Old Guys, Rockers And Rockets

AT LARGE

Old guys, rockers and rockets

THE OLD GUY WATCHED ME PEEL OFF my helmet, wipe sweat off my face and clamber off the Yamaha. He sat on an honest-to-God rocker under the awning of the little café in Nevada City, creaking back and forth in the deep shade, where it was maybe 20 degrees cooler than out in the white heat of a Sierra foothills summer noon.

As I stripped my leather jacket from drenched skin, he caught my eye. He was grinning. Great, I thought. Now I'm going to get some words of wisdom from Gramps. Like most of us who rode 20 or so years ago, I figured the words wouldn’t be about how neato-keeno my new 1964 Yamaha YDS2 was. I braced for it.

“Nice bike,’’ he said, still grinning. Warily, I nodded, making sure the bungee cord holding my little plastic mixer bottle full of oil was secure. In July of ’64, Autolube was still in the misty future.

“Used to have one,” he continued, not waiting for my reply. “Harley. A nice little 45.”

“Ah,” I said. In those days, 45 cubic inches was what Aerojet General used for launching Gemini capsules.

“Rode that sweetie almost 20 years,” he said. “’Till I hit that pig outside Yuma.”

“Pig,” I said with biting wit, keeping up my side of the conversation.

“Yup. Sumbitch come up out of nowhere. Ran right out in front of me. Wasn’t nothing I could do, so I laid her down.”

“Laid her down,” I said, still stunningly articulate.

“Right on the left side. Wiped off every damn thing, killed about 30 miles per, too. But I still hit that pig too hard. Killed him dead.”

“Ah,” I said again.

He squinted at the blue-and-white Yamaha, dazzling in the glare with its snappy chrome pipes. “You ever hit a pig with that thing?”

“Nope,” I said, sensing my time to make a break for the air-conditioned café.

“Just as well. Looks like it’d fold up around that little bitty spaghetti frame.”

I halted, hand on the screen door. Inside, I could hear the jukebox playing Roy Orbison. I could almost taste the coolth. But this was too much. A geezer in a rocker bad-mouthing my wonderful street version of the RD56 that Phil Read used to dust off the Hondas?

“Spaghetti frame,” I said as menacingly as possible. “What makes you think it’s got a spaghetti frame?”

“Hell, son, didn’t mean no offense. But even with that little twocycle 250 you got there, making maybe 20 horse tops, you got to be doin' serious twistin' to that frame. See there? No triangulation from the swingarm to the steering head. So what you got left is spaghetti.”

“You know a lot about Yamahas, do you?” I asked as coolly as I could.

“Some, I guess. Some. How about you?”

He had me. In 1964, what I knew about Yamahas came from bike magazines, guys swapping lies around the Coke cooler at Childress Cycle Center and, well, only what I found out by riding, breaking and painfully fixing my YG1 and this YDS2.

I sat down on the rail across from the geezer. “Maybe we ought to talk,” I said, meaning maybe I ought to listen. It was the smartest thing I did that day. Maybe that month. Because—you guessed it—that old guy knew a lot more about bikes than how to turn a Hog into a pig-killer.

Maybe callow youths will always think that old guys (read: older than, say, 25) can’t possibly know anything about motorcycles, but I doubt it. Nowadays, old guys on bikes are everywhere.

Take Mick Mikkelsen, for instance. A retired executive who put in a career making airplanes at Douglas in Long Beach, California, Mikkelsen's Hobbs’ meter shows around 70 years or so, but if you try to catch him on his blue-and-silver BMW R100RS, you'll never believe it. Last time I saw him, he wanted to know if the Yamaha FZR1000 was really all that fast. And if so, how could he get one of the first ones?

Mikkelsen’s idea of a good time is to buy a rocket bike some squid has trashed, lovingly resurrect it, improve it and then thrash it up and down all the splendid little roads he and his pals fight to keep secret so nobody will spoil their fun.

But Mick Mikkelsen’s not unique, at least not in the sense that he’s an older guy having fun with bikes. In fact, the more you travel our roads, the more you realize how many older riders there are. A decade or so ago, I ran across a club called the Retreads formed specifically to promote riding for older folks. But these days, it hardly seems necessary to have such a club, when the guy on the Ninja might just as easily be 55 as 20 years old!

Who knows why this has come about? Back in the Pleistocene, when I pulled up in Nevada City and had my own first lesson about age and wisdom and bikes, most of the older riders you saw were wearing Shriners caps on fairgrounds, doing nine mph on Harleys with white fringed saddlebags. But those days are long gone.

Maybe it all has to do with demographics and healthier lifestyles and like that. Or maybe it has to do with just plain better bikes. Doesn’t really matter. As any ride behind Mikkelsen will show, what matters is that life—and riding—doesn't stop when they start calling you a senior citizen. Besides, as Mikkelsen says, when the cops pull you over for speeding on your GPz and they find out you're older than their own fathers, they usually let you off.

But not always. And that's another story you can get Mikkelsen to tell. If you can catch him.

—Steven L. Thompson