Leanings

LEANINGS

The Pendulum

Peter Egan

ABOUT A MONTH AGO, I WALKED INTO A southern Wisconsin motorcycle shop, Mischler’s BMW/Harley, just to look around, and immediately noticed a beautifully restored Norton 850 Commando parked among the usual lineup of used Harleys and BMWs.

“Where did this come from?” I asked a young man behind the parts counter.

“A guy named Bob Lee traded it in on a BMW R1100RS,” he informed me. “It used to belong to some motorcycle journalist.”

“Well, I’ll be...” I muttered.

It was my old bike, of course. The black-and-gold 1974 Commando I sold to Bob five or six years ago.

This particular Norton was becoming well traveled. A friend of mine had found it north of San Francisco in Santa Rosa. California, in the late Eighties and hauled it down to Southern California where we were living at the time. I bought the Norton from him, and when Barb and I moved back to Wisconsin in 1990, the bike came with us in the moving van.

I rode the Commando for about six years, then, in one of my periodic “lifesimplification” garage-cleaning purges, sold it to Bob. He continued the rolling restoration I had begun, repainting the tank, polishing the metalwork to a high luster and so on. It looked good. And now it was sitting in a dealership in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

“Did Bob say why he decided to trade it in?” I asked Art Mischler, the shop owner.

Art grinned. “His riding buddies finally convinced him he had to get a modem bike so he could go places with them, instead of just working on his Norton.”

I laughed and said, “I think that’s why / sold it.”

“Want to buy it back?”

“Not this week,” I said. “I recently sold two of my less practical bikes and bought an R1100RS myself. So I can go places,” I added, “instead of just working on my Norton, so to speak.” The reader will notice that when Art offered me a deal on the Norton, I said, “Not this week.”

I did not say, “Never.”

I have learned in 37 years of motorcycling not to burn my bridges. I have a genetic weakness for certain types of motorcycles, and no matter how many times I clear them out of my life, they seem to reappear in one form or another.

I’ve often thought of this tendency as “the pendulum,” an analogy much beloved of historians, who have long noted the swings back and forth between left and right, largesse and conservatism, etc., in American government.

In motorcycling, however, the swings are not those of political doctrine, but of mood, engineering philosophy and a relative willingness to endure either embarrassing material excess or grim asceticism in the name of experimentation and the never-ending search for Truth. Of course, a lot of it also depends on whether your last bike was a joy to own or something akin to the Curse of the Pharaohs.

In any case, there’s a pattern to these swings, and there may even be more than one pendulum. There are probably half a dozen, in fact, and they all have different things written on them.

One is the Masochistic Sportbike/ Tolerable Roadbike pendulum. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between these extremes all my adult life-or at least for the past 20 years. I pick that number, because 20 years ago was when I bought my first bevel-drive Ducati 900SS. After several years of that hairshirt experience, I sold it and bought an all-purpose streetbike, a Kawasaki KZ1000 MK. II, which I then rode for most of a decade as my main bike.

But then the focused, unadorned purity of Ducatis began to appeal to me again and I bought another Ducati. Since then, the pendulum has swung through this cycle any number of times, mostly alternating between comfortable, useful VFR750s or various BMWs and ridiculously uncomfortable but infinitesimally lighter and more agile sportbikes. The beat goes on.

Then there’s the Tragically Flawed Charisma/Predictable Utility pendulum. This might also be called the Olde British Bike/Rest of the World polarity. Essentially, you ride a British bike for a while, then get sick to death of fixing it, so you sell it for something well engineered, then start missing the unapproachable beauty and mechanical charm of some old vertical-Twin or Single and find yourself with another lovely leaker. A bad memory helps here.

Another is the Harley/Other Bikes pendulum. This is where you buy a Harley and enjoy riding it until you finally overdose on the tough-guy “lifestyle” posing that surrounds this marque and move on to something else, mostly out of protest. Conchophobia.

But then you begin to miss the unique mechanical presence, realworld functionality (i.e. Road King windshield and seat) and the relaxing, torquey gait of a Big Twin on a crosscountry trip and find yourself hanging around the Harley dealership again.

There’s a Japanese/European pendulum as well, one that pits thorough, trouble-free engineering, 16,000-mile tune-up intervals and a favorable performance/dollar ratio against the handcrafted, heart-warming eccentricities of bikes apparently designed by individuals rather than committees. Or at least by smaller committees. Who drink too much espresso.

There are no doubt other extremes of action and reaction, and I’ve been hit by most of them. Over and over again.

But these days, for reasons that are unclear (age?), the pendulum seems to be swinging more often toward the utilitarian, sound-value end of the arc. Maybe it’s just a temporary attack of common sense-or transcendental new millennium wisdom-but lately I’ve become less tolerant of pointless discomfort, mechanical unreliability and overpriced exclusivity. I’m becoming more fond of bikes that simply work, while carrying as little sociological baggage as possible. As time goes by, I just want to ride.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve quit thinking about my old Norton, sitting there on the showroom floor. Still beautiful, and all alone. And for sale.