Key West Bike Week Poker Run 2011 ~ Thinking Back on ‘Easy Rider’
I’m no motorcycle mama, that’s for sure, but Key West Bike Week has always tickled my fancy and turned my whole perspective around. I’m amazed that over 10,000 bikers and enthusiastic characters come out for this event and ride down the Florida Keys in September, during some of the hottest and rainiest summer weather. Free spirits unleashed they ride for fun and charity – The Poker Run – they stop and draw their hands along the way down the “Big Slab” to enjoy colorful contests and bikini bike washes, and eat and drink and carry on. The sheer color of it all gets my head spinning with the memories of the mind-bending times of the 1960’s.
You see, I was a ‘flower power’ child of the 1960’s, and the artful movie “Easy Rider” (1969) etched Steppenwolf’s song “Born To Be Wild” in my mind forever. Watching those 2 counter culture biker dudes (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) travel from L.A.to the New Orleans Mardi Gras “in search of America,” unleashed a new level of free spirit in the baby boomer generation. As we listened to their shocking improvised dialog and watched their outrageous encounters with hitchhikers, a drunken ACLU lawyer (Jack Nicholson), a whorehouse, a friend dying, and jail time, the 1960’s generation took notice and the biker culture took hold.
Key West Bike Week takes my head back for sure – and forward at the same time. The inescapable ‘blapata – blapata – blapata’ sound of engines touring around the tiny island inspiring many and perturbing some. As I walk along the downtown Key West streets and stare at the Choppers, Sportsters, Full Dresses, Low Riders, Crotch Rockets, Soft Tails, and Triumphs, magnificent machines that these motorcycles are, I’m impressed with the inspired rebellion they represent.
There was a saying in the 1960’s – “It’s not the Destination, it’s the journey that Matters the Most.” But in this case everyone seems to end up at the ‘end of the road’ in Key West – ‘a biker’s destination extraordinaire.’
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMbATaj7Il8[/youtube]
