Electra-Glide

LEANINGS

Electra-Glide

Peter Egan

I THINK IT WAS EITHER GEORGE SANtayana or Roger Vadim who said that beauty is the promise of pleasure. If that’s the case, I recently bought myself a beautiful bike, assuming your concept of pleasure includes a long, rambling, open-road cruise across the Great Plains and the Southwest later this summer.

What I did, you see, was to go out and buy a new Electra-Glide.

That’s right, a Big Harley. But not quite the biggest. It’s a black FLHS, the stripped-down “Sport” model, with just a cop windshield, bare aluminum engine and two saddlebags. No fairing, top box, radios, etc.

Local dealers sold out of this model-and most others-early this spring, but I happened to be standing around Decker Harley-Davidson in Madison, Wisconsin, last Friday when a customer backed out of a deal, and I was there to scoop it up. (If selling off a couple of your most prized possessions and cleaning out your savings account to come up with the cash can be called “scooping.”)

I’ve now had the Harley for all of seven days and 800 miles, and I have to admit that I’m pretty enamored of it. Let’s face it: There’s a lot of motorcycle here to like.

The FLHS is not much on top speed, but it works amazingly well in the real world. The engine pulls like a locomotive from 50 to 80 mph in fifth gear and gives you the most relaxed, nonhectic, shuffling 70-to-80-mph cruise on Earth. The seat-one of the few ugly objects on the bike-is nevertheless comfortable, and the floorboards are in exactly the right position for an upright, look-at-the-world riding position.

It stops and handles pretty well, and the windshield-that old-fashioned barn door of Lexan and metal strips-is so good it ought to be on display in the Smithsonian. Maybe it is.

At highway speed, there’s no wind down your neck, up your jacket, under your sunglasses or roaring around the bottom of your helmet. Wind noise is reduced to a quiet rush, and you can hear the engine and other sounds around you.

Downsides?

First, the FLHS is the most expensive bike I’ve ever bought, by a factor of two. And there’s no tool kit.

Second, the Glide is the heaviest motorcycle I’ve ever owned, by at least 100 pounds, though I have to admit it handles its weight awfully well. The brochure says it weighs 692 pounds dry. Filled with oil and 5 gallons of gas, it’s probably more like 735.

Third, it doesn’t look quite as clean and simple as the retro-styled Softails, even if it’s smoother and more practical as a long-distance tourer.

It’s also the first of the 28 bikes I’ve owned that is not likely ever to be found, box stock or otherwise, on a roadracing circuit.

So what possessed me to buy this large object?

On the lightest of all possible surfaces, the mote that tipped the scale may have been a recent Harley ad in which virtually my very bike was pictured in a big-sky desert setting, accompanied by the question, “Is this a great country or what?” to which I answered, “Why, you know, it is.”

Luckily, even shallowness demands at least a little depth, by definition, and my motives go somewhat deeper and farther back. I’ve had this thing about Glides for a while.

My first motorcycle ride as a passenger, in 1960, was on a Duo-Glide, and a few years later, at the tender age of 15, I took my first solo ride on another old Panhead. I was about to buy this bike for $100 when the owner changed his mind. A near miss.

Years later, when I was working full-time for Cycle World, my wife Barb and I took a 1981 FLH Heritage from L.A. all the way up the Pacific Coast Highway and back. This original Heritage model had antique green and orange paint, fringed saddlebags and a sprung saddle. I suggested to Barb we might want to buy this bike from the dealer after the trip.

By the time we got home, however, the bloom was off. I loved the feel of the bike on the road, but the big solidly mounted Shovelhead engine was a shaker. I concluded then that rubber mounting was the way to go, and soon learned there was a smoother, newgeneration engine on the way.

Along came the Evolution series and then, a couple of years ago, Harley took some of the luxury features off the FLH full-dresser, giving us the Electra-Glide Sport version; more appealing to an ascetic, parts-removing guy like myself.

And now, it seems, the right motorcycle has finally crossed paths with the right mood.

It has been a long-contemplated plan of mine to attempt a rambling, laid-back tour of the West, rather than one of our usual sportbike attacks on the highway system. In the past, Barb and I have always used the full-throttle, radar-detector approach on the great American flatlands so we could have fun in the mountains.

The trouble is, there’s a lot of flat land out there. So on the way home, through states like Nebraska or Kansas, we’ve always found ourselves riding mostly just to get it over with, tucked into that old roadracer crouch and mentality, calculating time and distance, riding mathematically: “If we average 85, we’ll be in Rushville by noon...” That sort of thing.

On these trips, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to forget the arithmetic for once and just ride for the fun of it, for the simple pleasure of being on the road and listening to a couple of very large pistons making unhurried music.

To sit upright, unplastered by insects, undeafened by wind, just looking at the country. If not to stop and smell the roses, at least to see them, without my peripheral vision blurred by speed. Could I train myself to do that?

I don’t know. I’ll find out later this summer.