The Wrong Bag

The Wrong Bag

AT LARGE

MONEY ISN'T THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL. Stuff is, at least in motorcycling. Because too much stuff leads directly to the Wrong Bag Syndrome.

I've been suffering from this affliction ever since I began riding farther than my high-school parking lot, which means a little more than 21 years. On my first long ride—a whopping great safari of 80 miles on a Yamaha YDS-2 —I decided that, since I was going to stay overnight. I’d better take some gear in a bag.

Ah. Instant syndrome. What kind of bag? How big? What material? How attached to the bike? Where attached to the bike?

It took twenty minutes to plan the riding and the route, and at least two hours of rummaging through the basement pile of musty camping bags — ex-Army, ex-Air Force, exMau Mau, for all I knew—to come up with the first in a long line of Wrong Bags. It was a musette bag, a tidy, olive-drab pouch that looked great strapped to the seat, but that held a tad too little to get the nice tweed jacket in along with the good trousers, clean underwear, shirt, socks, a travel kit and the obligatory quart of Castrol bean oil that the Yammie gulped so thirstily.

I climbed into my white Sears overall, slipped on my Kangol porridgepot helmet, pulled down my Octopus RAF goggles and smoked out onto the freeway for the great adventure, sans the good tweed jacket. That night, I needed the jacket; and that was when I first understood the Wrong Bag Syndrome.

Today, we have a blessed cornucopia of potentially right bags, all designed by guys who've suffered the same fury. And I have my share of them hanging neatly on hooks in my basement. But guess what? It stiíl happens. And not just on sportbikes, either. When I first began testing touring bikes in 1974, I discovered that a corollary to the Wrong Bag rule is this: Even when you have saddlebags, you can’t escape the syndrome because of your built-in urge to use up all the space available, and then some. The only way out is ruthless packing discipline. Ÿou set your bags on one side of the living room floor the night before your ride. You then begin stacking up on the other side all the stuff you think you absolutely must take with you. Then you eliminate half of it. Twice. That gives you a fighting chance.

Now, when you ride away, all this stuff takes up, say, 100 cubic inches. But there are forces at work in the universe that modern science cannot fathom. One of them—the Mysterious Expanding Stuff Force—causes everything in your bags gradually to swell like a school of puffer fish. The same things that fit so neatly in your saddlebags at Mile 0 don't even come close to fitting at Mile 700.

In a desperate, never-ending search for ways to evade all this, I've made it a point over the years to study other riders’ tricks. One guy uses the garbage bag method. He jams everything he can into a 33-gallon, 3-mil trash bag, and only stops packing when he can no longer balance the whole mess on the back of his bike. He then lashes it down with about 30 bungee cords and rides away with never another worry. This Easy Rider approach, in which the spontaneity of it all is what counts, usually works for about two days. Then the bag gets ripped, and when the guy loses something vital through the gaps in the 30 bungee cords, so does he.

Mom-and-pop touring couples have a whole catalog of methods. Usually, they allocate bag space by entity: He gets the left saddlebag, she gets the right, they share the tour trunk (although her purse usually eats a considerable amount of space), and their rainsuits, booties, gauntlets and other foul-weather gear swell the tankbag. Fairing pockets are used for Merle Haggard tapes and other necessities. In theory, this is wonderful. But in fact, because mom-andpop tours usually include shopping sprees, they wind up having the Wrong Bags no matter how carefully they split the space at the outset.

Peg-draggers usually try the other extreme. A tankbag for the rainsuit and maps, a buddy bag for the clean jeans, and that’s it. They drop their sport-touring crosshairs on Racer Road and figure that since they’re after the mystical experience of the Perfect Apex, not the nightclub en route, anything other than their Road Warrior gear is unnecessary. But then, after 250 miles of banzai Winnebagoblitzes, they get red-eyed, their hands grow numb, their wrists ache, their backs throb, and their thoughts turn to the comfort-stuff they left behind. Worse yet, sometimes, unexpectedly, they meet Somebody. Somebody who would like to come along, maybe, but who can't. Because tied down on the back, where Somebody would sit, is The Wrong Bag.

The odd thing about all this heartburn is that it never stops anybody from having a wonderful time on a long ride. I suspect some of it is due to the very inconvenience we are caused by the Wrong Bag; like backpackers, maybe, we enjoy the challenge, and the rewards of the struggle sometimes may even equal the rewards of the ride itself.

Still. I never give up looking for the One True Bag. Like the Secret of Life, it has to exist; it’s just a matter of finding it. Naturally, I have no idea what the specs might be for this One True Bag. I don't even know what it would look like. I only know what it doesn't look like—and that’s like any of the bags hanging on those basement hooks.

That my search for the OTB might take 21 more years doesn’t really bother me. What does bother me is this: If I did find the One True Bag, would it only fit on the One True Bike?

Maybe the guy with the garbage bags had the right idea after all.

—Steve Thompson