Jim Roche: Glory Roads

Dirt-Dauber 365 TT for Ground Sport Motorcycles (2010)

JR: My daddy was a State beverage agent, bless his heart. Daddy was, a veteran, a two-time veteran, and a highway patrolman, but then he was a beverage agent. One of the nicest memories I ever had, in 1956, when I would soon be entering high school, my daddy was given a special car. It was a 1955 Chevrolet. I can’t help but tear up thinking about him. It had a Cadillac engine in it because they had to catch the “bad guys.” There was none of this pull over and call ahead for a road block. You either caught him or he got away. It was just that simple.

Museum: Then, it wasn’t a regular car, it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

JR: It was a wolf in serious sheep’s clothing. My daddy could really drive. I will never forget him. We were a little older then. We were getting into cars. I had already built my little go-carts. So my friend Dennis and I, Daddy told us to get in the back seat. We went out Meridian Road, when you passed Mutt and Jeff’s, there was nothing until you hit Thomasville Road and then nothing, just a few houses. I will never forget my dad in that car. We got down in our seats with our big eyes open like this, and he took off.

Meridian Road at that time was just a canopy, a tunnel. I remember how it became so fast, as they say, that the telephone poles looked like a picket fence. We were rolling. I never forgot that. I always loved driving and I always loved speed. Over the years, everywhere I went, whether it was in California, or Missouri, or Arkansas, or the Ohio Basin, Georgia, Texas, I kept notes of favorite roads. Now, as I am in the twilight of that part of my life, I’ve decided to capture those, write down what I know about them, and make them into maps, those roads I have ridden; I know what’s there. Like I say, I never thought it would be of much interest, but the drawings, people come up to them and they say, “Hey, I know that plac

1963 BMW R69S (1973)

JR: I have loved motorcycles all my life. At this time, I had already begun to think in terms of how to transform a vehicle into something that over-exaggerated the nature of everything around me. I never did a motorcycle because I don’t think I could shake away from the need for a motorcycle to have precise stopping, precise lights, and everything else. I proposed one. This is the first BMW that I ever owned. I had had bicycles, motorcycles and all, but my life changed when I got a 1963 R69S and really about 1971, it changed me. I used the distinctive look of a BMW, which with the cylinders coming out from the side and these, what is called an Earles Fork front end, highly recognizable, suggested things that we could put on it to do it up, so to speak, to do the motorcycle.   All these small sketchbook drawings were done on 100 percent paper, rag paper, but it was notebook paper like you still see, today. At that time, I was fluent, though I obviously could not spell. I could spell my name and various things that you absolutely needed to have, but the piece wasn’t about that. If anything, I like remembering the drawings where you don’t have confines. No constraints, you just have at it. Get the idea down, quickly, make sure that it’s readable and make sure that someone doesn’t have to know art for them to know what you’re talking about. Do a drawing anyone can understand.

The Sunday Morning Run (1981)

Museum: How did you find these roads? Were there other riders who had maps before you started making your own?

JR: No. That’s the beauty of it. You just go out and find them. Of course, when we first started to run motorcycles in Tallahassee, and with me that would have been when I got my first Ducati in 1966, we were riding much closer into town. We would just wait ’til the evening, and then when the sun went down, we went out. We were all over, Tallahassee was so small. Later, you began to venture further and further out. Even when I came back from Texas some of our loops were closer in. We would be off of what is now Velda Dairy Road and then Bradfordville, in that area. We would run back towards Lamont and down towards Wacissa and back in, even end up in Woodville, then back. You also began to find out where the churches were, where people are more likely to get you in trouble. Wakulla County is an example. Not to be prejudicial, there are just too many people drinking on the road to take a motorcycle down there. You usually try to find places that are isolated.

Jim Roche, The Sunday Morning Run, 1981, ink drawing on notebook paper, 11 x 8.5 inches; annotations: 10/18/81 114.4 miles 1 hr 35 min even 72 mph; 11/8/81 114.7 1 hr 19 min 87.11 mph personal record. [facing page] Jim Roche, undated evolution of The Sunday Morning Run, graphite and marker on notebook paper, 11 x 8.5 inches.

The Texas “Hill Rabbit 1000” Mile TT and its two internal loops (2006)

Museum: T.T. — time trial, and the number is how many miles long, and, it is a race, right?

JR: No, not a race. A time trial. Well, it is, if it is like the oldest on-going race in the world, on the Isle of Man. That is a T.T, a time trial, where you have a certain distance. In that case, the IOM (Isle of Man), it is thirty-seven miles and you run it six times. You are going for timing, how quickly you can do that. It is not like a rally, where you establish a speed you want to get to. The time trial is where you are running on real world roads. It is not enclosed track. In that way, it is really what “road racing” used to be before it moved to tracks.

The “Knob, Hollow, and Run 350” Mile TT (2006)

Museum: There is inherent danger in this as a sport.

JR: You have your own individual days of reckoning however you come to it. [One day] I had come back from Alaska on my BMW. I was young. I got up one morning after I had been working on the bike and I had on blue jeans and just a set of tennis shoes and a tee shirt, which you should never do. I always ride in full leathers for protection. All I needed to do was go to the Safeway store, but the center stand on the bottom of my bike had two springs to pull it up. One of them had broken and the other one wasn’t in such good shape. I was feeling so good that day, I had just tuned the bike and it was going great and I was just having fun at that point in life and so I deliberately picked a manhole cover that sits up a little off the road, just five or six inches up, in order to ride over it so I could test my suspension. When I hit that and went up, the other center stand spring broke. The center stand dropped down. When it hit, it hit flat on that manhole cover and immediately I was thrown end-over-end with the motorcycle right down on the pavement. It was just the first time I had ever been thrown that hard onto hard pavement. [That was] a bad wreck. It took me a long time to heal, I didn’t break anything on my body, but I was completely black and blue. The drawing had influence, certainly for my friend Ree Morton (who would later die in a car accident). Ree did a piece of flags that named everybody she was really touched by and a couple of other artists did the same, but hers meant more to me.

Not to get religious with you or spiritual with anyone, but I’ll speak for myself: when that happens to you, the epiphany is instant and real. The bike went end-over-end, I went straight. I’d been running about forty-five mph on hard, no kidding, pavement. I never touched anything but pavement in the roll. There wasn’t a place on me that wasn’t blue. So I thought if I had died then, and these people that meant so much to me in my life didn’t know that they had meant anything or that I remembered them or that I never told them, what would it be like? I couldn’t have that. I went home immediately and started the drawing and it starts with me naming people, naming friends, naming situations. I was writing over things. Names like Shep, Beowulf, and Ladybug were all dogs I had. Wiggly. I had dogs named Autopsy and Crush and stuff like that. Then I would come back to influences: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo and so forth. And then the friends from one time or another. I was in the school of narrative; I was also taken with how narrative could be used.

The Eastern Loops

JR: This was the original one [the original “loop”], the first. That is the route I run every Sunday morning with some of the extended loops, as I called them, the Eastern Loops. Over in the far right, you see the Havana 100 mile T.T., or time trial. Then later, as I started drawing, I began to expand from that core hundred-mile area, to other runs that we would make. Eventually, all of these connect to form the Tallahassee 600 mile T.T. and then the 750 T.T.

Museum: The accident with the deer was fairly close to home.

JR: I hit the deer right on Meridian Road at the Georgia line. I was coming in from Beachton. We turn at Rocky Hill on Hadley Ferry, go to Gainey Road, go to Lower Hawthorne and then on around. As I crossed the Georgia / Florida Line in 2005, I didn’t hit the deer, I vaporized the deer. Have you ever seen the picture of it?

Museum: No, but it’s probably best that way, thank you for asking.

JR: It’s actually a wonderful photograph because so many people thought it was faked. People thought it was a fake photograph. The deer is in perfect repose, except it looks as if it has been surgically . . .

Museum: … bisected?

JR: Bisected. Because I was running, I won’t use the exact speeds, let’s just say the speedometer had three digits showing. I am very excited because I am still working on these drawings and down here I say that I am still studying for my open road motorcycle finals.

The Havana TT100 Open-Road Motorcycle Loop as it has been run by Jim Roche since 1977

JR: The reason I did this, one of the very first ones, is that it’s the route from my hometown, here in Tallahassee. I start in Havana up on Lower Hawthorne Trail. In this one, I did write some basic scenarios: expect the unexpected, foot-down stop at every stop sign, quiet, clutch in, coast through all church zones, all animals have the right of way. I’d already learned my lesson by that point. You give aid when needed, do not drive beyond your limits, slow down and show respect around towns, communities, and gatherings, full bodied protection mandatory at all times, period, no exceptions, respect all law enforcement officers and abide posted limits, and the main thing, do not drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.

Jim Roche, detail from The Havana TT100 Open-Road Motorcycle Loop as it has been run by Jim Roche since 1977, graphite on paper. Photo credit: Jon Nalon. Cover: Jim Roche, Dirt-Dauber 365 TT for Ground Sport Motorcycles, in progress in 2010, color pencil on paper, 33 x 50 inches.

The Quincy 200 Open Road Motorcycle Loop

JR: You learn some basic rules having to do with churches, horses, and children. If you run it long enough, even the dogs become familiar with you and don’t run out. If you don’t want law enforcement down on you, because they can stop us anytime they want, I’ve been stopped multiple times in road blocks, but they weren’t looking for me, you use common sense. They were looking for people who were doing wheelies, who had been coming through some of those churches with open mufflers. Anytime they want to stop you, they can and they will.

The Blue Ridge 500 TT (2004)

JR: And coasting through [those church zones]. . . Well, definitely because that’s where you really can get in trouble in the church zones up there. They take it serious, but, you know, they don’t mind us. That Blue Ridge 500 mile T.T. right there is a beaut! Now this is one . . . I ran the Blue Ridge 500. I have done multiple loops of this and later I would purchase a place up there. This was before I did that, but this is Motorcycle Central for the East Coast. This is where they run the Tour of Georgia. They run the same roads we do.

So there is Route 60 where Thunder Road was filmed, here is Suches. That is Morganton. And Suches is right down there. Actually, kind of at that intersection. I didn’t put the town in. This is State Road 180 over Wolfpen Gap. Blood Mountain. Of course, the Richard B. Russell Highway, Scenic Highway. These are classic roads: Wayah Bald Road, Ellijay Road. All of these are known motorcycle roads, as I said, the number one motorcycle loop. Later, I would expand this map, much more detailed, much finer drawings. If we go in though, each time there is a road change, you have a slash mark for an intersection. Later, I would color those in and I sometimes would highlight areas.

Jim Roche, The Blue Ridge 500 TT, 2004, graphite and color pencil on paper, 23 x 29.5 inches

The Blue Ridge 500 TT 2 (2004)

Museum: So is this also a bicycle race?

JR: Oh, man! We’ve been talking about motorcycles here, but we have it easy! We have it safe! In the afternoons when we go down there, about five in the afternoon, after what little traffic there is coming home, there are only a few people coming home, the bicyclists show up. Some of them speak English and some don’t because they are from all over the world. They paint their clothes on. Their protection —they don’t even have any. They paint these things on that look like clothes, almost, that’s how thin they are. They don’t practice their up-hills. They only practice their down-hills with the cars. . . . Here I am in full leather. I’ve got Metzler tires on my BMW that are as soft as chewing gum. You can’t make them slide. I’m talking about the newest equipment. So when you see a guy, here he comes on a little tiny tire, the diameter of which is about the size of a nickel and he’s running forty-five through a corner that I can barely run forty-five through, it’s terrifying. The bicyclists love these maps as much as the motorcyclists.

The Dog Head (2004)

JR: Do not drive faster than your guardian angel can fly. We all — motorcyclists — use that because we have to think of ourselves as being invisible. We could add that you need to get up every morning, and when you get on your motorcycle, remember one thing: the only reason that the person in the car also got up that morning was to run over you. You have to drive with that in mind. When I started these maps, in an earlier drawing, you will notice that I put my best recent time of sixty-four minutes flat, running on my R11S BMW and I gave a date. On many of these, I gave the date. So you can do the figuring. This is ninety-nine point seven miles and my E.T. was sixty-four minutes even stopping at everything, and only averaging approximately, in this case, eighty-eight miles an hour average speed. You can very quickly figure out what you are running at some points.

Museum: To average eighty-eight mph, math is very useful. Scary useful.

JR: You’ve got to be rolling to do that!

Museum: But coasting through those church zones.

Jim Roche, The Dog Head, 2004, graphite and color pencil on paper, 30.25 x 44 inches.

The Tallahassee Crown 750TT Open Road Motorcycle Loop

JR: This map is the quintessential design . . . about as good as my drawings are going to get. I will say, that on this drawing, which is the Tallahassee Crown 750 T.T. It includes all of the popular loops that motorcyclists run around here, especially the ones I’ve run all my life, with intersecting routes showing connections. If you ran the route, the Crown 750, it is 750 miles of a contiguous route, but inside of it are multiple loops. In my case, I differentiate them in color and show how they connect. With the heartbeat, if you will, being the original Havana 100 Mile T.T, which starts near Calvary in the Havana area.

Jim Roche, The Tallahassee Crown 750TT Open Road Motorcycle Loop, 2004, graphite and color pencil on paper, 29.5 x 41.75 inches.

The Tallahassee Crown 600TT (2005)

JR: This is the Crown 600 T.T, but it does not extend up into the Flint River section. It’s one that puts together the Havana 100 Mile T.T, the Quincy 200, the Thomasville “Road Dice” 350 T.T. A lot of the fun is naming them. Of course there had to be a Silver Sliver. If you familiarize yourself with the names, you can run all of this with no maps. I know all of these roads, even today. It means that a person can go pick different slots. One weekend, you might run this, but, let’s say you run it two weekends in a row, word is out. You better not be back there too much. You might want to run this one next time. Give this one a breather, a little rest time over here. Then so forth, back to here, or run the contiguous route. I try to put in the towns. I try and show short cuts and on some of them I will write, as I did on here, about the basic-ness of it: two eyes, two hands, two legs, two wheels.

JR: Often, I will draw things like escape routes and short cuts. I will show places where, if you didn’t want to go out to some of these very obscure areas out here, you cut through. When I first started these drawings, I had no idea that they would be for anyone other than myself and my motorcycle friends. That was it . . . and bicyclists. But the very first time we showed them in a museum setting, I noticed that people went to them and just stayed in front of them, especially when I showed these at SECCA in North Carolina (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem). There you had variety, multiple types of art; people came over and really studied some of these drawings.

Jim Roche, The Tallahassee Crown 600TT, 2005, graphite and color pencil on paper, 35.75 x 64.5 inches.

The Missouri Cave Bat 500 Mile TT (2006)

JR: How I love Missouri! The thing about Missouri that you have to know, everything in Missouri is, you are either at a cave or going to a cave. It’s all caves. On this one, by this time in the drawings, I began to really get more detailed. You can see all the intersection hash marks and anything else on them. I begin to put more information on them, where you had the mileage between markers. You had all the caves marked. So here, we have five together. To show what the texture is along the road, the only line, which is a black pavement line, is the actual pavement.

You’re on the Arkansas / Missouri border in the Mark Twain National Forest. You go to different parts of the country for different reasons. This is one where it is up and down hills all the time. You have curves, and the real thing is that they don’t mind just sending you right off of a hill right into the nowhere land on the other side. It’s a rocky terrain, very interesting roads that demand a different type of attention, really isolated. Any time you are in Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri, you are out in it. There’s very, very little in this part of the country.

Jim Roche, The Missouri Cave Bat 500 Mile TT, 2006, graphite and color pencil on paper, 36 x 48.25 inches.

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

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.

The Bear Hair 100 Mile Time Trial For Open Road Motorcycles

JR: The Bear Hair is a beauty. This is a route that I run every Sunday when I am up at Buzzard Roost, our Georgia mountain studio. I live on Buzzard Roost Road at the foot of Brasstown Bald. Bear Hair is approximately 100 miles and my best E.T. was 102 miles, twenty-one road changes, and two hours and seven minutes. That sounds like that’s not doing anything, I only averaged forty-seven miles an hour, but, trust me, forty-seven miles an hour on these roads is something! This is where the Tour De Georgia is . . . they took the Tour away from Colorado. Bicyclists, internationally, think this is the best.

Jim Roche, The Bear Hair 100 Mile Time Trial For Open Road Motorcycles, 2008, graphite / color pencil on paper, 33.5 x 34.75 inches.

The Buckhead 300 Mile Time trial Loop for Open Road Motorcycles

Museum: A mysterious inscription on these maps that you need to explain: who is Dr. Curve?

JR: Dr. Curve was a name I did not invent. It came about when I left Tallahassee in 1987. I had been talking back and forth for years to the guys in California. I was building engines and the like. By that time quite frankly, everybody in California assumes they are the best riders in the world and when they hear a whiney Cracker accent like mine, they just think, oh my God, it’s another carhop down there in the South. A flatlander, they called us.

They started a race called “The La Carrera Mexican Road Race.” It has a wonderful history that goes back well into the fifties, where you are running cars on very, very difficult roads in Mexico. In approximately 1986 they reinstated it to run from Ensonata to San Filipe. So, you cross the Baja, three mountain ranges: the San Andreas Fault is right there. You go through three mountain ranges and you end up on the Sea of Cortez and then down to San Felipe. That road was built by the French and it is an extensive road, extremely dangerous. Our motto for the race was: “No guardrails, no hay bales, no snivelers allowed.”

The Gila Wilderness Sky Dog 500TT (2006)

JR: I had built a BMW engine here in Tallahassee and used all my knowledge from stock car building, of V-8 engines, and sports cars to put into this motorcycle. I went out there with my brother in a 1972 international truck. We took our bike, which was the scabbiest, cobby’st-looking bike you have ever seen in your life. We went out there and everybody else had their full decks, their whole big trailers, big pulling things, fancy stuff. The Ducati bikes were was there from Italy: it was an international race. The Ducati team had a helicopter flying to help them out. When I got there, I didn’t know anything about it, I just knew that the California people, every time I had talked to them they had talked about it. When I found out they were going to go there, I decided I would go and I would let them decide for themselves about what we southern riders could do. They were there, the San Jose BMW team. They are a major team still to this day in racing. They had their Daytona bike there. The Ducati had the 7.5 USA Ducati team. The night I was practicing with Fred Eiker. I didn’t know him and had no idea he was the defending champion. He would later tell me that he didn’t know where this person came from. We were practicing hard. In the practice I started leaking a seal. The night before the race, I tore the engine down to the flight wheel in the motel room. I put the bike in the motel room and tore it down to the fly wheel, took off the crank, and then replaced the seal. Meanwhile, they were all drinking at the bar. I’m back there working. He’d been driving all day. The Harley people and the Ducati people were talking about this guy who was just like, you know, he seemed so out of it. He had this engine, blah, blah. Fred Eiker wasn’t saying anything. “Well,” someone said, “actually, he is a school teacher down in Florida. I wonder what he teaches, what his field is?” At that point, Fred Eiker said, “Well, he may be a doctor of curves, in my opinion, and I think he is going to do quite well.” (Fred Eiker won the 1978 Daytona Battle of the Twos on a Moto Guzzi and was a two-time La Carrerra winner.)

The Colville National Forest 310 TT (2006)

JR: I did finish. I won my class and set an absolute record that was not broken in my class and I finished twenty-three seconds behind the factory Ducatis, coming in third. The name Doctor Curve stuck because, of course, they covered this in Cycle World and everything. Here was this guy and they wrote stories about him. He had come out of nowhere and had run this race. They later stopped La Carrera. There were people killed every time. Every time we lost someone and it was an extremely dangerous race. I mean, it is an extremely dangerous road. Later, I would go back, again, violating my own rules, I had run a section the day before and when I ran it the next day coming back, the federales had taken out a section in this one set of curves and replaced it with gravel. We never knew why. I hit that and it was a very, very serious accident. But, Dr. Curve stuck and I began to write for the magazine, which is international. A big magazine. I wrote fifteen articles for them under the name Doctor Curve. Our national motorcycle BMW club is the largest single Marquis club in the United States. It is bigger than the Harley Owner’s Group. We have over 120,000 members. In these maps, that persona comes through where I occasionally will sign it, Jim, “Dr. Curve” Roche.

The “Dixie Cup 250” (2004)

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.

Havana North Section

JR: Often, I will draw things like escape routes and short cuts. I will show places where, if you didn’t want to go out to some of these very obscure areas out here, you cut through. When I first started these drawings, I had no idea that they would be for anyone other than myself and my motorcycle friends. That was it . . . and bicyclists. But the very first time we showed them in a museum setting, I noticed that people went to them and just stayed in front of them, especially when I showed these at SECCA in North Carolina (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem). There you had variety, multiple types of art; people came over and really studied some of these drawings.