Ten Percenters

Ten percenters

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

"I DIDN’T KNOW THERE WERE THIS many dual-purpose bikes in the whole world,” I said to the table at large.

We were sitting at a booth at the Howard Johnson’s in Barstow, California, having the dollar ninety-nine breakfast special, soaking up free coffee refills like a five-man sponge and looking out the front window. It was 7 a.m. and the start of the 200mile, Barstow-to-Vegas Dual-Sport ride was only an hour away. Out there on the street, dual-purpose bikes, in all their alphabet-soup glory, reigned —XLs, XTs, KXLs, KLRs, SPs, ^RlOOGSs and so on. We’d seen a pair of BSA Victor 441s (one of them attached to a sidecar), a brand-new Honda Transalp, a Triumph T100C, an old Greeves, what appeared to be an AJS, a pair of Cagiva Elefants, and even a Honda CX500, all headed for the starting line. In half an hour of watching the traffic go by, we’d seen at least one example of nearly every street-legal bike that ever donned a set of knobbies and turned its gaze longingly toward the pavement’s end.

While every brand of bike was represented, it was clear that the motorcycle of choice for the Barstow-Vegas dual-purpose rider was the Honda XL. They were everywhere—old ones in silver, or black and orange, more recent types in red and black, new red-white-and-blue ones, dual shockers, monoshock Pro-Linkers, relics from the early Seventies and showroom-fresh versions with clean new chains and the mold flashings still on their OEM tires. It appeared that half the bikes lining up for the ride would be XLs, a perception that turned out to be very close to the truth. Jim Pilon, who organized the event, would later tell me that, of the 281 motorcycles starting the ride, 183 were some sort of Honda, mostly XLs. Unless the batteries on my calculator are going south, that's about 65 percent.

Awash in coffee, our little group of riders paid its breakfast tab and prepared to ride. We checked out of our riding-gear-infested motel rooms, fired up our thumpers and headed for the starting gate at the far end of town. We left just after 8 in the morning. This was my first BarstowVegas ride, and I discovered that Jim Pilon and his Phantom Duck of the Desert pals had laid out a beautiful route, three 70-mile legs of established dirt and gravel road, with enough ruts, sandwashes, whoops and sinkholes to make it interesting, and a few sections of restful pavement in the vicinity of the two gas stops.

The five of us got into Las Vegas just before sundown, largely intact and without serious incident. I had managed, midway through the second leg, to generate a dictionary-perfect tank-slapper while speeding through a sandwash on my XL500, finally flinging myself, ostrich-like, headfirst into the sand. No damage done, except for a wiped-off turnsignal (I should buy a bandolier of these things) and that vague, leftover feeling of having been mugged by someone with a wrecking ball and a full set of levers. In Vegas, we had a beer, chatted with the other finishers at the Hacienda Hotel, and then loaded our bikes up for the ride home. I rode with Allan Girdler, whose friend Vera had kindly driven his pickup to Las Vegas for us.

On the way home, we were passed by another pickup truck with three bikes in the back. All XLs, of course. The driver gave us a thumbs up and we waved back.

“I can't help wondering,” I said, “if Honda has done the right thing in discontinuing the XL line and replacing it with the NXs. I know the old XLs were never considered big sellers, but Honda seems to have a pretty dedicated, hardcore following for a street-legal bike that really works in the dirt. I didn't see any NXs out there today.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Allan said.

While I am admittedly fond of my old '82 XL, I had lately entertained the notion that any on/off-road bike in my own future needed to be lighter, nimbler and more crash-resistant, with improved suspension. What I wanted was a really good, 99percent pure, modern dirt bike that could be licensed (barely) for the street, so I could ride legally on fire roads, or for short stretches of highway, while enjoying good handling in the dirt. An XRL, if you will.

But what Honda has in the NX is a perfectly nice streetbike that can sometimes be ridden off road. The NX is what Ron Lawson calls a “badroad bike,” i.e., perfect for bad roads, but not so hot in the dirt. I think the NXs are handsome bikes, light and agile by street standards, but heavy and too softly suspended to be much fun in the dirt. Just when I'd grown weary of replacing $30 turnsignals, Honda had come up with an XL replacement that had, of all things, a rather costly-looking fairing. And just when I’d been flung into the sand by a bike that was a bit porky in many off-road crises, they’d rolled out a bike that was even heavier.

One could always buy a pure enduro bike like the XR, of course, and hope that the local motor vehicle department had some provision for dual registration, but in many parts of the country this could be something of a gamble, subject to the regional whims of forestry and law enforcement people. With the tightening regulations in desert and national forest roads, an XL is nearly always legal; an XR is legal sometimes, in some places.

An argument I’ve often heard in favor of softening and civilizing the dual-purpose bike is that most owners spent 90 percent of their time riding on the street anyway, True enough, I suppose, but this has always seemed to me a rather odd line of reasoning. Sort of like saying a lifeboat spends 90 percent of its time on an ocean liner, so it doesn't have to float very well, or that a parachute spends 90 percent of its time in a pack, so it doesn’t have to open every time.

On any dual-purpose bike I’ve ridden, owned, or wanted to own, dirt performance is the final test, the 10 percent that matters. The rest, as the late high-wire artist Karl Wallenda once said, is just waiting.