Barber's Vintage Races: The Pit

Being around old racers in a museum is inspirational.  Being around old racers still warm from a track is mind blowing.  I think I have been bit.

Barber's Vintage Races and Swap

Warren,Stacy and Co.
 As much as there is to look forward to on our local weekend of motorcycle history at the Barber's track, now our friends from the midwest are added to our blessings.  Warren Jr., Stacy, Doug and Catherine joined the sleepover in the racing pits.  I haven’t spent any quality time since with Warren since we crossed the country together two years ago.  Its impossible not to get to know someone in that situation, for better or for worse.  With Warren it was definitely for the better.  Now Warren adds to his passions racing and helping kids learn to work with their hands.  His Honda racer is the fruit of those passions. 

Alabama Map

It is in my bloodline to be fascinated with maps.  When I got my first motorcycle this infatuation, which started with my mom’s Plymouth minivan and a drivers permit in south Texas, reached full fruition on the blue and even smaller grey highways of Alabama.  Other states were soon within bounds.  I started ticking off states.  Surrounding states first: FL, LA, MS, TN, NC, GA, TX.  Mostly, I wanted to explore every twisted forest road, every wide open farm two laner and every century old town square still not yet eaten by the a freeway and bulldozed for a strip mall.  Those old bricks saw decades more use than the new lego structures with so much parking and so little usefulness.  

Soon the entire U.S. was no longer out of bounds.  I had developed the perfect tool pouch for road side repair.  My camping equipment was not worn out yet.  I piled it high onto my first makeshift sissy bar and set off.  I saw the West coast, British Columbia, Wyoming, and all the states in between.  All on different trips.  

When I would return home from the lone journeys I would thirst for companionship and, having rode 12 hours a day for 3 or 4 weeks, would usually let the bike rest as well for a couple of weeks.  I began riding the backroads of Alabama less, losing curiosity in what I perceived to be confined and monotonous at the time.  My curiosity had expanded.  So there was such a thing as too much.  Must be if I no longer day dreamed all day at work about going to eat breakfast in Centerville, AL at Twix and Tween, a 24/7 truck stop between Tuscaloosa and Montgomery, nowhere near an interstate.

I fasted from riding in Japan.  1 year, no motorbike.  I don’t recommend staying off a bike for a year but I can say, with some authority, what staying off motorcycles for a year did to me.  Time away from my own motorbike meant lots of time spent inside of my head considering the psychological effects of riding time, garage time, and friends.  I got cranky, even mean, going through this mental purging.  I binged on Japanese beer, which all seemed to taste about the same and was way more expensive than beer in the States.  I got to where I hated it but drank it anyway.  Stress crept into my joints and my nerve endings caught on fire, making movement painful.  Through all of this a there was a kind of rebirth happening.  A shift in paradigm.  I would never look at riding, wrenching, friends and home the same way.  The “why” of it all became clearer, if not easier to explain.  

My drinking did slow.  I made motorcycle friends and a bought a skateboard, which I should have done as soon as I got there, but I was caught in culture shock and learning how to navigate in Japanese for a bit.  Adhering to my old high school philosophy, if your joints or your brain hurts, punish your body.  Of course the opposite happens to be true.  Nerves eased. I became good friends with an 8ft metal ramp and acquaintances with a bilingual rollerblader, who call themselves skaters in Japan. Rollerblading is way more popular than skateboarding in Japan.  He was the only bilingual person in the park and we spent a lot of time on that ramp.  I had no idea what he was doing when he skated but he was a nice fellow.  His name was Takaaki.

I also spent some effort in getting to know and photograph some motorcycle friends.  Particularly the Vise crew in Nagoya who treated me and my wife better than family.  All the while, I ached, watching those friends go everywhere on their weathered and faithful machines.  

Now I find myself, both literally and figuratively at home again.  To what effect?  Now, again every off colored two lane road on the Alabama map jumps off the page with possibilities.  A two wheeled commute to work changes the entire experience of the day’s business.  My wife says I have returned to sanity from wherever I was.  Any excuse to ride is an excuse to daydream, like I used to about skateboarding and travel in high school.  I reflect on past miles, knowing I was there, but seeing them in a sort of dreamscape.  I was asleep then.  Now every mile that passes under my wheels is added to a vast reality of experience.  No longer sleeping, living the dream.

Picture by Brandon, rider: Chauncey

Biker and lady.
picture: brandon

to look at

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Pics:BrandonSmith

Sunday September 18.

On the road again.

     I currently live in a building that looks like a barn. Built two generations before the current owner, carpenter and close friend of mine, Big Joe, became the caretaker.  Next to the barn, is a little shack, built by Joe, complete with workbench two vises, out of place kitchen cabinetry and a few strewn tools.  Also occupying the shack is Joe's precarious collection of old motorcycle parts and me, for the last two months.    

     When I returned from Japan, I became the owner of a bike that looked like my friend Chauncey had craned it out of  the Coosa River.  Before leaving for Japan I had helped assemble it in the basement below my apt., a learning experience for both of us, but the real learning would come more than a year later, when I became the owner.  

     Chauncey grew tired of the cranky nature of the bike, and the tendency of my welds to crack. He bought a stock ironhead, chucked this one in his dad's garage in Locust Fort AL and put it on craig's list until I got it out of him that it was for sale during an intercontinental skype conversation.  It was sold back to me within days and destined to sit in the dark, with gas in the carbs, until I returned 8 months later.  

     It took me more than two months in Joe's shack to right our collective wrongs on the bike.  Yesterday I quintuple kicked the hesitant twin to life.  Grumble, pur and little spit.  I crossed town to Nick's house where a random old timer, Keith, showed up with a framed piece of history: a black and white picture of his older brother astride his panhead, with something like a 14 over front end, wearing his captain's hat.  Perfect.  Keith claimed that his brother used to put him on the fender and take him to school.  Living it in elementary.  

     I tuned my ignition sitting on Nick's gravel drive and waited for the sun to go down.  When it did I had the ride I had been waiting for more than a year.  Small dark forested roads, not a sputter out of the bike.  The long way home.  She still looks like she was pulled out of a river, but I think she's dialed in now.  

Moon and Heat Moon

Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d never have found this spring under the sycamores.  Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest.  Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention.  It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s-leaving as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get-that a man becomes his attentions.  His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.

William Least Heat-Moon from Blue Highways

photo: brandon smith