Southwest Missouri “Rocky Comfort 350TT” Open Road Motorcycle Route

Jim Roche, Southwest Missouri “Rocky Comfort 350TT” Open Road Motorcycle Route, 2006, graphite and color pencil on paper, 18 x 40 inches.

Museum: Some references come through loud and clear, but who are “corner worshipers?”

JR: “Corner Worshiper” is someone who is a motorcyclist — bicyclist, either one — who really does get their thrills not just in the driving or the scenery or the road, but in the actual finessing of corners at high speed, even if they are very sharp. If you are in a hairpin corner doing forty, you are still really, really running. Get down here where we run in the South and out in Texas and parts of the Colorados and you begin to be increasingly competent at higher speeds, where you are running sweepers and complex sweepers. That’s the kind of road we have here. When I go up to the mountains, it is an entirely different world because your speed never gets very high. Yet, your intensity and your consequences, in case there’s an accident, remain very high on all of these. This is an example where I have a contiguous route: that’s the orange one, which would be the Thomasville High Speed Endurance Loop. Then you notice, there is a blue, a green, and a red for internal loops.

JR: I would like to say about the roads — because of the “where do you find them?” question — you have to go to states and find areas of the country where the roads were originally Indian walkways. They would take the easiest walking pathways and they didn’t go in a straight line. Then their trails became roads for horses. Then the horse roads became roads for wagons and those became gravel. Then they were paved. The original curvature is still there because you don’t just shoot a straight line, like we do here in Florida, as far as you want to, and say, go pave it, no, you can’t do that through the mountains. You find roads that hearken back to Indian trails.

My recent interest is in Indian trail trees. There are a couple of books on it, but not many, for some of us who have an interest; Indians would mark roads by bending an oak tree, most often an oak tree, I think, occasionally a chestnut, but oaks, primarily. While it is little, they would bend it over, cut it and make it turn in certain ways so that it grew out and pointed, often towards the trail for water, or in some cases, the trail might mark where they were going to be hidden. Especially during the Trail of Tears; there were quite a few cut to mark a direction where they may have buried things, or to caves and the like. On these very roads we might see an Indian trail tree, that’s a real rare find. It is a big deal to find a trail tree. The roads that we’re seeking, even in California, because there are extensive roads in California, Northern California as well, but those are Indian trails that then became gravel and then became pavement. It’s no fun, if you are a corner worshipper, to just ride down the road — cruise, you know, cruise.