Gone Magazine

The Setup
“I hate that phrase,” our pal Jake used to say back in the ‘90s.  “The only time anyone ever says, ‘it’s all good’ is when something sucks.  If it sucks, say it fucking sucks, dammit.”
And for the most part, Jake was right, and still is.  A typical use of the phrase back then would go something like this.  “Yeah, man, we were, like, headed to Wilmer’s Park when we got a flat tire, and then a semi hauling a wide-load trailer knocked the car down the bank, and then, like, the cops showed up and busted Donnie with like a pound of indica and we all spent the weekend in jail.  But it’s all good.”

However, that didn’t prevent Jake, Jeff, Jon and I from going to those first All Good festivals out at Wilmer’s Park, Maryland.  They were usually pretty intimate and interesting affairs: a few thousand people and a dozen bands camping out at the old blues club/farm where the likes of Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters used to play.
I don’t know what’s happened in the meantime, but things have definitely changed.  The All Good festival is now a massive event, drawing at least 30,000 people and nearly 40 bands, and the venue has changed to Marvin’s Mountaintop, about a dozen miles from the Pennsylvania border and not far from  Morgantown, West Virginia.
I quit drinking a while back and the whole sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll scene has long since left me behind, but last year a good pal of mine talked me into going and I had a great time.  So it was fairly easy for my fellow editor Jon’s brother Jeff to talk me into going again.
“Doooood, it’ll be so cool!” Jeff has a way of crooning the word “dude” that reminds me of Warren Zevon.  “You gotta go.  If you go Christian will go, and then it will kick ass!  I haven’t even seen you since the last time we went to this.”
Jeff had a point.  And, The Man had just sent me a $300 stimulus check, and what better way to send this kleptocracy a big middle finger than to go blow it in the black market of a giant hippie drug fest?  Sure, I thought, I’ll do it!  It’s a great idea!
Sitting down in front of Google Earth, I carefully charted courses and alternate routes, measured distances, converted miles to kilometers and gallons to liters and back again a dozen times, and came up with a plan.
The So-called Plan
There was one major uncertainty in the mix: Jeff, though I love him like Jon’s brother, is not the most dependable fellow on earth.  Jeff is the eternal optimist, never swayed by adversity, dilatoriness… or prior experience.  He’s the living embodiment of the phrase, “it’s all good,” because for Jeff, it really is.  For Jeff a plan is, as Christopher McQuarrie once put it, a list of things that can go wrong.  And why worry about what can go wrong when everything usually goes so very right?
Cell phones never work on Marvin’s Mountaintop, and I reminded Jeff of that.  I also knew before hand that the people I was supposed to meet, Jeff, Christian, Jess, and Karen, are experienced recreational campers, meaning that they park in a circle around a light source and drink beer until it’s gone, and might do so even when forty great bands are playing a few hundred yards away. We would have to meet somewhere, because I’d never find them amongst thousands of tents.  How about at the ice tent, suggested Christian, and we agreed to check in there roughly every three hours each night.
But, as I knew from the previous year when the plan broke down and I ran into these same people only by coincidence, there was a chance that I’d be launching myself to the furthest reasonable limits of money, distance and endurance, perhaps beyond those limits, only to have to turn back due to any one of a million things that could go wrong.  So my plan would have to include a “lifeboat” scenario, in which I could make it there and return home without ever seeing my pals.  I called this scenario the Apollo 13.
I guessed it was about 200 miles by the routes I wanted to take.  Little Sorrel II, my faithful and apparently indestructible Hyosung SF50 scooter, goes 80 miles on a gallon of gas, so I would need five gallons of gas, plus one in a can just in case.  If I held back $30 for fuel I should be okay.
On the Internet, the advertised ticket price for admittance to the show was $139.  I had about $250 total, so if I had to pull an Apollo 13, well, I should be able to make it home… probably… Maybe.
The route could be broken into six legs, each one of which should put me within reach of a fuel station along the way.  Oh, it was going to take a while to get there and back, of that I was certain.
Both Virginia and West Virginia have a special little class of vehicles, sometimes incor
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It’s All Good!, continued

rectly called “mopeds” in the law books.  Scooters which displace less than 50ccs (less than four tablespoons) do not need to be registered or carry insurance, which is why I ride one.  I can’t afford a car or the fuel to make it go.
But scooters are also speed limited by law (and the less flauntable laws of physics), usually to 35 miles an hour or less.  Little Sorrel II has been slowing down a little lately, and the limiter seems to kick in at about 31.  One has to stop frequently to remain alert, and the fuel tank only holds one gallon anyway, so experience tells me it’s impossible to average more than 25mph on long trips.  Eight hours, minimum, each way.
I’ve ripped off 200 mile days on Little Sorrel II more than once.  How bad could it be?
Soon the day approached and I was fairly excited about it.  Going over the charts and maps one more time I realized that I had room to go a day early.  There might be less traffic on a Thursday afternoon, the weather was sure to be excellent, and even the Apollo 13 scenario could cover the extra $30 for early admittance.   So, I snapped off a couple of emails to Jeff and Christian and started packing.

Packing for the Bataan Death March
No scooter should grace the streets without a good milk crate on the back of it.  My bike is remarkable for being able to hide a full face helmet under the seat.  All the rest of the carrying capacity is covered by a simple plastic rack on the back, capable of holding 14 kilograms, which is about 200 pounds if my math is correct.  Shortly after I got Little Sorrel II, my brother-in-law used his amazing rope-tying skills to graft a crate onto it, which I have since styled the Excursion Vehicle Storage Unit, or EVSU, which sounds much cooler than “crate.”  On long trips, I usually attach a second crate behind the first: EVSU 2.
The underseat storage of the vehicle would hold all of the essential gear: maps, lights, tools, gloves, oil, extra bungee cords, and a mylar blanket which I hoped I wouldn’t have to use.
Everything else, including tent, sleeping bag, ridge rest, umbrella, winter coat, gas can, and back pack, would have to be grafted onto the EVSUs.
This was not a simple task.  The back crate can’t hold much weight, so it held the sleeping bag and the gas, with a little extra space in the bottom of the crate–er, EVSU 2–below the sleeping bag, which was mooshed on top and secured with bungee cords. The first EVSU had to hold the backpack, if possible, because wearing it for 200 miles would be sheer torture.  The umbrella, jacket, and ridge rest could be mounted on the sides of the EVSUs.
But what about the tent?  A few months back, most of the Gone crew and some guys from the fantastic band Smell of Death went camping at Elliot’s Knob, and I was saddened to discover that the tent I’d taken was my niece’s.  I slept with my legs dangling out the door.  The only other choice I had was the Taj Mahal of tents, a great big blue Ozark Trail thing that looks like Darth Vader’s head and weighs about  thirty  pounds.  Mainly I wanted it because it is so big that I figured I could park Little Sorrel II inside of it, which is a good idea when you’re camping amongst 30,000 felons.
It wouldn’t fit on top of the EVSUs and it would dangerously imbalance the scoot if I side-mounted it.  Eventually, I realized that the Vader tent could be mounted transversely, just in front of the first EVSU, and it functioned nicely as a seat back as well.  The sides stuck out maybe half an inch shy of the handlebars, which I deemed safe enough considering that absolutely nothing I was preparing to do is safe.
Now, I’m not going to say that the bike was overloaded with all of this crap, but without a rider it did shift the weight well over the back wheel.  Parked on its center mount, Little Sorrel II’s front wheel shot crazily into the sky, making the little thing look much, much faster sitting still than it actually is on the road.  That extra weight was going to sneak up on me, though at the time I was quite satisfied with the job.