#family

Ryland Wakeley Sr. was born in Chicago’s Beverly Hills neighborhood, a slightly less bougie part of town compared to the California city of the same name, in 1915. As a young child growing up in Chicago, one day Ryland found himself cruising on the back of a neighbor’s Harley-Davidson, watching the pavement fly by beneath him. It was at that moment the fire was lit. A lifelong passion for motorcycles, specifically Harley-Davidson, would ensue. From then on, whatever he had going on in his life, he made sure he had a motorcycle.

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I found myself at the top of the longest staircase I’d ever seen. My family and I were on a six-mile hike along the Great Wall of China, and we’d just traversed miles of the unrestored wall, clambering over stones that had fallen out of place and pushing through the trees that had grown in the centuries since the Wall’s construction. I’d expected the going to get easier once we reached the area that had been restored just 45 years ago, but this length of stairs pulled me up short. We’d encountered similarly steep sections of steps in 20-30 foot chunks along the wall but nothing like this. In the time of the wall’s construction, the terrain it traversed dictated its shape since the high explosives and heavy machinery we take for granted in modern construction weren’t available to lessen the mountain’s angles to suit those of humans on the wall.