Twenty years ago, I was in newspaperman’s hell. The Berlin Wall was falling. I was on the wrong side.
I’d been traveling with a famous journalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, through Eastern Europe. Somehow, he’d sold the corporate office on the idea that two country boys from Texas could travel through the bewildering landscape of communist Europe and make sense of it.
Some countries, such as Poland and Hungary, had almost free economies. Freedom was leaking out everywhere. Some countries, such as East Germany and Czechoslovakia, were run by terrified old tyrants who were afraid the lid was coming off. Those old guys were clamping down hard, scaring people to death.
It was an interesting journey. Just at the end of it, the wall came down.
Americans woke up to see marvelous pictures of trains, loaded with political refugees, arriving in West Germany. It was newspaperman’s heaven — the opportunity to talk to fresh ex-communists. But we were still on the other side of the wall, talking to communists.
We crossed just as a refugee train arrived. A couple of fellows in motorcycle leathers got off. Many people found them scary, but they looked like Earl and Joe Bob to us. They were the kind of guys who might have been rocket scientists but who had cut too many classes in high school so they could find the formula for getting the last fraction of horsepower out of an ancient Chevy.
In Texas, people like that were free to do what they wanted. But these two were from East Germany.
They had read every motorcycle magazine smuggled behind the Iron Curtain. They had seen all the films, even “Easy Rider.” They had the leather. They had the tattoos.
But they never actually had seen a Harley. What passed for motorcycles in East Germany in those days were actually mo-peds. There was no rumble and roar when they gunned the engine. It was more like the sound of a jammed sewing machine.
Because they dressed in leathers and had tattoos, and because they had been caught, more than once, watching decadent American movies, they had been sentenced to prison for crimes against the state.
Now they were out, talking to real Americans, and they wanted to know only one thing. Could you buy a motorcycle on the East Coast and ride to the West Coast, seeing everything in between? Could you cross borders freely and watch any movie you wanted? Could you drink beer in a motorcycle bar and maybe even get into a rumble?
They had dreamed of America. Was the dream really true?
I never will forget the look on the faces when we told them the truth, as we knew it: In America, there is no one dream. There are many. And all of them are allowed.
