Totally Touring
TOTALLY TOURING
CELEBRATING AMERICA AT THE ASPENCADE
STEVEN L. THOMPSON
WORD GETS AROUND. THAT'S the way it is in motorcycling, which is built up from dozens of subcultures. And it doesn't matter if those subcultures are local or nation-wide; their members always seem to get the word, sooner or later, about anything that counts within their slice of the motorcycle pie. In this way, Ninja riders knew even before the press did about the Canadian needles for their carbs to help alleviate the part-throttle stumbles; the MX guys knew about the new Metzelers before the shops even had them; and the touring community knew it liked Bill Dutcher's Aspencade within weeks after the first one was over in 1983. The word just got around.
Of all our subcultures, none is so well organized, so closely knit, so likely to get on the phone with useful news as the one devoted to touring. Touring people are gregarious. They’re social. They like to ride in groups, to stop in groups, to eat and drink in groups, and to stay overnight in groups. So it stood to reason that after the first Eastern Aspencade’s 7000 participants scattered back to their driveways, they’d quickly spread the word around.
They did so with a vengeance: The following year, Dutcher recorded about 10,000 registrants for his event. And this year—well, this year, interviewed on the third day of the event, right after he had run out of color-coded wrist bands, Dutcher allowed as how the figure looked to be in excess of 15,000.
That’s the power of the Touring Word. It doubled the attendance in just two years.
There are lots of reasons why. First, Bill Dutcher is a smart man, a Harvard grad, a longtime motorcycle-industry type who understands not just his clients but the business in
most of its facets. Also, of course, he’s a motorcyclist. Most recently, he was Harley-Davidson’s public relations manager during the AMF regime; and when AMF and H-D split in 1981, Dutcher was confronted with the classic mid-career crossroads. He says he liked the options being offered—go either with AMF or with HD—but liked his vacation home in Glens Falls, New York even more. When he and his wife Gini figured out that they spent 5 l of 52 weekends a year there, it seemed logical simply to relocate to the vacation home and look for a career in the lush, rolling countryside of upper New York State.
The search ended with a late-night call to Til Thompson, originator of the “old” western Aspencade in New Mexico. Would Thompson cut him a deal to run an eastern Aspencade for riders east of the Mississippi? Sure, was the reply, why not? From that came, four years later, 15,000-plus heavy-duty touring people, converg-
ing on a tiny town called Lake George, ready to pump $4.5 million into the local economy in return for a week’s worth of. . . what? Why did these folks ride all the way from Missouri, New Jersey, Texas, Canada, even Alaska?
If you’re a knee-dragger, a bermslayer or a holeshot specialist, you might have trouble relating to it all. See, what goes on in and around Lake George is, well, not much. At least not by Daytona standards. There are few-to-no late-night, open-exhaust drag races up Route 9. No wet T-shirt contests. No saloons jammed with bikers getting ready to terrorize the civilians. Because at the Aspencade, the bikers are the civilians.
They come to Lake George to be sociable, basically. Oh, there are the mini-tours through the surrounding countryside, the boat trips up the lake to Fort Ticonderoga, the fashion shows at the Roaring Brook Lodge, the seminars by industry experts, the Motorcycle Safety Foundation riding clinics, the endless judging of the best-dressed, best-lighted, best-whoknows-what touring bike; but all this seems secondary to just chatting with other Touring People.
The chat begins on the highway, long before any of those Gold Wings or Cavalcades or Tour Glides or Voyagers or Venture Royales actually roll into the Best Western to sign in, get their pins, patches, wrist-bands and lodging information from one of the 75 cheerful staff volunteers. The CB is alive with tour-speak, twowheelers filling the air and drowning, for once, the endless, mindless garbage that characterizes today’s CB radio. By the time the big rigs roll to a halt outside sign-in, the riders are already in the tour-party spirit. And in the following five days of Aspencade, nothing is scheduled that will break the continuity of that spirit.
What’s it like? Mostly, it’s laidback. Mostly, it’s long breakfasts talking about your bike with other folks, then talking about their bikes,’ then somebody else’s bikes, then riding off to a seminar or a show or a mini-tour, all done in the unfrenzied Tour Style. It’s long, lazy lunches with more touring folks, by a lake or a stream or near the friendly swarm that always seems to be buzzingJ around the exhibits and demo rides and tech people at Roaring Brook. Then it’s more looping through the nearby countryside, maybe, until you take in the TourExpo down at the Glens Falls convention center. There, on what is normally the', hockey rink for the Glen Falls “Wings” (a felicitous coincidence, not planned), the major manufacturers literally weigh in with an impressive hardware show, while upstairs the accessories hawkers ply their trade to an endless audience willing, apparently, to buy without limit. Finally, after a boat tour or a little parasailing on the lake, maybe, you can finish the evening with another languorous meal amid men and women who share your special kind of tourspeak, and allow the day to settle comfortably away like some especially fine wine sipped slowly for the lingering aftertaste.
The emphasis, put there not by organizer Dutcher but by the participants themselves, is on socializing, always socializing. “These are people,” noted Nat from behind the counter at Carl’s Honda Accessories, “who ride to California for breakfast.” And while that may be an only slightly exaggerated view of the riding done by most of the attendees at the Aspencade, it does give you a clue to something else about them: By and large, they are not mechanism freaks. To listen to them discuss their bikes isL to hear of Drag Specialties chrome, can-caddy technology, radio fixes, trailer hitches, fog lights and Rain-X. Compression ratios? Cam timing? Rubber compounds? Listen for that kind of stuff at Loudon or Laguna Seca, not Lake George.
It’s safe, too, to make some other observations, albeit gingerly, about the bulk of the 15,000 registrants. First, without the Honda Gold Wing, most would not be here. True, the Harley-Davidson contingent was impressively present on Electra Glides and Duo-Glides and Tour Glides, as were the Kawasaki Voyager crowd, the Yamaha Venture Royale group, even some Suzuki Cavalcade aficionados. But as much as Til Thompson’s original 1971 event began this touring rally, the availability of a truly comfortable, genuinely reliable, enormously capable machine spurred its development. A Honda dealer noted that many of his touring customers were first-time riders, middle-aged people who had never owned or even ridden before, who were taking the opportunity of the newly empty nest at home to branch out, grab a little adventure and plug into the Gold Wing experience. It speaks volumes for that bike and its competitors that so many people can see in them so much fun for the money, because these bikes are not inexpensive, even before the riders give in to the urge to customize, as most do.
This urge can, however, take some weird turns. Among the hundreds of bikes parked at the Best Western sign-in area, for instance, was a travel-stained but well-outfitted Electra Glide, whose owner demonstrated a hidden trick it could do when he climbed aboard, started the engine and began back-paddling it out into the lot. The spectators were stunned when, as soon the bike began rolling backwards, the familiar BEEEP-BEEEP-BEEEP of a heavy truck’s back-up warning horn echoed over the parking lot. For this, he received grins and envious glances from fellow hardware freaks. And you can bet that by next year, more than a few of them will be back with their own back-up horns. Thus is status measured in Touring City.
You couldn’t help but notice some other things about the nice people who rode to the Aspencade. Take the matter of the PIB. The Person In Back was usually (but not always) a woman, usually (but not always) a > wife. And as the touring-bike manufacturers and accessories purveyors have discovered, she is not just a supercargo. Sophisticated, third-generation intercoms allow her to share he adventure in real-time, as does her seat itself, which has developed from the gruesomely uncomfortable pillion to a complex, sometimes airadjustable and backrested perch often more comfortable than the one the rider himself sits in. You don’t have to be a marketing genius to understand that the success of the touring-bike genre depends, to a large extent, on the success of tailoring the machine to satisfying the needs of the PIB; and so the attention Suzuki paid the back-seat needs on the Cavalcade seems justified, as does the attention Honda’s product-planners give to any PIB when she speaks out at one of the focus-group sessions held at the Aspencade.
There are a few moto-cowboys among the crowd at Dutcher’s event (“Ah ride alone, ma’am,”) but not many. The sociability of the touring folks begins at home, on their own bikes; and not coincidentally, maybe, his helps explain why a family that ys a touring bike usually keeps it, rides the wheels off it—together—and keeps on riding. A touring couple might get into the motorcycle game ter in life than a bermslayer, but statistically speaking, they keep at it much longer. No small part of the reason must be because the experience is, like the Aspencade itself, a shared one.
Bill Dutcher is obviously onto something very big in the little town of Lake George, New York. He has combined good timing and good luck to give outlet to needs few people even knew existed. By holding his event in the springtime, Dutcher allows eastern riders to celebrate the loosening of the chains of winter, an pression of freedom and renewed vigor and joie d'vivre which few who live and ride in the eternal cloudcuckooland of California can understand. By locating the event’s center of gravity in a pleasant, historic secion of the country that any travelminded American would want to visit anyway, he’s given everybody a rationale for the trip, should the event itself not be a good enough lure. For example, Benedict Arnold bought us all a year of liberty with his little “gundalow” fleet only 50 miles from the sign-in table, and Ethan Allen’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga, up at the head of Lake George, did likewise. Only the most insensitive lout could stand in the restored Fort, look out over the lake, and not feel a direct connection with those events of so long ago. That we are able to ride for thousands of miles hindered by little more than fuel stops and traffic cops is the direct result of the last full measure of devotion given by someone not yards from where you stand with your Instamatic. This is an experience available mostly in the East, since the great struggles for independence and for unity were mostly fought in the East.
It would be risking triteness to say that Bill Dutcher’s Aspencade is a uniquely American event, as much a cliché almost as to note that regardless of where the hardware was built, the bikes themselves are as uniquely American. Yet both are true, and there is in the air at Lake George and Glens Falls (the kind of town where Wally and the Beaver would be at home) a sense of something larger than the events of the Aspencade itself, something transformational, something big, something unabashedly American. This handful of days is more than a collection of things for touring motorcyclists to do, more than a commercial venture that’s turned out nicely for an ex-PR man. Like so much about America, it defies categorization, and so the inevitable response by most of the tens of thousands of particpants to questions about what it was like this year— “Great. You had to be there”—is not an evasion of the truth.
A thing is important only when people make it important. In that way, Daytona is important to motorcyclists, the Isle of Man is important, and now, finally, you can add another event to the list. The Aspencade is important. And the word’s still getting around.
