Leanings

LEANINGS

First impressions

Peter Egan

IN THE OPENING SCENE OF THE MOVIE we find ourselves looking down on a motorcycle parked in front of a garage or shed, on a paved driveway. The motorcycle has a chrome-plated tank, in the old English fashion, and is bristling with rods and levers and interesting hardware. The apparent owner, a young blond fellow, is methodically, almost lovingly, tending to the motorcycle. He wipes off real or imaginary smudges with a rag and carefully adds oil to the side tank from an antique-looking oil container. We aren't told the time of day, but from the sunlight it looks like early morning, and there is a relaxed aspect to the man’s movement that makes us think it might be a Sunday.

When the motorcycle is ready, he sets several of the levers, just so, and lowers a set of round governmentsurplus-looking goggles over his eyes. A boot makes a sharp stab at the kickstarter, and the engine, a big VTwin, fires to life. The camera shows us a brief glimpse of the engine. It has the initials JAP on its polished cases.

Now the bike is moving through a village, around a road-repair crew and then onto an open country lane. The rider shifts up through the gears, going faster and faster, with that big V-Twin making glorious music. There’s a shot of the rider, grinning to himself as patches of sunlight flicker rapidly across his face. The trees on both sides of the road are beginning to blur into a golden-green haze and the rider’s head bobs erratically with the motorcycle’s stiff suspension. The bike and rider are really moving now, and the narrow pavement is flowing by at an impressive rate. Suddenly there are children on bicycles in the road, the rider brakes and swerves and we see a shot of the motorcycle, riderless, hurtling over a ditch, then lying on its side in a hedgerow. Wrecked.

The movie, of course, is Lawrence of Arabia, and the blond fellow was a young, newly-discovered Peter O’Toole, playing Lawrence himself. The motorcycle was a Brough Superior with an engine supplied by J.A. Prestwich. The movie was made in 1962, and I first saw it when I was a highly impressionable 14 years of age. Twenty-seven years ago.

When it was announced several months ago that Lawrence of Arabia was returning to the big screen, reedited, expanded and better than ever, I started a daily vigil, watching the newspapers to see when the movie would open. I, for one, planned to be there on the first night, seated front and center with a large supply of popcorn and Junior Mints.

Besides being a magnificent piece of cinema in its own right. Sir David Lean’s Law rence was one of two powerful influences that caused me, way back in 1962, to suddenly turn my back on years of folk wisdom and parental advice and take up the sport of motorcycling. The entire movie was memorable, but it was those opening few minutes of footage that stayed with me when I walked out of the theater, slightly dazed.

What, of all things on Earth, I thought while riding my bicycle home from the movie, could possibly be more perfect than to have a motorcycle., and to wheel it out of a garage early on a sunny morning, wipe it off with a rag, check the oil, ride quietly through town to warm it up and then go hurtling down an empty country road, listening to the engine and feeling the wind in your face.

The answer, of course, was that nothing could be more perfect. Nothing. On that day, a general curiosity about motorcycles was solidified into a genuine passion. I was hooked.

Just to make sure the hook was in good and deep, fate stepped in with a second tug of the monofilament about one week later. I found myself hitchhiking, without much success, to a junkyard in the nearby town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin. (I used to spend a lot of my spare time wandering around junkyards, sitting in old cars, smoking cigarettes, avoiding mud wasps, etc.) I’d been standing by the highway for some time when two full-dress Harleys came thundering by. To my amazement, the front rider signaled a stop and pulled over. I ran up to the bike and an older man in a white T-shirt and a yacht-captain’s hat grinned and said, “Hop on."

I climbed on the back of a huge sprung saddle with fringe and conchos and we roared on down the road. I remember looking over the guy’s shoulder at the speedometer and noting that we were going 80 miles an hour. The whole ride was a crazy overload of sounds and sensations; too much to take in. What struck me about it, though, was the absolute sense of freedom. I looked around myself at the Harley and thought, “With one of these you could go anywhere." On that big motorcycle, the open road seemed to beckon endlessly as it never had when I rode in a car.

I never made it to the junkyard that day. The two Harleys stopped at the New Lisbon Harley-Davidson shop to see about some parts or service, and I spent the rest of the afternoon hovering around the edges of the hard-core bike crowd who hung out there, listening to their talk and trying to learn something about motorcycles. It was the beginning of a habit that persists to this day. While other people are out shopping at the mall, I'm usually hanging around a motorcycle shop.

A few years ago my friend John Oakey asked how I got interested in bikes and I told him this story about going to the movie and then hitching my first ride on the Harley. He laughed and said, “Jeez. I saw Lawrence of Arabia that same year and vowed that I would never ride a motorcycle. The guy got killed, for God’s sake!"

I just shrugged. “A fluke," I said. “Bad timing.”

There's no accounting for what grabs people’s attention and what doesn't. But Sir David Lean and the friendly guy on the Harley certainly captured mine. If there is such a thing as compound interest on a good idea, I owe them both more than I could possibly repay. 0