Old School Triumph
Old School Triumph
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
WHAT WE HAD HERE WAS A CLASSIC CASE of full moon, big campfire, beer in hand and firelight glinting off the chrome of motorcycles. A balmy mid-September breeze rustled dryly in the trees, bringing down a random leaf or two. Dogs barked in the village of Bridgeton, Indiana.
Most of that reflected firelight was bouncing off the chrome of Moto Guzzis. This was a Guzzi rally, after all, a low key friendly little event put on for the past six years by Ben and Brenda Jackson.
It’s always held in the same place, a grassy, shaded field next to the old red brick Bridgeton High School. A family lives in the school building now, but they allow campers to use the old Boys Room and Girls Room and the showers for the gym.
If you open the wrong door while looking for the Boys Room, you are presented with the emotional hit of a perfectly preserved basketball court, complete with bleachers and a wood floor, right out of the movie, Hoosiers. You can almost hear the lingering echoes from the last home game, decades ago.
But I hadn’t come to this Guzzi rally simply to be struck dumb by the march of time and its inexplicable losses. I’d come to pick up a motorcycle, an old Triumph.
An old Triumph at a Guzzi rally?
Let me explain. Last summer I rode my BMW down to Knoxville, Tennessee, for the Honda Hoot. While I was there, a local enthusiast named Fred Sahms kindly loaned me his 1969 Triumph 650 Tiger to ride on our Cycle World Rolling Concours. It was a clean, nice-looking bike with a cheerful but historically incorrect blueand-white paint job, and it ran perfectly all day.
Fred had owned the Triumph since 1988, when he rescued it as a project bike from a local repair shop. It’d had a 1969 Tiger frame and cycle parts with a ’67 Bonneville engine, no instruments and a skinny rear wheel. Fred installed a correct wheel and tires, new instruments and a Boyer ignition system. He did a fresh valve job on a single-carb Tiger head and installed it on the Bonneville bottom end. What he ended up with was a sweet-running, good looking “bitsa” bike, as the British would say, with mismatched numbers.
But I don’t care much about matching numbers any more. I just like stuff that runs well. I’ve owned and restored “matching number” bikes that were never quite right after reassembly of their obsessively polished and powdercoated parts,
as if their molecular memory had been disturbed. Fred’s Tiger wasn’t like that. It was a smooth and happy motorcycle. So of course I told him, “Let me know if you ever think of selling this bike.”
This is always a mistake. A few weeks ago he sent me an e-mail and said he might sell off a few of his old bikes to buy something modem-maybe a brand-new Triumph Tiger. And unfortunately his asking price for the old Triumph was so reasonable I couldn’t refuse without having someone commit me to an insane asylum. Also, Fred said he could deliver it halfway to Wisconsin, at the Guzzi rally in Indiana.
So two days ago I loaded my ramp, tent and sleeping bag in the blue Ford van and headed south. My friend and total vintage motorcycle nut Rob Himmelmann went with me. We left early on a Saturday and reached the campground by mid-afternoon.
Bridgeton is a charming little village on a river, and it has a working gristmill. The surrounding countryside is famous for its covered bridges-there are 35 of them in the county-so the area draws a lot of rallies, swapmeets, etc.
When we arrived, the Triumph was sitting under a tree. Fred signed over the title and I took off for a ride on a beautiful fall afternoon, following part of the famous covered bridge trail. The bridges are linked by twisty rural roads like some-
thing out of a storybook. I rode for at least an hour, soaking up the Triumph’s lovely exhaust note, light weight, agile handling and listening to the smooth, castanet-like clicking of the valvetrain.
I suppose everybody has one bike of which this can be said, but when I am on a late-Sixties Triumph Twin, I always think to myself, This is exactly who I am. A couple of other bikes have this effect on me, too, but not with the absolute certitude of Triumphs.
Rob and I put up the tent and camped for the night, enjoying a grilled chicken and Italian sausage dinner around the campfire. While we were eating, two dogs got into a vicious fight. Both dogs, it turned out, were named “Harley,” so the owners were pulling them apart and shouting “Harley! Harley! Harley/” Fred turned to me and said, “Only two Harleys at this Guzzi rally, and a fight breaks out.” The rest of the night was peaceful and moonlit, with a million stars and we all stayed up late and told many unbelievably truthful stories around the campfire.
In the morning Rob and I said our good-byes, tanked up on coffee, loaded the Triumph in my van and headed for Wisconsin. We got home late in the afternoon and unloaded the Tiger in my driveway. Barb came out of the house and said, “You’re just in time. The Onoskos have invited us to come into Madison for dinner and to watch a DVD of the new Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. We’re bringing wine and dessert.”
“You take the car,” I said. “I have to clean up, and then I’ll be along in little while with the Triumph.”
On a beautiful autumn evening when you’ve just acquired an old Triumph, you can’t very well drive a car to see an early Dylan biography. I would brave the 50 miles of rural darkness and deer with my Lucas headlight, living dangerously, in the fatalistic spirit of those times.
Just before leaving, a small light went on in my brain (very small, as usual). I went back into the house and dug out my faded “Highway 61 Revisited” Triumph T-shirt, beat-up old cowboy boots and ancient Bell open-face helmet.
When you get wooden bridges, an old schoolhouse, a ’69 Triumph and a Bob Dylan documentary in one weekend, you have to show some respect for history, not to mention the march of time and its inexplicable losses.
