I knew they were there because I could see 'em. Trout. Not big trout, but trout nonetheless. Wherever there's little ones there's big onew, my dad always says - a theory he's never been able to prove by apprehending any of the latter.

I had a BMW R1100GS. I had Hermosa Creek - just north of Durango, Colorado - all to myself. I had a new rod and reel. I had a Styrofoam cup of worms. I had Jane, the wife, to impale the worms on the hooks. (Later I was told that using worms to catch trout is sacrilegious. Sue me. Is it my fault my wife doesn't know how to fish?)

Here it was then, all set to be one of the better days I'd had in awhile, nay, one of the great motorcycling days of all time. After crashing the 24-hour GSX-R750 (magnificently) the previous week - an event that will live in infamy - after having my dad diagnosed with a brain tumor, after having lived for the past two and a half years with our male voodoo child (home with his baby-sitter), things were looking up.

I stood on a giant granite boulder and cast my worm upon the water, into an aspen-dappled transparent pool, deep in that remote and completely unpopulated canyon. One trout darted over to it, dashed away. Then another zipped through the pool, zot, and grabbed the worm before he'd even had time to shrivel. A real trout, not a gutted limp one on ice behind glass, but an actual six inches of wriggling black-spotted blue and pink iridescence just like on National Geographic. Visions of frying these babies up back at the kitchenette danced through my head. I tossed him back but knew his bigger cousins would soon fall prey as we worked our way downstream on the GS. John, rugged outdorsperson, slayer of trout. I, Da-da. Ethel Mermon burst into song inside my head, everything's coming up roooses...

How did I come to be in Paradise?

It's tough being depressed in California. It's hard to give vent to the damp, drizzly November of the soul when the climate insists upon sunny and 80 degrees. The phone rang. It was Mike Broadstreet, proprietor of Freedom Tours. He'd been dangling bait for some time in an effort to get us to come on one of his tours of the Colorado Rockies, in a voice remarkably like Tom Bodett's on the Motel 6 commercials. Tough to resist. It could rain, there could be thunderstorms. I bit.

July w, 'twas, when I left the Left Coast on my borrowed BMW R1100GS, outta town, outta the outskirts, past Hose-Mart and Shed World and out into the desert. In Amboy, it was hot hot hot. With my gloves still on, I poured a bottle of water that had been bungeed onto the pillion down my shirt and scalded myself.

To drink and drive, my bike was cleverly rigged with my "sport jug" full of ice water bungeed to the left side of my tankbag, so affixed that it would contact the horn button every time I turned the bars to the left lock. It scared hell out of me every time I did it, and anybody else who happened to be around, so I left it that way. Old ladies gave me nasty looks normally reserved for their husbands.

My theme song this time is the Coor Light commercial: "Head for the Rockies, Coooooors Light." I can't escapt it, why fight Madison Avenue? Traveling the interstate with the new speed limits is hugely better than the bad old days, though. In Arizona, Utah and Colorado the limit is 75 mph. There I am, then, cruising the GS at a sedate 80 mph, Throttlemeister throttle lock doing its thing, being passed by all kinds of cars and trucks. You actually feel like you're getting somewhere.

And I did get to Longmont, in just a couple of days. There I hooked up with Mike and Lind Broadstreet, who run Freedom Tours. Linda drives the chase Jeep so there's no need to pack your own gear. My fellow travelers would be a few couples from Miami. Steve and Helen had their Harleys shipped in from Florida. The other Steve and his by Jarrod had their Gold Wing likewise shipped in; also Dr. Mike and his wife Joanne's resplendent Softail Springer, from Georgia. Freedom runs a turn-key operation for those so inclined. It looked to be an upscale crowd.

Freedom had already picked up the bikes, had everything ready to ride, and arranged a rental Virago for lone wolf Dick and a loaner Wing for Florida Frank. Details were all taken care of, including route maps for everybody. Information packets had been mailed out weeks before, bull of likely side trips to all sorts of Native American cliff dwellings, abandoned gold mines, defunct railroad lines, etc. Go with the group or go it alone, all you needed to do was show up at the hotel at night where a room was already arranged under you very own name, and if you got there in time, you could dine with the group or not. It's a good system, beacuse Mike doesn't discriminate as to race, color or speed. The trip before mine had been all sportbike guys; this one was decidedly not. What could go wrong?

Anybody will tell you that planning is my forte. Freedom Tours does five - and 10 - day tours. I needed at least 10 to try to forget. Halfway through the 10-day events, Mike schedules a few days down time in Durango, which is a beautiful thing since he puts his charges up in a '20s-vintage hotel/bed-and-breakfast place (with kitchenette where I would pan-fry trout) where Max Baer, ex-heavy-weight champion and father of Jethro, used to stay. It's a block off the main drag, and there are a lot of things to do that Mike and Linda are happy to arrange: whitewater raft, fish, ride the D&S narrow-gauge railway, drink heavily.....

Jane would fly into Durango, on the day I arrived by BMW, and was set to depart by air the same day I and the rest of the group would ride out. A conjugal visit, basically, without having to pack her stuff on my bike or be imprisoned - what could be better?

To make this long story shorter, the first few days of the tour were a blur of beauriful scenery and high mountain passes, way above the timber line, frequented by elk, and I may have seen a polar bear, I think, but it may have been a pale, fat woman - tough to tell at the speed I was moving at the time. Frankly, though, to be perfectly honest, I've seen that stuff before, know what I mean? We just did Yosemite last month. Snow, trees, a moose, big deal. The group was basically moving pretty slow for my taste; I needed to make the split.

Mike Broadstreet, who also owns an XR600 and is an old trials guy, had thoughtfully provided everybody with some super-detailed maps, complete with dirt roads, trails, cow paths, everything. What luck, then, that I had ridden the GS. I would've brought a BMW TR, but it was due for service. Just as well, the best roads in Colorado have not yet been paved. There I went on the GS, then, all over hell and back where few white men venture, growing ever more confident and in love with the Beemer. We were sliding 'round tight corners with our feet down, roosting out on the bike's prodigious torque - basically Los Angeles was about a million miles away in, what, four days? With ABS, what could happen? Maybe I can buy this bike from BMW when I get back, I was thinking, It'll be way used then, they'll give me a deal....

In Steamboat, first night out, it rained in the evening, and then there were fire-works, because it was the Fourth. Whenever there was a break in the rain, I'd see the mysterious "doctor" from Georgia down in the parking lot, polishing his Springer. A mysterious man, enigmatic. Later I would ask myself: Was it just coincidence that all my film of the doctor disappeared? Or something more?

After a day or two, our little group began to bond. There were plenty of stops along the way to yak, drink coffee, put new voltage regulators on the Harleys, that type of thing. Out of Steamboat on the second morning it rained a cold, grey rain for at least an hour. I was starting to get chilly in my Aerostich and rain jacket. Steve and Helen from Miami had been bombing along the whole time in their Harley-Davidson MotorClothes, dropping farther behind, he helmetless and she in one of those useless beanies. Here it come, I was thinking, the rich Miami-ites (Helen sported a 6.6-carat pear-shaped diamond) are gonna have a full-blown fit: hyperthermia, airlift us out of here right now, lawsuit to come, why didn't anybody take these damn things away from us? Wait for a truck to come pick up their bikes...Helen is gonna be pissed, I was thinking, once she thaws out.

But when we stopped at the side of the road for a break, still in that chilly rain, Helen and Steve pulled up with big grins on their faces. Ach! Troupers! They laughed through chattering teeth and sopping black leather. Sniff, I guess we motorcycle people are all alike deep down, sniff, and I won't hold it against Steve if he did make his money buying out AIDDS patients' life insurance policies. "Hey," his friend, the other Steve, pointed out, "it improved their (the AIDS patients') quality of life." Shortly after we got back on the road, we rode into warm sun.

The other Steve was a heavy financial hitter, too, involved in high-risk doings too complex and lucrative to go into here. Suffice it to say that he also owns a bunch of airplanes and sends Jarrod to all kinds of cool camps, where he does stuff like climb rocks in Yoesimite for a month. They also go on a lot of college scouting trips. Jarrod's in the 10th grade.

Meanwhile, the "doctor" claimed he was a urologist and his wife backed him up on that. Did he expect me to believe that? No urologist could pilot a Softail Springer the way he did. No one without some sort of clandestine special training could keep one so spotlessly clean on the road. My Beemer looked like it had taken part in the battle of Kursk. No, the "doctor" was there on some kind of top-secret mission, the nature of which we could only speculate...

But what the heck, everybody's got their closet skeletons. In Durango, I learned about Thomas Daniel Burns, no doubt a distant relative of mine, and founder of Burns National Bank there in town. T.D. made his first fortune ($14) at the age of 16 selling pamphlets on the treatment of horse diseases, for 25 cents. Legend has it he sold one to a man whose horse was relly sick, for $5. Business is business.

Durnago's a great town, with a highly walkable main street, the Animas River cutting right through - all kinds of stuff. Our options were open, we could've ridden the narrow gauge railway to Silverton, we could've soaked at Trimble Hot Springs, we could've walked around a ate and drank or maybe taken out a small business loan and opened a Harley-Davidson voltage regulator factory outlet store. But no. Jane and I decided we'd bag some trout that day. Popping into the local bait and tackle emporium, we bought a rod and reel, worms and innocently inquired where we could catch a trout, please?

Hermosa Creek, we were told, would be the hot setup - with a nice "Jeep trail" running along beside it all the way down....

There we went, then, cruising tree-lined dirt roads behind Purgatory ski resort, breathing transparent air beside glittering streams, pottering along on our beautiful BMW with our new fishing gear lased on behind - straight out of a beer commercial or possibly a Skoal print ad, possibly Motrin AD, maybe even some type of feminine hygiene product.....

We found Hermosa Creek trail right where it was supposed to be, and turned down it - a wide, smooth dirt road running along beside the stream. The sky is ddep blue at that elevation; the night crawlers in their styrofoam home wriggled in anticipation. Jane gave me an affectianate squeeze....

Then I caught my trout.

And then a big dark cloud rolled in overhead and it got kind of eerie all of a sudden, and it occurred to me that in my enthusiasm the wide dirt road had sort of degenerated into more of a narrow dirt road, and as a matter of fact had become more single-track trail than road for about the last mile...and then it began to rain.

Not a hard rain by any means, just a persistent little drizzle, just enough to saturate the tip inch or so of dirt, and to render the BMW's street tires about as useful as D. Kevorkian's first-aid kit. I'd been thinking that if the trail turned nasty, we could always turn around and go back the way we'd come. But when the surface changed from firm dirt to gooey, snotty mud, there was no way to go back uphill/upstream on the Beemer. We'd just have to keep heading down-stream and hope for better trail. Soon. The total distance of the trail was about 25 miles, and we' already come about halfway. How bad could it get?

Need you really ask? Actually, the Beemer was comporting itself very well, given its heft and lack of traction, and it seemed like just a matter of getting out from under the cloud that was raining on us. When it go gnarly, Jane would hop off the back and I'd feel my way along in first gear at walking speed. It was all very Conestoga-wagonish, and suitable for use on a Wells Fargo Bank or financial institution commercial playing up the rugged pioneer spirit angle and downplaying the fact that you had to be reasonably stupid and/or desperate to be a pioneer.

Lately the trail had been climbing up-bank away from the creek, eventually rising to a point 60 or 70 feet higher than the stream. The slope down to the water was pretty damn steep, too, but I really didn't notice because both sides of the trail were thick with ferns and bushes so you couldn't see much.

There I was, then, paddling along the eight-inch wide mud trail in first gear, Jane walking a ways behind, when I gave the GS a little too much throttle. The rear tire spun a tad, just enough to slither off the downhill side of the trail, and OOOOHHHHH NNOOOOOOOOOOOOO.....

When I stopped slithering through the damp underbrush, I heard something very heavy thumping towards me, picking up speed. Than a bounce, then a large splash. There sat the Beemer, upside down, steaming in a nice trout pool, hip-deep in water circulating around its cylingers, wheels in the air, rain splashing down. It was a scene right out of Deliverance - all that was needed now was for some fat throwback to emerge from the bush brandishing an H-D vontage regulator. (come to think of it, it would've been a perfect time for Karl Malden to jump out in his fedora and ask what will you do now?)

There was no way to get the bike out; there were steep rock walls on both sides and waterfalls downstream and up. Really I just wanted to sit down and cry, but I fished the bike's key out of the ignition and got the saddlebags off, and got Jane' Nikon out of the submerged tankbag (the film of my trout didn't make it).

Jane, though she's a great hook-baiter and old farm girl (she was once runner-up in the Grant County, Wisconsin, Pork Queen competition) takes to excercise like a fish to the Sahara. It was time now to walk, however, and walk we did, beginning at about two o'clock in the afternoon. It was a long walk, and we promised each other at some point to be better to each other in the future, to be more understanding and thoughtful, if we lived, gulp, and to quit smoking. An hour later we were done with demon alcohol. By dusk we'd resolved to return to the Church and help the less fortunate, and Jane ha made a personal resolution never to go off-road again. By the time our bottled water was depleted and she was reduced to licking drops off the top of the umbrella, she'd decided to become a nun. (Why not? She's already got the celibacy thing licked.)

For me, too, there was time for reflection, to realize that I must be the only non-British human to ever base an entire career upon crashing nice, new motorcycles. After several miles of soul-slogging, the question became clear; Who keeps sabataging my motorcycles? Immediately I thought of the mysterious urologist...

Finally, after we' walked at least 10 miles and it was almost dark and we were wet and looking at sleeping in the bush (and maybe dying there), two young guys on mountain bikes came along - the first humans we'd seen - and stopped and listened to our tale of woe.

"Wow," one of them said, truly slak-jawed and sympathetic, "wanna burn a bowl?"

Er, not right now, thanks. We did take big slurps out of their Camelbak water bottles, though, and they told us it was jus a couple more miles to the trailhead and don't stop now. What we didn't know was that it was eight miles from the trailhead down a winding gravel road to vicilization. The mountain bike guys pedaled hard all the way home, jumped in their van, drove back, picked us up and returned us to our place in Durango. I put some gas in their van and bought them a 12-pack and they were beside themselves with grati-dude.

As usual, there's no real moral to the story, nor really a point for that matter, but if you've read this far then you obviously have a pretty stubborn streak of optimism or a bad cas of insomnia and so deserve some sort of conclusion. It is relatively amazing how good people always do materialize when you need them most, bearing hope and bongs. And tragedy does knit people together until it passes. Also, it's not a good idea to start down unfamiliar dirt roads in the mountains on big streetbikes.

Speaking of good people, two of them are Mike and Linda Broadstreet at Freedom Tjours. I was having a blast, riding great roads and hanging in cool places, until my rendezvous with destiny. Mike took care of that problem, too, tracking down Jerry Rapp of Rapp Guides to helicopter the poor Beemer out a couple of weeks later. Jerry informed me that the real tragedy was that I'd ridden right past the best trout holes; he saw an 18-incher on the day he rode in to locate my bike, in a pool just a couple of miles from where we'd gotten on the trail. Don't you love people who bring you that kind of information? Damn!

I shall return.