Up Front

UP FRONT

THE DAY OF THE BIKES

Allan Girdler

Spring. A wonderful word for a wonderful time of year. On this otherwise normal April workday morning I walked outside and was surprised. The air felt good. Warm, calm, fragrant even. And the sun was stronger than I expected. For the previous several months I'd been routinely checking the thermometer at the front door, deciding whether this was a morning for a jacket, or a riding suit, or a jacket underneath a riding suit. According to my scientific instrument nothing had changed, yet I could feel the difference and feelings never lie. Spring had arrived.

To those living in places with Real Seasons, this may sound odd. California is reputed to have one climate, endless summer, all year and I guess for people who live indoors, work indoors and go between home and work encased in glass, it’s true.

For bike nuts, it’s wrong. Misleading, even. Wade Roberts and Steve Anderson have just survived their first California cold-and-rainy season and they tell me it came as a shock. They expected to be cold and wet in, respectively, Texas and Michigan, but not in California. I had to explain that they’d been, well, not exactly duped but certainly misinformed because all they knew was the Rose Bowl Parade which is not, even here, real life.

So I rode to work, humming to myself, catching a hint of orange blossom in the air and thinking It’s About Time. We do ride all year; no, wait. Some of us ride all year. I can’t say it’s work but we do get cold and wet and spend many miles hoping to get where we’re going, all the while becoming (in my case anyway) a terrible bore and critic of those who aren’t as dedicated as we are.

Which isn’t fair, but in any case the good weather persisted until the weekend. On the Saturday I rolled out the Yamaha Turbo and went for a ride.

I was one of what seemed like hundreds of bikers, all shapes and sizes and styles, all rolling along in the sunshine and pleasant air, all delighted to be on the road again and never mind what the calendar says.

The route was along the coast, through the resort towns with bustling sidewalks and parallel to the ocean at a few undeveloped stretches. The ocean looked (for once) Pacific, blue-green with whitecaps and breakers. The Turbo purred and I sat there watching the instruments and every so often feeding enough power to send the needle into boost and the bike into the middle distance. Wonderful.

My destination was the shop. By dint of many compressed lunch hours and too many Sundays I had my XR750 project ready for a trial run.

Anyway. The engine fired on the third kick, my homemade remedies for various little problems with clutch and throttle and brakes and so forth appeared to work so I started off down the coast.

I went to the hamburger stand and found a parking place from which the bike could be watched from the counter. The man at the next seat commented, which brought forth the full story followed by an account of the bikes he’d had in his youth, then his wish to get back into motorcycling and a round table discussion of the best models on the market.

I headed inland, down the fast lane and was clicking right along when the engine signed off. By good luck I stopped near an on-ramp, down which I easily rolled. There was a gas station (one no longer calls them service stations) at the corner. There was a Marine tinkering with his Yamaha Twin. He loaned me a spark plug wrench and we made sure the engine had spark, gas and compression. Puzzling. I am prey to a vivid imagination, plus I read too many technical articles and could conjur up visions of magneto drives that somehow jumped a tooth, or flattened cam lobes or reversed polaritiesnone of these ever happen, you understand. I just think about them. But, drawing upon a Husqvarna of my acquaintance, I disconnected the wire leading from magneto to kill switch and hey, the engine fired up.

I should note here that none of this bothered me much. I wasn’t that far from home, the sun was shining and I’d eaten recently. The worst that could have happened was I'd have sat there until the surf went down and my son got home with the truck.

Instead, away I went again. More bikes, on all sides, big and small, two up and solo and I had a thought out of step with our times:

The bike doesn’t matter. In the morning I’d been riding the very latest in modern machines, a turbocharged Multi with full fairing and all conveniences.

In the afternoon a 13-year-old rebuild, a homemade collection of secondhand parts. Two big clanking pistons, pushrods, no instruments, no conveniences at all.

Oh, well sure it matters. But only in a personal way, I mean if I didn’t prefer 750 Twins to 650 turbocharged Fours, I’d own a 650 Turbo.

But that’s an individual choice. Speaking as a bike nut I looked around and realized that the guys on the 1100s and 1200s weren’t grinning ten times harder than the guys on the 125s. The rider who’d washed and polished his CB750K4 was having as much fun as the rider who’d just taken delivery of his V45 Sabre. The Marine who loaned me the wrench couldn’t have been a better friend if he’d been riding a Harley and I couldn’t have been more grateful if I’d been riding a Yamaha.

Motorcycles are what matter. Riding is what counts. Jamming through the wind on a nice day, listening to the engine, cranking on the power, using the brakes, leaning into the turns, sitting back and rolling down the road, giving all your senses a treat, is the important part. All the rest is minor detail.

Some weeks before this, at a non-motorcycle event, I was introduced to a lady who said, “Oh, uh, er, yes, you’re the man who, urn, rides motorcyles.” And she shrank into herself and began inching away, as if I was contaminated, not to say contagious.

She was what the sky divers, our fellow takers of risk, would call a Whuffo, as in “Whuffo you people jump out of airplanes?”

I was polite, mostly because I learned long ago that there is no explanation, not one that translates into terms the nonbiker can accept.

Back to the first day of spring. As the sun turned orange in the west I rode home. I parked the XR on the front walk. Then I got worried and rolled it through the gate and into the front yard, so I could look out and make sure it was there. But getting up and peering through the curtains seemed like too much trouble, so I opened the sliding glass doors and parked the Harley in the living room. (Where was my wife? Back East visiting friends, I’m not a complete fool.)

My only regret is that the Whuffo wasn’t there to see it. EB