This article is part of the series Recalculating, a 28-day motorcycle journey along the Pacific Northwest coast and through its volcanic landscapes.

Before crossing Grayback Road I was due for maintenance. The motorcycle was doing great.

Three weeks on the road, sleeping in different places on different mattresses, and more than 2,000 miles on two wheels meant my body was screaming for maintenance. I was also still unsettled by what had happened the night before. I was safe, but apparently my body had not received the message. My neck, back, and hips were saying hello in all the wrong ways. I am old enough and wise enough to know that sometimes life calls for a deep-tissue massage, and I did not just want one. I needed a good two hours on the table to stretch and realign everything bent out of shape from three weeks on the road.

I found my way to Essential Wellness Bodywork & Massage in Grants Pass, Oregon, and made an appointment for 1:45. That left me with the morning to myself. The crew at the Best Western Grants Pass has always been fantastic. When traveling north in the truck, and now on the bike, I make a point of stopping there at least once, if not twice on each trip north. The breakfast is good, the rooms are clean, the price is spot-on—most of the time—and I have found that the staff at every level works well together here. I honestly did not know what to do with myself, so I checked out and spent a good chunk of the morning sorting photographs and lying by the pool, killing time before my appointment.

My massage therapist, William, was awesome. I think I caught him a little off guard when I started using medical terminology rather than simply saying, “My back hurts.” I told him that I thought my glute medius, piriformis, and quadratus lumborum were tight from repeatedly lifting the motorcycle, while my trapezius, levator scapulae, right extensors, and triceps were unhappy after weeks of throttle control.

As he began to work, he shot back, “Damn, you know your anatomy. You’re one of the most body-aware clients I’ve had on the table.” I smiled.

Years with an amazing physical therapist paid off. William was probably the most anatomically astute massage therapist ever to put hands on me. William worked deeply and precisely. Those two hours were the most wonderfully painful two hours I had experienced in a long time. Knowing your anatomy helps. Knowing to ask for William helps too. I lucked out on the second one.

As soon as I threw my leg over the motorcycle, I could feel the looseness in my body. In some ways, I felt like an awkward teenager who did not understand how big he had become after a growth spurt. My body moved faster. It moved in directions it had not moved before without at least a little tinge of pain. My back turned farther. My neck swiveled more freely.

Today’s ride was supposed to be a simple jaunt over the hill.

It was also 100+ degrees.

A road I had wondered about for years

I had been looking at this road for years, going back to soon after Google Maps launched in 2004. I was the kid who could immerse himself for hours in my parents’ world atlas, looking at all the different places a person could go. Along with Highway 96, this road held a far-off mystique for me because it was one of the only connections from the middle of Highway 96 to the places north of it. It was a small line through a large blank space on the map. Those are usually the roads I want to know more about.

I had driven Grayback Road in the Rivian a couple of years earlier, but that experience was dominated by power, range, and kilowatt-hour consumption. Today would be about heat, pavement quality, and the amount of gravel lying in the roadway.

This was the first stretch of the trip where I was truly riding inside an oven. Yes, I could have gone through the hassle of soaking my shirt and then walking out of the massage studio dripping wet with a very confused receptionist, but I was only riding about seventy miles. I decided to deal with it.

That may not have been my best decision.

I remembered Happy Camp Road from the Rivian as something of a goat trail. I still carried some of the lessons from Washington’s NFD-25 with me as I turned onto another lonely, barren stretch of asphalt through the mountains. First came a sign warning that there were no services. Then another warned that the road was not maintained during winter. Cell service disappeared soon afterward. The road had made its position clear. Whatever happened next was my problem.

This Land Had Seen Hard Times

What struck me the last time, and even more forcefully this time, was that the land had clearly seen hard times.

The 2020 Slater Fire burned more than 150,000 acres across this region. The Forest Service concluded that the fire began when a downed PacifiCorp power line ignited the surrounding land. Coming over the ridge like I did in 2023, I expected to see the lush forest associated with this corner of Oregon and California. Instead, all I could see were silvered, burned trunks covering the landscape. In some ways, it reminded me of the East Coast in the dead of winter, when the leaves and apparent life are gone from the forest. But this was not winter. It was 101 degrees, and the trees were not waiting for spring.

The fire had taken the shade first. Then it had taken nearly everything that once created the shade. The road, the mountainside, the motorcycle, and the “smart” idiot wearing several layers of protective clothing in August were all exposed to the full sun.

The pavement had not escaped hard times either. The edges of the roadway were crumbling. Years of trucks and heavy traffic had left gashes in the asphalt. In some places there were sinkholes. In others, cracks, landslides, and winter frost heaves demanded my full attention. There was a temporary traffic signal controlling a one-lane construction section, and I stopped at the red light alone in the middle of a burned forest. No one came from the other direction. Eventually the light turned green, granting me exclusive access to a road I had apparently already possessed.

Thank you, mister traffic light.

I could feel the loss in the land. The fire had burned through the forests surrounding Happy Camp and devastated the community itself. Approximately 200 homes were destroyed, and many residents who lost them did not have the resources to rebuild. The blackened trunks were not simply a dramatic backdrop for a motorcycle photograph. They were evidence of lives interrupted and a landscape that would carry the event for decades.

Yet the land was not empty. Fireweed pushed out of the exposed soil in bright clusters. Green shrubs filled some of the spaces between burned trunks. Water still moved through the creeks over clean, rounded stones. The destruction was impossible to ignore, but so was the life beginning underneath it.

The Line Across the Road

Crossing from Oregon into California was equally unceremonious. US 101 and US 199 had welcomed me with grand signs in both directions. This squiggle of asphalt had yellow letters spray-painted directly across the pavement: OR on one side, CA on the other.

The arbitrary line stuck out because everything around it continued uninterrupted. The pavement crossed it. The mountains crossed it. The burned forest crossed it. Fire had not discriminated between the two states, and the landscape had no reason to acknowledge the boundary humans had painted across it.

I stopped anyway.

For a minute, I stood with one boot in Oregon and the other in California, surrounded by the remains of a forest that did not care which state I was in. It may have been my favorite border crossing of the trip.

As I began descending into California, some subtle differences appeared. Oregon had clearly spent more money maintaining its side of the road. The sinkholes became bigger, the frost heaves grew taller, and navigating the pavement became a much more precise mechanical exercise. The road continued changing names as it crossed the mountains—Happy Camp Road, Grayback Road, and then Indian Creek Road. Three names for one strip of asphalt. That should probably have been another warning.

The sun was sitting low in the sky when I saw my buddy’s farm just beyond a turn, resting in the summer evening glow. I turned the corner, made my way up the gravel driveway, and realized I was about to spend the next few days somewhere very different from home back in town.

I had crossed the state line, ridden through the burn scar, and survived one of the most unusual roads of the trip.

At the farm, a very different machine was waiting for me.