Humble Beginnings

Humble beginnings

EDITORIAL

I GUESS I’M LIKE MOST PEOPLE: I USUally don’t practice what I preach.

See, I’ve always advocated that riders who fall off with great regularity, beginners in particular, should limit their motorcycle-riding activities to the kind found in video arcades. People with such tendencies usually are accidents desperately looking for a place to happen, and putting them on a motorcycle simply speeds the search.

So, given my outlook on such matters, the fact that I’ve been up to my gluteus maximus in motorcycling for over 30 years is hard to explain. Because I crashed a motorcycle not once, but three times, before ever actually riding one.

I was barely 1 5 at the time, and my riding experience had been limited to a few short tours of passenger duty on the back of my cousin’s ’49 Harley Hydra Glide. One evening in the summer of ’56, while on a leisurely two-up cruise through the countryside, my cousin and I had a chance meeting on a deserted backroad with one of his high-school chums. Seems this kid had just picked up two absolutely stunning girls in his new car, and he invited my cousin to come along and make it a foursome. Without a moment’s hesitation, my cousin wheeled around and informed me that he was leaving and would I take his bike home, please?

As my heart began to rise into my throat, I reminded him that I didn't have a driver’s license for the silly reason that I was not old enough, and that it didn’t matter anyway because I didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. But he just smiled, patted me on the back and said, “You’re a clever kid—you’ll figure it out,” then jumped into the car and vanished into the hot, humid night.

And, as I learned the instant the car left and took its lights with it, also an extremely dark night. No moon. No streetlights. Not even any traffic. Just such pitch-blackness that I could barely see my hand in front of my face.

After sitting there a few minutes in stunned disbelief, I started trying to unravel the puzzle. I located the ignition switch easily enough and turned it on, but l couldn’t tell what gear the thing was in. A '49 Hydra Glide, in case you didn't know, had one of those lovely hand-shift/foot-clutch arrangements that even used to befuddle people with years of riding experience. I also didn’t know which way to rock the clutch pedal for disengagement, or in which direction the left-hand twistgrip (a manual spark advance, my cousin had once told me) should be turned.

I soon found out. I put the shift lever in what I thought was neutral, rotated the left grip all the way in one direction, and gave the kickstart pedal a firm prod. The tilt-o-meter in my head immediately sensed that something had gone awry, an intuition quickly confirmed as both I and the bike unceremoniously crashed to the ground.

Hmmm. I had not selected neutral, apparently, so my stab on the kickstarter had rolled the bike off its sidestand and onto its left side.

It was right about here where I learned that people who don’t ride aren’t so good at picking up fallen bikes. Especially if the picker-upper is a skinny, 140-pound kid trying to right a 600-pound lump of Harley in such complete darkness that he might as well be blind. But after what seemed like hours of failed attempts and near-hernial exertion, I got the beast back on its wheels.

This time, I decided to find neutral by selecting various gearshift positions until I came to one that would let the bike roll freely. Once confident that I had succeeded, I gave the kickstarter another romp—and about one ten-thousandth of a second later, felt intense pain throughout my en-

tire right leg as the pedal kicked back and catapulted me up onto the handlebar. And as I momentarily hung there, with my torso dangling over the front wheel, the bike rolled forward off its sidestand and plopped over onto its left side—again.

After much wheezing and cursing,

I got the thing upright, twisted the left grip all the way in the other direction and angrily jumped on the kick pedal once again. And to my amazement, the engine sputtered to life.

Problem was, I then was terrified to do anything, lest the bike take off on its own. I deliberated a while before deciding which way to push the clutch pedal, assumed that first gear was the lone notch just above neutral in the shift-lever quadrant on the left side of the gas tank, and gave the lever a shove in that direction—and abruptly ended up on the ground once again. I had guessed right about first gear but wrong about the clutch; so, when I jammed the thing into gear, the bike had idled off the stand and onto its side.

More wheezing, grunting, swearing. Lots more swearing. If it falls over again, I vowed, I’ll just leave it lying there and walk home.

Long story short, as George Carlin says, my fourth attempt finally got the Harley moving. But I wasn't up for any more surprises, so I gingerly rode the entire distance to my cousin’s house—only about eight or nine miles, but it felt more like eighty or ninety—in first gear. I shut off the engine and coasted around the last corner, then pushed the thing into the driveway so I wouldn't awaken my aunt. As I climbed on my bicycle and headed home, I promised myself that I would never, ever ride a motorcycle again.

I broke that promise, of course. Even as I pedaled home that night, I began to sense that I'd enjoyed my brief ride, although I wasn’t sure why. And in the days that followed, I couldn’t get the experience out of my head. All I knew was that I had to try it again. I was hooked, as I have been ever since.

So, please excuse me for ignoring my own advice; I’ve been having too much fun all these years to think about my less-than-auspicious introduction to the sport. Paul Dean