Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Fred Saunders: Have trike, will trek
The open road has been a way of life for Fred Saunders, and he has no plans to park himself anytime soon.
Photos by SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times
Fred Saunders, 81, recently completed a transcontinental motorcycle journey that took him all the way to Alaska and back via a very scenic route. Saunders rides around the Roanoke area nearly every day, a holdover from his job traveling for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Photos by SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times
Fred Saunders, 81, recently completed a transcontinental motorcycle journey that took him all the way to Alaska and back via a very scenic route. Saunders rides around the Roanoke area nearly every day, a holdover from his job traveling for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times
Fred Saunders warms up his trike prior to a late morning ride recently. In the spring, he made a transcontinental trip to Alaska, California and back, and more recently he has visited Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, where he picked up a new sticker for the front of his bike. He said last year he had to haul the trike back to Roanoke after a young woman ran a traffic signal and smashed into him.
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
dan.casey
@roanoke.com
981-3423
Dan Casey
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When wanderlust struck this spring, Salem resident Fred Saunders did something many others have dreamed of.
He hopped on his motorcycle and hit the road.
It took him from the warm and lush Roanoke Valley all the way to Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska. And later, down the Pacific Coast Highway through California, where he made a left turn near Los Angeles and headed east on Route 66.
By the time he arrived back home about 13 weeks later, Saunders had ridden up snow-dotted passes in the Canadian Rockies, traversed 115-degree deserts in the American Southwest and weathered sleet, rain, hail -- you name it.
He is 81 years young, and nothing will stop him from riding. The weekend of Sept. 12, he rode to Washington, D.C., and back for the Tea Party rally and march.
I heard about Saunders from his hairstylist, Beatrice Varnette. At 60, she's young enough to be his daughter. It blows her mind that a guy his age is wheeling around the continent on a motorcycle.
"I said, 'Aren't you afraid you'll run into mean people?' " Varnette told me. "He's run into the Hells Angels before. And he said, 'Well, they've gotten old, too. They're harmless.' "
Saunders and I met recently. He's a friendly and soft-spoken guy. And he's a lot more mind-blowing than Varnette realizes.
Much of the top quarter of Saunders' spine is artificial, he said, the result of degenerating disks and two surgeries for them.
The Elliston native told me he's survived three bouts with the dreaded skin cancer melanoma, and prostate cancer, too.
Way back in 1986, some heart surgeons in St. Louis refused to do a cardiac bypass operation on Saunders and told him to go home and get his affairs in order, he said.
But his ticker ticks on, thanks to stents that were installed later.
"Everybody thinks I got excellent health," Saunders said. "I don't complain. I wake up in the morning and thank the Lord for what I have."
A life on the road
Saunders has traveled nearly his entire life, ever since he dropped out of high school to enlist in the Navy near the end of World War II.
After the war, he finished school and took a sales job with a Montgomery County meatpacker. He married and he and his wife had two sons. Then Saunders went back into the Navy for two years. When he came out, he went to work for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The job was inspecting VA hospitals and offices all over the country, and it kept him on the road about 36 weeks a year. He and his wife separated after five years of marriage, and they divorced seven years later.
By that time, he'd met the woman who would become his second wife, Betty. His eyes light up every time her name crosses his lips.
His travels for the VA continued, usually by car, and Betty went with him wherever the job took him. They lived out of suitcases, mostly.
After 16 years of traveling all over the country, Saunders landed a desk job in Washington, D.C., as a top assistant to the secretary of the VA. He and Betty bought a 48-foot powerboat, moored it in a Maryland harbor outside D.C., and lived aboard.
When he retired at 55, they motored it to Florida, and later sold it. They bought a house, but felt a little antsy in it. After a couple of years, they sold it and bought a recreational vehicle.
Then the couple hit the road -- for 22 mostly fantastic years. They went wherever they wanted to and stayed for as long they cared. Then they moved on to another campground.
"We'd been used to traveling. We missed the traveling. We decided we could settle down when we got too old to travel," Saunders told me.
Toward the end of that adventure, Betty developed pulmonary fibrosis. Before it killed her, in 2001, she used to tell him how much she loved looking at puffy white clouds against an azure blue sky.
"When I leave," she'd point to the sky and say, "and you see those clouds, think of me. I'll be riding them."
A trike and a trailer
Saunders' siblings and his sons, who are now 60 and 58, persuaded him to settle down after Betty's funeral. Many in his family live in the Roanoke area, so he found a place to park his RV in a mobile home park near the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem.
For a while, Saunders mostly stayed put there. He drove a minivan. Then, back in 2004, a Honda Shadow motorcycle with a "For Sale" sign caught his eye.
He bought it and took it on short rides for a few years -- he's been riding motorcycles on and off since 1947.
Then the urge to travel grew again. So in 2007, he traded the Shadow for a Honda Gold Wing custom trike, and bought a small travel trailer to tow behind it.
In the summer of 2008, he took the trike and trailer all the way to Washington state. On his way back home, in Alabama, a young lady in a pickup truck T-boned Saunders when she ran a traffic signal while talking on her cellphone.
The impact totaled the pickup and did $11,000 in damage to the trike. He walked away from the wreck "with a few knocks and bruises," he said.
With a little help from some friends he'd made after the accident, Saunders rented a truck and got the trike and his unscathed trailer aboard it. Then he drove it back to Salem and had the trike rebuilt.
Over all his years of journeying, Alaska was the only state he had never visited. So that was his destination this year.
He has plenty of stories about that journey: the friends he made, the storms he weathered, the beauty he witnessed, especially in the Canadian Rockies.
And the white clouds he'd see against the deep blue sky, which always reminded him of Betty.
"I see those clouds pretty often, and I talk to her," he told me. "I tell her hello, and other things.
"She left me that. She's still with me."
