The Rites of Spring

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THE RITES OF SPRING

Allan Girdler

At about 9 am. on as fine a Sunday as ever saw the sun come up. my son Joe and I strapped our bikes into daughter Kate's pickup and headed east, into the mountains. On the other side of the pass we turned south, down the inside of the coastal range till we came to the Valley Progress Forgot.

Our name, For those in the neighbor hood the proper name is Tenaha Road, south of Murrieta and what it is is a huge old ranch that didn't make it into the exurbs. Someone had a plan and they laid out tracts and put up flags and deeded the trails into roads. Public roads. The lots didn't sell, the signs have fallen. A few tattered flags still flutter in the wind. And the trails are still trails and still public, bounded on the north and west by national forest.

This is where California hasn't been ruined by progress. This is cowtrailer coun try.

It's usually lonely country but not on this day, the first sunny Sunday after month after cold, rainy month. When we got to where the pavement ends, we met a family, nicely dressed for casual church, standing on the corner as if for a bus except there is no bus. What happened, they said, is they came to look at a lot and husband got his 4WD stuck so he and wife and son hiked out and figured to ride to the high way with the first inbound vehicle.

Wanna borrow our truck? ("There goes the truck," muttered Joe, who at 13 is more cynical than I.) No thanks, somebody will give us a ride.

So we unloaded and rode off down the trail. Caught a passenger car and it pulled over and let us pass. for the first time in my memory and a hint of what was to come.

The wet months mentioned earlier brought us three times normal rainfall. The ground was a saturated sponge. The rocks in the ravines glistened with water oozing from every pore. At the first downhill. we came upon a truck stuffed into the bank. Don't worry. the occupants said, although we are stuck now we aren't as stuck as we were an hour ago when we first got stuck.

So we putted on, threading through the canyons and up and down the hills, across the green meadows, between the oak trees. There's one slight rise and as you come to the top, the ground falls away and there in the distance are the snow-capped peaks of the real mountains and Oh, Jim Bridger what fun you must have had.

1o~ SpOt in the tra~ we found a reverse tug-of-war. The trail was firm. Per fect traction. But the grassland was soggy. Seems two trucks met and being versed in the rules of off-road, each put the outside wheels off the shoulder . . . and each out side wheel sank past the hubs. Stuck. One had a winch and when we rode up they were chaining the trucks to each other, the idea being that whichever one was the more firmly mired would play tentpeg and haul the other onto dry ground. We stopped and chatted and talked motorcy cles and rode on.

Downhill from the spring Joe dropped the front wheel into a rut, gassed it and did a 180, right over the bank and down 20 feet or so into a ravine. He wasn't hurt, but I picked him up and hugged him (checking for broken bones, I said, `cause teenagers don't like mushy stuff from their fathers) and then we looked at the bike. No way we could push it up the cliff.

We went back to the tug-of-cooperation. They asked if we had forgotten something, a motorcycle maybe and we explained and asked for a rope. They found one and a trucker offered to help. I rode on the tank, he sat on the seat and Joe perched on the luggage rack and back we went, the Hodaka not at all distressed by the burden.

With leverage and three pairs of hands and shoulders we got the bike back on the trail. Wrenched the forks straight and rode back to the trucks. The winch had yanked the less-stuck truck free but the other was still mired, so we and a couple other bikers and both truck crews all fell too and lifted! shoved the truck free.

At the Dreaded Uphill there were huge diagonal trenches washed into the trail. By noon the trenches were filled with rocks and passable even by sedans. As if by magic or telepathy, every vehicle that came by dropped or rolled a couple rocks into place. One doesn't find this too often.

Then, the mudhole. There's a dip going across a meadow and the mud got more and more churned. When we arrived it was total bog. A swamp. Quickmud, if there is such a word. In the middle was a pickup truck.

We stopped to help. Other trucks stopped. So did a dune buggy and three stripped VW sedans. Bikes? Scores of `em. Motocrossers, trail bikes, old sleds. There was one Ossa Pioneer that made Henry's former Ossa, hitherto my candidate for world's oldest motorcycle, look like the bike of tomorrow. From out of the woods, literally, came every off-roader for miles around.

Bit of a puzzle. Most of the time we cowtrailers think motocrossers on public trails are a hazard and a detriment. Trucks and vans are fine for hauling cargo. Out in> the woods, well, although my daughter is married to a truck, still I don't enjoy sharing the trails with the beasts.

And the other off-road factions think of playbikers in the same way, that is, not with complete favor.

Yet here we all were, volunteering to help each other without being asked.

Suddenly all became clear.

Spring. It was Spring. Not the one on the calendar, but the original Spring in the sense of weather and tempo and mood. Every civilization I ever studied had a regular holiday schedule: Spring, Sum mer, Fall, Winter. The reasons varied, i.e. the ancient Romans didn't have Fourth of July or Labor Day. But they had some thing.

Indoor people have the calendar. Out door people. of which group all motorcycle riders are automatically members, have that lovely first bright, sunny Sunday after months of gloomy gray skies. We were celebrating our release and we did it by pushing and pulling each other out of the mud.

The bikes got through the mudhole. (Cheers.) Then the buggies and bugs. (More cheers.) Then a van and a family car. (Cheers and surprise.) As the Grand Finale the young man with the old truck that began this episode rared back, got a flying start and made it. slewing and spin ning and wrenching at the wheel. Kenny Roberts never had more enthusiastic fans.

We went our separate ways. While I was loading the bike and Joe was practicing donuts in the road, up came two girls on a DT-1, with tach drive cable dangling. I fixed it. Thanks, they said, but we don't need help for us. There's a van stuck in the mud over the hill.

Not even a Hodaka 175 can tow a van, so I flagged down the VWs, who were also doing donuts in the road.

Aswe drove back to the pavement, last thing I saw was a rear-view mirror full of VWs whooping away up the hill.