IWW Olympia Branch
Train Riding Subcommittee
Black Hills Special Reportback
Fellow Worker! Hello! Tell me, would you like a break from the bleak doom of wage slavery? Well, why not kick back for a moment and read a new special reportback from Olympia’s own IWW Train Riding Subcommittee, SPECIAL MOTORCYCLE EDITION. *engine revs*
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This report back is so fast-paced it managed to verb itself from the past into the PRESENT TENSE
Speeding down the highway on four hundred and twenty pounds of resurrected velociraptor magic, I stare at other motorcyclists in disbelief.
“What a bunch of lunatics. Who would be crazy enough to ride one of those?”
Unregistered, uninsured, loaded down with all my gear and a lunchbox full of cash handcuffed to my wrist, I rocket down Dakota’s highways on an exploding two-wheeled machine gun, while my brain goes blank.
Now,
Where the hell is the revolution?
Black Hills, South Dakota: the endless ocean of prairie gives rise to an island of pine and ancient rock.
“They said to meet here.”
There’s no one here. I’m on the middle of Pe’sla. A bald spot in the middle of the mountains. An inexplicable golden grassland surrounded by crumbling mountains and forest.
“Excuse me, have you seen the revolution? I was told it would be here.”
I ask a local woman after driving onto her property and yelling my head off until someone came outside to see what the dogs were barking at.
“Revolution? No, haven’t heard of one of those round these parts. Maybe ask Joe Buck down the road.”
FINE THEN.
She doesn’t know, but I already flew my goddamn drone all over Joe Buck’s property and scouted it out on my mount, my all-terrain poisonous land vulture also known as a motherfucking motorcycle. He’s got buffalo, a shitload of vehicles, a treeline. No revolution.
Well where the hell is it anyway?
Is it in the IWW? I scour the back trails surrounding Pe’sla. One rocky road leads to several branches. Like the IWW, I choose one branch, which then branches again into several committees, I choose one, then a subcommittee.... There’s nothing here. A dead end.
Sometimes I backup a little, try to do it systematically, committee by committee, but there’s just too much mountain, not enough sun. Ah, the feeble strength of one. I'd need a whole union to find it this way.
At this rate I'll never find it before hyper militarized fascist goon squads with attack dogs and helicopters will be busy getting promotions for how easily they dealt with us.
Day two of the search for the revolution. I give up on doing it systematically and try luck.
“Just around this next corner.”
My motorcycle moves carefully down a back mountain road. Luckily, I have fused myself into it, mind and body, using a combination of LSD, sleep deprivation and tantric yoga. The roads fight back. Rocks, ravines, boulders, downed trees, but thanks to my special nuclear education technique I can navigate it all as gracefully as a jedi-ballerina.
One mistake out here and I’ll be compost. No one to come help me, just tall pine trees, deer with big old antlers, turkeys, eagles, and the impossible empty blues of the coyote void choir every night.
“No not this corner, the next one.”
I realize roads don’t actually need to be traversable, that no one is going to guarantee that they don’t just end suddenly in a steep crevasse leading to my doom. Just like revolution, there’s no guarantee any path we take won’t end in failure and death. And we don’t know which path to take. I try to get lucky, follow the hawks.
“There aren’t any goddamn hippie buses out here. I’m just a fucking WINGNUT!”
I’m looking for painted up school buses. The rural anarchist equivalent of a local branch, except also, nomadic. They’re supposed to be out here building the infrastructure for a free school at the request of some Lakota youths. It’s almost as if we have no fucking communication.
Working systematically didn’t work and following hawks at random didn’t work, I’m going back to town. Not all the way back to Rapid City, the seat of power in this Mount Rushmore tourist fart-based economy, no just to Hill City, a much smaller old west looking tourist town where I can easily lean up against a post and get my James Dean on.
I speed down to Hill City in a cloud of dust, into the sunset, and a hawk cries, a wolf howls, and
where the hell is the revolution?
I get to Hill City and there’s all kinds of motorcyclists lining the old-west style mainstreet because there’s some depraved motorcycle festival somewhere around here where all the retired white couples come trying to find some kind of adventure.
“It’s right here damn it! I am the real goddamn adventure!”
Nobody cares. I am the youngest motorcyclist by far.
“I’m trying to recapture the feeling of my youth!” I tell them. But they don’t care.
Now normally at this part of the story I should go to a bar and order a beer and sort of lilt over it like a tall dark stranger and just look so perfectly American, with maybe a slouching sombrero and a cigarette with its ashes falling off the only motion my stoic profile provides against the dimming light. Wait, is that bugs bunny? Goddamnit I’m subconsciously channeling bugs bunny, aren’t I?
“Hey stranger,” A woman with a mohawk and face tattoos dances up and starts grinding on me.
"Hey! What? Have you seen the revolution?”
“Shh!” She dramatically puts a finger over my mouth and then, all sly and conspiratorial: “Who told you?”
“Uh”
“Were you followed?”
“No, but I have the wrong coordinates.”
“Ok here, take these.” She writes them on my palm. “I’ll meet you there.”
"What's your name" I shout as she skips away.
She turns back.
"The name's Kiki." She says, indicating herself with her thumb in a dramatic anime-style gesture, then she runs off.
I check the coordinates against my map. Oh yeah. I know where that is. After two days of this, I know where the fuck everything is.
I quickly strap on my helmet, flip a bunch of switches, twist some dials, the engine starts. Revolution here I come.
I fly down the road to the secret rebel base and there's a fence and a NO TRESPASSING sign.
“This must be a test.”
I try to force my way in. No beans, the gate is locked up tight. Well maybe it wasn’t a test. Maybe I should just take that road that doesn’t go through a locked gate. I go around and in the failing light realize this mountain path is by far the most treacherous of any that I rode down so far. I guess this revolution’s gonna fuck me up.