Dateline Missoula
CYCLE WORLD w -
1962~
retrospective
--ditor's Note: No telling where a trip might take you. Iceland, Montana-or maybe a whole new career. Back in 1977. young Peter Egan, a struggling foreign-car mechanic with an unused journalism degree, set out on a 4000-mile roundtrip aboard his "old" Norton. wife Barbara on pillion. The story Cexcerpted here) about the misadventures that followed marked the first time Egan had been pub lished. More freelance submissions followed and the rest I~ his story in 1900, Peter joined the Cycle World staff; three years later he was hired away by sister magazine Road & Track. Today, he's Editor-at-Large for both publications. In 1990, he and Barb moved back to Wisconsin, where they still live.
Dateline Missoula
The pundits said we’d never make Seattle—and they were right
PETER EGAN
I GUESS IT’S BETTER TO BEND A VALVE IN MISSOULA THAN to lose your mind in Bozeman,” my wife said, patting my hand as if to console me.
We were riding back to Madison, Wisconsin, via Grey-hound bus, returning to a city full of prophets honored in their own time. Everyone had told me not to ride my British Twin to Seattle. Howard was the first.
An old friend and first-generation Honda mechanic, Howard had grown up among Super Hawks, Benlys and Dreams, having little patience with things that leaked oil, blacked out or had to be kicked. With just the lightest touch of derision, he had named my venerable motorcycle the “Manxton Contaminator Twin.”
I told him, “Next month, Barb and I are riding the bike out to Seattle.” He looked at me exactly as my mother had when I told her I’d quit college to join the Army: wearily, quietly incredulous.
“Take a car,” he said.
“What?”
“Take a car. Turn on the radio. Chew gum. Put one foot on the dash. You can steer with one finger and look around at the scenery. Write postcards while you drive, read the Wall Street Journal, roll your windows up or roll them down-anything. But don’t take your motorcycle.”
“Why not?”
“Because on that bike, you can’t get there from here.”
Howard's last word of advice was that I send a Honda Gold Wing to the post office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and then pray that I made it that far, so I could change horses en route. No thanks. I’d ridden a Gold Wing. Too easy. Like taking a tram up the Eiger instead of climbing the face. Anybody could get to Seattle on a Gold Wing. It was adventure I was after, not trip insurance.
The next day, I visited my friendly Suzuki/BMW dealer, who had the last shop in town with antique British parts moldering on its back shelves. On the side of the building the names of three extinct motorcycles had all but faded away, like those Mail Pouch Tobacco signs on old barns.
It was a shop with a glorious past.
Incredibly, they had both the throttle and clutch cables I wanted as spares. Jeff, the head BMW/ex-British Twin mechanic, stepped outside to look at my bike, wiping his hands on a rag. I told him about my trip and asked if there was anything special I should do, outside of regular maintenance, to prepare the bike for a 4000-mile trip.
“If I were you,” Jeff said. “I’d change my oil, adjust my chain, set the valves, and then, just before I left, I'd trade it in on a BMW.”
Skeptics, heretics and hooters were everywhere, like some chorus in a Greek tragedy, portending ill for their flawed and heedless hero. I finally quit telling people about the trip and made plans with my wife in the privacy of our own living room.
We would travel light and simply. No fairings, trailers or
saddlebags for the old bike. A strong luggage rack on the back, to hold an army duffel bagful 1 of stuff, and a tankbag to hold the rest. For shelter from the storm we had Big Pink, a formerly red, two-child Sears pup tent left over from my youth (the replacement aluminum poles were too short, causing the tent, when erected, to look like a failed soufflé), and a double sleeping bag whose lining was printed with branding irons and cowboys. There was some raingear, minimum clothes and a carefully chosen toolkit. No compass, snakebite kit or spare shoelaces. Traveling light on a motorcycle demands ruthless restraint, a fine sense of asceticism and a big wad of colorful plastic credit cards. We left before sun-up on a Saturday morning.
Two hours of ghostly pre-dawn gloom swirled past, and then at 7 a.m. the Twin delivered us to the crest of the palisades above the Mississippi River Valley. The air was cool, but the first rays of the sun wanned our backs and began to burn away the mist. Only the towers of the bridges below rose out of the fog. The hills on the opposite bank were golden green in the morning sun. “Not bad!” I shouted over my shoulder.
“What?” my wife replied. We were to have many such conversations in the miles ahead.
Iowa’s rolling eastern hills stopped rolling, the trees dried up and com country arrived. The roads ran as straight as the crop rows, and the midsummer corn held down a hot blanket of humid air that defied even a 55-mph chill factor. No breeze blew; the heat was stifling. Com plants, I noted, breathe and perspire just as we do. Maybe more.
The Contaminator Twin loved it. The engine had not missed a beat crossing one-and-one-half states-nearly the length of, say, England. Gas station checks revealed no loose bolts or unnatural oil loss; the headlight still burned. I began to think that a little Loctite and silicone sealer might have changed the fate of British motorcycling.
As Iowa is firmly Midwest, South Dakota, for me, is the beginning of the West. The Badlands, in particular, have that quiet, dawn-of-time feel. “Lovely,” 1 said to myself, making an expansive sweep of my arm over the view. My wife repeated the motion, knowing w hat I meant. One of the 10 great gestures of motorcycle wind language, that sweep of the arm.
By evening we were in Winner, South Dakota, camped just outside of town. We spent a stormy night in Big Pink The Two-Child Tent, which affords about as much rain protection as a tree with quite a few leaves. In the morning, we were awakened by a rooster that actually said “cock-a-doodlc-do,” as if reading the word.
My dislike of interstates and love of secondary roads found us the following day on a clay-and-gravel goat path south of the Badlands. The road wound through butte and gully country with dozens of pastel shades of rock and dust muting the strong sunlight. The dust, in fact, was worrisome. We were trailing a w ide plume of the stuff, and I wondered what deleterious effects it was having on Manxton chain, bearings and cylinder walls. 1 hoped the air filters were keeping the inside of the engine cleaner than the outside. The Twin was never intended for Baja. After a few hours, I began to feel like a courier in the Afrika Korps, and decided it would be best to avoid dotted-line roads and stick to the red ones in the future.
On what was to be, it turned out, the last night of our bike trip, we were turned back from Yellowstone Park by a “Full” sign on the entrance gate (now that folks can drive their houses out West, camping is more popular than ever), so we backtracked to a very pleasant campground in the Shoshone National Forest. The Twin started hard (i.e., not at all) in the morning. The weather was cool, and the 50weight oil about as viscous as three quarts of Smuckers topping. Each time I jumped on the kickstarter, the engine went “uff ’ and moved through half a stroke. Something was not right with the Contaminator. Usually two kicks, no matter how slow, were enough to make it fire. That morning, we finally pushed it downhill while I popped the clutch. It started reluctantly and ran less smoothly.
“Bad gas,” I said. “It’s that dishwater they’re selling as premium now.”
We pushed north into Montana. If ever a license-plate blurb carried a grain of truth, it is Montana’s “Big Sky Country.” There is no other place in the world where you are eternally surrounded by mountains that are forever 50 miles away. We rode up the Madison River Valley into the first rainstorm of the trip, invincible in our rubber suits. By noon, a cool wind dried the pavement and we were on the dreaded interstate-our only choice-near Butte, headed for a night with some friends in Moscow, Idaho. After 1400 miles and five days on the road, the Manxton Contaminator Twin still lived, running better than it had any right to. I began to suspect that we would not only reach Seattle, but possibly even make it home again. I felt guilty, however, pushing this sporting machine over endless miles of interstate, even for one afternoon. It was like some interminable torture test, with the engine hovering at one constant, dull, unvarying pitch.
Finally, the Twin decided it had endured enough.
About 25 miles from Missoula, the engine gave out a raucous mechanical clatter and started running on one cylinder. We pulled over, removed the rocker covers, and found three hundred-thousandths of rocker clearance on the right-hand exhaust valve. It was not returning all the way. Bent, as it were. The right cylinder had just enough compression to blow one very faint smoke ring. I adjusted the tappet to cut down
some of the clatter and tried to restart the bike. Oddly enough, it started and ran. We were on our way, albeit not too swiftly or silently. For 25 miles, the (now) Contaminator Single pulled us across the country, up hill and down, at 45 mph.
I listened to the engine for sounds of further disaster, waiting for the worst. The bike kept on, lugging its 300-pound burden of passengers and gear on one tired cylinder. My emotions vacillated wildly; I couldn’t decide whether to heap abuse or praise on the machine. But it was a painful ride for us, like forcing a crippled horse to run. We were exhausted from tension by the time we reached the first motel Missoula had.
Some quick telephone calls confirmed the worst. No shop in town had parts for, or could fix, the old Manxton. No one knew where to get parts, or anyone who even had such a bike. Someone at a Yamaha shop said one guy in town might be able to fix it if he had the parts, which he didn’t, but he was on vacation.
The next morning, on Missoula’s Annual Hottest Day of the Year, we pushed the Twin two miles across town to a Bekins freight office. The proud Manxton, which had conquered the Bighorns with impunity, now had me trembling at the sight of Missoula’s manhole covers. As we pushed, swarms of children on banana-seat bicycles encircled us and asked clever questions or made witty remarks. Why, I asked myself, aren’t these children working in coal mines or textile mills, where they belong? By the time we finished pushing, I’d made a mental note to refrain from having any children, and had, at the same time, found new respect for the latent energy in a cup of gasoline. We filled out all the forms and mailed the bike home.
The trip to Idaho, and then to Seattle was made by bus and train. We took the Greyhound home.
Riding in the bus, I thought about the trip and about the motorcycle. When the Twin arrived home, I would fix the valve, clean the engine, polish the chrome, and keep the bike for special occasions like Sunday rides, the way one uses a MG TC or a Piper Cub. I had, unfairly, asked too much of the motorcycle. My fault.
Everyone had warned me what might, or surely would, happen. My own instincts had warned me. I knew the trip to be an undertaking whose outcome was uncertain. There was plenty of good advice to that effect. On any of a dozen other motorcycles, our finishing the trip would have been a foregone conclusion.
Maybe, in the end, that was why we took an old British Twin. It’s not so terrible, just two weeks out of the year, not to know what’s going to happen next. □
