At Home On the Range

At Home on the Range

PETER EGAN

LEANINGS

WELL, LAST WEEK WAS NOT A GOOD one for my fellow Slimey Crud and riding buddy Jeff Underwood. He spent the morning helping a neighbor cut wood, then drove his pickup back to his nice old farmhouse—which is tucked into a scenic hollow west of Madison, Wisconsin—and found the place on fire.

The fire department responded quickly, but it was too late to save the home, and Jeff ended up with a basement full of smoldering embers. Personal possessions, including a large record collection and extensive library, all gone. He thinks the fire started with a wood furnace that kicked out some coals onto the basement floor.

The only bright side to all this was that Jeff had all his motorcycles (older BMWs, a Ducati MH900e, a few dirtbikes and his "main bike," a KTM 950 Adventure) stored in his workshop, which is in a nearby barn.

When Jeff's fellow Cruds heard the house had burned down but his bikes had been spared, they all breathed a sigh of relief, as if he'd said, "I wrecked my car but didn't damage the beer in the trunk." Not that we don't care about Jeff's home, but we all share a tacit understanding that houses are just a support system for riding motorcycles. A good place to warm up and do laundry between rides.

Easy to say, of course, if you haven't lost your home. Anyway, Jeff is now living in his pickup-mounted camper and wondering where, if or how to rebuild. Luckily, he has good insurance and a surprising number of nice-looking women friends who seem intent on bringing him the finest meats and cheeses.

I called to see what I could do, and he said, "Bring me some good books to read, and let's take a ride this Thursday. It's supposed to be beautiful weather, and I need to get out and clear my head."

So last Thursday, six of us showed up at Jeff's former abode to ride the hilly backroads of Dane and Iowa Counties. It truly was a beautiful late spring morning, and before the ride, we all sat in lawn chairs on the concrete slab in front of his workshop/red barn and drank coffee and ate homemade cookies someone had dropped off.

The bikes that showed up were an interesting mix.

I had my Buell Ulysses, Jeff was poised to ride his KTM 950 Adventure, Jason Daniels showed up on his new BMW F800GS, Rob Himmelmann motored in on his BMW R1100GS, and another old friend of Jeff's named Craig Johnson thundered up on yet another KTM 950 Adventure. The only "normal" road bikes in the group were Matt Rosen's Triumph Sprint ST and Lew Terpstra's modern Bonneville.

Five big adventure-tourers out of the seven bikes, all sitting high and wide.

This is an interesting change. When I first joined the Cruds in 1990, nearly everyone in the gang rode a sportbike or a "standard"—Ducati 900SSs, airhead BMWs, Suzuki GS1100s, etc.

Slowly, those bikes have been supplanted by adventure-tourers—a class that barely existed 20 years ago. Several of us still have pure sportbikes or old British or Italian classics, but the motorcycle almost every member chooses to ride on a long trip—or on a twisty backroad with uncertain pavement—is a big, tall adventure-tourer.

The reasons are fairly self-evident. First, these bikes are roomy and comfortable and most have hard luggage, so you can travel on them. Second, they have wide bars for good leverage. Third, there are a variety of dualsport tires available, so you can tackle a moderate amount of gravel and dirt without turning back or falling on your elbow. You might say they represent the motorcycle version of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. Only in this case it's Freedom from wrist pain, Freedom from clean pavement, Freedom from soft luggage and the Freedom to sit up and look around.

A cynic here might add, "Freedom from youthfulness," as most of us were a lot more comfortable on sportbikes when we were 20 or 30 than we are now.

Be that as it may, the Freedom from clean pavement thing was important on Jeff's ride. He led us on some very narrow and twisty back lanes whose tarmac had not yet been washed clean of winter's sand and gravel by the spring rains. Our swift passage stirred up large clouds of fine dust, and I quickly discovered that the Pirelli Scorpion Syncs on my Ulysses aren't exactly knobbies. The Ulysses is a wonderful torque-monster, so it spins that street-oriented rear quite readily on loose sand and dirt.

When Erik Buell first introduced the Ulysses, it came with a special Dunlop dual-sport tire that worked moderately well on gravel and dry dirt trails; but it soon became evident that most Ulysses owners were not going to be running Paris-Dakar with that 17-inch front wheel (or a muffler doubling as a skidplate), so Buell started putting pure street rubber on the Ulysses.

Good idea, most of the time, but the Buell still has an almost perfect dirtbike riding position, despite the small wheel, and I wouldn't mind a little more soil capability. So my goal now is to wear the Scorpion Syncs out as soon as possible (a noble endeavor) and put something with more duality and knobs on there.

At noon, our little group stopped at a hilltop biker bar, a spot accurately called Pleasant Ridge, with a great view of the surrounding hills. We all ordered cheeseburgers and drank Cokes. (In another sign of maturity, people seldom drink beer any more on our rides, but this may be more a Darwinian thing than a case of acquired wisdom.)

After lunch, we went back out to our bikes for the ride home.

For Jeff, of course, there was no home at the moment, just the camper. But he was also going back to his workshop and collection of bikes. As he himself said, "Things could be worse."

Indeed, they could. He didn't perish in the fire, and on that big KTM he can go anywhere in the world. Which is exactly what Jeff is inclined to do. This guy rides. In the meantime, we wish him luck on rebuilding his base camp.

If he ever gets back from Moab, Utah. Which is where he's trail riding at this moment. □