What a laugh it was, not so many years ago, when consensus ruled that road smoke would be limited to working gauge and the Aztec Ceremonial shit would wait till the last fifty miles. What a reasonable concept, rendering out-of-body experiences that may have been near-death in their own right. Hands worked clutch, brake and throttle with no input from telemetry, keeping things between the ditches with intricate timing in the purple haze, as if they had a mind of their own, along with the feets working the shifter and the back brakes.
The working gauge rule was another sentiment of denial—we weren’t even fifty and felt young. Fuck. But free will and motivation converge in youth to a point. Then comes the blessed infusions of road wisdom and most clear alignment of values—then begins the divergence, in which body follows mind only on a slower tempo.
The herbologist recommended electrolyte drops to maintain optimal energy and avoid mineral depletion. Dehydration is a challenge on any outing, but plain water won’t restore minerals and salts. One drop of electrolyte elixir per ounce of water preserves equilibrium. Energy is also enhanced with red ginseng, two caps daily. Ibuprofen eases cramping and a muscle relaxant inhibits spasm, but the muscle drug was only for nighttime ingestion. Daytime could bring the ditches into hazardous focus. Finally, a digestive enzyme with meals keeps the dukey chute lively, so the meat and French fries wouldn’t stack up.
A plastic tub in the garage opened like a tomb on old leathers, mildewed but supple, soon aired and cleaned. Foul weather gear, gloves, gussets, boots, scarves and stuff from years in the saddle rose from the folds to wake up and embrace the rider one more time, maybe with a tad too much emotion—tighter in the waist and looser in the shoulders.
The fuck?
The question is rhetorical but suggested yet another alteration in reality. Old enough for elderly discount at the movies, on buses and in some museums, I viewed age as seasoning. The old days weren’t so long ago—I don’t mean the old, old days, but the recent, old days. Not even two decades ago I rode my first Road King around the state of Washington casually as some people head to town for groceries. The North Cascade Loop ran a hundred sixty-five miles over the mountains to Winthrop for lunch with the Canucks, who rode down from Lake Cristina about the same distance. The Loop gave us rain out of Seattle easing to partly cloudy near Arlington, and up to sunshine on the pass with sweltering heat on the far side. After lunch with friends, the Loop went on around, home by dusk.
Another run across the North Cascades would be a first step back. I forgot the twenty-mile freeway scream up from Everett to Arlington, but it wasn’t so bad and not too loud with the Harley- Davidsons in back. The country road to the mountain remained free of development, and a biker bar on the outskirts of nowhere looked laughable. Many times we backed to that curb and bowlegged in for beer, low-rent ambience and the sheer raw camaraderie of men bonding on common values, like hunky cams, loud pipes, low-end torque, custom paint, pussy jokes and jukebox tunes.
Years later it seemed parochial and quaint, like a scene in binoculars viewed from the front. The massive power station at the foot of the pass still buzzed. Third-gear curves along the mountain felt easier, not so jerky and freer of close calls. Long straightaways through the forest felt shorter. Maybe it was the better ride, balanced and lighter, no bulldogging required. Maybe it was less dope, fewer stops, lower speed, and time passing more evenly on fewer thrusts. Or maybe it was more scenery and less scene.
What about the Triumph? Like all things anticipated, it was more and less. Flawless fit and finish, superb handling and responsive tracking made a blink as good as a nod. Taking five hundred pounds through the curves instead of nine hundred made for joy instead of work. At sixty it wanted seventy and leaned into eighty. Ninety came on a perfect sweep along the Salmon River in Idaho. Twenty miles of it connects White Bird to Riggins Hot Springs, so a hundred was easy with an inch of throttle to go. But a hundred was plenty and helped round the cogs, tame the gear dogs and ease things in. Decelerating from a hundred, eighty-five felt eerily slow. Did I already feel that, forty years ago?
So far so good, but judgment would come at motorcycle Mecca: Lolo Pass, a hundred twenty miles connecting western Montana to eastern Idaho. Lolo is revered. After Labor Day, Lolo is empty. A road sign on the Montana end states the rider’s prayer:
S
Winding Road Next 120 Miles
Lolo Pass is engineered to curve through nature’s grandeur on a spiritual banking that embraces every rider. Warm, crisp air and rustling trees or rain and mists; all connect the rider to the place. All components flow through Lolo. The road follows a river and feels like life.
Spirits linger at Lolo, beckoning and receiving till goose bumps rise from head to toe. Spontaneous war cries rise at Lolo, where we ride again together, warrior brothers of the ages. We die in a wave of civilization and cry out for what was and yet could be.
The blood-and-guts Harley Davidson guys made fun of the Speedmaster, calling it a Mixmaster or a good ride for a crack addict. But blood-and-guts was a show, a shallow rumble of tall tales in the drunken half-light of a smoky reverie. Most tales were of past Smokers, told and confirmed by liars who were there. Short of road tales, any macho bullshit would do.
I rode casually around seventy-five, but that seemed hurried. Sixty-five felt right. The Canadians grew up with a dollar discounted to seventy-six cents, often less—and a ninety day riding season. None went to college. But they’d had no war to dodge, so things evened out, more or less. They spent money in two columns: liquor and reefer on the one hand, chrome and cubic inches on the other. Many went to jumbo jugs, a hundred ten cubes to the pair. Nearly all had chrome pegs or chrome floorboards or chrome floorboard inserts, chrome passenger pegs and pushrod sleeves, chrome grips and header bolt covers. Chrome and muscle were a motif for the Canadians, and they parked their rides in a casual array of chrome muscle in any parking lot to take a break and break out the B.C. bud and mix up the cocktails—in glasses with ice, in a catalogue shot for a lifestyle market—a shot surely censored by Harley Davidson.
Cocktails in the parking lot were nice at the end of a ride. Most guys wanted to shower or lie down or check their messages or call the kids. Not these guys—hanging in the parking lot was like lingering on the road, kind of going that extra mile on a pic a nic for alcoholics. Drinking, smoking, leaning on their rides, remembering binges and wild pussy, these guys could hang and shoot the shit for hours. The road bond was bliss with no work today or tomorrow. It couldn’t get much better, except maybe in a few hours when they could get really fucked up and find some trouble to get into and maybe get laid. Road romance was rare, but the old stories got dusted and buffed, stretched and swollen. Hope sprung eternal, even in Canada. Besides, what can you do, ey? Go to bed?
They lived at maximum macho, looking down their noses when we agreed to hit a few bars. We walked; they rode. Around the corner, down a block and down twelve steps to the bar, they rode. We quit by midnight. They hit every motherfucking stop till the last light went out, night after night. When a female went along for one ride or another, they would crowd around, move in, press for new limits in the sexual anarchy universe, as new yarns would spin. But the women had also aged and in time they too turned in early or died off or laughed out loud. New honeys replaced the old, but what would any honey want with a gang of drunk and crusty old guys?
Events occur in threes. A few years prior we’d met Kevin, a likeable, self-possessed guy, or so it seemed. Kevin had seven earrings on one ear, eleven on the other and tattoos like a NASCAR racer, with crawlies up the neck and out a bushy eyebrow and Maori patterns across the chrome dome. His biker duds were sleeveless in leather or denim, and shirtless. Last, but in no way motherfucking least, the ride: a hardcore Softail in gold-sparkle green with massive chrome and a double-stack calliope carburetor like a milk bucket with jets on the end to force feed the power plant down to monster megaphone pipes that could drown out a steel foundry. The package may have been a set
up on a change of pace; Kevin was so soft-spoken and well-mannered. Maybe the package was to balance the softness. Speculation came later.
The night of our gathering, Smoker Eve, Kevin drank in the lead, bonding till daybreak. Not to worry, ninety minutes of sleep would be plenty for three hundred fifty miles of desert, mountain pass and high plateau—if a man was a biker and a Canadian, ey. He only needed a quick stop at a drugstore for some of that stay awake shit, a half bottle or so oughta do it.
Bug-eyed and twitchy, Kevin rode well enough for forty-five minutes out of town to the first sweeps that soon tightened, rising to the pass. A few guys had an eye on him, but when his head wobbled, his loud laugh let them know: didn’t mean shit, not if a man was . . . yadda yadda.
By the sweeps everyone was deep inside and outside; this is what we came for. Blue sky, sunbeams, charged air, a thousand moving parts coherent as a babbling brook converged on a greater flow. We climbed to the third sweep, where Kevin eased over to the shoulder and a sand drift, till his wheels broke loose. He went down flailing, bouncing, skidding, breaking ribs, puncturing a lung, trashing his ride and hanging things up for the three hours it took to get the ambulance and flatbed in, and Kevin and his motorcycle out.
Kevin never came back. His neighbor, Gino Marcione, had invited him on the ride and after his low-speed crash caused by sleep deprivation and a NoDoz OD, Kevin fell out with Gino. Why? Gino said, “Fuck if I know why. Guy must be a prick or something.”
And that was the end of that, till a few years down the road on an understated sweep at low-speed just after lunch, when Gino drifted off the shoulder and went down. I saw Gino two years later and asked what happened. “Fuck if I know. Fucking road just . . . fucking disappeared.” Gino was succinct on a tender subject he’d cogitated many times, pressing for the why with the most difficult follow-up: could it happen again? Gino was the second guy.
Anyone with a few miles or a hundred thousand knows it can end in a blink. With a few seasons in all conditions you think you can avoid it—or avoid the avoidable at any rate. But you know the rule of the road: shit happens. You take a calculated risk by first calculating the risk. Details in stories of crashes usually involve at least one of four factors: youth, speed, liquor and urban traffic. Car creaming is a major threat and can happen anywhere, often in the left-turn lane, while you wait.
The boys didn’t scoff at safety but did not want to appear overly concerned. They would rant and rave about the blind bitch who came in for the kill. Safety stops allowed for sharing thoughts on road hazards to keep everyone alert and stoned.
What? A bunch of guys on motorcycles are supposed to stand around with no dope? That wouldn’t be likely. But a seasoned rider processes stimulants better than an unseasoned rider. It goes to second nature. The calculated risk is weighed against the jackpot payout of joy in movement. With acceptable odds, you make the bet. These and other thoughts and joints pass round the safety stop.
Riding is solitary, no camp songs or talk. You can pull alongside and yell, but meaningful dialogue is with the self. A rider on back, often a wife, may complain about the cold and the leaning, but the seasoned rider will not have a passenger on a long haul. You remember things while riding, things to share at the next safety stop, like the time so-and-so got shit-faced and saw this woman at the bar. Turns out she’s a nun, one of those civilian clothes nuns, and he asks if she wants to . . .
So many miles, stories, meals and joints make for kinship. Common experience is a bond on beauty and bad weather, on close calls, long hauls, buffalo in the road, a bear on a bluff, elk on a hill. Big trucks blow retreads at high speed with lethal shrapnel. The boys know this but still pass, each taking a turn with faith in the road gods, downshifting, goosing to the power arc and shooting the gap in gratitude for money well spent on bigger cams and jugs. The other boys see. They feel and know.
I didn’t press Gino on details. Sudden impact can erase short-term memory. Or maybe he still sorted his odds on survival. He may have known why he crashed, but riders keep rider error to themselves, in another solitary place.
The Senior Discount
BULLDOGGING THE BEAST hard over could not prevent the wheels from easing over the double yellow, because every curve reaches a point of no return, especially a curve that runs deep and laughs at all your miles and seasoning and road wisdom. Don’t mean shit, bound for pavement, crunch time.
A collapsing curve can convict the defendant on a violation of the laws of physics. Enforcement is strict and harsh. The big difference between four wheels and two is between steering and leaning. Steering is fundamental, leaning intuitive. Another big difference should be obvious but can require learning: that four wheels can stop from high speed in a straight line. Two wheels can’t, or won’t. Ditching speed quickly can save a rider; sudden braking can challenge a rider’s health. Engine braking is vital. Throttling down in anticipation of need will reduce speed internally rather than at the friction points. But the squirrelly stuff sets in if you go too slow so far over into a curve. You’ll lay it down without the umph to the back wheel, so you goose to hold the line, but you need to pull things back inside the double yellow. You bear down on the bars even as you scrape pavement, even as you know that things just don’t aim to work out this time.
With an SUV oncoming and bearing down, life/death decisions transcend logic and rationale. The passionate moment defers to instinct, striving for minimal loss, deferring to life and limb, even in the severely depressed, which I wasn’t. In defense of rider skill—my skill—I will say that the error did not occur on my Triumph but on a ride that will remain unnamed, a heavy cruiser weighing nearly nine hundred pounds with a V-twin engine. It could have been a Harley clone. All the Japanese manufacturers were building to the V-twin market, and two guys rode them, one a Yamaha, the other a Kawasaki. So maybe I traded with one of them. What difference could a tank emblem make?
It’s common to trade for a stretch, especially on unique new scooters so different from the norm.
Jerry from Kelowna rode the extreme opposite of my Triumph, a heavier shade of heavy with gross power. We’d struck a friendship, talking about livelihood and what a man must do. Jerry called himself a jackoff all trades, cobbling a few bucks here and there, turning back. His odometer aptitude had earned good money for years, beginning with his first motorcycle.
After a hundred thousand clicks he buffed that old motorcycle till it shone. But with all those clicks showing, the trade-in value was still low. Easy enough, he took apart the odo through the traps and lockouts on mileage wind-down—deconstructing down to the little solder points on gossamer-thin foil, sealing layers of mechanism. It was surgical, penetrating to the nerve center to take years off the life of his very used scoot. At a different dealer he traded for twice the first offer. “Hell, even if a guy had to spend the money to put in new jugs he’d still have a great ride.”
The first mark of a true thief is his ready rationale. Jerry’s resume was peppered with logic, reason and good deals, really, through years of ever more challenging odometers. Hardly circumspect, he got a reputation, and customers came from miles around. “Fuck. Two, three hundred bucks, I’d wind ’em back a hundred grand. It doesn’t matter—if a car or a motorcycle is a piece o’ shit, it’ll show anyway. I did a couple junkers but then decided not to do that anymore. If a car is in good shape, the mileage doesn’t matter. I never fucked anybody. They were all good cars. Ran great.”
I couldn’t really trust Jerry, and his circus wagon of a ride ran like a semi with rocket thrusters. It looked frightening in curves—a fear that proved correct. But I gave him the nod when he wondered aloud just how crazy it would feel to ride something half as big with the same power to weight ratio. Pride is not a virtue.
Heads turned for my response, as if Jerry had offered alternate sexual relations. The wry eye of the Canuck contingent followed the volley. “What? You guys think Jerry wants an anal romance? You got the V-twin addiction. Your nuts are sagging
halfway to your knees, and all you can come up with is bigger engines.”
Har har. What a laugh. So Jerry and I would trade for a stretch. For me it was a whack off the tee on hugeness at a hundred-ten horsepower. It all came back in a curve or two, the weight, the folding, the bulldogging. Like anything, you adapt to make it easier, give a little more here, hold in some there. I didn’t get cocky but that didn’t matter; I went into a tight one, misjudged by a freckle on a gnat’s ass on the hundred-ten horses and went over my head. No biggy, I’d just, er, oh . . .
A seasoned rider survives by application of basics, like braking. Front and rear brakes must apply together, but the back brake can be lethal. Bicycle riders fear front braking—stopping the front wheel of a twenty-two pound machine at speed can throw a rider over the handlebars. But a motorcycle is hundreds of pounds, and it’s the back brake that can eject a rider in a phenomenon called high-siding. If the back wheel locks in braking, the tire skids. If the brake is released in that skid, the rig will spring the other way like a boulder from a catapult. High-siding must be avoided.
But drastic conditions call for drastic measures. I stomped to lock the rear wheel. Into the skids I pop-released, springing back to vertical and then some, which meant laying it down the other way. What an immortal moment, actually planning best conditions for a lay down. But the cliff wall to the inside did seem the lesser of two evils. Nobody talks about a controlled high side—I made it up on the split second, savoring the admiration of peers over a cold one only an hour up the road. At least I wouldn’t eat a gob full of grill. But too far over, low enough to go under the oncoming SUV, this move looked bound for greasy mangle. Ha! Except that the boneshaker between my legs wouldn’t fit under there. Well, maybe it would fit with enough momentum.
Another critical skill is push steering, whereby a motorcycle does not align with the rider into a curve but is pushed into the curve via the low end of the handlebars. Push steering separates the posture of the rider, which remains more vertical, from that of the machine, which is pushed down into the curve. Push steering can feel like steering in the wrong direction, pressing the bars to the left in a hard right curve. Given the hang of it, push steering can get a rider through far tighter curves at speed than body alignment steering. The vast majority of riders in non-fatal motorcycle crashes never heard of push steering.
1969 and Then Some Page 25