Leanings

LEANINGS

Bimmers

IT WAS THE DAY I PICKED UP MY brand-new 1975 Norton 850 Commando from the dealership in Madison, Wisconsin. I was filling out the final paperwork, adding sales tax to the whomping $1800 purchase price, and getting ready to take the bike home on its maiden ride. The long way. Maybe via Alaska.

Standing nearby was another man who’d come to pick up his new motorcycle, a shimmering, silver-smoke BMW R90S. We walked outside to look at our new bikes and fell into a conversation of mutual motorcycle admiration.

“I love Nortons,” the man said, looking at my new Commando. “I’ve had two of them. Also a number of Triumphs. I rode my old TR6 around the U.S. and Canada one summer.”

“How did it hold up?” I asked.

He made a wry face. “I went through two sets of pistons. And a crankshaft.”

“And now you’re switching to BMWs?”

He looked at me and grinned. “When you ride British bikes,” he said, “you always know in the back of your mind that a day will come when it’s time for a BMW.”

I nodded, just to be friendly, but privately, I wasn't so sure I agreed.

On a rational level, I admired the old Earles-fork BMW Singles and Twins for their sturdy, globe-trotting, citizen-of-the-world look; they were usually plastered with stickers from Morocco and the Belgian Congo and were ridden by beatniks and other thoughtful yet adventurous types, people for whom the accumulation of mileage and passport stamps was a badge of honor.

I also liked the new direction BMW had recently taken. The R90S was a glamorous, beautifully crafted bike with a sporting flair overlaid on the old foundation of civilized, slogging reliability. I had even talked a good friend of mine into buying an R90S, mostly so I could ride the thing myself without the heartbreak of making monthly payments. 1 rode the R90S and liked it a lot.

And yet . . . and yet, BMWs were not quite for me.

Why?

Emotional reasons, mostly. A tendency, I suppose, to root for the underdog. British bikes lacked the seamless cleanliness of the German product, but went just as fast—or faster—because they tried harder. And damned near killed themselves doing it. A simple case of intrepidness over Science. Granted, BMWs had plenty of Bavarian mystique and a long tradition of quality, but British bikes were just slightly more romantic. They were what Rupert Brooke would have built, if he’d been an engineer instead of a poet. In fact, I often wondered (while gazing into my Norton gearbox) if perhaps Rupert Brooke hadn’t actually designed them. In his spare time.

Also, in the mid-Seventies, BMW advertising always depicted the Bimmer rider as a rather self-assured fellow, forty-ish, successful, with lightly tinted skeet-shooting glasses. All very upscale and correct. These bikes seemed to be aimed at somebody who, mentally, ran a tighter ship than I did. I was clearly too disorganized and untidy in my personal habits to own a BMW. The man in the ads made me feel like Charles Bukowski.

Time passes, however, and the day my friend and I stood outside the dealership looking at my new Commando and his R90S is now 13 years in the past. I haven’t changed my feelings about British bikes; the old Triumph TR6C I’ve been riding to work these past six months is my favorite bike ever, and romance still clings to it like road dust on a leaky primary-chain cover.

But for the past six months, I've been riding over to the BMW dealership to just stand around, rock on my heels and jingle the change in my pockets. After a couple of decades of watching successive waves of superbikes go from the front page to the garage sale nearly as fast as they cover the quarter-mile. I'm becoming increasingly fond of permanence and continuity in the design of machines. Whether it’s advancing age or some subtle philosophical adjustment, BMW Twins, like Harleys, have begun to look better and better to me. They always did look handsome, but now they look repairable, light and simple—traits presently shared by only the most elemental dirt and dual-purpose bikes.

What this is all leading up to is that I caved in about four weeks ago and bought a clean, used BMW R80 that showed up as a trade-in at the dealership. It’s the plain, unfaired version with the Monolever rear suspension and black paint with white pinstripes. I’ve put 3000 miles on it in one month of evenings and weekends, which is something of a personal record. So far, it’s a very agreeable, fine-running machine. Remarkably smooth but not terribly fast, it’s what the British would call “docile.” It still has all the usual BMW scientifically designed quirks, like the springloaded sidestand and the weird tapered grips, but after a thousand miles or so you forget the eccentricities and learn to enjoy the good points, like the low center of gravity, light weight and excellent throttle response. I'm having a good time with the R80. It’s an excellent motorcycle with a lot of character. Like the Triumph, it’s a keeper.

Still, riding a BMW takes some getting used to, after all those years on British stuff. There are times when I feel vaguely self-conscious on the Bimmer, as if the civilized neatness of the bike might create an odd, conspicuous contrast with its owner. I keep expecting an alert traffic cop to pull me over for a possible dress-code violation, or to ask if I’ve got a permit to operate a non-Japanese bike without oil leaks.

It’s not a bike Rupert Brooke would have designed, but it’s a motorcycle he might have ridden if he actually had to get somewhere. Like over to Rilke’s place. Peter Egan