You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

You ain’t goin’nowhere

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

BOB DYLAN SEEMS TO HAVE WRITTEN A song for every nuance of emotion at one time or another in his long career, and the one I borrowed for the title of this column always seems fitting for the winter non-riding season.

Great opening verse: Clouds so swift/Rain won ’t lift/Gate won’t close/Railings froze/Get your mind off wintertime/You ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Bob supposedly wrote these lines while recuperating in upstate New York after crashing his Triumph. Fortunately, I have no such malady at the moment, but I woke up this morning humming the song anyway. It works even when your health is good, if the weather’s bad enough.

Those living in California, Hawaii or Florida may not identify quite so closely with this song, but here in the Upper Midwest, we are deep in the clutches of winter. Let me describe the scene out my home-office window: The sky is right out of a blackand-white Ingmar Bergman movie, the one where the peasant farmer sits in a dark cottage relentlessly sharpening a knife on a whetstone and brooding. You begin to wonder what he’s going to do with it. About that time, Death knocks on the door, injecting a note of cheer and levity into an otherwise depressing scene.

Anyway, I hope you can picture the sky in this movie. At this moment there are large snowflakes falling (again), and the temperature is 24 degrees. Which is a long way of saying I probably won’t go riding today. Still, the urge is there, and of course it must come out in some kind of motorcycling activity. But what?

Last year, I wrote a column about watching motorcycle videos in the winter, and that still works, up to a point. I just bought a copy of “Bike GP ’91,” a review of the 1991 season, and it’s pretty good. Never mind that all the racing circuits have begun to look exactly alike, and the British announcer thinks Doohan rides a Rothmans “Honder.” Just watching Kevin Schwantz’ rear tire slide and smoke through corners is worth the price of the video.

We watched On Any Sunday at our Slimy Cruds Motorcycle Gang meeting and huge muskie dinner last week, and that film holds up pretty well. I’ve seen it so many times, however, I’m

beginning to believe Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith are actually part of my own family, and would recognize me on the street. (“Hi, Pete. How was that Lean Cuisine manicotti TV dinner you were eating last week?”)

Movies are okay, but they fill only part of the void. There’s garage work to be done, usually, but I’m in the unusual position of having all my motorcycles currently fixed and running, and you can only wax a red Ducati 900SS fairing so many times, or drink so much red Far Niente while admiring it before you develop liver problems or yellow waxy buildup.

As soon as I recover from the financial trauma of buying the thing, I’ll probably install lighter and slightly louder mufflers, along with a larger rear sprocket, and that’ll keep me busy for a while. I also have it in mind to build a vintage-racing Triumph 500 Daytona this winter, but I haven’t found the right bike yet, so that’s on hold, too. In the meantime, I’ve discovered several lesser outlets for the winter motorcycle urge. While they are no substitutes for riding, they do seem to help.

First, there’s the usual hanging around motorcycle shops on Saturdays. I make the rounds about once a week, and the owners now know me even better than Mert and Malcolm do.

I figure you can spend approximately an hour browsing in a motorcycle shop before they call a close family member to come and take you home. Trying on helmets and snagging brochures (ZX-

II and ST 1100, for instance) can use

up half an hour alone.

The other 30 minutes can be filled by looking at price tags and wondering why nearly all motorcycle prices went up this year again, while the income of virtually everybody on Planet Earth went down.

Ordering stuff is another great winter time-wasting ploy. I need a new set of riding boots, for instance, so I’ve dialed up a couple of 800 numbers and asked for their boot catalogs. It’s taken me weeks to make a decision, but just as soon as I can get Barb to * draw an outline of my stocking foot on a piece of paper, I’m going to order some. That is if I don’t find a Triumph 500 first.

I also need a new motorcycle jacket (every 25 years...) and a quieter fullface helmet, so searching for both has absorbed a good deal of time this winter. This has not been easy, now that many of our jackets and helmets are manufactured on the far side of the Pacific Rim, because all sizing logic has gone out the window. It seems my head has grown from a 7 V2 to a 7 3A (or from L to XXL) in less than a decade, having paused briefly at 7 5/s (XL) in about 1989, when I was apparently not learning much.

I wear a 42 sportcoat, but a size 42 motorcycle jacket now fits me as though I stole it from an organ grinder’s monkey. What’s going on here? Do tape measures shrink in hot humid climates?

The last great winter time sink, of course, is Planning to Go to Daytona. It’s like a Florida-shaped carrot on a stick, dangling out there in early March. You ask yourself: Should I ride all the way down this year? Am I crazy? Should I haul my bike to Nashville and ride south from there? What if I buy a bike at the auction and need my van to get it home?

Besides being great fodder for the idle imagination, Daytona stands as the one and only shining refutation to Bob Dylan’s fairly accurate observation on the dynamics of winter motion.

Bob himself is from Hibbing, Minnesota, and understands these things.

I don’t know where he lives now. But if the rain ain’t freezing to the railings, he probably isn’t getting many of these critically important things done.