During one of my annual treks to Sturgis, bisecting Nevada along Route Fifty, things began to go down hill after The Wilderness motel near the Utah border. Geeze. I never should have walked into that fool casino across the road. Yeah. I guess it was my turn in the barrel.

I'd been through that region before on previous trips to South Dakota but not through that tiny berg. I should have been more alert but I was enjoying the ride and dismissed the events, which, in retrospect, should have warned me that ole Lady Luck was playing with me.

I decided to stop early that afternoon, about three, to overnight in a no name place, a short way off the famous, lonesome Route Fifty. The summer sun did its thing and sapped my usual endless, iron butt, marathon-like endurance. A handy, nondescript restaurant/casino was right across the street from the motel. The motel was in poor condition, however I've slept in some pretty hairy places during my past two decades of motorcycling.

I signed for my room with someone who seemed to be a passer-by. He was an old, bent, gray whiskered dude who happened to be walking past the tiny office as I filled out a guest card. He shuffled through the door, around the counter, handed me a key on a plastic fob that advertised Suzy's Chicken Ranch in New Mexico and then disappeared without saying a word. Guess I'd pay the bill in the morning.

Up the warped wooden steps I went, past the peeling sun bleached paint and the business end of the room air conditioner protruding through one window of room 201. "It had better work," I moaned.

When I opened the door it was obvious that the place was not insulated from the elements. A whoosh of hot oven air washed over me as I dumped my saddlebags on the lumpy bed.

"Okay, Sam. What do you want for twenty-nine bucks a night?"

I answered my own question. "Twenty-nine dollars worth of cool." I often talked to myself on long rides.

I took off all my clothes.

Where is the idiot on/off switch? Surely this antique A/C had one. It was not immediately apparent.

"I guess I'd better start with the power cord. Plug it in, dummy."

I did, and the compressor came on.

Yes. Yes. Coolness. Well, noise, anyway.

I twisted the old fashioned dial to maximum cooling and the knob came off in my hand. Damn. And the position of the dial hadn't changed.

"No problem, Mr. Fix-it. Get your handy-dandy Leatherman® and go to work."

After a few experimental turns of the shaft, cool air began to waft past my arms. Yes. Salvation. I left the room door open to ventilate the place while I cleaned up. Before I did that however, I lifted off the toilet tank cover to shut off a noisy trickle of water and kill the whistling plumbing. Gad. That was a mistake. What a disaster. The Black Hole of Calcutta.

For an instant, I thought a creature from another planet could be living in that swill of black yuck. I overcame my momentary sense of science fiction fear of noxious aliens and succeeded in bending the arm of the float.

"Yup, I'm good. And now to wash up."

Even the cold water was tepid, but as I washed my face and hands, my face burned. A quick look in the aged medicine cabinet mirror and, yup. Red. Number forty-five sun block against the desert, and my skin lost. My dermatologist would be concerned but not his banker.

Desert grime is particularly gritty and the water from my wash-up remained in the little rust stained sink. I contemplated the quiet water level and considered the potential for a booby trap if I attempted a fix. Is this a rerun of This Old House, or a Tim Allen comedy? Would my luck hold? Should I attempt to clear the drain? I hadn't tested the shower yet.

I caught myself getting silly and wondered if I'd been out in the heat of the noonday sun far too long.

"Twenty-nine dollars a night, dummy."

Hell, I pulled the stopper out of the drain and a six-inch long chain of hair came with it. The water gurgled its way down the pipe. Double yuck.

"Damn I'm good."

Time to eat. Was it a casino or a restaurant? Perhaps neither, depending on one's perspective. As is often my wont, I ordered the house special, amid background clanks and buzzes from the slots. The dinner special turned out to be some kind of a baked beef stew-like cauldron of stringy meat and peculiar colored vegetables. If the round lumps were potatoes, they would have made super projectiles, like ball ammunition. Maybe it was the fluorescent lights, maybe it was me, or the desert heat. I just picked at it and drank lots of ice water. The background din of a monotone clanging helped my loss of appetite. Ah, such ambiance.

I tried my luck. Or, I was being tried by my luck. That great sucking sound, often referred to by politicians, was not the after effects of NAFTA. It was the whirlwind pace of quarters spewing from my pocket into the bowels of those machines. Soon I was playing three at a time in an idiot effort to triple-up and beat the dealer, as it were. I was at my self-imposed limit in short order. Hell, I could do better in Deadwood. I was tired anyway.

I checked the bike on the way back to my room, locked the handlebars and ran a chain through the front wheel. Typical worthless anti-theft devices that soothe the biker psyche. The close proximity of the motel to the road didn't concern me as it usually would. The snorting rumble of tractor trailer trucks often shake and rattle rooms that close to a road, but this berg had no traffic to speak of. A real quiet no-place place. And the A/C had dropped the room temperature down to where I could sleep, as long as I was naked.

I recognized the carpeting. On the way back from the now quiet bathroom, I noticed that the carpeting was the same as that in the living room of my folks' old house. That would make the carpeting at least twenty-five years old, which fit with the old black rotary phone on top of the fake wood night table. Kinda reminded me of a reject from a wood shop class. I got a kick out of the kinks in the rabbit ears of the vintage TV. Yup, twenty-nine bucks.

I laid my skin down on the top sheet, spread eagle, dissipating body heat to the rumble of the struggling A/C. After I set my alarm clock for six-thirty a.m., I chuckled at the thought of calling for room service, or for a wake-up call.

The morning was not electra. It was a rerun of any of the previous mornings. Hot, bright and beautiful, if you're a desert-o-phile like me. So what could possibly go wrong?

For one thing, I could forget to undo the chain I put through my front wheel before I tried to ride out of town.

So I broke the speedometer cable, and without a gas gauge, how do I determine when to get gas? I get forty miles per gallon at sixty-five MPH, and twenty-nine or so MPG at ninety MPH. I'd have to modulate my speed to manage the distances between gas stations all the way to the Black Hills. I'd have to use mileage posted on road signs whenever I found them and my wrist watch to compute, to guess that is, when I might run out of gas.

I hate mornings like that, mornings that start poorly. The day can go down hill from there. I wondered if any of the larger towns on my route might have a motorcycle shop and a replacement speedo cable? I knew Loveland, Colorado had a good racing shop but that was a while away. I checked the local phone booklet. Now there's a joke. I needed a big town, so I got on my way, in need of some coffee and a cable.

A short while later, my windshield broke loose.

I remained in remarkable control as I slowed to the side of the deserted road.

I seized the opportunity to investigate my immediate environment and walked a bit, checking the exotic flora and fauna of my locale. It's a good thing I like the heat, preferring incubating to shivering. Indeed, the desert was certainly beautiful.

All this wonderful, simmering, shimmering landscape and not another soul around to whom one could express one's awe over nature's proud, resplendent regalia. Bald hills, scrub bush, clear skies and absolutely no shade. No shade for people, at least. An inquisitive salamander eyed me from the darkness beneath some dry vegetation. I engaged it in a rather one-sided conversation as I made emergency roadside repairs.

Later, like the Lone Ranger, I yelled into the desert emptiness, "On to the rally and races," and sped through Utah.

"Damn, I'm good."

Sturgis Rally News.