The Book
Rub Some Wind On It
A fiftieth birthday, a motorcycle ride, and a reckoning.
Five states. More than a thousand miles. No real schedule—and only two pairs of underwear.
What began as a birthday motorcycle ride became a reckoning with friendship, marriage, fatherhood, failure, and the dreams we bury without admitting they are gone.
Written by John Anderson — rider, father, and first-time author — Rub Some Wind On It is the story of one man's thousand-mile attempt to figure out what comes next.
Author
John Anderson
About the Book
John has spent his life fixing things.
Roads. Machines. Businesses. Other people's problems.
But as his fiftieth birthday approaches, the things he cannot fix are becoming impossible to ignore: a failed business, a strained marriage, an aging father, and the uncomfortable suspicion that the life he worked so hard to build has somehow passed him by.
Then Jack arrives with a plan.
Indian motorcycles. Five states. A thousand miles. No real schedule—and only two pairs of underwear.
John believes in tools, responsibility, hotel reservations, and making it home in one piece.
Jack believes in songs, signs, strange women, bad ideas, and going wherever the road leads.
They have spent a lifetime arguing, building, failing, laughing, and dragging each other through adventures neither could have survived alone.
As the miles accumulate, the road begins pulling old memories loose. What starts as a birthday ride becomes a reckoning with friendship, fatherhood, marriage, failure, addiction, and the quiet, private funerals held for dreams.
Funny, profane, and unexpectedly tender, Rub Some Wind on It is a story about reaching the halfway mark, looking back at the wreckage, and deciding whether there is still enough road ahead to become someone new.
This is a book for anyone who has reached the halfway mark and wondered what happened to the person they once expected to become.
The Route
The Road Behind the Book
This was not a carefully planned tour or the fastest route between two points. It was four days, five states, more than a thousand miles, and a loose collection of places I wanted to see before turning toward Pittsburgh and home.
The roads shown here carried me along Lake Erie, across New York and Pennsylvania, down into West Virginia, and eventually back to where the ride began. Along the way, the trip collected weather, strangers, strange signs, bad decisions, old memories, and stories I did not know I was looking for.
Rub Some Wind on It grew out of those miles, but the book is less about where the road went than what it pulled loose along the way.
June 4 — The big Erie–Warren loop · 336 mi
June 5 — The long diagonal, up to the NY line and down to WV · 377 mi
June 6 — Pittsburgh–Morgantown connector · 71 mi
June 7 — Ride home · 196 mi
