A Triumph In the Crescent City
CW FIRST RIDE
A Triumph IN THE Crescent City
Riding the revised Bonneville in a resurrected New Orleans
PETER EGAN
EVER NOTICE HOW ALL THE GREAT CITIES SMELL LIKE garbage and spilled drinks in the morning, if you get up early enough and take a walk? Look at Paris and New York.
And—normally—New Orleans.
But on my first morning in the Big Easy last week, the street crews were actually out there washing down the pavement in the French Quarter with big brushes and jets of hot soapy water. Is nothing sacred?
Still, there was just enough morning-after musk and decay in the air to let you know you were somewhere important. And as I walked down Toulouse Street toward the Café du Monde for breakfast, new smells of chicory coffee and beignets began to fill the air, along with blooming spring flowers in Jackson Square.
What a town. It was good to be back again.
The first time I came to New Orleans was in 1978, and the trip took almost a week. I rode my red 1975 Honda 400F down the Mississippi from Wisconsin along Highway 61, alternately camping, staying in cheap motels and meandering through the blues country of the Mississippi Delta.
When I finally rolled into New Orleans, I took the Vieux Carre exit and rode the Honda right into the heart of the French Quarter. I serendipitously found a vacant room at a place called The Cornstalk Fence Hotel on Royal Street. So-named-as you might suspect-because it had a wroughtiron fence that looked like a row of cornstalks. The original owner’s wife had been homesick for Iowa-hard as that is to believe, what with the quality of Cajun food in Des Moines.
It took me about five minutes to fall in love with New Orleans on that first trip, and I’ve been back several times since-once in my very long 1963 Cadillac and once in a 1945 Piper Cub. My last visit was on a car trip four years ago, just weeks before Hurricane Katrina stuck.
And now Triumph had invited us to New Orleans to try out the new fuel-injected Bonneville SE. A nice chance to do some riding and see the place again, but I didn’t know what to expect. If you believed the dire TV news images of the city, you might think there was nothing left but the highand-dry French Quarter, surrounded by a wasteland of soggy abandoned houses, mildew and crime. I didn’t know if I’d recognize the place.
But on the shuttle ride in from the airport, everything looked surprisingly clean and neat. I asked the bus driver if there’d been any flooding along I-10. “The water was up to the bottom of that railroad overpass,” she said, pointing upward, “and this highway was closed for three months.”
Amazing.
Suddenly we were in the French Quarter. Narrow streets, iron-railed balconies, great food smells, horses & buggies, cobblestones, ancient brick homes. Vampire and voodoo tours! I checked into the Ritz-Carlton on Canal Street, where the hotel PR director, a young woman named Char, told me she owned two Triumphs, a Thruxton and a Speed Triple.
A good omen...
I walked a short nine blocks to a Vespa/Triumph/Ducati shop called The Transportation Revolution and picked up my bike, a 2009 Bonneville SE. Blue and white, 17-inch mag wheels, fuel-injectors embedded in what appear to be traditional carburetors. I was told the rake had been pulled in a half-degree for quicker steering. Seat a tad lower than my own 2008 Bonneville’s, and slightly more reach to the handlebars.
When I first heard Triumph was extending its retro look forward into the Seventies with this SE version, I was less than ecstatic. The Seventies were not exactly Meriden’s Golden Era, and most purists (I guess that would include me) prefer 1970 and earlier Twins, aesthetically speaking.
But the new SE, to my eye, is undeniably handsome and has a fresh, sharper look, rather jaunty with its mags. It probably helps that it doesn’t embody the Seventies stigma of ever-declining performance and lean-emissions blues. It has the fuel-injection those bikes needed and didn’t get. Also the quality control.
The bike fired immediately with the fast-idle (not choke) knob pulled out on the left faux carb, accompanied by a brief electrical whoopee-cushion sound telling you the EFI system is wide awake.
I headed out onto the street and explored New Orleans for the rest of the day. Once in motion, the SE is pretty much like my own ’08 version, though the throttle response is crisper-almost abrupt in slow traffic-but you adapt and the bike soon feels quick and alert. No flat spots anywhere, no hunting.
I was told by Max Materne at the Triumph shop that the steering would feel noticeably more agile, but I couldn’t detect much change at Big Easy speeds. I wasn’t exactly dragging my knee down Bourbon Street (that would come later in the evening), so we’ll have to take Max’s word for it. He’s been out of town in the twisties.
Basically, the bike feels like a modern Bonneville. Smooth, lively, precise, comfortable, easy to manage and maybe just a bit stiffly sprung for the cobblestones of the Quarter.
Near perfect size, though, for exploring these narrow streets. As Max said, “New Orleans is a good Bonneville town. Everything is old here, and the bike fits in, even though it’s new.
We’ve sold a lot of them.”
It might help, too, that Bonneville sounds like a New Orleans street name. The Salt Flats, after all, are named for a fur trader born in Paris.
For lunch, I followed a tip and rode out to a joint called Liuzza’s, on Lopez off Esplanade, and had my obligatory fried oyster Po’ Boy-made with garlic butter. I couldn’t decide if it was to kill for or die for, but it was good enough to be dangerous.
I wanted to ride to Westwego Airport, south of the river, where Barb and I had landed our Cub in 1987, but I couldn’t find it on the map. So I rode out to Lakefront Airport on Lake Pontchartrain and bought a sectional air chart.
No Westwego Airport. Gone. The guys at the airport had never heard of it.
On an upnote, Lakefront Airport was busily peeling the ugly concrete walls (circa 1964) off an old civic bomb shelter, revealing a beautiful art-deco air terminal underneath it all-built in 1934. Kind of like tearing down an old Wal-Mart store and finding the Pyramid of Cheops inside. Most of this was being done with FEMA money.
“A wall of water came in off Lake Pontchartrain during Katrina and smashed though all our office windows,” Assistant Airport Director Vincent Caire told me. “People were trapped on the top floor. The runways were under five feet of water.”
Looks fine now. With a rediscovered terminal, so periodcorrect that scenes from the movie Ray were shot inside.
That night, Max and I rode our pair of Bonnevilles out
to dinner at his favorite place, Adolfo’s Italian restaurant on Lrenchmen Street. Grouper special, smothered in shrimp and crawfish sauce. If I lived here, I’d look like Fats Domino or Dr. John. If I don’t already.
We retired to the Spotted Cat Bar, a few doors away, for some live jazz from Jumpin’ Jerry & His Jump City Band. Two great saxophones. The doors and windows were open to the street, and a soft Gulf breeze wafted through the bar. Everyone was in short sleeves-in March. I sensed I wasn’t in Wisconsin anymore. Or even Iowa, among those cornstalks.
Speaking of which, we rode home on Royal Street, right past the old Cornstalk Fence Hotel. Max let me ride his black SE, with aftermarket Arrow pipes, fuelinjection suitably recalibrated. Very quick and fun, if a little raucous for the
narrow brick confines. One of the nice things about fuelinjection, of course, is that the 900 Twin’s ECU can now be easily reprogrammed for a variety of Triumph and aftermarket exhaust systems-no messy carb removal and jet changes.
In the morning, I rode out Rampart in the supposed direction of the infamously flooded Ninth Ward. I stopped to ask a street musician for directions and he said, “Straight ahead, thataway. But be careful! I’d put that Nikon away, if I were you.”
Put it away where? I was on a bike with no luggage or tankbag.
Strangely, I'd gotten exactly this warning-word for word-riding into East St. Louis on that first bike trip to New Orleans in 1978. Different Nikon, though.
Not digital.
The Ninth Ward was a mixed scene.
Some homes restored others abandoned.
Most businesses were boarded up and closed-transmission shops, groceries, even a KFC. Neutron-bomb country, business-wise. But there were signs of life.
On Claude Ave., a crowd was unloading a truck full of new red sofas, and nearby a small man carried a huge front door down the street, like an ant with a leaf. The disaster was slowly getting paved over.
On the way back, I stopped at the St.
Louis Cemetery to look at some of New Orleans’ famous above-ground tombs.
Don’t ask me why. You just have to do this when you’re here. After all, Billy and Captain America did. Not to mention Karen Black.
Back in the Quarter that evening, I walked down Bourbon Street, had some gumbo at a porch café and emerged for a stroll with a big Hurricane in my hand. Yes, open beverage containers are not only tolerated here but possibly required by law. The street was jumpin’. I walked past Larry Flynt’s Barely Legal Club, where there were pictures on the marquee of scantily clad women-several of whom I immediately recognized from my old high school catechism class.
Just kidding.
I’ve never been exactly the right age for these women. When I was 16, they seemed too old and now / seem too old. But they are permanent and ageless here, like vampires.
In the morning, I returned the Bonneville and took a taxi to the airport. My cab driver was an older gentleman who wore a black cowboy shirt and hat, and bore a striking resemblance to Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, the late blues great.
I told him I’d visited the Ninth Ward and he said “Used to live there.”
“Did you get flooded out?”
“Lost everything but my family. Cab, two cars, house...all our possessions, gone under 30 feet of salt water. Everything. We made it to Baton Rouge before the storm hit. If the levee had held we’d have been okay.”
He told me FEMA bought his ruined property and helped him buy another used cab and a house over in the Garden District. He pointed out the window along the Interstate and said “The water here was right up to the top of that old truck body, over in the field.”
You’d never know it now.
If I hadn’t watched the news on TV or talked to Katrina survivors, I wouldn’t have spotted anything different from my first trip, 31 years ago. People have done a lot of work here, and the effect has been steady and unnoticed by the outside world like the gradual, silent healing of a wound. But then New Orleans is just one of those great cities, a place with the capacity to shrug off the changes of generations and the passage of time. The Crescent City simply abides.
The vampires, voodoo queens and cab drivers are back in business, there’s music in the bars and there are Hurricanes on Bourbon Street. The dead in the cemetery are still dead the living are still lively and it remains a great place to go on your motorcycle. Hopper and Fonda are older now, but they’d still feel right at home. □
