Hog Heaven -- A Reporter And A Photographer Cruise The Open Road To Sturgis, S.D., And Learn What Bikers From Around The World Already Know: It's Wild Out There!

I have been to Sturgis, S.D., and back, and here's what I have learned:

After 100 miles on the back of a motorcycle, your butt feels like a flaming tortilla.

People can snore louder than you think.

A heck of a lot of motorcycles fit into a four-block area.

However, there are some things one shouldn't try to stuff into a pink webbed body suit.

Melted cheese is no picnic to eat when you wear a ring in your tongue.

It is possible to weep with joy at the sight of a portable toilet.

You can sell food called "cheese curds" and "tater ribbons," and people will actually buy it.

A chihuahua will answer to "Ted."

Riding a bike 1,200 miles is a brutal thing to do to a body that has never been on a bike before.

Despite the aches - nothing a pillow won't cure - I have seen the high beams, and I know now that freedom is flying down a highway with the road rushing under your feet and the smells of mint or fresh rain in your nose and wind whipping your skin so numb it leaves the hair on your arms standing on end. It's zipping down a straightaway through blond, crewcut plains, and doing it on a Harley-Davidson.

Says one longtime rider from Kansas, "I tell these Christian clubs that come out here, you can't get much closer to God than when you're riding. You can reach out and touch His hand out there."

If America is the land of the free, then for one week in August, America comes to Sturgis, S.D.

Leather and shades

It's the werewolf of American towns.

Motorcycles pour in from all over the globe, wild one by wild one, taking the scene like hornets at a picnic, raked, chopped, chromed, snarling, their riders a montage of leather and shades and fisted gloves and tattoo-covered limbs.

The two-wheeled conquistadors, mostly straddling the rolling thunder of Harleys, fill nearby places like Spearfish and Deadwood and Rapid City, making cars look freakish and out of place. Bikes pack traffic stops and strangle the parking lots of gas stations, Wal-Mart and restaurants with beef stroganoff dinner specials.

But the real party is on Main Street in Sturgis, where bikes parked handlebar-to-handlebar form two soul-train pathways through which showoffs and gawkers parade in slow lines for four machine-clogged blocks. The noise is thick - a constant rumble rumble rumble with an occasional rrrrrrrip thrown in. As one woman said, you not only can smell the testosterone, you can hear it.

Flesh is ubiquitous, especially at famed dens of iniquity like the Buffalo Chip campground - lots of it, tanned, burnished, sculpted, painted, lifted, sagging, wrinkled, never shy.

The Sturgis Rally & Races has become far and away South Dakota's biggest production, revving a good $150 million a year into the economy. The city of Sturgis itself clears about $400,000 from the one-week event.

Mecca or Mardi Gras

For the estimaged 350,000 riders who came this year, it is Mecca or Mardi Gras or Sodom and Gomorrah, and because the 58th annual Sturgis Rally & Races is all of that, it is very America, and that being the case, it must be marketed and sold.

Makeshift banners hang over storefronts whose owners make better money renting their space to vendors who come to sell everything from shot glasses and saddlebags to halter tops and painted gas tanks. In this way, Lucy's Nearly New Shoppe becomes the All-American Leather Company, and as the weirdness replenishes itself like new skin, it is not odd to see women topless save for the pasties on their nipples or bikes outfitted with fur, mounted video cameras, Confederate flags, birdcages, longhorns, snakeskin, snake heads, signs reading "Don't Follow Us - Follow Jesus" or trailers pulling stuffed hogs.

Other than that, Sturgis is just your typical American town of 6,000 people.

Hitting the road

But they say it's not just the being there, it's the journey.

A photographer and a motorcycle-virgin writer had to find out, and if you think we're nuts, consider the two people willing to take us. More than 600 riders from Washington registered as Sturgis visitors last year, and while plenty of guys going this year seemed ready, even eager, to accommodate Times photographer Betty Udesen, far fewer offers exist in the macho motorcycle world for a man who wants to ride pillion, as they say. I mean, that is just not done. Hadn't these guys seen "Easy Rider"? I wanted to be Jack Nicholson on the back of Peter Fonda's Captain America bike. Then again, look what happened to them.

But in early July, we find Marty Etquibal, a husky, ponytailed Vietnam veteran of few words and Filipino heritage, at West Seattle's Alki Tavern. The Alki hosts Taco Thursday, a weekly assembly of Seattle riders that draws sidecars, bikes with exotic bullfrog leather and clubs like the moneyed Daves and the African-American Soul Riders.

A warehouse supervisor for the city of Seattle who has done Sturgis at least a dozen times, Marty is looking forward to people-watching. "And all the crazy bikes," he says. "But mostly the people."

We find his girlfriend, 28-year-old Rachel Briney, at the monthly meeting of the Ladies of Harley, where some among the dozen women in leather wear pink armbands, having just completed the Pony Express benefit ride for breast cancer.

A pair of stickers on Rachel's helmet echo issues close to her heart: helmet laws ("I'm Not Wearing This Helmet By Choice") and the growing number of people who trailer their bikes to Sturgis rather than ride ("Silly Yuppie - Trailers Are For Boats"). An accountant for a Seattle janitorial service, she's determined to ride the mechanical bull this year at Sturgis' Broken Spoke Saloon, where Seattle riders will meet during the big week.

Not many women have ridden as long as Rachel has, although more are joining all the time, even having bikes lowered for better balance. She learned when she was 16, and a couple of years ago, she plunked down a decade's worth of savings for a 1996 Road King. A small bell, a gift between riders to ward off "evil road spirits," dangles below her bike, jingling on the pavement when she curlicues freeway off-ramps. Her license plate reads "BD GRL."

She took her new purchase to the 1997 Redwood Rally in Piercy, Calif. There she clicked with the stoic, stogie-loving Marty, who is in his 40s and bought his first Harley in 1970, about the time Rachel was born.

She says: "Sparks flew. I was crazy for him."

The couple accept the mission. I ridiculously assume I'm riding with Marty, but a quick "You're riding with her" sets me straight. We'll leave Sunday, Aug. 2, a couple of days behind most Washington-state riders and the day before the rally begins. A straight shot down Interstate 90 into eastern Montana should get us to Sturgis by Tuesday night.

Pebbles and truck tires

Rachel loves curves, especially downhill ones. Advanced-safety courses have given her confidence in the physics of her bike.

She likes to ride lead, which Marty knows, and he likes that she's not afraid. Every so often he'll pull alongside her and the two will alternate wordless glances until Rachel seems to take his mere presence as a challenge, roaring ahead as fast as necessary to pull away, even if she has to go 80. Even if she has to go 90.

"Marty told me he'd never met a girl who could shift as good as me," she says. "I took that as a huge compliment."

Marty and Rachel travel well together, waking at the same time, preferring the same speeds. After our afternoon ride through the balm of Eastern Washington, they race for the Idaho state line as Betty and I hang on. Marty wins it with a power move, but Rachel screams as she crosses and happily peels off her helmet, with no laws requiring them the rest of the way.

"Now I really feel like I'm on vacation," she says.

The road ahead holds rest stops and gas stops and night stops at campgrounds where we relish cheap all-you-can-eat pancake breakfasts. Riding heightens the senses: Stray road pebbles sting my cheeks, and random wind gusts pound my helmet like an angry football coach. It's all good as long as we don't get bit by "road gators" - truck tire peelings that often litter the road - or develop "raccoon face," which happens to sunburned faces wearing shades.

Along our pilgrimage, we encounter multiplying fellow riders from places like Port Townsend and Port Angeles and Wenatchee, including a first-timer who won his bike in a raffle. The temperature drops; we're on the heels of thunderstorms that reportedly have rained on the parades of cycles headed through Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota.

Monday's Montana stretch pulls us down twisting mountain roads through cool swaths of national forest. We stop for lunch in the trip's rocky halfway point of Butte, where there are street names like Aluminum, Platinum and Iron. Bees hover around the windshields of our bikes as we dismount, picking at hieroglyphics of smashed bugs. "Ugh," Rachel says. "There's grasshopper guts all over my shirt." I notice the same outbreak on my sunglasses.

We stay the night at the country's first KOA campground, in Billings. "We went through some of Rachel's favorite stretches today," Marty says. "Downhill curves. If you were to put a rack of ribs at the bottom of some downhill curves, nobody would ever beat her to the bottom."

"Nobody would ever beat me anyway," she says.

It all began in 1938

The Sturgis Rally and Races began in 1938 with a 19-racer challenge posed by the Jackpine Gypsies motorcycle club. Margaret Billups was there, and though the 82-year-old from nearby Belle Fourche, S.D., has never actually ridden a bike, she returns when she can. She attended the event's 50th anniversary in 1990, which attracted an estimated 400,000, the largest crowd ever. (The event was suspended for two years during World War II.)

"I just love all this roaring," Billups says merrily at this year's event, leaning on a cane near a Humvee touting Playboy magazine and coveted by her 56-year-old son, Dwight Sholl. She's bought a souvenir, a Sturgis magnet, "to put on my Frigidaire and remember I was here in '98."

Says Sholl: "I'm just waiting to see if she buys some leathers."

Through the years, rally week activities have grown to include Black Hills riding tours to Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse and Wyoming's Devil's Tower, custom chopper shows, daily prayer services, an amateur hillclimb and shows by biker faves such as Steppenwolf and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Last year 23,000-plus people registered as visitors, or about one of every nine estimated attendees. Of those, nearly half came from Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas and South Dakota, while 846 riders came from Canada and 114 more flew in from Germany.

The event remains mostly white and male, with T-shirts spewing old-school attitudes about women, gays and Asian-made bikes, but change is slowly afoot. Mexican-flag skullcaps, for instance, are among the souvenirs on sale this year, and the Ladies' Day ride attracts nearly 100 participants, including Rachel Briney. Says Oliver Bland, a Kansan of African-American and Choctaw Indian heritage, as we watch his leggy blond girlfriend pose on his motorcycle for paunchy, quick-fingered guys with point-and-shoot cameras: "This is the most black people I've ever seen up here. People have been saying, `Minorities don't ride Harleys, minorities don't go to Sturgis.' Those barriers don't stop me. My father taught me different."

And really, it's about community: "Harley riders are ostracized," says Elizabeth Dinsmore, a 24-year-old rider from Seattle. "People have fierce stereotypes about how we are and what our ethics are. That's why Sturgis is so important to us. Because we're the majority for a change."

`This is an adult event'

Though organizers say they have never promoted it as such, more riders and tourists are making the rally a family event. Rally spokeswoman Robin Bagley says it's more that the culture of biking is changing. "Honestly," she says, "this is an adult event. There are things I just wouldn't want my children to see."

Still, they come, parents with strollers or kids wearing "My Daddy's a Biker" T-shirts amid the din as if it were Disneyland, with Goofy strapped in leather chaps and Snow White's leopard-skin bra barely keeping her enhancements at bay.

Local law enforcement rises tenfold during the week as the Sturgis Police Department beefs up its 12-full-time-officer unit with badges from surrounding forces. Although biker gangs are a small but constant concern, the guest list at the city jail - also known as the Sturgis Bed & Breakfast - consists primarily of reckless revelers.

However, it's not the parenting that concerns Rachel, it's the posing and profiteering.

"Sturgis is all about looks now, isn't it?" she says to Marty.

"Everything is like that. This is America," he says.

"Sturgis didn't used to be."

"Quit your whining."

A rainy detour

Tuesday morning starts with icy fog, clouds low and menacing in the foreverness of Montana. Just past Crow Agency, we ditch I-90 for Highway 212, a more direct route to Spearfish, S.D., where we'll set up camp for our Sturgis stay.

Just past the pastel-colored homes of the Cheyenne Indian Reservation, we hit construction under dreary, gray skies. From the back of Rachel's bike, I watch as the red-dirt path becomes a sudden slope of mud, catching her by surprise.

"Sit very still and relax!" she barks, and I am in no mood to jitterbug. Wheels hit the slick surface, and she tenses to control the slide, the bike tottering like a newborn calf in the mud but staying upright. At last the road turns to pavement again under a cold drizzle, and eye-catching swirls and cones left by the gods in their pottery phase rise out of the land as we aim for the temporary haven of Broadus, Mont.

We stop at an ice-cream shop where the coffeemaker is kaput, and the word is that more rain and construction plague our planned route. "They just told us there's 12 miles of mud that way," says one rider. "Guys are dumpin' their bikes like crazy."

Bad. We detour south to Gillette, Wyo., and get pounded by a blitzkrieg rain that pellets our mouths and lips, forcing us to lick the moisture away. We dry off under automatic hand dryers at the next rest stop.

Lunch is at the Fireside Cafe in Gillette, where Marty and Rachel recognize a familiar face: a guy who's left Sturgis on his way back to Seattle. Apparently, four straight days of rain was enough. "Never again," he says.

Two hours later, we're overlooking the muddle of a Spearfish campground. We pitch our tents in an area of tall, damp grass staked out by friends Joe and Madeline Rando, who own a Harley parts shop in Fallon, Nev., and have weathered the deluge.

"I've had wet feet all day," Joe says. "They probably look like Raisinets in these shoes already."

The next morning, I stand third in line for a campground shower, a choice spot I scored by getting up at 5 a.m. I am steely-eyed after surviving a night of snoring somewhere nearby that at full throttle sounded like two lions fighting over a piece of meat, as well as the threat of the dreaded brown recluse.

The area spider is the bustle of the women's shower lines, with a bite that requires a call to your health plan. The men's shower is a different scene entirely - exceedingly grizzled primates issuing barely perceptible grunts about the rain that camp managers say is the worst to hit the area in 10 years. One couple awoke Monday morning to find their sleeping bags in an inch of standing water; at another camp, a rider pulled in, spilled his bike and broke his ankle.

In the morning sun, a trio of Connecticut riders hold hands and pray. Rachel braids Marty's hair. I think: All of these plates from every corner of the country - Massachusetts, New Mexico, Michigan, California - and somehow we have ended up next to a couple from Bothell.

Doing the town

The hive approaches. Swarms of bikes toboggan the interstate. Lines of Harleys slither like licorice Christmas lights on adjoining country roads.

In town, "Welcome Bikers" signs are everywhere. So are the bikes, trestling freeway overpasses, queued up at gas stations where prices have risen 12 cents a gallon, tilting dominoes at motels with rates suggesting bellhops and valet parking, not free wash rags for scrubbing down your motorcycle.

On Main Street in Sturgis, we see wide three-wheeler choppers, the buffaloesque Boss Hoss with its powerful Chevy V8 engine, riders dressed as Santa Claus, as Batman, as knights or in hog suits. There is a giant motorized chair on wheels. Old-timers truck by on old Indians and Sportsters, yuppies in their shiny new leathers.

"When it gets full up, it's almost sensory overload," Marty says.

They drink it all in: Marty test-drives a 1999 Harley and its fledgling U.S. competitor, the Victory, and visits an old friend who helped tow his bike to town after it broke down five years ago in the Custer National Forest. Rachel does the Ladies' Day ride with Seattle pal Jan Kane, while that night, the friends enjoy a motorcycle demolition derby where a sturdy Seattle woman known simply as Vik is the only female rider in a dirtbath of crashing metal.

At the Broken Spoke Saloon, a platform of old bikes detailing the flathead-knucklehead-panhead-shovelhead evolution of Harley-Davidson engines runs the length of the bar, where Chicago Bulls forward Dennis Rodman made a surprise appearance last year. Busty waitresses accept tips en cleavage.

Seattle-area riders fall in - Jan Kane and her husband; Dave Eady, a Washington State Police escort who rides with the Seattle Cossacks; a group of battalion chiefs and firefighters from Redmond; "Knucklehead John" Crudup from Burien; two members of the Soul Riders.

"It's so nice to see people you know in a place that's so totally different," Rachel says.

She downs a beer and eyes the mechanical bull. For five bucks, she signs a waiver and hangs on tight while Marty watches, grinning in the crowd, chomping on a cigar, clearly enjoying himself.

Last year, 102 marriage licenses were issued to rally attendees, and chances are the ceremonies were like the Thursday afternoon occasion the friends attend at the Believer's Fellowship church just south of town. The groom wears a leather jacket, the bride a cream-colored halter top and brown pants. The maid of honor wears a T-shirt commemorating the 58th annual Sturgis Rally and Races.

As a dozen witnesses hum the wedding march, Lonny and Zandi Spiva of Vancouver, Wash., wait as the pastor - informal, dutifully long-winded and possibly the only person wearing a tie within a 30-mile radius - makes them one.

Remember why you love each other, he says; it's not because of what he or she can do on a bike, or because they can weld. It's something deeper.

The groom repeats after the pastor: "With my worldly goods . . . including my Harley . . . I thee endow."

Of all of God's gifts, the pastor says, love is the greatest. And love, he says, goes on forever.

Back on the interstate

So, too, does the open road, and, having had their fill of it all, Marty and Rachel find themselves side by side again on the interstate, staring at a monstrosity to their right - an RV pulling a trailer upon which sit a pair of handsome Honda Gold Wing motorcycles. They're tour bikes, constructed for ultimate traveling comfort, and they're on a trailer, barely outside of Sturgis. It's like buying yourself a bicycle and walking around with it, for heaven's sake.

When a fortysomething couple who trailered in from Michigan joked to Rachel that there was a trailer in her future, she answered that it would take a breakdown. Now, with this in front of her, she has to turn to Marty and laugh, a big hearty laugh of joy and freedom that echoes behind her as the mighty purr of the muscle jets goes zooming down the highway.