None Dare Call It Progress
None dare call it Progress
AT LARGE
Steven L. Thompson
THE FRONT WHEEL. STOPPED DEAD. the bike rotated over its axle and I was spit off the thing like a bug flicked off a finger. Various cartoon noises ensued. Pow. Whang. Ooof.
I sat in the trail-side rock pile. folded into a position that 43-yearolds are not supposed to explore outside a yoga class. I looked at the fallen bicycle and a scene from 15 years ago flashed through my mind.
It's 1976. I'm a guest rider in the inaugural motorcycle event at the brand-new Long Beach Grand Prix. It’s an all-Kawasaki function, and I'm the only media guy. riding a potent little KR250 GP bike. Always a slow racetrack learner, when the flag drops, I circulate carefully, but by the end of the second lap. get up to speed. Until I go too wide on the steep downhill right-hander at the intersection of Ocean and Pine streets.
At the same time the little 250 wheelies downhill, the rear wheel slides sideways. I ride out the wheelie well enough, but when the front wheel comes down, it's a little offcenter. I'm spit over the bars.
Broken bike, broken hand. Dan McCue, the Kawasaki PR chief who'd orchestrated this affair, takes me to the Long Beach hospital. Where we're checked in. and wait.
Most of an hour goes by, and no doctor appears interested in me. Dan gets mad, finds a doc. and just as we're about to get some attention, more riders come in, bloodv, broken
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and bruised, from the front lines on the GP course. Bicycle riders.
A whole gaggle of them has gone down in a multi-bike tangle of spokes and arms and spandex. But they're rushed through the check-in.
I look at Ian, the Team Lotus mechanic who’s sat next to me in the corridor for an hour with his smashed hand, legacy of a failed air-jack on the team's FI car. Ian raises an eyebrow and shakes his head ruefully. “Wonder,” he says in a Yorkshire accent so thick you can ladle it out. “what those blokes have that we don’t?”
Bicycles, in a word. I remember that as I contemplate, from my uncomfortable position in the rocks where its mechanical crudity has tossed me, my ungrateful mountain bike 15 years later. This expensive piece of equipment isa perfect example of the weird relationship between motorcycles and bicycles. A relationship that goes back to the very beginning, that is encapsulated in that scene from Long Beach.
The bikes with which those unhelmeted heroes mangled themselves in Long Beach were hardly changed from similar track racers of a half-century before, at least in basic design. But then, the KR250 wasn't the model of revolutionary change, either, despite its impressive speed. It had a tube frame, a twin-cylinder engine. a chain final drive, air/oil fork and shocks and other hardware that would have been instantly understandable to a guv in the pits at the 1939 TT.
I didn't see the bike-to-bike connection so clearly in those days, 15 years and two millennia ago. Like everybody else, I still believed in Progress. I thought someday w-e'd escape bicycles, and they'd escape us.
Sitting in the rocks two weeks ago, I wasn't so sure. Bicycle riders have long exulted in the simplicity of their mounts, priding themselves in the physical demands of the machines. But for someone who thinks that the job of engineering is to solve problems, this is hard to understand.
Being that someone, when I decided to buy a mountain bike, I reluctantly paid the physical and financial price, but wondered if any of the guys who designed the things knew that it was possible to ride a two-wheeler off-road without turning the rider's cartilage to worthless jelly.
The answer must be yes, because yesterday a new. $3500, fully suspended mountain bike made the “Technology” column in our local newspaper.
You may be wandering where this relationship between bicycles and motorcvcles leads. So do 1. Because
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it's beginning to look as though it leads nowhere really new, for either group of riders.
The bicycle spawned the motorcycle, and for decades, motorcycles w'ere known worldwide as “motor-bicycles.” Yet a century of fooling around with bikes of both kinds has led not very far down the long path of real development. Tires still need air, engines need gasoline, and riders of both kinds of bikes still need patience and skill to make up for the lack of real breakthroughs in the engineering of either branch of the two-wheeled family.
Maybe it will always be that way; maybe what we're stuck with is evolution, and not revolution. Maybe, just like me. some guy 50 years from now will pitch himself off his motorcycle or bicycle into a rock pile, muse briefly about how he could have avoided it, shake his head and climb aboard again, thankful that he didn't get too hurt to ride. Maybe this is all any of us—or most of us, anyway—in the two-wheeled w'orld really w-ants. Maybe we're happy with improvements to the components, but not interested in improving on the basic contigu ration.
And maybe that's just fine, the bicycle and motorcycle having evolved into a mechanical horse with which we humans can share a frozen-forever kind of symbiosis. Nobody really expects the horse to be revolutionized. Should we expect the motorcycle to be?
Yes. Some of us still believe in Progress. Some of us hope that tomorrow’s bikes w'on't just be yesterday's bikes in new clothes, that they’ll maybe not be “bikes” at all, but something like the “speeders” in the Star Wars films. And not just because we relish the idea of flying low rather than riding hard. But because, just as humans don't seem to evolve, neither do rock piles. E3
