Motorcycles

Back in the middle sixties, my dear Daddy bought a plot of land a couple of miles north-west of Guelph and built our very first new house. Quite an accomplishment for DP's barely ten years into their new lives in the new country.

I wasn't yet into my teens, but I was highly attracted to all things loud and fast and motorized. The Andrews boys around the corner ran a '58 Chevy on the local dirt track, and they had their test 'n tune days on the gravel road in front of our new house. Needless to say, they were my idols.

I made a deal with Dad. If I carved a little circle through the scrub brush that covered our ten acres, he'd buy me an old beater, something that in this era and in these parts would be known as a "field car," and I would henceforth be free to hone my roundy-round chops to my heart's content.

Look out Pearson and Yarborough and Petty! Here comes Neumann!

Much to my father's surprise, I actually succeeded in carving out that circle. With an axe. It would have been maybe a really short eighth miler. Nevertheless, I'd built the track. So I went to Dad and reminded him of the other part of the deal.

Here's why you should get every deal in writing, even when it's with your Dad. He had utterly no memory of our deal to provide the race car if I provided the race track. This went back and forth for months until we struck a compromise; he bought me a motorcycle instead.

The motorcycle he bought me was an old Suzuki 80 street bike that he got from a workmate for forty bucks. It had but one mechanical flaw; it was forever stuck in second gear.

Even on my significantly less than one eighth mile track, second gear didn't cut it. So I abandoned my track and fashioned a new one around Mom's kitchen garden. It was maybe fifty by a hundred feet, and you got perfect circumlocutions without needing anything other than second gear!

That's where I honed my flat-track finesse. I'd circle that garden for hours on end with the back wheel hanging out and my left foot on the ground. No shifting required when you've only got second!

That Suzi paved the way to bikes on which the transmission actually worked. I went through a series of small-bore dirt-bikes till I landed a 175 Bultaco.

The Bultaco had the gears and brakes on the opposite side of where the Japanese bikes had them, a fact that wreaked havoc on the raspberry patch of Bruce Dickinson's mom the first time I took it for a test drive. Bruce was the school pal I was buying the Bultaco from. His mom was not impressed.

I graduated from the Bultaco to a Honda three-wheeler I got at Zdeno Cycle in Guelph. I had one of the first ever sold in Canada.

Could I ever do tricks on that little monster! I could side-wheelie for miles at a time. I could keep the front in the air for miles at a time. One of my favourite memories was when I'd line up my four younger siblings and jump over them, Knievel style!

Nobody ever got hurt, just for the record.

Alas, I hit the ripe age of 16 and it was all cars after that. Flat-tracking around Mom's garden had nothing on burying the speedometer on a 440 cubic inch Chrysler.

Oddly enough, just as I was getting out of motorcycles, my younger brother "the tree guy" was getting into them. His first ride was a 350 Honda. Then he was up to a 750, which I remember taking well over a 100mph.

Without a helmet.

My glasses blew off in the wind.

He's riding a 1200 sport twin today, commuting back and forth to work.

So I was away from motorcycles for forty years or so, till I picked up that 500 Ninja on the cusp of 60. Not sure where to take things from here. I take it for short runs around the neighbourhood once in awhile, but I don't feel I'm ready for the highway.

Where to from here?


Gonna buy a helmet tomorrow.

Zdeno Cycle and the first ATV in Canada

The first ATV was actually called an ATC. I should know. I owned it.

Zdeno was a guy who was once motocross champ of whatever eastern European country he came from. One of those countries that's been wiped from the map.  Moved to the new land. Got a Honda dealership. It was on Elizabeth Street in Guelph.

I wandered in there one day in '69 or '70. They had this weird hallucination on the showroom floor. A tricycle. Balloon tires. Honda 90 engine. Hi-lo four speed. Looked like something out of a cartoon. I just had to have one.

Kind of odd when you think about it. My very first childhood memory involved a tricycle. I was pedalling my trike up Lorraine Avenue in Guelph, past Billy Kipling's house. Billy was standing on the front lawn. As I passed he hurled his sister's toy iron at me. Those were the days. Little sisters had toy steam irons. Big brothers had toy guns.

So he flings the iron at me, for no reason I could figure out, and bops me square in the head. All I remember is it really hurt, I fell off my trike, causing even more trauma, and I ran home crying.

So now I'm in my mid-teens and I want to buy this trike. Maybe I just wanted to run over Billy's face with it, I don't know. But I had to have it. It was my first bank loan. Dad co-signed.

That Honda three-wheeler was one incredible joy-ride. First thing I figured out is that I could pretty much go indefinitely on either the two back wheels- a wheelie- or two side wheels - a side-wheelie as it were. Sure, a few times I went over backwards and scraped a bit of skin off my ass, but you kind of expected that with anything you bought at a motorcycle shop back in the day.

I soon got the stunt riding thing figured out. Built a little ramp up beside the road. Got all my siblings to lie on the ground behind the ramp. Then I'd jump over them. Sort of like Evil Kneivel except instead of jumping buses you were jumping over your siblings. Nobody ever got hurt.

Must say the design of the Honda ATC was a litigation lawyer's dream. Even after I'd racked up hundreds of hours on this baby, totally unpredictable things could happen. You'd be snaking up a 60 degree incline back in the woods. Low range. Territory that none of your dirt-bikin' buddies could dream of, and suddenly the Honda would do a sharp left and take off down the hill.

I remember the first time I let "the kid" take her for a spin. He's got her at about 50 clicks alongside the irrigation ditch up beside the highway. He's about nine years old at the time. He's whipping along, drifting closer and closer to the ditch. I'm watching, thinking oh shit, he can't be going in the...

And the ATC disappears from view, tumbling into the ditch. Holy shit! I just killed my little brother... I run for the ditch, look over the edge. Eight feet below me I see three balloon tires, and up beside the front tire, there's the kid's face. He's looking at me. Then he starts to laugh. The ATC has flipped, he's trapped underneath, but he landed in mud and two feet of water. It broke his fall. He's OK!

Unfortunately, not everybody who had one of those three-wheelers go its own way had such a happy ending. Honda had a flood of law-suits over the controlability of their three-wheelers. So they stopped making them and along came the four-wheeler. Less fun. Less law-suits. But today in rural America, the four-wheelers are everywhere.

Before they pulled the plug on production, Honda had seriously upgraded their three-wheeler. The balloon tires went the second year of production, in favor of off-road knobbies. They upped the power. You could get 185's, 250's, and more. Yamaha and Suzuki even got into the act before the legal tsunami hit the fan.

Then the three-wheelers morphed into four-wheerlers. They're everywhere. But I'm looking for a good clean three wheeler. At least a 250. Give me a shout if you have one for sale.

 I'm still looking to run over Billy Kipling's face.