterinarian. But for 10 days we are bikers, pure and simple.
Peggy Hermann got her motorcycle license at age 26 and one year later joined an IFMR tour of California. “I rode a Heritage Softail,” she says, visibly slipping into the memory of wind and engine noise, and the great stone peaks of the Sierras. The daughter of a German Rotarian, she also has done fellowship rides in South Africa, Patagonia, Argentina, and New Zealand.
You can hear the nostalgia and emotion in the riders’ voices as they recall their first bikes. Schwarz started riding his brother’s dirt bike when he was 13. Reiner Strohmenger, of the Rotary Club of Wolfratshausen-Isartal, Germany, waited until he was 40 to buy the bike he first saw in college, a BMW GS with a white tank. Lennart Souchon (Rotary Club of Hamburg-Wandsbek, Germany) flashed back to tucking over the tank of a small Honda, racing up Route 1 in California during his days at Stanford, remembering every speed trap. Alfred Rehwald (Rotary Club of Saalburg-Taunus, Germany) talked about buying a BMW R69 after college and riding across Europe into Africa, across Turkey and Afghanistan and over the Khyber Pass. Bruno Meyenhofer (Rotary Club of Winterthur, Switzerland) is the most recent convert: He shows the back of his Swiss license, which has silhouettes of the vehicles he is qualified to drive – including, as of 2011, a motorcycle. He owns a BMW F800GS and a Harley Road King. “I love to ride,” he says.
Reucher takes me aside at the top of Pikes Peak, still exhilarated from 19 miles of curved road, switchbacks, and drop-offs without guardrails, to look out over 100 miles: “To go from this morning to this peak was an explosive joy, like opening champagne.” At a gas stop the next morning after a sinuous ride along the Platte River, Souchon says: “I am in harmony with the bike. The bike is in harmony with the road. The road follows the river, and we are all in harmony with the earth. I live my whole life for such a feeling.”
The Rotary experience proved a natural template for like-minded riders – collaborative, not competitive. Strohmenger recounted his search for riding buddies: “I began at 40. I looked for people who had my style, or outlook about riding: early starts, scenery, not racing, a confirmed destination, not hunting for hotels in the dark. I live in Saarbrücken, a small town in Germany. I heard about an IFMR guy in France, just across the border. I started riding with his group. I did a Google search and found the German chapter. Now these guys are my home club away from home.”
The local rides are spontaneous, posted online, inviting riders to discover secret roads in the area. Every year a different member volunteers to plan an “ambitious tour.” At an international conference, a member met a Rotarian from Namibia who said, “You should come to Namibia.” So they did.
Schwarz organized the Harley Tour after a disastrously rainy journey in the Czech Republic and Croatia. “We had seven days of deluge. We call it the Motorboat Tour. We vowed to find someplace guaranteed to be dry and chose the Southwest. I spent more time organizing this tour than I will spend riding it.”
He sent out a prospective road book last winter. Rehwald gift-wrapped it and gave it to his family for Christmas. Jan Schepers, of the Rotary Club of Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Germany, was listed on the roster as “Mr. X” until his birthday came around. His wife planned the surprise.
When The Rotarian asked me to accompany the group, we discussed possible language difficulties. In the road book, Ortsdurchfahrt is the word that describes what we would be riding on after leaving Denver. Once I deconstruct it, and crash Google Translate, I figure it means we’ll be riding on secondary roads rather than highways. One night after checking into a motel in Durango, I ask another rider what the schedule is for the evening. He rattles off a long German word that I take to mean “free time, shower, unpack, and dress for dinner.” By the time he finishes the word, we’ve used up the available time.
Rotarians of every stripe embrace travel. They have a mission to learn about the world. As the week progresses, we note differences between European and American behavior. Schwarz’s son Dave and I discuss war movies in which escaping prisoners unwittingly reveal their nationalities. In The Great Escape, it was table manners: Germans hold their fork in their left hand and the knife in the right. They do not put the knife down and switch hands, but Americans, it seems, can’t steer the fork into their mouth with their left hand. Dave recalls a Quentin Tarantino movie in which a British officer reveals himself to the Germans by counting on his fingers without using his thumb.
I make a little fun of the group. They order iced tea without ice, Cokes without ice, not wanting to dilute flavor or fizz. And then there are the burgers. “Guys,” I tell them, “no one in America eats a hamburger with a knife and fork.”
Reucher uses his camera to record his take on the country. At lunch one day I see him climb up on a chair to get a clear picture of a hand-lettered sign announcing: “Coffee lets you do stupid things faster and with more energy.” A white-bearded tourist in Silverton has no objection to our taking a shot of his T-shirt with the question: “If a man expresses an opinion in the forest and no woman is there, is he still wrong?”
The group passes through towns with the past depicted in murals of Victorian-era townspeople walking arm in arm, pharmacists standing behind counters. We eat in restaurants whose walls are decorated with the implements of the West: cowboy hats, lariats, scythes, Hawken rifles, belly cinches for plow horses. We spend time in Silverton, a mining town lined with sun-bleached wooden Indians and cowboys. We pass junkyards and folk art stands. Two steel vultures peck at the underside of an overturned car – on a pedestal 20 feet above ground.
There are cultural details, but mostly there is space. Strohmenger muses: “In Germany, you ride for 20 minutes and you’ll pass through five villages. Here, you ride for 20 minutes and you might see one house. Don’t people out here need other people?”
I email my editor. “Why is it that the parts of America the world loves most are the parts that have the least number of Americans? German motorcycle tours have been riding across the Wild West for decades. We’re talking wide open spaces. I expect the group to be essentially speechless every night.” Actually, most evenings, the reaction is one word: Wow.
On a motorcycle, there is no frame. You take in the vista: the sky, the rock, the weather, the light. We move past rock formations that change color, that fragment in unique ways, for mile after mile, edging from reds to gray to dun to skeletal white. We watch storm clouds gather over peaks 50 miles distant. What happens on the horizon affects us. The cell phone in my pocket buzzes a flash flood alert.
Schwarz has orchestrated a ride that unveils the magic of wind and water. Near Arches National Park, we ride along a steep canyon cut by the Colorado River through red rock. We will follow the same river along I-70, where it kept to its ravenous way as the Rockies rose up on either side. In a single day, the group goes from Antelope Canyon, a miraculous slot cut through red sandstone by repeated flash floods to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, watching storm clouds build on the South Rim. The two moments are connected by a long climb up the Vermillion Cliffs. I begin to understand the fellowship.
At the Grand Canyon, we wake to a steady rain. Meyenhofer’s bike starts, but the throttle is unresponsive. A phone call to the dealer in Denver sketches out a rescue plan. A technician from Zion Harley will pick up the bike. Meyenhofer should be back on the road in a day. Schepers volunteers to stay behind with him. The group slowly rides in a circle past Meyenhofer, shaking hands, giving hugs. The scene leaves me speechless. The day after, he texts me status reports. I suggest that he take I-15 and I-70 to make up for lost time. “They are interstates, but they are awesome.”
He texts back: “I don’t understand ‘awesome.’” Are these roads to be avoided? I try various definitions. When he arrives in Green River, he greets each member with a cold beer. Taking my hand, he says, “Now I know the meaning of awesome. Those were 280 miles of the most beautiful roads I have ever traveled.” Over dinner, he explains that the problem had been different words for awesome in German – one meaning “fear and trembling in the face of God,” another meaning “spectacular, humbling.”
In this group of Rotarians, naturally, no fun happens without fundraising. On the next-to-last night of the tour, Paul Hegemann, a physician and member of the Lions club in Ingelheim, Germany, appeals to them for help. Hegemann – who is on the trip as a friend of Schwarz’s – is director of a hospice program that provides care for 80 patients and counseling for family members. The group pledges their support. At a reunion back in Germany several months later, the riders would present the hospice with a check for €2,300.
The final day dawns with a temperature hovering around 34 degrees Fahrenheit. We ascend Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, past a sign that indicates we are 2 miles above sea level. The road twists, turns, lifting us 12,000 feet into the sky, with stone peaks breaking like waves to either side. We cross the Continental Divide for the second time in 10 days, then head across the prairie, home. — James R. Petersen
See photos from Petersen’s ride through the Wild West.
