Wild Motorcycle Tales - Safe riding is no Accident

Wild Motorcycle Tales

Here's a great story from Sean Blankert. Got your own story? Send it to me.

Safe riding is no Accident

The first time I rode a motorcycle was when I was 12 years old. A younger friend of mine, Glen, who was the closest neighbor to us in the Sandia mountains of New Mexico where I grew up, had parents who rode motorcycles. They bought him and his sister Dina Honda 150 dirt bikes, and Dina never rode hers. Somehow Glen conned me into hopping on his sister's bike, telling me that first gear was one down, and the rest of the gears were up. Left hand was the clutch, right was the brake.

We rode down the dirt road away from his house to the main road for maybe two miles before turning around and going back. I do not believe I even shifted out of first the whole time.

Mr. Hollingsworth, Glen's dad, was waiting for us in the driveway when we got back. He was an old WW2 veteran who had the pug-nosed dogface look of an army guy like you would expect to see in a movie like Patton.

His body was still strong and fit from years of working, hunting, riding, and taking care of business, and his eyes seemed to see through us, as if he were looking into the past and future at the same time. His silence spoke louder than any words, and when he spoke you listened half out of fear and half out of curiosity for what he was trying to tell you.

So, when he called us over to him, he asked us where our helmets were, and told us that motorcycles are like snakes: If you fear them they bite you, but if you don't fear them, they bite you too. He had us park the bikes, and I didn't ride a motorcycle again for more than 20 years.

His words echoed in my memory all the way to this day, however, and are good advice for any rider. "Do not fear or take for granted what you are riding, just respect it."

I didn't start riding seriously until 2003 when gas prices were hovering around $5 per gallon. I had been accepted to graduate school for biochemistry at Arizona State University in Tempe, while my wife, Erin, was accepted to graduate school for hydrology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. We decided to move to Casa Grande which is a cow town approximately half way between the two cities, with Erin getting a slightly longer drive than my 120 mile round trip.

I had been driving a 1978 Trans Am to and from Tempe for the first month of graduate school, but I was spending nearly $120 a week in gas transiting back and forth each day. Erin had a similar drive, so you can imagine how much we were spending on gasoline. Something had to give!

I read that motorcycles could get 50 or more miles to the gallon, and I started imagining what it would be like riding an old Harley to school. The long drive back and forth to Phoenix each day was boring in a car, but a motorcycle, that might just make things interesting as well as cheaper.

I started looking in the Arizona classifieds for a motorcycle. I really wanted a classic Harley, but Harleys are not cheap. All the ones in the paper were around $5K at the cheapest, and I was looking to spend around $3K for a starter bike, so there really wasn't much selection.

When I found a bike I was interested in, I would call and find out they had already sold it days earlier. I finally found a guy selling his Harley Sportster for $4K, and he still had it in his possession. He lived in Phoenix, so one day after school I stopped by his house to look at it.

The guy's name was Kim, and he looked like the stereotypical Harley biker that would kill you if you made fun of his name. He had long gray hair, a beard, bleached denim jacket and pants, and a red bandana on his head.

He said he needed the money for his sick wife, and he showed me the bike in his garage. It was a 1989 Sportster 883cc with ape hangers and a bobbed tank sporting a custom paint job of a naked black woman with big round breasts looking like they had been painted on by a nine year old.

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