This Is Your Life

This is Your Life

LEANINGS

PETER EGAN

BREAKING A LONG TRADITION OF ALWAYS being in a hurry and accomplishing nothing, I finally managed to slow down last week and smell the roses. Okay, there weren’t any roses because it was late autumn, so I had to smell the bare brown fields of the Great Plains, some recently spread with fresh manure, but I still managed to engineer one whole extra day into a cross-country trip so I could take two-lane backroads instead of blasting down the Interstate.

Alas, I was not on a motorcycle this time, but driving home with a nice, inexpensive “winter” car, an older BMW 325i I bought from a friend in Denver. Flew in from Wisconsin and drove it home.

And on my meandering three-day drive, I magically found myself stopping for gas in Anamosa, Iowa, right next to the National Motorcycle Museum, which is housed in a large building at the center of a mall.

Now, I’ve been past this place at least a dozen times in my life but never had time to stop. Always miles to go or people to meet. But this time I looked at my watch, realized it was still morning and I was only about 150 miles from home, so I walked right in and bought an $8 ticket. Map in hand, I passed through the entrance into a big, remarkable motorcycle wonderland, with only a few other tourists wandering around on this cold weekday in the off-season.

A strange calm descended upon me as I realized that—for the first time in my life—I was by myself in a motorcycle museum, with all the time in the world. I could spend the whole day here and still make it home that evening.

The first section I happened upon was an Evel Knievel display, which was fascinating, even though I was always a little too old for the lunch-bucket and coloring-book phase. Opposite that sat the last existing Captain America chopper from Easy Rider.

A placard explained that the bikes Fonda and Hopper rode through most of the movie were stolen right after filming was completed, but a second Captain America bike used in the final redneck/ shotgun scene was saved, and this was it.

I looked at the bike for a long time and recalled that I first saw it projected against the yellow plaster wall of a latrine at a base camp called Than Hai. I saw another motorcycle-intensive movie, Alice’s Restaurant, on the same wall that year. I was not a big fan of the Vietnam War while I was there, but it occurred to me—even then—that a less tolerant country than the U.S. (North Vietnam, for instance) would probably not show movies with these anti-establishment themes to its troops.

So, for some riders, the Captain America bike may represent freedom of the road, but for me it’s more symbolic of freedom of expression—and a country worth coming home to. An odd twist, I admit, but there you have it.

I passed a display dedicated to the really bad biker movies of the Sixties and watched a trailer from The MiniSkirt Mob. Babes with big hairdos and tall, white boots riding the usual mix of small, mismatched motorcycles. Fistfights and wrasslin’ matches between girl bikers in tiny skirts. Summer outdoor movies so bad and so funny you just had to go. Where are they now? We need to make more movies like this. Yes, moguls, it’s retro time.

I turned a corner and ran into a bunch of mannequins wearing motorcycle-club uniforms from the Forties and Fifties— one of my first impressions of motorcycle riders in this life. Uniforms of a radium-green not found in nature, cowboy pockets and yellow stripes down the legs, part military and part servicestation attendant, with a hint of a countryand-we stern band.

The monogrammed uniforms were from a club in Chillicothe, Ohio, with a father figure “John” standing next to a uniformed child with “Little John” embroidered on his green shirt, both of them talking to a woman mannequin named “Vickie.” Small people, by our standards, thin as rails. They’d survived the Depression and WWII and were celebrating life with motorcycles and friends who understood them, at a time when not many people did.

At another display sat Steve McQueen’s Indian Scout rat-bike with the old sleeping bag strapped to it. On the wall, the “Halt” Triumph poster from The Great Escape, the same one I’ve got on my garage wall. Off to the side, a continuous running of On Any Sunday, one of the few movies I will watch at the drop of a hat, anytime with anyone. They were showing the desert-racing section, and I got a brief glimpse of our late Off-Road Editor, Ron Griewe, coming into a checkpoint. Ron was a great guy to work with, and desert racers like him and McQueen did a lot to make riding in the dirt seem like a wonderful idea in that era. I’m not ashamed to say that I got a little watery-eyed watching this film clip, the way you do when you truly glimpse the steady passage of time, if only for a few moments.

What else? A Bridgestone 7, the Sport 50 model, exactly like the first motorcycle I owned. I saved the money for it by mowing the local cemetery all summer and stared so hard at this bike in the window of Lee’s Hardware store that I’m surprised it didn’t melt. Pure desire, condensed into a single object. To paraphrase John Prine, if desire were lightning, that shop would have burned down a long time ago.

And over there, an original, unmolested 1913 Henderson Four on display. I went over and stared at the engine for about 20 minutes, looking at its open valve gear, polished aluminum intake manifold and beautiful flowing exhaust header. I traded a go-kart for one of these engines in 1963 because I wanted to use it in a home-built airplane—one I never got built at home or anywhere else. I got part of the wing done, and that was that. Out of money, time for football practice. But what a beautiful engine. Just to have owned one erases all regrets.

There were many, many other bikes, of course, and the museum seemed to have at least one version of every motorcycle I’ve ever owned or longed to own. Nortons, Triumphs, dirtbikes, roadracers. For me, taking my time and walking through these displays was kind of a slow unfolding of life and experience, from the earliest moments I can remember to the present.

We’re lucky, I thought as I drove away, that we have such a good way to measure time. Motion, memory, loss and desire, all contained in metal castings and the shapes of tanks.