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There are those who would argue that we are witnessing the waking moments of The Great American Dream. Prosperity squandered, moral authority corrupted, and a melting pot fouled and separated. But despite all that we have done to pollute it, there will always be at least one great purifying American dream accessible to all…a pilgrimage across our land. It is an intrinsically sacred act that connects us to our forefathers (and mothers) who first conquered this expanse from sea to shining sea. First by horse and carriage, later by trains, planes, automobiles, and of course by motorcycle. In our modern age when there is no corner of the globe left uncharted, 45 noble riders and uncounted noble supporters set forth from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on September 10, 2010 so they might go back in time, saddle up astride pre-1916 vintage bikes, and chart our great country once again.

While I later learned that the Cannonball Endurance Run was titled after Erwin “Cannonball” Baker, the famed racer, my first guess was that anyone competing would likely feel as if they were giving birth to a cannonball…without an epidural…while enduring a two-week delivery, hence Cannonball Endurance Run. As I awaited their arrival beneath the gates of the iconic Santa Monica Pier in California last weekend, I anticipated that the humbled participants and their bedraggled steeds would limp and sputter mercifully to the conclusion of their torment. But far from battered and broken, the universally beatific dispositions of the participants nearly outshone the sun on that 100-degree day.

Edward Zalonski, who competed on a 1910 Flying Merkel beamed, “It was a group of strangers who all got together and had a ball. I cannot believe how friendly everybody was! You spent the whole day trying to ride the bike, and the whole night lying under it trying to fix it, but it’s so memorable. This was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal. Sure, we had a lot of problems. We had a cylinder that had to be shipped from home, and a piston, and a new carburetor, and a manifold, an ignition one time, I blew one tire, I blew another tire bringing the new tire back to the bike. But the thing is that people I had never met were so helpful. I was stuck on a road five or six days ago and a guy stops by and says, ‘My shop is right around the corner.’ I was trying to fix the clutch and so we brought it over to his shop and spent three or four hours working on it. He couldn’t do enough for us, and it seemed to be like that with everybody we met along the way. Nobody could do enough for you to get you going. My toolbox stayed open in the back of my pickup the whole time and people came and worked out of it while I was asleep in my room, but I never had a tool go missing. Heck, the bike doesn’t even belong to me. I borrowed it from the owner, and I put it together in about three to four months. He paid all my expenses. I’ve only met the guy before I took the bike maybe two or three times. I did the best I can, but I was maybe a month or two short of getting it really running good. I just ran out of time. I only rode it for two or three miles before leaving for the rally.”

The tenaciousness of the riders and their crews in coaxing nearly century old motorcycles across a 3,294 mile long ribbon of asphalt was perhaps best exemplified by Katrin Boehner, who earned the admiration of all her peers by winning the Class 1 single cylinder, single speed title, completing the journey at 35 mph on a 1907 250cc J.A.P. The lone female rider to finish opined, “Unfortunately we have to crate them now. I just got used to riding it 200 miles a day and unfortunately it’s finished now. I’d like to do it again. It was so much fun!”

Dale Walksler, proprietor of the Wheels Through Time Museum, was duly impressed with both the event and the participants, “I figured there’d be about six or eight bikes show up. You always gotta think about the West Coast guys have been doing pre-sixteen runs for the last thirty years, and those guys are pretty strong. But for a lot of the guys who just decided to build something up for this event, to finish as strong as they did is pretty amazing. What really amazed me was the stick-to-it-iveness that a lot of people had. I figured if they had a major catastrophe they’d just give up, but those guys toughed through it, and fixed their bikes, and made it through as many miles as they could.”

Walksler was also eager to give kudos to Harley-Davidson’s early engineering team. “I did all 3,300 and whatever it is miles, minus two miles for a minor engine failure about two days ago,” he said. “A 1915 three-speed Harley will hang right in there with modern traffic. These bikes are really made to go. That’s the bike that put all the other companies out of business back in 1915. They had a three-speed transmission, great metallurgy, great engine, great chassis, that’s why the predominant finishers with full points or close to full points like mine were Harley-Davidsons.”

The last 95 years weren’t as kind to the fabrication of some of the bikes though, and tales of mechanical misadventures abounded. Doug Rykel, who claims that his team’s 1914 Pope 625cc OHV single did (mostly) 50-55 mph all day long recounts, “About four days ago we were in the Navajo Nation up in Northern Arizona, and we had a broken axle and we were done. We spent four hours on the side of the road repairing and actually adapting another smaller axle too small for the frame and we ran 270 miles that day with no brakes. We came in at nine at night and it was scary running through the hills and the mountains with no lights and no brakes and we still made it. We had a little light from the full moon though, so it can always be worse. It’s been a little tortuous at times but it’s been a great adventure all the way along and it’s a lot of hard work that paid off. These machines are amazing. I have quite a few antique motorcycles and in my wildest dreams I never thought these things would come across the country the way they did. They were really surprising.”

There are those who would claim that we are witnessing the dying days of the Great American Dream, and I suppose that they could point to some pretty damning evidence. For the first time in history, our country is suffering more from the self-inflicted wounds of power-madness, unbridled greed, and cultural jingoism, than from the hostile actions of any foreign enemy. There are days when it feels as if our one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all is being slowly stolen from us in broad daylight, right beneath our noses. But I would remind those folks who prophesy that the tale of American greatness has reached its final page, that this weekend I bore witness to a group of great American dreamers, reconnecting to the Great American Dream just as it was imagined by big-hearted optimists with indomitable spirits nearly a century ago. So if, as they proclaim, that dream is truly over, someone sure as hell forgot to tell the Cannonballers about it. http://www.motorcyclecannonball.com/