I typically read very little fiction. Each day I read a wide variety of news sources online and I read magazines and mostly historical books. So I read the New Yorker magazine but I generally skip the fiction piece they put in each issue.

They grabbed me in the October 19 issue, though. The full-page image on the left-hand page was the back of a biker’s jacket with a variety of patches and my eye fell on the word “Harley” in the first sentence on the facing page. OK, let’s see what this is about.

I didn’t immediately recognize the geographical references but it soon came out that this was Ireland, and this group of six aging riders were heading west to spread the ashes of their seventh member on the seashore where he grew up. His name was Chuck Murphy and the piece is titled “Chuck Murphy’s Last Run.”

This was a bunch of old-time hard-core bikers. There was talk of rumbles, addictions, and incarceration so these guys were not wannabes. They still talked trash like the old days but no one took that seriously anymore.

The thing was, and this is why I’m telling you about it, that after awhile I forgot I was reading fiction, not memoir, and I got very caught up in it as a true-life story. That counts as good fiction in my book.

I smiled in recognition when the narrator remarked that “It is a dismaying aspect of the Irish bike tramp’s lot that even the most epic of journeys tend to run out of road after three or four hours. This is a small island, our horizons are cruelly foreshortened, and even if you decide to head way out west you’re still in County Sligo long before teatime.”

Judy and I went to Hawaii last year and as I noticed motorcycles from time to time it occurred to me then that living in Hawaii–or on any island smaller than, say, one of the New Zealand islands–must be a motorcyclist’s purgatory because you’re condemned to ride just a very few roads again and again and again.

There’s not a lot more that would benefit from my trying to tell you about it so I’ll stop here. I would recommend you read it yourself, following that link up at the top. It’s worth a few of your minutes.

Biker Quote for Today

I had dreamed all night of riding alone through strange country and unknown places, had dreamed of nameless valleys and broad mysterious fields, of sombre mountain roads, all of it sweeping past me in a blur, as this life sweeps past, and streaks of pale gold reached out across the ripening fields. These dreams, I felt, had the certain weight of a foretelling—they told me of the lonelier roads to come. — Kevin Barry

Tags: Chuck Murphy's Last Run, motorcycle fiction, motorcycle stories, New Yorker magazine

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