General Declutteration
General declutteration
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
THE BIKE SITS THERE WITH ITS FOR SALE sign every time I drive into the big city, parked in a farmyard on the corner of Old Stage Road and Highway 14, rain or shine. It’s a 1974 Honda CB500T. Not one of the great bikes; a heavier, more conservative development of the earlier and more sporting CB450.
Nevertheless, I have stopped to look at it. Complete with light rust, finish worn off cases, fuel stains under the carbs, it’s a $100-$200 fixer-upper that I need like a case of gum disease. I climbed back on my own bike and repeated aloud my favorite phrase from H.D. Thoreau: “A man is free in relation to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.”
At the moment, it would have to be a pretty special bike to set the mental gears turning. Because, here in the late autumn, I just happen to be in the throes of a cyclical attack of general garage cleaning and declutteration. A simplification of life. (“Simplify, simplify,” sayeth H.D. in Walden).
It all started last month, when we got the first cold day that mimicked the bruised purple sky and early darkness of winter, despite the grass still being green. I looked in my garage and saw that I was facing yet another winter with five perfectly good motorcycles and one high-mileage, 14-year-old Chevy van with a bad exhaust system, iffy vacuum lines on the heater controls and the alternator light glowing weakly.
It’s nearing that time of year when you carry motorcycles around more than you ride them, and my carrier was hurting. “You’re like the grasshopper in the Ant and the Grasshopper fable,” my friend Bruce Livermore told me. “Fiddling all summer with motorcycles and no reliable way to get around in the winter.”
So I made one of those lurching, doit-now decisions. I put virtually everything I owned up for sale and stood back to see where the chips might fall. Within days, two of my bikes were gone, and a third maybe. I won’t say which ones, lest I be ostracized from the respective owner’s clubs and cut off from some of my favorite newsletters. I’ll just say that I am now down to one inviolable British bike (there is a limit to simplicity), one bike that can actually go places far away and one bottle-rocket sportbike.
With the ink barely dry on those checks, and before I had time to fritter the money away on food and clothing, I ran right down to my Ford dealer and ordered the first brand-new van I have ever ordered. An extended 1 -ton Econoline cargo van with windows all around, air conditioning, deluxe sound system, towing package and a big honking 460 V-Eight. Dark “Twilight Blue” metallic clearcoat. Tilt, cruise, privacy glass.
Overkill for bikes, but in another life I also drive a Reynard Formula Ford 2000 in SCCA races and need a van that can occasionally pull a transporter up a steep hill and retard it while going downhill. I also wanted a van that would carry any bike, regardless of length, with one rear passenger bench seat installed. Daytona here we come. The bikes will travel south this year indoors and untrailered, without a crust of road salt. Pavarotti and Neil Young will sing to them through four speakers.
Buying the van has been a source of joy, but it’s an odd business getting rid of good motorcycles in which you have invested time, money, emotional involvement and years of brochure gazing. When you sell motorcycles to buy a mere truck, you feel a little bit like the muskrat chewing its foot off to escape a steel trap. Conversely, keeping them all conjures up visions of the famous Indonesian monkey trap, where the animal gets its fist stuck in a coconut because it won’t let go of the handful of rice inside.
Luckily, there are compensating
factors that came with the bike sales.
I agonized for weeks over selling one of my two British bikes, but when it was gone, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: The other one looked better.
In the absence of comparison, it seemed suddenly that all the shop lights had turned, unseen and subtle, toward the remaining bike and the considerable beauty of its castings, cases, sweptback chrome mufflers and shapely tank. The other bikes, too, fell into sharper focus, deprived of crowded company. I saw that one still needed new front-brake rotors and could imagine replacing them this winter, were I not nickel-and-dimed to death by trying to maintain too many bikes, keeping too many batteries charged, replacing too many rear tires and paying too much insurance. A neglected child is easier to spot in a small family.
Anyway, the garage is looking a little empty now, for the first time in years. And it doesn’t feel all bad.
Probably because I have never quite thought of myself as a collector of motorcycles. Any bike that is not in good repair or ridden regularly has always been something of a burr under the saddle. If I’m not riding the thing, no matter how beautiful it is, I’m perfectly happy to have it displayed in someone else’s garage/museum.
And as time goes on, that instinct seems to be gaining ground. Like a lot of slightly disorganized people my age (mid-40s), I did not find a job with anything resembling a normal American salary until the early Eighties, and it seemed important to make up for lost time and collect things. Electric guitars and motorcycles, for instance.
Last spring, I sold off all but the two working guitars I play regularly in our garage band. Since then, I’ve scarcely noticed the others are gone. And I seem to play better and more consistently if I always use the same friendly instruments. Maybe the same thing is happening with motorcycles: A few good guitars, a few good bikes.
Having said that, I should add that a nearly empty garage and a large van have great potential for the highly selective holding and hauling of new, as-yet-undiscovered motorcycles.
The hunt never seems to lose its appeal. Only the need for too many trophies at one time.
