The Convertible
The Convertible
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
"WHAT BIKE ARE YOU RIDING FROM Wisconsin out to Oregon?” my friend Andy Holobinko asked over the phone.
Andy is an airline pilot who lives in Denver. I met him a few years back on an Edelweiss Tour of the Alps and we’ve stayed in touch ever since.
Besides a common interest in flying, we share the Experimental Gene in motorcycling. Like me, Andy is always trying to fine-hone his small motorcycle collection into the perfect balance between touring, sport, dirt, vintage charm, etc.
Our fondest hope is to eventually get this motorcycle thing right before we die, but in the meantime we are forced to ride, swap, buy, sell and trade our way to perfect wisdom. It’s a process related to alchemy, but the only product, so far, has been a compound of good clean fun, perpetual poverty and the general bewilderment of our friends and families. But no one ever said the search for Truth was easy.
“I thought I'd ride out to Oregon on my Road King,” I said.
“You got another Road King?” Andy asked, sounding a little surprised. Andy himself had an FLHR a couple of years ago, but eventually sold it because it was just too slow and limiting in the mountains.
“Yeah, I couldn’t help myself,” 1 said. “My friend Pete Novae at Cutter Harley-Davidson in Janesville got in three unexpected ‘bonus bikes’ with his last allotment this spring, all plain-black carbureted Road Kings, so I bought one. I had to sell a car and another bike to get it, but I guess I’m just destined to always have some kind of Electra Glide. This is the third one I’ve owned.”
“How do you like it?”
“Well, as usual, I love the way it goes down the road, and that big windshield is the secret weapon. You wear an openface helmet and you can hear and see everything. It’s like going cross-country on your front porch. As you know, it makes a perfect Great Plains bike.”
“But then it gets to the mountains,” Andy reminded me.
“Yup,” I said. “And there’s the rub. The new 88 engine makes a little more power and the cornering clearance isn’t bad, but it’s still no sportbike.”
“What you need to do,” Andy suggested, “is ride that thing out to Denver, drop it off with me for a week and borrow my Honda VFR750.”
There was a long crackling silence over the phone line as the gears in my brain whirred and clicked (probably low on oil) and I let this intriguing offer sink in. I do like riding VFRs.
“That would be fun,” I said at last. “But...we’re meeting a bunch of old California riding buddies at some cabins near Sunriver, Oregon, and Barb is flying in to join me. We’re staying in one place and going off on day rides. The VFR would be great for that, but then we have to ride down to Southern California for my niece’s wedding. And I have to ride back to Wisconsin. It’s a big trip, and we need luggage.”
“Sounds like you need at least three bikes,” Andy said. “Or one that magically converts itself into a different kind of motorcycle on different parts of the trip.” Ah, yes. There’s the dream. Every really long trip through the varied geography of this country seems to leave a single motorcycle compromised in one place or another. A magically convertible bike that continually morphed itself into new forms would be the answer.
An only slightly more realistic alternative, of course, would be some kind of modern Pony Express system, where you jump off one kind of bike and throw your saddlebags on the next one.
If I could do that, I’d probably put together a series of relay stations that would have the following bikes: 1 ) Some kind of Electra Glide for the prairies and the Great American Desert. 2) An RI 150GS or some other posh dual-sport bike to ex-
plore the occasional dirt or gravel road in the mountains-or just to get to some back-country lodge. 3) A fast, comfortable sport-tourer-an ST 1100, maybe-to sweep two-up through the paved roads in the Rockies or Appalachians, or down the Coast Highway through California. A pure, luggage-free sportbike for days when you just leave the cabin and go out for a ride, returning to base that evening.
A nice dream, but I don’t think this relay system is ever going to be feasible-unless we build up a great network of bike-owning friends like Andy. Just another of the many tragic limits on fathomless materialism.
Strangely, right after I talked to Andy, my old friend and former CW Managing Editor Steve Kimball called from Detroit.
Somehow, we got talking about canoeing-a subject of mutual interest-and I told Steve that Barb and I had just put a canoe in Badfish Creek, which runs right through the middle of our property, and spent most of last Sunday paddling all the way down to the Yahara Riverwhich leads directly into the Rock River, which in turn joins the Mississippi.
“Just practice,” 1 said. “Someday, Barb and I are going to carry a canoe from our garage down to the creek, put it in the water and voyage all the way to New Orleans.”
Steve then told me it had long been a dream of his to start at the source of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and also go straight down to New Orleans.
“But when you look at the map,” Steve said, “it appears you’d have to start the trip with a light kayak to get out of the shallow northern marshes, graduate to a small, maneuverable canoe for the upper Mississippi, then switch to a much bigger one that could carry all your camping supplies and wouldn’t swamp in the wakes from river barges and currents on the lower Mississippi.”
“Sounds like you need at least three canoes,” 1 said.
Steve was thoughtfully silent for a moment, and I had the sense that this was not an entirely unpleasant prospect. Nor a very novel one.
Nice to know that some things haven’t changed in this big, empty country since the Indians invented canoes. And the white man invented Indians.
And Harleys, of course.
