The Importance of Being Earnest

The importance of being earnest

LEANINGS

IT WAS LIKE ONE OF THOSE SCENES from Butch Cassidy, where Newman and Redford are being relentlessly pursued across the West by lawmen and they keep looking back over their shoulders and saying. “Who are those guys, anyway?”

Well, it was almost like that. I was in the high California desert, somewhere between Bell Mountain Road and the Slash-X Bar, thumping along over hill and arroyo, through sandwash and rockpile. past yucca thorn, whoop and rabid jumping cholla, on my XL500, delighting in its grand torque and revelling in its many comforting inches of gooshy suspension travel.

Just behind me on the trail was my friend Rich Homan, riding my old 1975 XL350. the orange-and-black wonder I’d sold him last year to finance my current desert mount. Rich is new to motorcycling—the XL350 is his first bike-and this was his firstever ride in the desert.

You never know what to expect when you take a new rider to the desert, or anywhere off-road. People who can ride fluidly on the street and seem to have plenty of coordination for walking down the hall at work will sometimes experience a sort of rapid physical and emotional meltdown in the dirt. A little fatigue, a few hard falls, too much heat and a good dose of kick-start exhaustion can turn the best of us into a steaming pile of riding gear with its head resting on the handlebars. A modicum of physical fitness and stamina, along with a certain cheerfulness of

outlook (witless optimism, my pal Jaeger calls it), are required if you are to have Fun in the desert and ever return for a second dose of same.

And Rich seemed to have all three in abundance.

I'd be riding along at a pretty good clip and suddenly drop into a surprise drywash, wallow through the sand and barely power my way up the steep bank on the other side, thinking “well, this'll finish off ol' Rich. I better turn around and go back and help him get up and straighten his handlebars. Or his busted leg.”

But. behold. I'd look back over my shoulder and there he’d be, riding upright, unmarked and looking quite pleased with everything.

So then we'd come to the dreaded rock-strewn steep uphill, the kind where you arrive at the top with the front tire two feet off the ground and the rear knobby using its last gasp of engine torque to fling a couple of boulders down the mountain. “Bad idea, coming up here,” I'd mumble to myself between wheezingsas I rested on the peak. “Rich will crash his brains out on this one, and we’ll have to walk his bike back down the trail ... if he can still walk.”

But lo, the distant, labored chugging of the four-stroke Single would get louder and more labored until a lofted front tire appeared over the brow of the hill and there he'd be, a little breathless and astonished, but ready and willing to try the steep downhill on the other side.

Amazing.

Not that I’m such a hard act to follow. I've only been riding in the dirt for about eight years, and then only four or five times a year. It’s just that desert riding is a little bit like skiing in its ability to intimidate the firsttimer. Just as you have to believe that you can ski all the way to the bottom of a mogul-covered headwall and survive, you also have to believe you can ride down the steep, rutted trail, or you will fall down and crash. Throw up your hands and say, “I can’t do this,” and you most assuredly won’t. There is a high faith element in desert riding.

Powering through a silt bed in Baja, for instance, is the closest thing this side of the New Testament to walking on water; a moment of doubt and you sink. But most of that faith is built through experience. On first rides you learn lessons, and on later ones you use them.

Rich did learn a few lessons on that first ride—to the tune of a smashed headlight shell and a mildly twisted knee—but he came out of it pretty well overall. Better than I did on my first desert ride, during which Steve Kimball and Paul Zeek took me out and tried to kill me, and probably would have succeeded if they hadn’t run out of daylight. As a desert guide, I was not quite as sadistic as those two, but I took Rich through some challenging terrain and he handled it sportingly, with grit and determination.

Which is a good sign in someone who has, at the age of 30, just discovered the world of motorcycling. Essentially, a long ride over rough terrain constitutes a kind of test. If you can ride the desert during its hot, dusty, late-summer phase, as we did, and actually appear to be having a good time, it bodes well for all kinds of other riding. Touring, for instance.

It means you’ll be able to endure the Mississippi Delta in August when the humidity is killing the catfish, or ride through north Ontario for three days in the pouring autumn rain and camp in a wet down bag. Or sleep in a mosquito-infested boxcar in Brainerd, Minnesota, when all the motels are full, or stop in a bar in Portage, Wisconsin, to stuff newspapers in your jacket for warmth during a snowstorm, or push your blown-up Norton Commando all the way across downtown Missoula to the office of the trucking company.

And then there’s roadracing, where the right attitude can help you bounce back from a long slide through Turn 7 when you’ve ground the elbow off your leathers and smeared your alternator case onto the track in a long streak of copper and aluminum, or—well, that’s enough.

Let's just say that if you are in motorcycling for the long term, as I suspect Rich is, the two most important virtues you can cultivate are stamina and cheerfulness of outlook. Not to belittle the considerable importance of witless optimism, a rare and priceless quality with which some of us are simply born. Peter Egan