Ride Hard, Ride Short
Ride hard, ride short
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE MIDWESTERN Autumn weekends you’d like to frame and put up on the wall so you could look at it all winter. Balmy and clear, with the maples nearing full color and the wind “counting its money and throwing it away,” as Carl Sandburg put it so nicely, scattering golden leaves across country roads. The wind smelled like dry leaves and grain dust from corn harvesting.
Which is a good thing, because I did not. I reeked of wood smoke from sleeping in a tepee all night, next to a campfire.
Yes, we recently acquired an actual plains-style Indian tepee and have erected it on the lower pasture overlooking our creek.
We camped in it this past weekend with a bunch of our friends, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks, much as Lakota warriors might have done if they’d had a grocery store nearby, instead of 10 million buffalo.
Good times, but when I got up in the morning and walked out the east-facing door into the first rays of sunlight, it was time to shift back into the present century and ride. A big day around here: The seventh-annual autumn Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang Café Racer Run.
As I’ve noted in previous years, this-and the spring run-are essentially semi-disorganized affairs in which interesting bikes in the café-racer tradition are encouraged to show up at a country bar in Pine Bluff, Wisconsin, and then randomly ride about 60 miles to another country bar called the Sprecher Tap in the village of Leland, for an afternoon of bike appreciation. Not a real long ride, but then the Slimey Crud motto is, “Ride hard, ride short.”
This year, I looked over my meager four-bike “collection” and decided to ride my black 1977 Harley XLCR. What could be more appropriate, after all, than a motorcycle that actually has the words “Café Racer” in its official factory designation? It’s as easy as picking out clean underwear with “Wednesday” stamped on it.
A nice assemblage of bikes showed up again this year, approximately 500 of them. My favorite was a café-racerized “Black Bomber” Honda CB450, looking very Dunstall-period correct, with upswept pipes, long, low tank and bum-stop seat. None of this pre-packaged stuff, like mine.
Motorcycle Performance of Madison brought a Kawasaki drag racer they started up for the crowd. It revved with an unearthly, eardrum-shredding bark and filled the air with exotic fumes that made everyone’s eyes water. It was wonderful.
Late in the afternoon, our Slimey Crud President for Life, Dr. Kenneth Clark, mounted the front steps of the Sprecher Tap to thank all the riders for being there and not crashing their brains out on the way. He said people had been calling all week to ask if the unpublicized run was being held as usual, and he said, “Of course it is! This event has taken on a life of its own. We couldn’t stop it if we tried!” Much cheering.
Then, on a more somber note, he reminded the crowd that one of the founders of the Café Racer Run, Bruce Finlayson, had died of cancer this past summer.
“We Cruds ajl took up a collection and dedicated a park bench to him,” Ken explained. “It’s at Brigham Park, up in the hills near Blue Mounds where we all used to ride together. It overlooks the valley, at the place where we scattered his ashes. If you ride past there, you should stop and rest a while. The bench has a plaque with his name on it.”
It suddenly occurred to me, while looking out at the crowd, that you could see the faces of nearly all the people who took care of Bruce when he was sick.
Like so many families, his was widely scattered around the U.S., so it was friends who looked after him when he
became ill. An old friend from Michigan named Kathy did most of the hardest work, but the Cruds helped, too. We all drove Bruce around, ran errands and put on rides and gatherings to try to condense the pungency of life as best we could. Another old friend, Phil Schilling, the former editor of Cycle, flew all the way out from California to visit and help out, then returned a few weeks later for the funeral.
Bruce knew everyone in the motorcycle world. He raced at Daytona in the Sixties, restored Ducatis, BMWs and old Hondas, and wrote articles for motorcycle magazines. He was a fast guy of almost magical smoothness, who could ride like the wind.
And in the end, it was mostly just other riders who looked after him. People in leather jackets; the other family.
Odd how that happens, I thought. All but a small handful of my own good friends, after 52 years of life, are motorcyclists. The effect, no doubt, of some unspoken agreement on how life should be lived.
I rode home alone that afternoon, and took a little detour, the XLCR hammering up the winding valley roads out of the Wisconsin River Valley, climbing County Highway F to Brigham Park, which stands on Military Ridge in a natural grove of sugar maples.
It didn’t take me long to find the new redwood park bench. The bronze plaque on the backrest reads:
Bruce M. Fin lavs on 1945-200Ó
Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang Ride Flard, Ride Short
I sat there for a long time, taking in the view. You can see all the way back down to the Wisconsin River Valley, and beyond, to the bluffs at Devil’s Lake. It is, to my mind, one of the finest views on Earth.
Late in the afternoon, a wind came up and began to blow steadily, rustling the trees. There’s something about a warm autumn wind in this part of the country that’s a little unsettling. It sounds like the audible passing of time, the hidden clockwork behind the scenery, moving way too fast and sweeping another season away.
I rode home on the backroads, taking the long way around, listening to the beatific sound of those siamesed pipes until it was almost dark.
