The National Motorcycle
THE NATIONAL MOTORCYCLE
Discovering America on an Electra Glide Sport
EVEN COVERED WITH A week’s worth of road grime, the Electra Glide Sport looked good. A study in blue and silver, it rested quite regally beside the KP Café in Silver Plume, Colorado, an old mining town 50 miles out of Denver. As I was zipping into my jacket—a task made that much harder by the excellent cheeseburger inhabiting my stomach—the café’s cook stood on the sidewalk, wiping his hands on a towel and admiring the motorcycle.
“Nice restoration,” he finally said, “What year is it?”
He didn’t believe me when I told him the Harley was brandnew.
Understandable. When I called up Harley-Davidson’s press fleet to get a bike for the 85th anniversary ride, I’d requested one of the Softail versions. What came chuffing into the Cycle World garage was the Electra Glide Sport, looking for all the world like it had just finished filming an Elvis Presley movie. I didn’t quite know what to think. “What it is,” someone offered, “is funky.” It fit. Shoot, this thing is so awash in funk it ought to come with a ticket book and a pair of mirrored sunglasses, or at the very least a shriner’s fez and instructions on how to do formation figure-8s.
Actually, the Sport is nothing more than a standard Harley-Davidson touring bike shorn of its fiberglass fairing and rear trunk. But the effect is dramatic, “Like taking your winter jacket off in the spring,”says a spokesman for the company’s styling department. “It has a nostalgic look, a ’50s feel. Like a car that’s been chopped and channeled, it becomes low and wide.”
The bike has sold well and even has some friends in high places. Recently, motorcycling’s multi-millionaire ambassador, Malcolm Forbes, was a guest on a call-in radio show, where someone asked him what his favorite bike was. Said Forbes, who owns close to 100 motorcycles, “The Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Sport.”
It doesn’t take too many miles aboard an E-Glide Sport to be convinced that Forbes is on to something. With nothing but an eighth-inch-thick windshield to interfere with the view, the road ahead streaks up to the Electra Glide and then is dispatched beneath its two, car-sized ti~res. Relieved of the fairing and tour trunk, the bike feels and looks at least 100 pounds lighter than the standard Glide, though Harley says the difference is more like 20.
About all the bike asks is that you steer clear of the interstate highway system, where it feels out of place, maybe even out of era. Better to stick to the meandering rural highways that link up the small towns of America. On these less-traveled roads, the Electra Glide is happy, the right tool for the job. After all, this is a motorcycle for making memories, not miles.
My girlfriend Billie-Jean flew to Milwaukee and rode home with me, her first long trip on a bike. We rolled through two humid, 105-degree days to sightsee at Mount Rushmore, marveled at the vastness of Wyoming, danced with thunderstorms throughout the beauty of Colorado and beveled the Harley’s floorboards along some of Arizona's best backroads. Back in California, Billie admitted to being less than enraptured with the heat, the lightning and the long hours in the saddle, “But at least I can say I’ve experienced the country,” she said.
It reminded me of something the great mystery writer Agatha Christie, most famous for her Murder on the Orient Express, once said of travel by train: “Trains are wonderful. To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.”
I’d like to think that Miss Christie, before her death in 1976, had a chance to ride a motorcycle and find out about another wonderful mode of transportation. She’d probably even concur with this bit of travel advice: The next time you want to see the country, I mean really see the country, hop aboard the Electra Glide Sport. Think of it as the American Express.
And don't leave home without it. David Edwards
