Leanings

LEANINGS

Sic Transit Gloria

Peter Egan

“LOOKS LIKE YOU'VE GOT A COUPLE OF buffalo back there,” my friend Chris Beebe said, peering into the back of my Chevy van. “Are you sure those are motorcycles?”

It was hard to tell at a quick glance, but they were motorcycles, all right. Two of them, a Ducati 900SS and a Triumph TR6C, wrapped for transport across 2500 miles of western and midwestern America. I was headed for our new/old farm in southern Wisconsin, and Chris had flown to California to help me drive back.

Both bikes had been repainted during the past year, so I wasn't taking any chances. I'd covered their tanks in soft blankets, which were carefully wrapped with strapping tape. Over the blankets had gone thick foam pads, also held on with strapping tape, and over each bike, with its paranoia-inspired mass of padding. I'd thrown a cloth dust cover.

The idea was, if a tiedown strap suddenly pulled loose and allowed one bike to fall over, it wouldn’t destroy the tank of the other one. I suppose they did look like buffalo, or possibly some kind of museum exhibit packed for transport. Whatever they looked like, I was trying to guarantee their safe conduct from California to Wisconsin by idiot-proofing both bikes against my own historic tendency to dent the tanks of fine motorcycles.

There was a grand tradition at work here. It started in 1975.

That was the year I installed a set of short, “European” bars on my brand-new Norton Interstate and adjusted them nice and low. I rode down the street to try them out and found myself glowing with satisfaction at the perfection of my handlebar swap. Then I turned around in the middle of the road and clanged the left-hand switch cluster into the tank, neatly centerpunching the capital N in the word Norton.

There was an elderly woman sitting nearby on her screened front porch who—unless she was a retired drill sargeant—has probably never forgiven me for what I said. My ultimate reaction was to put my heated forehead down on the cool steel tank and, for at least one full minute, to meditate silently on my immense

stupidity.

Then, in 1982, I rode home from the office on my first Ducati 900SS, a virginal silver-blue bike with low miles. I parked in the garage, threw a cover .on the bike, walked back outside and shut the garage door.

Unfortunately, the door was sometimes held open by a bungee cord, because its springs were weak. The bungee cord was stretched to a set of utility shelves in the garage. When I shut the door, the bungee cord naturally pulled the shelves over.

I felt the cord stretch and opened the door just in time to watch the entire set of shelves crash down on the 900SS, burying it in a shower of paint cans and boxes. When my wife Barbara came running out of the house, she found me sinking to my knees, shaking my fists toward heaven and making speechless noises of rage. “Jeez,” I thought you'd been murdered,” she said.

I looked at her darkly and she went back into the house. Then I picked up the tantrum where I'd left off.

Later, when I’d composed myself, I stood outside under a tree, smoking a cigarette and wondering if I should commit suicide fairly soon, in order to spare the civilized world any more physical damage to its finer artifacts.

As it turned out, the Ducati was remarkably unscathed, considering the avalanche of junk that fell on it. The cycle cover had saved it from the paint cans, but the shelf unit had put a deep crease right across the D in Ducati. I seemed to have a knack for hitting those first letters in every great name. “Lucky it wasn't an AJS,” I muttered.

So this time around, I vowed there'd be no opportunity to ruin a perfect pair of gas tanks. The bikes got wrapped up like buffalo, eased into the van carefully, cinched down front and rear, and then I taped the tie-downs with duct tape so they couldn't slip off. The motorcycles were essentially suspended in a web of canvas strap, so even if the van rolled over they’d survive, theoretically, even if we didn’t.

Chris and I rolled out on a Monday morning, hit the freeway, left the clogged arteries of L.A. behind and caught the open road, following I-10 through Tucson and El Paso, stopping only to visit my favorite book store (The Blue Pig) in Archer City, Texas. Then we went through more cities—Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Iowa City, Cuba City—and found ourselves rolling into the driveway of Chris’s farm, which is right across the river from our own.

It was a rainy, windy day when we arrived in Wisconsin, so we didn’t unload the bikes. I decided to leave them tied down in the van until I returned a month later for the closing on our new farm.

And as I write this now, we’re only two days away from leaving California. The moving van comes on Monday, and we’ll be on our way.

If the weather is nice the day we arrive in Wisconsin, I'm going to unload the Triumph and the Ducati from the van and take each one for a ride on our country road. Although I’m looking forward to getting both bikes out of the van. I'm still paranoid about backing them down the narrow aluminum ramp. In my imagination, those two undented tanks have taken on the aspect of time bombs waiting to go off They are ticking even now.

They’ve already gone 2500 miles without damage, but it’s that last 24 inches to the ground that worries me.

Maybe I’ll just get it over with and give the D and the T a good sharp blow with a hammer before I unload the bikes. Then I can relax. There’s nothing more dangerous than a couple of freshly painted bikes waiting around to mock your excessive pride. They’re meaner than wounded