 | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
Motorcycling
Most people know me as a sailor, but I've been riding
motorbikes since 1965. The current steed is a Yamaha
FJ1200, but my bikes have included a 250cc BSA C15 that taught me about mechanical
breakdowns, a 650cc Matchless aboard which I almost killed myself at age 19, various reliable Hondas
and Yamahas in the 70s and 80s, a Kawasaki GPZ1100 whose straight-line performance you simply
couldn't ignore, a 1979 Triumph Bonneville that was outrageous
fun to ride, and a Harley-Davidson
Soft-tail called Black Madonna. I also used to ride my wife's
yellow Harley
Sportster, Betty Boop. A
few years ago, Roz and I
took the Harleys and rode a round trip of 12,000 miles over the
USA. There's an extract or two below from the book I wrote about the trip.
When you've finished, click here to boot through to the good vibrations page, or try visiting my pal Rene Chinery at www.harleyplace.co.uk, and the inimitable Mike Caddick on www.dynamike.net, for all sorts of good stuff on motorcycle issues. Then, whether you ride or dream, open the throttle and treat yourself to a blast down the highway of time to the Ace Cafe on the old North Circular. www.ace-cafe-london.com
Extracts from good vibrations
« click on the image for a blow-up
The first sight a plains biker has of a converging eighteen-wheeler comes when the truck is at least three miles ahead. It appears as a smudge of colour several feet above the road, probably breasting a rise in the distance. Maybe it disappears for a while behind the next undulation, but converging speed is around 130mph, so it moves closer fast. After a minute, it has grown to a ridiculous height, its chrome reflecting the sun like flickering lasers, two stove-pipe exhausts belching heat and engine fumes at the angry sky. Soon, it stands 100 feet tall, teetering in the mirage and beginning to rock’n’roll. As for forward progress, none is apparent on account of the zero perspective of the head-on meeting until suddenly, when it is as close as the length of a football field, it becomes deadly.
Massive and roaring, it is on you in seconds, swaying on the uneven surface as it
rushes by leaving glimpsed impressions of its world. The sun glinting off the windscreen and the driver’s shades, his shirt sleeve flapping at the open window, perhaps a split-second sighting of the name of a far-off town painted on the door.‘Cheyenne.’
As it passes, it shoves a wall of hot air that picks up the motorbike and hurls all quarter-ton of it to one side like a broom sweeping a dead mouse off the back porch step. The blast is so thick you can feel it. Diesel exhaust, grit and gravel, with oblivion thrown in if you are napping on the job. Then it’s gone, but every Freightliner carries a reminder of that slender thread by which we hang on in the land of the living.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Roz was climbing out of her riding leathers in order to survive the terrible heat when we were approached by two small boys in a wayside gas station.
‘Great bikes, Mister, but what happens if you blow a front tyre at seventy?’ the larger specimen demanded bluntly.
‘You’re in trouble.’
Roz’s mouth turned down at the corners.
‘Yeah. But what happens?’
‘The tyre goes flat, but you don’t see much of that sort of thing these days with modern rubber.’
‘OK Mister. But what happens to you when the tyre goes flat, even if it doesn’t go flat often?’
‘You fall off and slide down the road at high speed.’
‘Great!’
The pair mooched off to a nearby soda machine to keep their weight up, while Roz turned her back on temptation. She zipped up her leather and never rode without it the whole summer, not even in Death Valley. The kid had a point, she decided, and she’d rather broil than bleed.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Leaning back on the perished tractor tyre, I inspected Black Madonna. To my surprise, the rain was giving her a new dimension.
As the clear drops ran off her waxed tank to drip over the shining complexity of her power plant, each one carried an image, a tiny world that lasted only long enough to land on the smooth black gloss and run to the edge. Letting go its despairing hold on the underside to tumble onto the cylinder fins, its doom was sealed as surely as that of an iceberg sailing down from Labrador to meet the warm Gulf Stream by the corner of Newfoundland. The droplets hit the hot chrome and evaporated with a hiss, leaving nothing but invisible vapour, where a second earlier had been a fish-eye image of the tractor, me and the oak tree.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The road to the north across the hilly, deserted cattle country ran alongside a railroad line and soon deteriorated almost to dirt-track status. Theoretically metalled, it was in such poor shape that we slowed to 20mph to lessen the crunch if either of us came off on the longitudinal ruts that were picking up our tyres and throwing the bikes from side to side. After ten miles of this horror show a train horn sounded almost on top of us. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a Union Pacific freight train rumbling past us heading up towards Canada, overtaking at a combined speed of around 10mph. The engineer gave us another two blasts. ‘Whooooo! Whooooo!’ The haunting sound went through me like a shot of moonshine and it took the train over five minutes to clear us.
Twenty miles down the road the bikes were back up to speed so that we found ourselves overtaking the same locomotive. This time the guys gave us four deafening notes. They were leaning out of their cab, lapping up the macho Harleys. Just us, them and the American highway.
Half an hour later, I wasn’t feeling so elated. I stopped to take a photograph and Roz rode on ahead. When I remounted I reckoned she was five miles away, so I pressed on as hard as I could on a surface which was again deteriorating. I didn’t see the yellow bike until I almost ran over her. She was on her side by the ditch, engine stopped, and no sign of Roz. The road was bending slightly to cross a bridge over a rare stream bed with water in it.
I hung on the brakes with my heartbeat in limbo, realising in an instant this was what I had been dreading all the way from the coast. Running back to Roz's machine, I was struck by how small and vulnerable she looked lying in the dust, but what I desperately needed to know was what had happened to my wife. Was she in the ditch with a broken neck? Had she wandered off somewhere with a snapped wrist, or crawled into cover with a fractured leg?
Weighed down with remorse for dragging Roz along all the way from the New Forest to dump her bike here on the lonesome prairie, and beside myself with anxiety, I called out, dreading silence most...
Click here to kickstart for my bookshop!