Peyote Dreams
by
Art Bone
"Poor Mexico; so far from God, so close to the United States." Porfirio Diaz
I’m just home from attending the 2018 INOA National Rally in Elma, Washington and, inspired by all the beautiful Nortons I saw there, I thought I would share with you my love affair with these mechanical objects we all find so seductive.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, through a series of unfortunate incidents, I found myself a patient in the charity ward of the Los Angeles General Hospital. I had lived for several years with a delightful young woman who had an actual job and graciously put me on her medical insurance policy. When we came to the inevitable parting of the ways I, fool that I am, thought she would continue that practice. I found this not to be the case when I ran my new Royal Enfield TT Interceptor into the back of a car at a crosswalk in front of the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California.
When I showed the ambulance driver my (now defunct) insurance card they transported me to a very nice private hospital in Hollywood where I was treated with kid gloves but as soon as my unwitting deception was discovered the gloves came off and I was dumped on a gurney in a hallway of LA General all night, until the day shift showed up and assigned me a ward I soon found was called the Motorcycle Ward.
It was for folks of my ilk, young and uninsured, who had the effrontery to get themselves injured riding around on those infernal machines. It wasn’t all motorcycles however. There were two guys who had been in a head-on collision when one of them drove drunk onto the freeway going the wrong direction.
That made for interesting lunch time conversation.
I was X-rayed and diagnosed with a broken femur which necessitated a body cast for forty five days; a cast that extended from just under my armpits to just above my toes on my left foot. “Uncomfortable” doesn’t adequately describe it.
To give LA General their due, my treatment there was professional and, to my untrained eye, as good as I could have gotten anywhere, even if I was paying for it.
But it was sadly lacking in amenities. Lying on a gurney in a hallway for eight hours was just a hint of things to come.
I have many stories to tell from that experience but to make a turgid tale terse I’ll just say that this led me to hate anything British in the way of motorcycles. I only owned the Royal Oilfield about three months. I could never get it to start because no one explained that you had to tickle the carbs until gas ran out onto the magneto, a practice I considered unsafe, but was the approved starting method. When I finally did get the bike started I ran into the back of a car and ended up in the hospital.
Obviously it was the fault of the bike and, by extension, British motorcycles in general.
Working in a motorcycle shop and trying to set the points on early sixties Triumphs and BSAs only reinforced this prejudice.
At this point in my life Nortons were an unknown quantity. I had heard of an F1 race bike called a Norton Manx and I thought it was called a Manx because of the bobbed off rear end of the bike, sort of like the Manx cats. I didn’t know that all things connected to the Isle of Man were called “Manx.” People, cats and, yes, motorcycles.
I saw my first Commando, a Fastback, in about ‘72. A guy riding from Florida to New York broke his clutch cable near our shop and I soldered on a new end for him.
I remember asking him, “Is this some kind of race bike?”
The thing looked fantastic to me. The styling was so far ahead of it’s time it was practically in the twenty first century already.
I’ve heard all the stories about how dealers took the Fastback bodywork off and replaced to with Roadster bits because everyone hated the Fastback but loved the performance. That was not the case with me. I loved the Fastback’s looks. Very few bikes had a tailpiece like that in the early 70s. And no one, before or since, has had knee pads going into the tank like that. With the engine now canted forward, pipes canted upward at the back, all the polished cast aluminum Z plates, side covers, and valve covers, Fiberglas bits (remember when Fiberglas was cool? No one had heard of carbon fiber) this was the epitome of Cool.
I’m a longtime admirer of British automobiles and, to me, BSAs are like MG sports cars, Triumphs are, well, Triumphs, (TR6 or 7) but Nortons reminded me of Jaguars; not a bad thing to be reminded of.
I’m not sure were exactly the Fastback falls in the succession of art styles of the 20th century but it’s somewhere between the beginning of Art Deco and the end of Art Nouveau,
I also remember asking how much it cost and, if memory serves, it was almost double what Pug Vickers was selling 750 Hondas for in Huntingdon, Tennessee at that time.
Fast forward a few years and I was trying to get shed of this Harley I had fallen out of love with. I called myself a Harley guy back then. This was when Harleys were still motorcycles; before they became a religion. A guy answering my ad wanted to trade me a Norton for my hog. I told him to bring it over and it was a beautiful bike; a Fastback in a copper metal flake paint I haven’t seen since. When I tried to ride it in the parking lot I kept stalling it because I didn’t know the shift pattern was one up, three down.
I could tell that he had fallen in love with the Harley so I let him have it. It was the best kind of deal; both sides were happy.My mistake was calling my wife and telling her, “I’ve just bought this new bike. Let’s go for a ride in north Georgia next Sunday.”
That ride was one of the defining points of my life.
I remember passing farmhouses in the early morning and smelling bacon frying.
I remember following streams beside the road and watching mist rising over the water.
I remember tipping the bike over into corners much faster than I’d ever ridden a Harley and feeling totally in control.
I remember stopping to look at a view and noticing oil puddling around the the tach drive.
Yes, in those days, Norton ownership was a mixed blessing. All the problems we as a club have found repairs for were not discovered yet.
But the seed was planted. I’ve owned at least one Norton ever since.
Keeping the “Fun” in “Funeral.”
I know you, my faithful readers, are beginning to think I can only write about travel and obituaries. I was trying not to do either this time but last week I went to a wake for Joseph Smith, a local hero but a man I barely knew here in San Miguel, and came away with an appreciation of him as a person and the wish that I had got to know him better.
I also got an appreciation of the supernatural world which I don’t believe in AT ALL but after this experience I can see how some folks do believe.
There was a group of about sixty folks at the wake, almost all about my age or a little younger and mostly of the old-hippie persuasion.
Much praise was lavished on Joseph and the stories were many and varied. Joseph was a Mississippi boy who fell in love with Mexico when he got out of the army, moved down here, and went on to become this larger-than-life character.
He was a plant person all his life and, back when you could do that sort of thing, he would bring exotic cactus across the border and sell them in the US. When I came to San Miguel he had probably one of the largest commercial cactus nurseries in Mexico. I met him when I attended a lecture at his home by a cactus expert from the El Charco del Ingenio Botanical Gardens in San Miguel. His home was surrounded by acres of beautiful cactus.
He was an outdoorsman and loved hunting and camping. On a hunting trip to Alaska he met a guy who claimed to know where to dig up a mastodon so Joseph gave the guy an expensive pistol to guide him to the site and they dug this thing up and Joseph brought a mastodon tooth back to Mexico.
One guy told the story of swimming in a flooded cave in southern Mexico and almost drowning but Joseph grabbed him and swam him to safety.
Another person told of Joseph taking Delbert McClinton, the Texas blues musician who taught John lennon how to play harmonica, on at plant collecting trip in the mountains of central Mexico and how Delbert wrote a song about Joseph afterwards.
All this was tender and heartwarming to the friends who knew and loved Joseph and when the stories petered out we all stood around and swapped a few more tales until someone lit off a few fireworks. Just as the last boom echoed away a light rain started falling. We all began wandering towards the enclosed porch as the rain started increasing . . . and increasing . . . and increasing some more. We were 60 people inside this small porch with a tile roof and the noise was deafening.
Then it started to hail, and I don’t mean a few bits of ice. I mean hailstones that lay on the ground for hours, even after the sun comes back out. It went on like this for over ten minutes and the yard outside was coated with ice, then the rain started again.
At this point Tim Sullivan, my friend and Joseph’s longtime friend, ran out into the rain and stood looking up until he was completely soaked. He came back inside, looked up at the tile roof and said, “Okay Joseph, we all know you’re here.”
Everyone there who knew Joseph looked knowingly at each other and said, “Yes, that’s Joseph for sure.”
I just wish I had got to know him.
Knowing my love for MotoGP, Barry Armitage sent me a wonderful little book he found called The MotoGP Miscellany by John White. It’s full of statistics; the sort of statistics that no one not a Fan (Capital F) cares anything about.
Stuff like “Most second place finishes” and “most DNFs.”
You know; information I want to have at my fingertips, or at least my fingertips caressing my Iphone, but that is useful only in very limited circumstances such as motorcycle rallies and bar room betting.
It has a foreward by one of my Moto heros, John Surtees, the only driver to win World Championships on two and four wheels, and it is a valuable addition to my Moto Library.
Thanks, Barry.