On Occasional Sundays

My first motorcycle was a wretched Hodaka Dirt Squirt, a 100cc thing with a red frame, chromed steel gas tank, and a heart of pure malice. It had been pretty heavily modified (ported, new pipe, enormous carburetor so forth) and barely ran below about 5000 RPM. It started to gain potency at 6000, and turned on like a light switch at about 7000. All the power was way up high, and I, being totally new to dirt bikes and uncoached in their ways, never realized that there was power to be had up high. I’d putt along, the thing loading up and gagging and sputtering, and on those rare occasions when I did let the thing build RPMs and it started to come alive, I frantically closed the throttle imagining that the sudden spurt of power and acceleration was
a sign that the world was ending.

Eventually it developed some bizarre ignition problem that prevented it from running at all. My parents bought me a whole new ignition system for the thing, and it still wouldn’t run. We towed it around the block repeatedly, fiddling and twiddling, and other than a few random pops, it never did anything. In retrospect, it seems obvious that we had it dramatically out of time. If I had another chance, I could probably get it running in an hour. C'est la vie.

Then I got a Suzuki TC-100 trail bike. My dad was working for a company that modified heavy trucks for extreme-duty service, and I used to go down on Saturdays with him. Somehow we ended up at a bizarre chopper shop that had been set up in a disused Circle-K. I lusted for the Suzuki, which seemed sleek and modern compared to the wretched Hodaka, and my dad eventually bought it for me. It was more suitable for me than the Hodaka because it was a rotary valve thing, not a piston-skirt thing, and it wasn’t as dreadfully peaky as the Hodaka. On the other hand, it wasn’t as dreadfully peaky because there was no power to be had anywhere, high or low. It came with trials tires ("Paw Action", as I dubbed it), a dual-range four-speed transmission, and a swoopy and curvy downpipe complete with chrome heat shield. Stylish, si, but a major pain when it came time to balance the thing on a crate. (It wouldn't balance on a crate, so when I had to work on it, I hung it from the barn roof with a block and tackle.)

I rode the crap out of that thing. I was forever replacing tires with scabby and worn-out knobbies I found at the dump. I replaced the grips. I read The Boonie Book and spent hours lubing my cables, adjusting chain tension, moving the bars forward and back, that sort of thing. I even fiddled with the spokes until they all dinged at exactly the same pitch when struck with a tiny Crescent wrench. In my constant adjusting of the chain, I stripped out the axle nut. In my constant fiddling with the ignition timing, I advanced the timing so much that it eventually broke its piston. I installed a forged aluminum Wiseco number for a TM-100 and was off again (single-ring forged piston, I said to myself, in contrast to the earlier twin-ring cast piston… ooh la la). I took to switching between high and low range by giving the selector a sound thump with my boot (old MX boots I bought at Park-n-Swap or found at the dump, can’t remember). In do doing I broke the range selector arm and had to replace that.

Oh, I botched no end of things. Some kind of actuating rod went all the way through the transmission, and when I was farting around with the clutch, I lost the snap ring on one end. The rod would slowly work its way out and the transmission would stick, so I’d have to take off the side cover and tap the rod back in again. I replaced the brakes when they got so worn out the rear brake cam actually got stuck in the fully-engaged position between the shoes, causing a reasonably spectacular wipe-out right in front of house during one of those phases when my mom was toying with the idea of forbidding dirt bikes because I always seemed to be nursing an injury of some sort. The chain and sprockets wore out and all the teeth wore off the countershaft sprocket, so I tightened the chain until it twanged and kept riding. Every now and then the throttle would stick wide-open. The bike was, as previously mentioned, rotary induction. Its carburetor was in a little compartment low on the right side of the engine, with the fuel line and throttle cable going down through a large rubber grommet. But so did the choke cable. Yes, it theoretically had a choke lever on the handlebars, but the handle was gone and one actuated the choke by simply yanking the choke cable out of the grommet. This worked pretty well until you accidentally yanked the throttle cable through the grommet by mistake…

The countershaft sprocket wore out. I mean it wore out, all the way down to vague scalloped nubs, and the only way it would actually roll under its own power was if I tightened the chain down to the point that it twanged. Even then, under load it would slip six or eight or ten teeth with a horrible shuddering vibration and a machine gun sound, rat-a-tat-a-tat. So I saved up the money I made mowing lawns and sprung for a new countershaft sprocket. Unfortunately, chains and sprockets wear out together, and by mating a new countershaft sprocket with a worn chain, all I did was rapidly ruin the second countershaft sprocket. It lasted maybe a month, if that, and then I was back to the twanging chain and machine gun rattle all over again. After saving even more money, I then did the right thing and replaced both sprockets and the chain (but only after carefully weighing the relative merits of various chain manufacturers, as though it matters when you don’t produce enough power to warrant 428 chain, let alone 520). And whilst I was at it, I replaced the rubber blocks in cushion hub as I was suddenly and strangely obsessed by the fear that my hub was too cushy.

But I learned a lot from that thing. I learned that crashing hurts. I learned humility, because it seemed that I was always pushing the thing home, or being towed home behind someone else while cheerfully enduring the requisite indignities. It got so bad that I strapped a rope to the handlebars since every ride had a roughly 25% chance of ending with a non-running Suzuki. Once I crashed so hard on a long, rocky downhill that the footpeg assembly was ripped clean off the bike. I rode so often and with such pretensions of being a real motocrosser that my furious stirring of the transmission caused me to strip out the splines on the shift lever. I fought that problem seemingly forever. I cut shims out of beer cans and sheet metal. I drilled out the threaded portion of the shift lever so I could use a larger bolt and external nut to gain more clamping force. I hammered pieces of baling wire flat and tried to get them to act as keys. One day I was all set to try to braze the damn thing when my dad suggested that the seal might not like being heated up that much. Finally, after it stripped out for the final time and I had to ride home ten or fifteen miles in second gear, I bought a new shift lever. Geez.

Everyone I knew owned faster bikes. One guy had a YZ-250 that simply ate my Suzuki’s lunch. Another's Yamaha 125 wasn’t all that much nicer than mine, and was arguably as cheesy, but it developed just enough more power to seem in a different league. A third had an off-brand 80 that, being a lot newer, was a lot more reliable though no faster. Another guy had a truly bizarre Yamaha 90 that, like my old Hodaka, had a lot of power but had it all up on top. I was always last. Everyone had faster machinery, and more reliable machinery. But I think my frantic attempts to keep up with my inferior machine were good for developing a certain amount of skill, and the fact that I was towed home about every fourth ride was good for my ego.

But in the end, the Suzuki wasn’t worth repairing. The shift lever was still marginal. Years of fanning the clutch in third gear in the vain attempt to induce wheelspin (the "Semics Technique") left me with a clutch that slipped all the time. The ignition timing wasn’t right and it occasionally belched fireballs out of the exhaust. It rattled, it shook, and it still had its original problem – it produced no power at all. I sold it at a little swap meet outside Avondale for the breathtaking sum of seventy bucks.

Then came a Yamaha 175. It started out as one of those on/off-road “enduro” things, but by the time I got it, the lights and street refinements were long gone. What I remember most was the bike’s bizarre brownish gas tank, kind of like (but not exactly like) raw fiberglass. It ran pretty well, and by the time it came along, I had developed a modicum of skill and was, not necessarily fast, but at least not the slowest kid on the block. This bike’s chief claim to fame was the time I sank it in a patch of quicksand and had to come back several hours later with a shovel and dig it up like a tulip bulb.

By this point I had had my great falling out with my former friend and his pack of bootlicking sycophants. The origins of this falling out need not detain us here, simply suffice it to say that I no longer rode with him or his cronies. They got matching YZ-250s and spent most of their time trying to impress girls, while I spent my time riding endless practice laps around one of two or three motocross tracks I had set up out in the desert. The tracks were tricky, and for good reason. They had very tight corners, abrupt jumps, off-camber stuff, sandy patches, anything I could find that I thought would improve me as a rider. Now and then they invaded my tracks, and invariably found them too tight and technical; they always ruined them by widening all the corners and avoiding the steep and in some cases gut-wrenching jumps. All the informal tracks they rode on trended invariably toward being flat jumpless ovals.

Then we moved out of the country and back to the city, and the Yamaha 175 went the way of the dodo. Once I was in college and was working, I had money, and elected to get into dirt bikes again after a hiatus of about a year. I developed a buying hair-trigger and bought the first bike I looked at, an elderly but not beaten-up Suzuki TM-250. At the time RMs had already come out and were considered race-winners, while the elderly TM was considered something of a joke. No, not something of a joke, just a joke. But I rode it, and I liked it, and I bought it.

I rode less often that before. Back in the country, I rode essentially every day. But now, living in the city and faced with having to lug the bike out to the desert, riding became a Saturday thing, and not every Saturday either. But to compensate for not riding every day, I rode harder. When we went out to ride on Saturdays, I went out with the serious of a knight suiting up for battle. This wasn’t a pleasant Saturday trail ride, this was work. And the TM just wasn’t up to it. Though it was significantly more powerful than my old Yamaha 175, it had Stone Age suspension and was almost lethal to ride at high speed. It was particularly prone to a savage head-shake, which at speed could be fairly disconcerting, to say the least.

I started to collect bikes. Another guy at work, Buzz, had a Penton 175 and I bought it from him cheap, mainly because it had serious transmission problems and wouldn’t shift. I tore it apart and split the cases, lost parts, broke screws, and generally muddled my way through a major rebuilding, and eventually got the thing to run and shift. And it was okay. It wasn’t any great shakes as a dirt bike, but it had a certain stylish élan that derived entirely from its brand name. In those days, KTM didn’t export dirt bikes to America. The main European imports to the US were Husqvarna from Sweden and Maico from Germany. But an American, John Penton, set up a company that specialized in importing KTM engines and assembling the rest of the motorcycles around them. The resulting Pentons were popular enduro machines (which, considering that John Penton was something of a force in enduro circles, should come as no surprise). My Penton was quirky and European, and I liked it – up to a point.

In talking to an associate at work, I found that he knew a guy who was selling a fairly new Suzuki RM-250. I went out to test-ride the thing and was immediately entranced. This machine was everything my old TM wasn’t. It was fast and powerful. It was nimble and responsive to control. It had first-rate suspension. It was, in fact, a bike that could win races.

It didn’t win any for me, but not for lack of trying. One weekend me and what I euphemistically called my “hearties” decided to try our hand at organized motocross. So we all went out as a group and raced in the 250 Beginner class at a local motocross track. I remember it being scary, thrilling, and bloody hard work. Halfway through the first moto I was just totally trashed, so exhausted I couldn’t stand up any more, and every time I faced that long downhill jump I was gripped by fear so thick and heavy I could taste it. I finished the moto in the sense that I crossed the finish line and was flagged off the track. But from halfway on, I had stopped racing and was simply struggling to survive. I don’t even remember where I placed. Certainly nowhere near the top. Some of us – myself included – raced the second moto, but none of us reported for duty in the third. I was just too tired.

So now I had three bikes, my RM, my TM, and my Penton. A fourth was soon to be added. My dad worked for the county and maintained landfills, and one day he went up to the New River landfill and found a shiny red Honda CR-125 in the trash. He dug it out and brought it home, and I was astonished.

It wasn’t just a factory-stock CR-125. Someone had spent money on it. A lot. Aftermarket FMF pipe and swing arm, fancy Fox gas shocks, gas forks, huge Mikuni carburetor, the works. The only problems with the bike were A) the boot had come off the carb, and B) the countershaft sprocket was missing. I went to Apache Honda West and bought a replacement countershaft sprocket, and the thing ran. Like all highly modified 125s, it produced a lot of power, but only in a very narrow range near maximum RPM. As long as you kept it on the pipe and altered speed by changing gears instead of closing the throttle, it went like a bat out of hell.

So I had my choice of bikes. If I felt retro, I’d ride the TM. If I wanted to be eclectic, I rode the Penton. If I was interested in serious riding, I took the RM. And there was always the CR-125 for play-time. I had a three-rail trailer, and often took three with me, switching from bike to bike as my whim dictated.

I got rid of the Penton. I don’t even remember where or how. The TM started to piss me off. I didn’t ride it often and the less I rode it, the worse it ran. It wasn’t a spark issue, or even a fuel issue; it just didn’t seem to be breathing. So I took it apart and discovered the case was full of some weird fluid that resembled phlegm. Oil residue? Water? Snot? I had no idea. And I had no idea where it had come from, though my private theory was that the Suzuki was having an allergic reaction to the Yamalube-R oil I used after Blendzall became unavailable in my area. I drained the fluid and it ran better, though it was never the same. It remained hard to start and never seemed to develop the same power. I eventually got rid of it too, and I have no memory of where it went.

My brother-in-law knew someone who was selling a big KTM 420 motocrosser, and we went out and rode it. This was a serious machine. It had suspension every bit as good as my Suzuki RM-250, but it had mountains of power. It was scary at times - the way it tried to peel one off under full throttle was simultaneously thrilling and horrifying. It went so fast that the first time I rode it the wind popped the visor off my helmet. It couldn’t be operated anywhere near top speed without goggles because the wind burned one’s eyes. And, having been sensitized by exposure to my old Penton, I found the KTM brand interesting, Amal carburetor and all. So I bought it, and not long thereafter, I liquidated my prized RM-250. (The Amal carburetor was great. How many times did I get a private laugh out of saying "You guys go on ahead and I'll catch up, I have to tickle my Amal.")

Thus began a long association with a particular KTM dealer. My KTM leaked quite a bit of oil from the shift lever and kickstart lever shaft seals, and I went to said dealer to acquire said seals. In the process of yakking (KTM dealers aren’t terribly busy in America) he mentioned that he “sponsored” a desert racing team. And having found out first-hand just how bloody fast my KTM 420 was, I conceived the notion of desert racing. His sponsorship amounted mainly to providing a stake truck and gas; after that, you were on your own. I ended up riding my KTM in a desert race that took the form of three 25-mile loops with a central pit area. My memories are mainly of dust and exhaustion. On the third loop I once hallucinated that a saguaro cactus was waving at me; my friend crashed when he thought he saw a burro and a Mexican bandit in the middle of the trail. (He rode a Honda XR-250, but the KTM dealer “sponsored” him as well. Sponsorship, at least for us, didn’t amount to much. The best part of sponsorship was having a couple of relatively fresh guys at the end to help heave the bike back up into the truck.)

This same KTM dealer invited me out to go ride some new KTMs from the factory. KTM’s theory was that if they took affluent single guys out and let them ride fancy new motorcycles, they’d end up selling a bunch of them. I went and rode, among other things, the newest 495 two-stroke and the 504 four-stroke, a machine that quickly earned the nickname “Katoom” in honor of its name (KTM) and its exhaust noise (loud, deep and booming). This was up near Riata Pass, now entirely claimed by subdivisions, but on that day, it was out in the middle of nowhere, on a crisp winter morning with just enough rain the day before to lay the dust. The 495 was explosively fast, much faster than my 420 and with better suspension to boot (it had KTM’s version of the Pro-Lever rear suspension, unlike my 420 which had a pair of conventional cantilevered gas shocks). The Katoom produced oodles of torque from idle on up and it was a gas to ride, especially since the powerband was so wide you only had to shift two or three times an hour. But this was before true lightweight four strokes had arrived, and the Katoom felt top-heavy and somewhat awkward, especially at low speeds or when leaned into tight corners. I could dive my 420 pretty hard with complete confidence, but diving the Katoom always left me with the sinking sensation that it was never going to straighten back up. I never felt comfortable sliding the Katoom either and always found myself over-revving the engine looking for a two-stroke peak that just wasn't there. The 495 wasn’t all that pleasant to ride either. It was, if anything, too fast. A quick twist on the grip and suddenly the front wheel is off the ground and Einsteinian blue-shifting caused me to misjudge corners. It threw up such a profound roost one had to actually be conscious of it and not accidentally frag bystanders.

But I didn’t buy. I’d bought a house and didn’t have that kind of spare cash laying around any more, so I soldiered on with my aging 420. It was still bloody fast, but it was no longer state of the art. This was evidenced when I took it and myself to the motocross track and raced in the Open Beginner class. There were only about four of us in Open Beginner, so they mixed us in with (I kid you not) the 80cc Expert class. I mainly remember being passed over and over by those freaking kids on their 80s. I had way more horsepower and could eat them alive in acceleration, but I lacked suspension and lacked courage (that horrible long downhill jump was still there, plus a new feature, the pedestrian overpass that scared the crap out of me every time). I entered two motos, finished the first one, and DNF’ed the second when I fouled a plug. Just in time too, because just like the first time, I was physically beaten. I didn’t bother starting the third, because I just didn’t have the strength.

I bought a second, identical KTM 420, but I never rode it. I imagined it would be a good parts bike for the first one, but my interests were starting to stray elsewhere. I had in the meantime discovered computers, and went into the intense period of nonstop programming that is usually referred to as “larva stage” in programming circles. I didn’t exactly stop riding, but I most definitely stopped racing. The KTM dealer went out of business so my easy entrée into desert racing was lost, and long days of doing nothing but sitting in front of the computer resulted in me lacking the endurance to race motocross.

I sold both KTMs and my trailer to a guy at work, and thus liquidated the last of my dirt bikes. It was sad, but it was time.

Every now and then I think about getting a dirt bike again. I'd like to try vintage motocross, or at least I think I'd like to try vintage motocross. If I could have any bike, it would be a Maico MC490 Mega Two, which means that my wife would collect life insurance in about a week. A less-lethal choice would be a Yamaha YZ360B. With that one, my wife would have to wait three weeks to collect my life insurance.