“Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” - Porifiro Diaz
I had a birthday last week. Not one that ends in zero but significant nevertheless. My birthday is in the middle of July so it almost always falls during the INOA Rally. Since they’re trying to have the rally in October this year, does that mean I have to change my birthday to October?
They changed Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays when they made President’s Day, and I AM a past president of the INOA. But, in this modern world, trying to change your birthday is bound to create problems I would hate to attempt to navigate.
I have been, officially, an Old Man for several years now. My birthday cakes look like one of those forest fires in Northern California. Just yesterday, I was crossing a street where a cop was directing traffic and, when I started to speed up, he said, “Don’t hurry, partner. Someone will have to wait on me, one of these days.” I appreciated that.
I was born seventy-five years after the Civil War ended. A kid born two years ago, in 2020, was born seventy-five years after WWII. WWII was the defining event of my life and the lives of many people I know, and the idea that, over time, it isn’t as important as I had thought, is sobering.
When the Civil War ended, they were still fighting from horseback with sabers. When I was born, many fighter planes had open cockpits and two wings. In Sci-Fi stories, rich guys built rockets to the moon. In the comic strip, Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist radio.
They exploded the first atom bomb on my sixth birthday, July 16, 1945; I’ve been living in Sci-Fi ever since.
Last week NASA landed a rover with a helicopter aboard on Mars, and we watched it live on TV, three billionaires have space programs, and I can answer FaceTime calls on my Apple Watch, something ol’ Dick couldn’t have imagined.
In 2021 warfare, like retail sales, medicine, and everything else, seems to be, more and more, conducted online. Oh, we have all the hotshot hardware to rain Hellfire down on folks from long distances. Still, the essential stuff, the stuff that involves money and the transfer of wealth, seems to depend on software operated by the little jerks we called “nerds” and stole lunch money from, sitting in dark basements in front of a computer screen.
But Time, as it always has, marches on and, as we come out of this Covid Plague, Life is slowly returning to Normal (in capital letters,) whatever Normal means. To me, “Normal” is just a setting on the clothes dryer.
CJ and I drove to Atlanta as soon as the vaccine was announced (to avoid flying, which we deemed dangerous) to get our jabs. Unfortunately, we got trapped because of the Texas ice storm and had to fly back to Mexico, then fly back to Atlanta for our second shot, and drive home.
If you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans.
Morning Becomes Electric - Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had three rules concerning our reaction to new technology.
1. Anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty five is against the natural order of things.
Number three seems to be much of the bike fraternity’s attitude, especially classic bike enthusiasts, about electric bikes. I don’t understand why so many Norton owners hate new motorcycles or any new technology. I owned a varied list of motorcycles; Royal Enfield, Honda, Harley, BSA before I got my first Norton, but I was always looking for the most advanced engineering or technology for the time. I bought my first Norton because it was the coolest, most advanced motorcycle available. It was the first with Isolastic suspension, and the styling on the Fastback model was very advanced for the time. Now it seems many Norton owners resist the idea of any innovation after 1975.
It seems internal combustion engines will no longer be sold anywhere in the world after about 2035, and I’m wondering what the new Norton company has in the works as far as EVs are concerned. I don’t think TVS Motors spent all that money to buy the name, just to produce a few internal combustion bikes. The future is electric, and I’m sure they’re preparing for it.
Of course, no matter what they do, we’ll hear all sorts of reasons to hate the new bikes. When Nortons became rotaries, that group hated them because they weren’t twins; when Kenny Dreer tried to resurrect the brand, they hated them because the bikes weren’t built in England; when Garner tried, the bikes were too expensive.
“No thanks! I’ll stick to my Commando (or Manx or Electra, or Atlas, or Hi-Rider.).”
I must admit I never had faith in the past attempts to raise the dead, but my reason had nothing to do with hatred of new tech, nationalism, or price. I didn’t think any of them were going to make it because they were all under-financed and none of them seemed to me to have a business plan that made sense.
On a tour of the Norton factory in Shenstone in 1981, I was told that the “Engine Assembly Department” was having his tea. They were nice enough to give me a test ride on a Commander. When I asked about the clunky transmission (sourced from the Triumph T160) they said that’s the way they are; we’re not going to change it, meaning they couldn’t afford to change it.
The folks who own the name now are businessmen, not enthusiasts, and that’s what’s needed to build a viable product.
The idea of a three-hundred-pound, two-hundred horsepower electric motorcycle with a two-hundred-mile range is very intriguing to me, especially if the only “tune-up” is changing the brake pads and tires.
Can you imagine getting on your bike with only your cellphone in your pocket and riding across the US without your panniers full of tools?
And to me, traveling long distances is what motorcycles (and Life) are all about. My mother instilled a love of travel in me from an early age. She used to put me on the train by myself in Albany, GA, and tell the conductor to watch me. My Aunt Laine would pick me up at the beautiful marble train terminal at the end of Cherry Street in Macon, GA, one hundred (an unimaginable distance) miles away. What an adventure for an eight-year-old! That led directly to hitch-hiking to California in 1960, to riding a Honda 250 Scrambler from South Bend, Indiana, to LA and back in 1967, to hauling mobile homes all over the United States in the early 70s, to going to the Isle of Man in ’89 and getting bitten by the “TT Bug.”
Then, after I retired in 1995, it gradually dawned on me that there was no need to save for the future any longer. The future had arrived, and it was time to do the things I had dreamed about while running a lathe at Owens Corning Fiberglas.
That soon led to two weeks on a motorcycle in Costa Rica, which led to riding across Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego in 2001, where one of the other riders laid another trip on me.
“Art, now that you’ve ridden to the farthest point south that you can go, you need to ride to Prudhoe Bay,” said J.C. Ledbetter.
“Where is Prudhoe Bay?” I asked innocently, unsuspecting he was about to send me on a quest.
“It’s the farthest point north that you can ride in Alaska,” he said and sealed my fate, at least for the next four years.
Valentino Rossi retires. Very few of us achieve awesomeness. Awe was what you’d feel if Jesus appeared to you in person and touched your head and made you intelligent; you’d be awestruck, so you couldn’t use the same word for, say, the way someone’s hair looks. But now they do. The first time I remember the term being widely used was for Awesome Bill From Dawsonville, a NASCAR driver who won just about everything worth winning for a few years. And, at the time, I was awed by Bill, who lived in a town near me and, from humble beginnings, made it to the top in a very tough profession. But if the term “Awesome” applies to any racer, I think Valentino Rossi deserves it more than anyone I can think of.
In a career spanning 26 years, he has contested 428 Grans Prix and won 115 of them or an astonishing 26.8%. From his first win until his last is 20 years and 311 days. He won championships on 125s, 250s, 500s, and MotoGPs, a feat that will never be equaled because there are no more 125s, 250s, and 500s. He won the last race on 500s, before the 990CC four-strokes were introduced, then won the first race on the new bikes. He won the championship on Honda then, when Honda refused to pay him what he wanted, he switched to Yamaha. When he went to Yamaha, he said he just wanted to have fun. Then he won the first race of the year and went on to win the championship that year. That’s how you have fun.
In 2008, Rossi paid a $35M settlement for tax avoidance, which has to be a record for a motorcycle racer, albeit one he probably wishes he didn’t hold.
But for all his records, time has caught up with Rossi, as it will to all of us, and he’s bidding “Adieu” to riding, if not to the racing world. He’ll continue as a team owner and a racing school promoter, and he’s just announced he’s going to become a father. His beautiful girlfriend, Francesca, is pregnant. I think that’s awesome!
Rossi has been brave and skillful in his racing life, but he’s also been lucky, a requirement in that fraught profession. I hope he’s now just as lucky in love. I’ve always been very lucky in love, and it has made all the difference.
As I write this, CJ is putting the finishing touches on our plans for our trip to Europe to drive an Audi TT through the Alps. In the time of Covid, planning a trip like this is something I am no longer capable of. With the restrictions changing by the day, I would have, long ago, thrown up my hands and said, “Forget it!”
But, as I said, I’ve been lucky in love, and I’ve found a partner who embraces all the new technologies and has endless patience with bureaucratic BS. As a result, we’ll soon be ensconced in an aluminum tube at 35K feet in the stratosphere, listening to my favorite playlist of music on noise-canceling earbuds while reading on my Kindle, on our way to having way more fun than I ever thought I would be having at this time in my life.
My only job now is to take care of my own health and make CJ laugh once in a while, something I do regularly, although often it’s inadvertent.
Now that’s a job I’m awesome at.