Back In the Dez
Back in the Dez
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
A FEW WEEKS AGO, I CALLED MY OLD friend and former CW Editor, Allan Girdler, to tell him I would soon be flying in from Wisconsin for a California visit. “Want to go riding dirtbikes in the desert?” I asked. “Maybe up in our old stomping grounds around Stoddard Wells?”
“Lord,” Allan said, “I haven’t been up in the high desert in years. Is it still there?” “I think so,” I replied, “unless it’s all been closed for riding, or developed into tract housing.”
“Still got your riding gear?”
“You bet, as we say in Wisconsin. I just bought all-new stuff to replace the 1980 gear I got the year you hired me. New helmet, pants, jersey, knee protectors.. .all I need is new boots.”
“What’s wrong with your old boots?” “They’re the old style,” I explained, “with leather straps and pegs. My back is so bad I can’t spend that much time bent over, pulling on those straps. I need the new kind, with over-center latches.”
“Too bad,” Allan said. “My back is okay, but my hearing isn’t so good anymore.”
“I tell you what,” I said, “if you’ll buckle my boots, I’ll listen. Maybe if we get six or seven of us old guys together, we could form up as one fully functional human being.”
I flew into California the next week to visit my sister, Barbara, and gave Allan a call. We had arranged to go riding on Sunday morning, with Allan meeting me with his pickup truck at the Arco station near Corona. “There’s just one small problem,” I told Allan. “Cycle World doesn’t have a dirtbike I can borrow at the moment. I’ll have to see if I can rent something.” “Easy solution,” he said. “You can ride my XR250 and I’ll ride my XR100.” “Jeez, Allan,” I said, after a moment of thought, “that’s a pretty small bike for the desert. Why don’t you let me ride the 100, and you take your 250?”
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Besides, you’re bigger than I am.”
Tactfully spoken. Nice of him not to use the words “big galoot” or “oafishly large” in that sentence.
So meet we did at the Arco station, driving the pickup toward Victorville and climbing into the warm, crystalline desert air. It would be great to ride in the Mojave again, a place for which there is really no substitute.
I had my first ride in the “dez,” as it was called around the office, when I came to work for CW in 1980. It was an initiation
ritual in those days to take the New Guy out to the desert, set him on a dirtbike and beat him to death with his own incompetence. If he survived, he got to keep his job.
Managing Editor Steve Kimball and Art Director Paul Zeke took me on that first ride. They set me up with a Yamaha XT350 and said, “Follow us!” Then they took off cross-country in a cloud of dust, leading me through sandwashes, over berms into sudden roadcuts, up incredibly steep mountainsides and down breathtakingly vertical trails littered with boulders and loose gravel. Needless to say, I crashed my brains out.
In one incident, I endoed the XT on a steep downhill and the engine landed on my right ankle. Which I then needed to kick-start the flooded bike. I had a little trouble getting my boot off that night, and I still walk funny on that foot.
But I learned a lot, in a hurry. Dirt riding, like roadracing or flying, is the art of the possible. You have to learn what can be done and what should never be done, where to go fast and where to go slow. That first ride was a crash course-literally-in all those skills. I survived and went back many times. As a 32-year-old desert novice, I was no threat to Brad Lackey or Bob Hannah, but at least I quit crashing my brains out. And I had fun.
Allan hit his turnsignal as we came up to our traditional Bell Mountain Road exit north of Victorville and saw a sign that
had once said Off-Road Vehicle Area, but now had a NO stenciled in front of those words. We pressed on toward Lucerne Valley nevertheless and soon saw a sign that said Off-Road Vehicle Area 6 Miles. That was more like it.
When we got there, we pulled off and parked in exactly the same spot my first ride had begun 22 years ago. There were two or three other pickups in the area, a mixture of families putt-putting around the nearby trails and a few serious fast guys blazing off into the distance. We anged into our gear, started the bikes and took off in the general direction of the famous Slash-X Bar, that dirtbiker oasis of lunch and fluid replacement in the high desert.
I needn’t have worried about Allan getting along on the little XR100. He rides the thing a lot, practicing for his favorite hobby, vintage flat-track racing, and gets around on it just fine. Allan is one of the few people I know who actually seems to be getting faster as he gets older.
The desert was especially dry this year from lack of winter rain, and the trails seemed a bit looser and sandier than usual. At least once during the morning I repeated those two mantras of low-level dirtbikers everywhere: “I hate sand,” and that other classic, “I hate rocks.”
Despite these two intermittent geological plagues, most of the trails were fine and we had a nice ride over to the SlashX, stopping for cheeseburgers and Cokes to replace the calories we’d squandered getting all heated up in the whoops.
By the time we rode back to Allan’s truck, it was late afternoon and all the other trucks and families had packed up and left. We loaded our bikes, changed into street clothes and Allan broke out a couple of cans of iced tea from his cooler.
I stood there drinking, looking out at the Mojave and feeling the friendly rays of the sun against my face, radiating warmth into my only-slightly-sore muscles. The visibility was perfect. You could see a hundred miles. The sky had the deep blueness of outer space.
I thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s famous question, “What could be nicer than this?”
At the moment, I couldn’t think of anything. We climbed into the truck and drove south into the growing stream of weekend traffic heading home into the L.A. basin.
“I guess the desert is still there,” I said later as we hummed along the interstate.
“I guess it is,” Allan said.
