This Little Piggy goes to Market

This Little Piggy goes to Market

Well, we didn’t actually “go to market”. What we did, was go for a ride. This time, the other “little piggy” (Lazzy) “stayed home”…..having been out with me yesterday for a short tryst. It was a beautiful (though windy) day, and the Buellosaurus had been ignored long enough, to the point here I believe Lazzy was probably rubbing it in behind my back. So, I pulled Rex out and suited up. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going, other than the fact that I was. Going, that is.
And so, we do. Rex pops right off, and as I finish suiting up, I let him warm up in the driveway, the big 1203 doing it’s best imitation of a paint shaker. Gotta love it! Something about that throbbing, guttural rumble that gets me right here…..Now, naturally, one does not ride a B.Rex without the earplugs, unless one is; a) in a hurry, or; b) feeling rather stupid. I was neither today, so I pop them in and roll out of the driveway on this glorious day.
Rex seems just the teensiest bit cantankerous out of the gate; likely due to the weeklong hiatus he’d had. After stopping at the corner 7-11 for a shot of premium, he’s back in the game.
Every time I ride this particular beast, I am utterly astounded at the flickability and balance as well as the immediate seat-of-the-pants throttle response; so radically different from Lazzy or the Seca, or even B.Rex when he was still a mild-mannered Clark Kent (pre-mod days). Someone other than myself has described the Mikuni HSR-42 carb as feeling like a direct connection between your wrist and the rear wheel; no truer words were ever spoken!
We head out onto the usual route; a 60-some mile jaunt through back road cornfield country. The fall colors are just beginning to show here and there, and there is the beginning of the smell of autumn in the air. I roll on the power slowly and evenly and settle into a comfortable rate of cruise.
Heading north into southeastern Wisconsin, we pass numerous bikes; mostly Harleys, not nearly as many as the previous weekend. I suspect that the higher-than-normal winds have kept some at home. I find myself behind slow-moving vehicles; Relax, I tell myself; they’re probably just out enjoying the weather like you; too bad they’re stuck in a cage! The thought brings a chuckle inside my helmet, and I do relax. What a glorious day for a ride!
I find a Harley in my mirrors pacing me through a small town; he catches up with me at a stop light just as it turns green; I’ve stopped and he rolls right on through, coming abreast of me with rumble as I clutch through second. I put a little mojo in the right wrist; Rex snarls and he backs off; this is a B.Rex here, mister, not some bronto-bagger like yours! I effortlessly take the lead and settle into my pace again, Rex thundering out his glorious song in metalspeak. I crest a gentle rise and brake for a right turn; scanning for gravel reveals nothing to get excited about, so I lean Rex over hard and roll on the power. Rex, whose mind has been wandering some, like a schoolboy staring out the classroom window, immediately springs to attention and before I know it, has blown past eighty…..whoa, there, fella……and I ease off the throttle a bit and bleed off some speed to a more reasonable seventy as the cornstalks whiz by like the X-wing fighters in a Star Wars flick. Damn, I love this bike! The thrumming of the big Vee Twin at this speed and RPM is hypnotic and mesmerizing. It penetrates your skull and body clear through to the bone. I could just “set it and forget it” if I had cruise control. The farm smells assail me and I wish this road would go on forever; but I know it doesn’t; I brake, bank left and after a short bit end up at the next highway.
Turning left, I roll through the gears until I wind up behind an SUV traveling aggravatingly slow; 50 in a 55 no less! Masking my irritation, I throttle back and keep a safe interval behind the cell phone-yakking driver as I impatiently wait for the double yellow and oncoming traffic to end; after an eternity, it does….see ya later, sucker! I dip down into fourth and roll it on; Rex leaps forward in a manner that always puts butterflies in my stomach. Now, you have to understand; when I speak of “rolling on the power”, this monstrosity only takes a quarter-twist to scare the living snot out of you. The entire time I’ve owned Rex, I’ve only pinned the barber pole once; once was enough! Rex leaps forward like I’ve zapped him with a cattle prod, and the cell-phone-yakker-SUV disappears from my mirrors and off the radar like a distant memory. Unencumbered by traffic, Rex settles in to a nice eighty mph rate-of-cruise. As we crest a hill, the full force of the winds catch me. We are being buffeted about not unlike an errant plastic shopping bag blowing about the supermarket parking lot. I can feel the wind tugging at my helmet; the strap straining against my chin in a vain effort to deploy itself; were it not strapped on, I believe it would launch itself like a cannonball right off the top of my head. I tuck my head down a bit and motor on, enjoying this far too much to let a little wind discourage me!
We motor on, oblivious to the problems of the world, sucking in the sights and smells and sounds around me. The motor is making a glorious drone as we blitz down the highway. Did I mention I was enjoying this? Finally, we come to the next major intersection, where I’ll turn left (and southeast). This intersection is always a bittersweet reunion; sweet because it’s a magical, glorious stretch of 2-lane pavement that winds between a heavily forested section containing a nice stand of pine. The pine scent always seems to waft in through my visor and transport me back to the northern woods of Minnesota, where I spent many a summer scrounging up trouble in the woods as a boy. Sweet, also, because it is a section of road that always seems to taunt me to push the envelope….my last jaunt down this particular stretch of ribbon somehow found me exceeding three digits on the clock. Bitter, because I always know in my heart this is the turn back towards home, and even though I’m still thirty miles away, the ride is winding down. As I mentioned, I usually engage this section of blacktop with vigor and a bit of punk-youth exuberance, but not today. As we come to a stop, two bikes are resting at the 4-way stop in the right turn lane. Since they have the right-of-way, I pause, to give them the option to go…..they take it, hesitantly, as if unsure of their destination. Rex closes the gap impatiently, and I can see one rider is a female and both of them appear to be newbies; evident from the shiny new Harleys, to the bright orange stickers still on the back of both helmets like bumper stickers. They eke on up to 55 and totter uncertainly southeasterly at a sedate, geriatric pace in a area where I would normally be tickling the rev limiter on the north side of ninety; I try to calm Rex the way a jockey might calm a thoroughbred; Easy, big fella, easy…..
I think about passing them; all it would take is a quick flick of the bars and a whisper in Rex’s ear; but no! For some reason I decide it would probably be bad form to smoke by two obvious newbies, probably scaring the snot out of them in the process, and possibly tainting their view of sportbike riders forever…as the saying goes; you only get one chance to make a first impression. I throttle back and drop into staggered formation behind them and relax; there’s still a lot of highway left before home. Rex fidgets impatiently; I know he was anticipating that stretch of highway and the surge of adrenaline that parallels a nasty power roll-on, but he’ll just have to be patient for now.
Several miles down the road, and the left turn blinkers come on as the newbies totter off down a side road, still giving off an air of uncertainty. Immediately past this intersection is the one I usually take, today is no different, so I slow and bank left.
Now, Boss?
Go get ‘em, Rex!The Vee Twin between my knees fairly explodes as I whack the throttle, hard, the guttural, Jurassic snarl making the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Rex lunges forward like a quarter horse taking the bit in his teeth and it’s all I can do to hang on….50, 60, 70, 80, 90……Slow down, boy! Easy! I can’t seem to erase the s???-eating grin off my face, as I ease back down towards a little more legal pace. Rex snorts and shakes his Buellosaurus head; a true prehistoric meat-eating predator; angry, defiant, and representative of his name.
Tyrannosaurus Rex, loosely translated, means “Terrible Lizard King”
Buellosaurus Rex, loosely translated, means….well, I guess it can mean whatever you want it to. But you get the idea.
Rex seems to relax a bit now; we thunder down the highway with scant traffic in the oncoming lane, and nothing but empty, open road stretched out in front of us. Ahh…the freedom and solitude of a solo ride!
We pass a farm near the road and smell the freshly mown hay. Cows gaze sedately through the barbed wire as we thunder by, chewing their cud, like bovine village idiots, as the flies buzz around their heads. I can almost hear their thoughts as we rumble by…COW-asaki…COW-asaki…COW-asaki…is the mantra they chant…the fools!…all this scenery frozen in a nanosecond mind-snapshot…..I roll on more throttle as the road inclines, Rex eager to be out of hostile territory. We crest the incline and begin a long descent to the major highway we’d gone north on. Rex burbles happily as I engine brake down the slope; downshifting through the gears until we come to a stop. Then it’s a quick glance north to check for traffic, and we turn right heading southbound. Rex snaps through the gears swiftly, effortlessly, and we find ourselves riding formation behind two Harley baggers sporting doo rags and Oh-Fishul Motor Co. garb. We come to another major intersection, and I enter the left turn lane; the two Harley riders in the straight lane do their best to completely ignore the noisy brethren sportbike to their left, despite my amiable nod their way. It’s as if we were a ghost or apparition. Or, perhaps, had leprosy. The green left-turn arrow illuminates and Rex lunges forward and leans gracefully left. He is obviously perturbed at being snubbed by the snooty baggers, and makes his displeasure public with an angry snarl. I find this mildly amusing, but he is a sensitive old buellosaur, despite his appearance. Dude, chill! I admonish, and he seems to shake it off and forget all about them as he makes a right onto another two-lane country farm highway. We slow here; caution is the watch word as winding, shrub-obscured driveways threaten potential danger. We arrive at our connecting intersection and turn left again….closer, closer to home. I ease off throttle, lean back in the saddle, and take in the sights and smells of an idyllic farm country highway. It’s almost too perfect. My uncle, a pastor from Colorado, tells a story of a member of his congregation who had just died; he was asked to give the eulogy. Being new to both the area and congregation, he sought a little information about the deceased. His widow, between laughter and tears, told the story of how much he loved to ride his motorcycle. One evening, before supper, he told her he was going for a ride; he’d be back in a couple hours. She began to worry as the Rocky Mountain darkness approached with no word, then the phone rang. It was her husband, calling long-distance from a payphone, apologizing for not calling sooner, and for being two states away. “It was so peaceful, so beautiful” he explained, “that I just kept going…..I always wanted to see California”. (She was laughing now, with tears rolling down her cheeks, as she told her story) “Well, ” says she, “you better damn well call me when you get there!” She forgave him, she said, because he always told her there were only two loves in his life…and the bike was Number Two.
I can totally relate! There are times when I feel the urge to turn right when home is left, to storm down the road unknown just to see where it goes. Not today; I’d scratched the itch and was content to wend my way homeward bound, although I had been getting more creative as of late about just how I arrived there. South is south, and east is east, and you usually wind up “Close Enough for Government Work”. We take a couple of detours and end up in the target zone area despite our creativeness…..see; it all works out in the end!
All too soon we find ourselves on the last long, winding turn before we arrive back in the neighborhood; I’m hoping there won’t be any traffic on the road today. I usually enjoy my “Hail Mary” last-ditch throttle stomp around the curve, tucking in tight while rolling it on. Not today; I join the queue of traffic and resign myself to enjoying the last few minutes of the ride.
All too soon, we pull into the driveway and come to a reluctant stop in front of the garage; (Home Away From Home.) I swing a leg over the saddle and flip the key off; the thunder stops instantly, leaving only the echoes and background ringing in my ears, despite the earplugs. Off with the gear; I walk around and open the garage door, stow my gear, and then reluctantly push Rex inside, the motor ticking and radiating heat like a dog in a mill pond shedding fleas. You can smell the heat; the fuel vapor smells, the motorcycle smells that mix and mingle, yet I somehow know what they all are; twisted and blended into a mysterious concoction that assails the olfactory senses with an almost overpowering urge to grab a handful of throttle. You know what I mean, right? Sure you do…..I can sense it. You’re probably sporting a big grin right about now….
Lazarus appears pissed at being left behind; giving the jealous bitch-eye to Rex, who lounges smugly in his spot, basking in his latest Thunder Road glory. I sternly remind Lazzy he’s had his day in the sun, plus more. The little Banshee looks forlornly over her shoulder from high atop the extended lift table; What about me? she asks….I haven’t been on the road in two years….Patience, Little One…..you know your time will come again. She sighs….I doubt she believes me, but I know I’m sincere. I got really close this year, actually firing her up before fuel pouring from leaking O-rings on the Mikunis made me shut her down for fear of an unscheduled weenie roast. We both know it’s too late in the year to get her back on the road. Next year, Little One, I promise, next year……
She pouts. She always pouts. I hate that. Now listen, I admonish, you were here long before either of these two guys…..how many miles did we do then, just you and me? You think I’ve forgotten? I could’ve sold you easy when your brothers came home, but I didn’t. There will always be a spot for you in my garage.
This seems to satisfy her; I turn and walk between Lazzy and Rex; I drag a rag across Lazzy’s seat the way you might tousle a small boy’s hair. He beams up at me, placated for the moment; all is well again.
I stand under the open garage door; the lawn mower beckons with all the appeal of a pair of leg irons. I grimace and roll the ol’ ball and chain out into the bright sunlight. As I push the button and the garage door lowers, the objects of my affection fade from view like a tramp steamer disappearing on the distant horizon. I pause a moment; visions of Japanese cows and blurry fence posts dance, still, in my mind. A half-grin slides it’s way up the side of my face, and on that note I lean over and tug on the pull-rope and the mower roars to life…..

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