Gloria Steinem - My life on the road

I board a plane for Rapid City, South Dakota, and see a lot of people in black leather, chains, and tattoos. Airline passengers usually look like where theyre goingbusiness suits to Washington, D.C., jeans to L.A.but I cant imagine a convention of such unconventional visitors in Rapid City. Its the kind of town where people still angle-park their cars in front of the movie palace. My bearded seatmate is asleep in his studded jacket and nose ring, so I just accept one more mystery of the road.

At the airport, I meet five friends from different parts of the country. We are a diverse group of womena Cherokee activist and her grown-up daughter, two African American writers and one musician, and me. Weve been invited to a Lakota Sioux powwow celebrating the powerful place that women held before patriarchy arrived from Europe, and efforts now to restore that place.

As we drive toward the Badlands, we see an acre of motorcycles around each isolated diner and motel. This solves the mystery of the leather and chains, but creates another. When we stop for coffee, our waitress cant believe we dont know. Every August since 1938, bikers from all over the world have come here for a rally named after Sturgis, a town thats just a wide place in the road. They are drawn by this sparsely populated space of forests, mountains, and a grid of highways so straight that it is recognizable from outer space. Right now about 250,000 bikers are filling every motel and campground within five hundred miles.

Our band of six strong women takes note. The truth is we are a little afraid of so many bikers in one place. How could we not be? We have all learned from movies that bikers travel in packs, treat their women like possessions, and may see other women as sexual fair game.

But we dont run into the bikers because we spend our days traveling down unmarked roads, past the last stand of trees, in Indian Country. We eat home-cooked food brought in trucks, sit on blankets around powwow grounds where dancers follow the heartbeat of drums, and watch Indian ponies as decorated as the dancers. When it rains, a rainbow stretches from cant-see to cant-see, and fields of wet sweet grass become as fragrant as gigantic flowers.

Only when we return late each night to our cabins do we see motorcycles in the parking lot. While walking in Rapid City, I hear a biker say to his tattooed woman partner, Honey, shop as long as you wantIll meet you at the cappuccino place. I assume this is an aberration.

On our last morning, I enter the lodge alone for an early breakfast, trying to remain both inconspicuous and open-minded. Still, Im hyperconscious of a room full of knife sheaths, jackboots, and very few women. In the booth next to me, a man with chains around his muscles and a woman in leather pants and an improbable hairdo are taking note of my presence. Finally, the woman comes over to talk.

I just want to tell you, she says cheerfully, how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the yearsand my husband, too. He reads some now that hes retired. But what I wanted to askisnt one of the women youre traveling with Alice Walker? I love her poetry.

It turns out that she and her husband have been coming to this motorcycle rally every year since they were first married. She loves the freedom of the road and also the mysterious moonscape of the Badlands. She urges me to walk there, but to follow the paths marked by ropes. During the war over the sacred Black Hills, she explains, Lakota warriors found refuge there because the cavalry got lost every time.

Her husband stops by on his way to the cashier and suggests I see the huge statue of Crazy Horse thats being dynamited out of the Black Hills. Crazy Horse riding his pony, he says, is going to make all those Indian-killing presidents on Mount Rushmore look like nothing. He walks away, a gentle, lumbering man, tattoos, chains, and all.

Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot.

See that purple Harley out therethe big gorgeous one? Thats mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesnt have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attack and totaling us both. I even put Ms. on my license plateand you should see my grandkids faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!

On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. Ive walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.

What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.

I tell you this story because its the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because Ive come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.

We have only to discover itand ride.