Stocking Up
Stocking up
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
WHEN YOU LIVE IN WISCONSIN, YOU CAN never be sure exactly when your last ride of the season will take place. Some years, it snows at Halloween and goes downhill from there. Other years, a strange, soft Indian autumn lingers or reappears well into December and you find yourself riding down roads flanked by stark, leafless trees through balmy air that seems to have been wafted up from New Orleans.
This past fall, riding ended for me in mid-November. We had one last gloriously warm weekend when I packed in a bunch of riding in a sort of frenzy of last-minute activity, like a Yukon gold miner loading up on provisions at the Dawson general store before winter hits.
On Saturday morning, I put on my ancient enduro gear, mounted my trusty BMW R100RS and rode 50 miles through the hills to the cabin-in-the-woods home of my friend Toby Kirk, who had invited me to go dirtbike riding near a place called Yellowstone Lake. Toby jumped on his XR500, lent me his XR200 and we spent the afternoon trailriding 40 or 50 miles through deep woods and open fields.
When I rode back home in late afternoon, Toby went with me part way on his Triumph Sprint. We stopped in the historic Swiss town of New Glarus for a mandatory visit at Puempel’s Olde Tavern for a beer and one of their famous Limburger and onion sandwiches. This cheese is so deadly, it’s kept in a foil wrapper inside a Ziploc bag inside a big glass jar in the refrigerator. Like many of my favorite foods and drinks, it’s an acquired taste, shunned by millions.
We dined on the front deck, under umbrellas in the sunshine, with recorded Swiss music oomping from a distant speaker somewhere up on Main Street. Guys on Harleys thundered by wearing do-rags; a Gold Wing simmered through town, husband and wife communicating by helmet hookup, like deep-sea divers out of water. A perfect day.
The next morning I woke up and Lo! it was still sunny. Much colder, but still sunny. The weather forecast warned of freezing rain by late afternoon, the map showing those nasty slanting lines moving across Iowa and Minnesota in a broad front, like the 3rd Armored Division. Time to ride again.
This time I mounted up on my old Triumph 500 Trophy, the green 1968 T100-C I’ve had for years. For some reason, whenever I sense that a ride is to be my
last of the year, I always head toward the Triumph. It has some benedictory significance to me, like a final blessing on the season.
As usual, the Trophy started first kick, even though it had been sitting for two weeks. I notched into first gear, headed down our driveway and turned to cross the old iron overhead-trestle bridge that crosses our creek. The bridge has been closed for 10 years, condemned as unsafe. To keep people from driving across it, county road workers dumped big piles of dirt at either end. These make wonderful jumps, of course, and I never miss an opportunity to do my Great Escape routine, sans barbwire, with the Triumph.
Significantly, the Trophy is the only streetbike I own that can jump over these mounds without high-centering or crashing in a pile of fiberglass. This is one of the reasons people used to buy Triumphs.
Over the leaps, but where to go?
I gravitated eastward about 12 miles, past the little town of Albion, and found myself drawn once more on “The Quest,” a strange little private search for a lost farmhouse.
It’s a charming old sandstone house with walls as thick as a castle’s. My old friend Ward Paxton was renting the place the winter after I came home from Vietnam in 1970. A bunch of us went out there for a party one night and ended up taking a moonlit walk over the nearby fields. There was a small frozen lake just behind the farm and a dry-docked sailboat covered with snow on the shore. We walked on the lake under the stars and
the extreme cold was making the ice harden and contract, sending thunderous cracks across the ice like jagged earthquake faults and breaking glass.
That’s it. Just a small, pleasant memory filled with cosmic wonder, and I’ve always wanted to see the place again. I was going with Barb then, and we were all so young, nobody married yet or settled into any career, the future stretching out mysteriously like that black sky full pi cold stars.
I know about where the place should be-it’s only about 15 miles from where , we live now-but in 1970 we arrived in a Chevy cargo van full of people (Moroccan carpets, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, etc.) and I don’t remember exactly how we got there. Or how we got home. I could call and ask Ward exactly where it was, but that wouldn’t be any fun. I’d like to find it by accident while riding the Triumph around.
I narrowed the farmhouse location to one of three small lakes on the map and circled on a series of backroads, but didn’t find anything that looked right. Late on Sunday afternoon, the long shadows disappeared into chilled gloom as the first clouds of that storm front moved in, so I gave up the search, headed home and pulled the bike into my workshop just as pellets of sleet began to rustle on the roof. I didn’t realize until I stopped how cold I was. Frozen through without noticing.
Unless we get some freakish warm weather, that was it; the Triumph is parked for the winter.
On Monday morning, my old pal Pat Donnelly called and asked what I did all weekend.
“Rode a couple of motorcycles,” I said. “I went dirt riding with Toby Kirk, then exploring on the Triumph.”
Pat told me he went riding all Saturday afternoon on his Ducati 900SS. “Beautiful day,” he said. “Perfect.”
The shorthand of pleasure.
You have to admire any activity whose texture and essence are impossible to explain in any quick and facile way. The best things always seem to be that way: Riding, flying a light plane cross-country, canoeing a river, fishing a stream, mountain climbing or racing just about anything.
A thousand impressions are noted and kept, to be contemplated later. And sometimes we run all winter on the voltage stored away.
