A Short Ulyssean Summer

LEANINGS

A Short Ulyssean Summer

PETER EGAN

WELL, I DON’T THINK I’LL APPLY for a Guinness World Record for miles traveled by motorcycle this past summer. After breaking my ribs and foot in a dirtbike crash last June, I spent about two months in a La-Z-Boy, tilted back and watching the paint dry on our living room wall. Which I painted 20 years ago, so there wasn’t much action.

Nevertheless, I arose from the chair one bright August morning and discovered that I could once more pull a boot onto my left foot, so I clumped out to my garage and began riding again. Climbed on my nearly new blue ’09 Buell Ulysses and headed out into the great wide open.

Destination? Off to Mischler’s HarleyDavidson in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, to get my official post-break-in oil change and drive-belt adjustment done.

I rode those first few miles rather tentatively, making an effort not to hold the bike up with my left foot at stop signs—or low-side on a patch of sand in a corner. Never had the prospect of landing on my rib cage (again) seemed quite so unappealing.

I won’t say I rode like a little old man, but picture Wilford Brimley taking his first-ever motorcycle ride on the way home from filming an ad for burial insurance. “Let’s see, the clutch is the one on the left...” After about 10 miles, I got back in the flow and began to wick it up a bit. Great to be back on a motorcycle.

The Ulysses (for those who missed last year’s epic column) was the bike I’d bought—literally—in the middle of a blizzard last winter from Racine Harley-Davidson. I got it shortly after Buell folded, and it was, according to the “Buell Finder” factory website, the last new XB12X sitting on a showroom floor in Wisconsin. I guess this makes me the direct opposite of an “early adopter.” Just in time to be too late, as Hank Williams would say.

Actually, I could have been the early adopter with this bike, as I was one of the first journalists in the U.S. to ride a Ulysses any distance, right after the original 2006 model’s introduction. I picked up a Barricade Orange version from the East Troy factory—about 65 miles straight east of my house—and rode it on a long autumn Bluegrass music tour, down through the backroads of Virginia.

I took an immediate liking to the bike and found it comfortable and nimble, with great luggage, fantastic brakes, first-rate suspension and the best seat in the industry.

Drawbacks? Well, the rear cylinder was cooled by a loud fan that stayed running for about a minute after you shut the bike off, and the Check Engine light came on when I was still about 400 miles from home. In West Virginia, on a Sunday. This turned out to be a faulty worm-drive screw that was supposed to open a flap in the muffler at high rpm— an early production problem that was quickly rectified.

Also, the engine, though dead-smooth on the highway, did its typical 1200 Sportster dance on its rubber mounts at idle. Frankly, this didn’t bother me much, as ownership of Road Kings and Norton Commandos has turned me into the very poster child for vibratory Twins with rubber mounts. If you like the overall personality of a motorcycle enough, it’s possible to see nearly any engineering fault as pure charisma. Something I felt the Ulysses had in abundance. And still has.

Nonetheless, I was just a little uneasy when I bought the Buell last winter. I’d liked the bike on a long autumn road trip—five years ago in cool weather— but how would it hold up now as a daily rider? Friends warned me that it might not be so good in the heat of summer. Which we had plenty of this year, followed by an unusually warm and beautiful Indian summer, all through October.

As it turns out, everything I liked about the Ulysses on my trip in 2005 I still like, and the bike’s quirks have turned into non-issues for me. I’ve got just over 1500 miles on the Buell now and have ridden it in 100-degree weather with no problem. Granted, if you’re heading north and the wind is coming from the west, there’s quite a bit of heat on your right leg, but then you just swing your knee temporarily away from the frame/gas tank (or turn east) and all is well.

The loud fan still irritates just a little bit and sometimes makes me wish I still smoked so I could walk over there, light up a Camel and wait beneath a tree while the bike cools down, but that’s a pretty minor problem. I suspect if Buell had stayed in business for another year, the engineers would have developed a “Whisper-Jet” fan or some such thing.

Mileage? The Buell brochure advertised an enticing 51/64 mpg for city and highway, but I’ve yet to exceed about 44 mpg, mostly gassing it around on backroads. Maybe I need to get out on the highway and cruise sedately at 55 mph, without those wide saddlebags. Or hire a shorter rider.

Anyway, the report from this truncated summer is a good one. The Ulysses has quietly become my Main Bike, the one I ride almost all the time, just as my old Kawasaki KZ1000 Mk. II was in the 1980s. I rode the KZ everywhere for eight years, and its usefulness allowed me to dabble in all kinds of arcane and less sensible projects—old Triumph 500s, clapped-out Yamaha RD400s, early Honda Fours with faulty float levels, café racers with impossible handlebars, etc.

And that’s what the Ulysses allows me to do now. I don’t see myself replacing it any time in the foreseeable future because it does so many things well. It has real garage appeal for me—I like its strangely offbeat styling and ingenious mechanical architecture. And it fits me well and does everything I want to do on a modern bike—tour, carve corners, run errands, go fast or just go slow and soak up the scenery while listening to that nice, loping Twin. And then there’s the marvelous roll-on torque, my favorite trait in a motorcycle engine.

So, with reality taken care of, I can once more indulge wholeheartedly in what you might call the peripheral fringe of riding logic.

Just this week, I found myself looking at an orange 1975 Yamaha RD350 that needs a little work. It doesn’t run right now, but it doesn’t have to. I’ve got the Ulysses. □