Jim McArdle Just Can't Drive 55. By Jeff Smith DID YOU EVER stop to think that if you go 100 miles an hour for an hour you've gone 100 miles?" Actually I hadn't, and something in McArdle's tone made me suspect that until pretty recently, he hadn't either. Plus the phone connection was tinny and far-away sounding, so I assumed he had spent a fistful of quarters to share this insight with me. Jim McArdle always was the sort of friend who'd wake you in the middle of the night with a phone call and a terrible joke, and then hang up. You could call back later and try to ruin his night's sleep too, but of course he wasn't home in bed. Jim's midnight missives always came from after-hours bars or from across state lines. Then I remembered that I had spoken to Jim earlier that day--7 a.m. in fact, because he had specifically noted the time--and said he was just heading out the door to jump on his bike and take a road-trip. More was going on here than a simple time-distance equation. "Where are you, McArdle?" I asked. "Dolores," he said. "Bullshit," I said. "You want to talk to Tom?" he said. I did, and damned if he wasn't telling the truth. I looked at the clock on the stove and it pointed straight-up noon. McArdle was a jump ahead of me at every step. "...and if you go 100 miles an hour for five hours, you've gone 500 miles." "There's a lot more to that statement than meets the ear," I said to him. "That's what I was thinking." Jim McArdle had left Pastime Road and Oracle at 7 a.m., and rolled into Tom's Conoco station in Dolores, Colorado, at 1 p.m. Noon, our time. I already knew the distance involved in the equation because Jim and Pat Palmer and I had made this trip last Labor Day. It was 500 miles even. We knew because we'd had to chip in to pay the freight on a new rear axle shaft for Jim's BMW. The old one seized up in front of Tom's Conoco in Dolores, and we'd spent three days waiting for the replacement to arrive in Cortez. Three days of playing poker, eating pork chops and drinking beer. Tom and his friends rolled out the Welcome Wagon. Five times 100 equals 500. It sounded so simple and unremarkable. Five hours times 100 mph equals 500 miles. Still nothing to phone home about. Until you retrace the steps taken to get there. For starters there are maybe eight or a dozen stop lights on Oracle Road before you get out of town. You couldn't hit every one of them green. And then you've got to go through Oro Valley where the cops wait to nail anybody going one over the limit. Then there's Oracle, Mammoth, Globe, the Salt River Canyon and Show-Low. You've got to slow at least to 80 going down the main street of Show-Low. And then there's gas. The motorcycle has yet to be made that can cover 500 miles on a tankful. Jim had to stop for fuel at least three times. Did he break for lunch? A beer? To take a leak? Going 100 miles an hour for five hours in order to go 500 miles is a straightforward proposition in a grammar school math text, but in the real world it involves bursts of relatively serious speeds--125 or more--to offset the inevitable school zones, hairpin corners, stop signs, suspicious-looking, plain-vanilla Chevrolet sedans in the rearview mirror. I have observed--both in conversation and in print--that in order to maintain a 15 mile-an-hour average over a typical day's ride of, say, 400 miles, one needs a motorcycle capable of running 150. That's because riding a motorcycle allows you nothing short of intense concentration and attendance to the business at hand. You don't fiddle with any radio, chat with a passenger, suck on a bottle of beer, adjust the temp on the A.C., munch Fritos or anything except watch where the road goes, check your mirrors, study the moves and manners of traffic so nobody carelessly murders you. In point of actual fact, there is nobody on the road more alert nor safer than a motorcyclist running way beyond the posted speed limit. You want to talk menacing and dangerous to every other life form on the highway, take your out-of-state Lincoln Town Car with an elderly gentleman behind the wheel, Lawrence Welk on the CD player and cruise set at a conservative 54 mph. This guy hasn't had a thought pertinent to the trip he's on since the last time he felt the need to find a Stuckey's and empty his weak bladder. He could run you and your motorcycle off the road, leave you for dead, and never even know it. You, on the other hand, peering at the world through the Lexan shield of your helmet, focused like a laser, every sense on the qui vivre, are alert to and appreciative of the potential threat of each speck on your horizon. Nobody is safer than he who understands the danger that surrounds him. "That's pretty remarkable, Jim," I said. "So where do you plan to go from there?" "I thought I'd go up to North Dakota and see Pete and Debbie. I may slow down a bit." Which he did. And collected six speeding tickets. I've got just 700 miles to cover on my bike from here at the feet of the Colorado Rockies until I'm back with the dogs and cats and horses. I figure to use up the better part of three days. At that rate I'll be lucky not to end up in jail.

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