Back In the Dirt

Back in the dirt

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

"No, I DON’T NEED TO BORROW ANY off-road riding equipment,” I told my friend Gary Elmer over the phone. “I haven’t ridden a dirtbike since I did the Barstow-Vegas dual-sport ride 11 years ago, but I still have all the gear from my desert riding days in California.”

Gary had just invited me to go riding on his family’s 600-acre farm nearby. Gary rides a much-modified Honda CR250, but he also has a Kawasaki KDX200, available for guests. “Got a helmet?” he asked.

“Yeah, Eve still got the original Bell Moto III I bought the first week I worked for Cycle World in 1980.”

There was a respectful silence on the other end, and then Gary said, “Better check the helmet lining. It’s probably dust.”

After I hung up, I dug into the back closet and found the old canvas Duluth pack where my off-road riding gear has languished, clean and carefully folded, these many years. I unbuckled the leather straps and dumped everything out on the bed.

One red-and-yellow CW jersey, name on back, no moth holes; one pair all-leather Malcolm Smith motocross boots with strap-and-peg buckles; deerhunter-orange high socks; motocross pants with Cycle World emblazoned down both legs; three pairs of variously armored gloves; two pairs of goggles with limp headbands and foam disintegrating; and one white Bell Moto III helmet.

I tried the helmet on, and when I took it off, most of the inner liner was stuck to my head in small tufts and streamers of black foam with the consistency of sphagnum moss from an Irish peat bog. I looked like a Rastafarian from County Cork.

So much for the helmet. Ten summers in a hot storage closet had not been kind to, it. I carried it by the strap out to the trashcan in the garage and threw it away, along with the two pairs of decayed goggles. Everything else was useable, if dated, but I’d have to wear my black open-face street helmet and the Smith ski goggles I bought last winter.

So dressed, I jumped on my 1968 Triumph 500 and rode off toward Gary’s farm.

A couple of cars whizzed by (as they will, when you ride a Triumph 500), and I must have made a strange sight on the highway: “Look, Dad, a guy going to a Seventies costume party!” For in truth, all my riding gear, bought in January of 1980, was 20 years old, at least. Unbelievable.

Quite frankly, my sense of nostalgia has been fading of late. I’m sick of the old century and glad to see a new one arriving. I vowed to get some new stuff. And maybe another dirtbike-a «evegeneration dirtbike. If I enjoyed riding in the dirt again, that is. We’d see.

Gary’s farm turned out to be something of a dirtbike fantasyland, an ideal mixture of wooded trails along a creek, open hayfields, sweeping hills, gullies and-best of all-a series of long-abandoned limestone quarries that left behind a kind of unreal landscape of ponds, small cliffs, ravines, and steep climbs and descents, mostly overgrown with a carpet of grass. Into these natural features Gary had engineered a spectacular series of jumps and ramps, using a Bobcat to build up the terrain.

He showed me one of his favorite jumps, a dirt ramp higher than my head, built at the edge of a deep 30-foot ravine.

“I won’t soon be jumping over this,” I told Gary as I peered uneasily over the edge. Gary laughed and made a run at it with his CR250, blasting over the ravine in a high arc (feet off the pegs for show) and landing easily on the other side.

There is an athleticism among good dirt riders now that I don’t think was even imagined when I started fooling around in the dirt in high school. Watching Gary leap and fly around the farm, I realized I am never going to learn to ride like this, just as I am never going to play the guitar like Eric Clapton.

But that doesn’t keep me from enjoying my guitar, and it didn’t keep me from having a great afternoon on the Elmer farm. The KDX200 is a delightful bike (at least at my level), light and easy to turn and steer, with a surprising amount of low-end grunt for digging up steep hills. It’s also about 275 percent better than the last dirtbike I rode.

Gary also let me ride his CR250, which even I could recognize as yet another noble step upward in suspension control and steering precision-with explosive, trigger-pull power. There’s something about a real motocrosser... I am not worthy, but I could get addicted.

At the end of the afternoon, we each took my Triumph Trophy 500 on a lap of the farm, just for fun. And Gary pronounced it, “surprisingly, not that bad.” I knew what he meant. The Triumph, which feels arthritically stiff and undergeared on the highway, actually feels more at home-more fluid, if you willin the dirt. The suspension handles dips and ruts at moderate speed pretty well, and the engine always seems to have just the right kind of torque on tap to pull it through anything.

Nice to discover that an early dirtbike (and seven-time national enduro champion), in its element, still has some genuine magic to dispense.

But my next off-road purchase won’t be a vintage bike.

When you’ve been away from these things for a while, the latest generation of dirtbikes makes you feel as though Time itself has reached out to hand you an unexpected gift. As if to say, “Here’s what we were doing while you were away.”

It’s not as easy to ride off-road here in southern Wisconsin as it was in the deserts of California. You have to have a friend like Gary with private land, or else travel a fair distance to the public fireroads and trails up north. But, whatever you have to do, it’s worth the effort.

I think I’m due for another dirtbike.

And, while I’m at it, some new riding gear. (Maybe I could sell my old stuff to Mike Myers for his next Austin Powers episode.) If I upgrade every 20 years, I won’t need any new equipment until I’m 72.