Part 2: An 82-Year-Old Stranger Was Stranded On The Side Of Route 66 With His Broken Harley — I Rode 100 Miles Next To Him Without Saying A Word
His name was Walter.
Walter Eugene Briggs. Eighty-two years old. Born in 1942 in a town called Bisbee, Arizona, that you have probably never heard of unless you have driven the long way down to the Mexico border on a motorcycle, which I have, three times.
He told me his name standing next to his bike on the shoulder of Route 66, with the spark plug back in and the engine cooling and the late September sun starting to drop toward the mountains in the west. He said it the way old men say their names. First. Middle. Last. The whole record.
He held out his right hand to shake mine.
His hand was shaking. He didn’t apologize for it. I didn’t mention it.
I shook it.
I told him my name. I told him I was from Flagstaff. I told him I rode out of an independent charter in Coconino County, which he nodded at without any reaction, the way men of his generation nod when you tell them something they already understood from your cut three minutes ago.
Then I asked him about the Shovelhead.
He told me.
He told me she was a 1978 FLH Electra Glide. He told me she had been bought new at a dealership in Phoenix in the spring of 1978 by a man named Calvin Briggs, who was Walter’s older brother. He told me Calvin had ridden her for two years before he was killed in a head-on collision with a logging truck on Highway 87 north of Payson in the summer of 1980.
He told me the Shovelhead had been parked in his brother’s garage for thirty-one years after that. Walter had inherited her in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight. He had not had the heart to ride her for three decades. He had cleaned her every Sunday. He had started her engine once a month so the seals wouldn’t dry out. He had not put a single mile on her until the summer of 2011, when his wife of forty-four years — a woman named Doris — passed away from a stroke on a Tuesday morning at the kitchen table.
Walter buried his wife on a Friday. He came home that Saturday. He went out to the garage. He looked at his dead brother’s motorcycle. He said — out loud, to nobody, he told me this on the shoulder of Route 66 — “Cal. I’m taking her out.”
He had ridden her almost every week since.
Thirteen years. From 2011 to 2024. He had put forty-three thousand miles on a 1978 Shovelhead that had three thousand on her when he started. He had ridden her to Sturgis four times. He had ridden her down to the Salton Sea. He had ridden her up to a cabin in Pinetop where he and Doris had spent their honeymoon, every June, on the anniversary of the day they got married.
The week before I met him, an eye doctor in Flagstaff had told him his vision had degraded past the point where the DMV would renew his license. He had ninety days to surrender it. He had not waited. He had handed his license in the next morning.
He had then called a Harley dealership in Kingman that he had known about for twenty years and asked them what they would give him for a 1978 Shovelhead with original paint and a story.
They had told him fourteen thousand dollars.
He had told them he would ride her down the next Tuesday.
Tuesday was the day I met him.
He was on the last hundred and twelve miles of the last ride of his life, and his hands were shaking so badly he could not seat his own spark plug.
I want to tell you what I said to him after he told me all of that, standing there on the gravel shoulder with the sun getting lower and the wind picking up the way the wind does in northern Arizona in September.
What I said was four words.
I said: “I’m riding with you.”
He looked at me for a long second.
He did not say you don’t have to. He did not say I’m okay. He did not say thank you.
What Walter Briggs said — and I have thought about this sentence almost every day for the last two months — was this:
“Son. I would be honored.”
We rode out at four fifty-one in the afternoon.
I let him lead.
I want you to understand what that meant. I was on a 2018 Road Glide with a 107-cubic-inch Milwaukee-Eight engine and ABS brakes and traction control and a heated grip system and every piece of modern American motorcycle technology that money could buy in 2018. Walter was on a forty-six-year-old Shovelhead with drum brakes and a kickstart and a carburetor that he had rebuilt himself in 1983 and had not let anybody else touch since.
His top safe cruising speed was about fifty-eight miles an hour.
So we rode at fifty-eight miles an hour.
I rode his right rear quarter. The same place a wingman rides for a brother in formation. I did not ride next to him. I did not ride behind him. I rode where the wind off my fairing would buffer his bike from the crosswind coming off the high desert, and where I could see his right hand on the throttle in my left-side mirror.
I watched that right hand for a hundred miles.
It did not stop shaking for the first twenty.
The sun got lower. The shadows on the highway got longer. We passed the turnoff for the Grand Canyon Caverns. We passed a cluster of three burnt-out cars that had been on the shoulder of Route 66 since 2019. We passed a hand-painted sign for a place called Hackberry General Store that I had eaten lunch at six years ago with a brother of mine who is now dead.
Walter rode steady.
His right hand stopped shaking somewhere around mile thirty.
I do not know exactly when.
I just looked over at one point and his hand was still. His thumb was wrapped around the throttle the way a man wraps his thumb around something he has been holding for forty-three thousand miles. His face under the bandana was unreadable. His eyes were on the white line on the right side of the road, where the DMV had told him a week ago that he was not allowed to put his eyes anymore, and where he had put them anyway because the white line on the right side of the road was the last thing he was going to get to look at from the back of a motorcycle in this lifetime.
I did not say anything.
He did not say anything.
The V-twins under us did all the talking that needed to get done.
I want to be careful how I describe the next part, because anybody who has ever ridden with somebody they were never going to ride with again will know what I’m talking about, and anybody who hasn’t will think I’m making this up.
Somewhere around mile sixty — out past Hackberry, with the sun about a hand’s width above the mountains and the light going that color the light goes in Arizona in late September that there isn’t really a word for — Walter took his left hand off the bar.
He held it up.
He made a fist.
He pumped it once, slow, the old club signal for I see you, brother.
He did not look over.
I made the same fist.
I pumped it back.
That was the entire conversation we had for a hundred miles.
We pulled into Kingman at six forty-two in the evening.
Walter knew exactly where he was going. He led me off the highway, down a frontage road, around the back of a strip mall, and into the parking lot of a diner called Mr. D’z. It is painted bright pink and turquoise. It has been on Route 66 since 1939. He killed the Shovelhead’s engine. He climbed off slow, the way an eighty-two-year-old climbs off a motorcycle after a hundred miles. He took off his bandana. He hung his helmet on the bar.
He looked at me across the two parked bikes.
He said: “Buy you a coffee, son.”
I said: “Yes, sir.”
We sat at the counter. He ordered a black coffee and a piece of cherry pie. I ordered the same. The waitress was a Black woman in her fifties named Sherri who looked at Walter the way you look at a person you have known a long time and have not seen in a few months.
She said: “Walter. Where’s Doris?”
He said: “Sherri. Doris passed in 2011.”
She said: “Oh, Walter. Honey. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
He said: “It’s all right. You couldn’t have known.”
She poured his coffee. She poured mine.
After she walked away, I asked him about the patch.
I had been looking at it for two hours. It was on the right front panel of his cut, tucked low, almost hidden under the leather of the lapel. It was small. White thread on a black background. Three letters and a number.
MIA 1969.
I asked him what it meant.
Walter Briggs set down his coffee. He turned on his stool until he was facing me. He looked at me for a long ten seconds. His pale blue eyes did not move.
Then he said, in the same flat dry voice he had used on the side of the highway about the spark plug:
“Son. My brother Calvin didn’t die in 1980 on Highway 87.”
He paused.
He said: “Calvin went down in a helicopter in Quang Nam Province in 1969. He was twenty-three years old. They never found enough of him to send home.”
He took a sip of coffee.
He said: “I bought the Shovelhead in 1978 with the death benefit money. I put it in his name at the dealership in Phoenix because the paperwork let me. I rode her for two years pretending she was his. Then I parked her in my garage in 1980 on the anniversary of the day his platoon got hit, and I told myself a story for thirty-one years that he had ridden her, and that the truck on 87 had taken him, and that I had inherited her clean.”
He set the cup down.
He said: “Doris knew the truth the whole time. She never made me say it out loud.”
He looked at me.
He said: “You’re the first man I have ever told.”
I want to go back to the spark plug now.
Because I have thought about that spark plug for two months, and I want to tell you what I think was happening on the side of the highway.
Walter Briggs was not shaking because his hands were old.
Walter Briggs was shaking because he was riding a motorcycle that had belonged, in his head, to a brother who had never come home from Vietnam — and he was riding her for the last time. He had ridden her for thirteen years as a way of keeping a man alive who had been dead since 1969. And on the morning he met me, he had gotten on her knowing that when he got off her at the dealership the next day, the last living connection he had to his brother Calvin was going to be handed to a stranger with a checkbook.
That is what the shaking was.
The Vietnam patch on the right front panel of his cut — MIA 1969 — was the only piece of his brother he had ever let himself wear. He had never told anybody what it was. He had let people assume he was the veteran. He was not. He had been 4-F. A heart murmur. Calvin had gone in his place.
The Shovelhead had been the second piece. The one he had hidden from himself for thirty-one years and then finally let himself ride after his wife was gone and there was nobody left who would have to watch him be sad about it.
He had ridden a ghost for thirteen years.
He had just ridden the ghost home for the last time.
He told me all of this at the counter at Mr. D’z over two coffees and a piece of cherry pie that he did not touch. He told it the way old men tell things. No tears. No raised voice. Hands flat on the counter. Eyes on the napkin holder. The flat dry voice of a man who has been carrying something for fifty-five years and is not going to break in front of a stranger now that he has finally set it down.
When he was done, he paid the check. He left Sherri a twenty-dollar bill on a fourteen-dollar tab. He walked out to the parking lot. He put on his bandana. He put on his helmet. He kickstarted the Shovelhead. She caught on the first kick — the way Walter said she always caught on the first kick, because Calvin had been the kind of man whose motorcycles caught on the first kick.
He raised his left fist.
I raised mine.
He rolled out toward a motel he had a room at a mile down the road.
I rolled the other direction.
That should have been the end of it.
I went to the dealership the next morning.
I do not know why. I did not have a reason. I had three hundred miles left to make and I made zero of them. I got up at six. I rode to the Harley dealership in Kingman. I sat on my Road Glide in the parking lot across the street and I watched the front door from seven a.m. until they opened at nine.
Walter pulled in at nine-fifteen.
He rode her in slow. He parked her in a customer spot near the front door. He climbed off. He took off his helmet. He walked inside. I sat across the street and watched the front window.
He came out forty minutes later with an envelope in his hand.
He walked to the Shovelhead one last time.
He stood next to her for a while.
He took something out of his pocket. He bent down. He tied it to the right handlebar. He patted the gas tank twice — the way a man pats the shoulder of an old friend who is about to get on a train.
He turned. He walked across the parking lot. A green Ford sedan pulled in. A woman in her fifties got out — his daughter, I would find out later — and helped him into the passenger seat.
They drove away.
I waited until they were gone.
Then I rode across the street.
I parked next to the Shovelhead.
Tied to the right handlebar with a piece of leather lace was a small folded note. It was held in place by a single dog tag on a chain.
The dog tag said: BRIGGS, CALVIN R. — USMC — 1946–1969.
The note said, in shaky old-man handwriting:
To whoever buys her —
Her name is Cal. She was my brother’s. She was my wife’s favorite. She has carried more of my family than anybody alive knows. Ride her like you mean it. Tell her hello from Walter on her birthday — May 14th.
— W.E.B.
I did not buy the bike.
I am not the right man for that bike.
But I took a photograph of the note. And I left twenty dollars on the dashboard of the showroom desk for whoever did.
Walter passed in February.
His daughter called me. She had gotten my number from a card I had left at the dealership. She said her father had asked her to call me if anything happened. She said he had not ridden again. She said he had not been sad about it. She said he had told her, the week before he went, that he had been on the last ride he had ever needed to be on.
I rode Route 66 again last September. Same week. Same stretch.
I pulled over at the same gravel shoulder outside Seligman.
I stood there for a while.
Somewhere out west of me, a 1978 Shovelhead was on a highway with a stranger on it, and a dog tag was tied to the handlebar, and somebody was telling her hello on a Tuesday in May.
I made a fist. I pumped it once. Slow.
The wind on Route 66 doesn’t answer.
It doesn’t have to.
Follow the page for more stories about the bikers America thinks it knows — and the last rides we don’t always know we’re on.
