"Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States."
Porfirio Diaz
What I Did This Summer
It started as a simple plan. Doesn't it always?
For several reasons, my friend Charlie Brookman and I decided to rent two bikes to attend the rally in New York this year. For one, we didn't want to ride our bikes across Texas in July. Well, Texas in July? Texas in July is hotter than an exhaust valve! You understand? For two, gas above five dollars a gallon made loading the bikes in a trailer and hauling them a lessthan attractive option. For three, we planned to ride with Glenn Bewley and Tom Hill to the Norton Rally in New York, then the Vincent Rally in far northwestern Illinois. Glenn lives in eastern Tennessee, so the round trip, if we drove all the way, would be about four weeks, innumerable hotel rooms, countless Cracker Barrel meals, and tanker loads of gas.
That's when we decided we should maybe fly to eastern Tennessee, rent bikes, and do the trip, then fly home. So I started looking at a site called riders-share.com, AirB&B for bikes. That's when I saw the Vanderhall Venice.
It was love at first sight.
The Vanderhall Venice is a three-wheeled device with all the incommodiousness of a motorcycle, except that it won't fall over when stopped. It has very little luggage space, very little wind and weather protection, and a very cramped cockpit for two full-sized men.
What it does have in abundance is power, from a 1.5 liter, turbocharged, direct-injected Chevrolet engine, putting out 190 horsepower. In a vehicle weighing 1500 lbs puts it in the missile class. We had no problem passing on mountain roads.
Trouble was, making this trip in a timely manner required a lot more Interstate miles than mountain road miles.
But, no matter where you're driving, the Vanderhall puts a smile on your face every time you fire it up.
One thing I appreciated about the Vanderhall; the hood is attached with six Allen head screws, and the owner didn't include a wrench to remove them. I couldn't even check the oil.
There's an interesting meme I keep seeing on FaceBook. "The old (car or motorcycle) manuals told you how to adjust the valves. The new ones tell you not to drink the battery acid." My thought is, you mostly don't have to adjust valves anymore; most cars and many motorcycles have gone to hydraulic valves, most batteries are sealed or lithium, and you can't get to any battery acid.
What the meme is trying to say is, "See how much smarter we are than those poor saps who drive or ride newer machines," but what I see is that we're a group of people who've learned a bunch of stuff that's no longer applicable to the modern world and we want to hold on to that.
We old bikers love a challenge. When have you read a story about a club group ride without at least one breakdown, solved by a pop top found on the side of the road and some used chewing gum from under the seat? We love our mechanical ability to solve problems that modern bikes are not prone to.
There was a reason those old BMWs came with such a nice set of tools. You had to work on them on the side of the road. My Africa Twin's "tool kit" is a 5 MM Allen wrench. There's not much you can work on under all that plastic.
With many old bikers, anything new is anathema. Unleaded fuel will be the end of our sport. Our engines will be ruined in just a short time, probably after the first tank full. Electronic ignitions! Oh my God! What if it fails? What are we going to do? There's no fixing THAT with a set of 55 Chevy points. Electric starters, who needs that? Electric bikes? It doesn't even bear thinking about.
Like Baptists, another group I have long-time familiarity with, we love to feel superior to people more fortunate than us.
So a lovely couple, Emory and Mosie, drove down and delivered the Vanderhall to our hotel just outside the airport in Knoxville. After a few minutes of conversation, we were on our way. I immediately noticed the car only had about a half tank of gas, so we stopped to top off. There we discovered the first challenge of driving a Vanderhall. Everyone wants to ask about your ride. So if you're socially awkward or in a hurry, don't even think about a Vanderhall.
We had a pleasant three-day drive through the mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania to Corning, NY. I worked for Owens Corning Fiberglas for twenty years and had long wanted to visit the Corning Glass Museum. The next morning we walked over, only about a half mile, and got there shortly after it opened. They have a beautiful art space, and I was delighted to see a piece of art by an artist I've met in San Miguel, Susan Plum, who does amazing glass sculptures you can't imagine how they are done or how they are moved, they look so delicate. Then we saw a glass-blowing demonstration, and then we moved into the industrial part of the museum. I learned that the "Owens" in "Owens Corning" was the man who invented a way to mass produce glass bottles.
I worked for them for twenty years and didn't know who "Owens" was. Imagine how important mass-produced glass bottles were before plastic!
We saw a demonstration of glass used in many scientific fields. After the demonstration, I chatted with the speaker and remarked that I had seen the same show in about 1951 called the "Parade of Progress," sponsored by General Motors. They traveled around the country in cool-looking buses and demonstrated why "America is the Greatest Land Of All."
He had never heard of the Parade of Progress.
We drove north to Hammondsport, to the Glenn H Curtiss Museum. For those who don't know, Curtiss was the "Fastest Man on Earth" for four years. To test one of his airplane engines, he built a V8 motorcycle and rode it 136.36 MPH.
In 1907!
The new museum space is full of wonderful old motorcycles, cars, and airplanes. Curtiss and his company went from a bicycle repair shop to building engines for B29s during WWII. They built the P-40 Warhawk, the famous Flying Tiger, and over 3000 C-46 transport aircraft, and many others. He was obviously a brilliant and fearless man who set records on bicycles, motorcycles, boats, and aircraft.
This part of the country is very interesting. It looks so rural, but so much of what defines modern life had its beginning here; mass-produced glass products, Fiberglas, modern airplanes and motorcycles, and so much more, in a countryside that looks like primarily small farms and dairies and a few vineyards.
The following day, we drove to Hyde Park, NY, and visited the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum. This was particularly interesting to me because Roosevelt was president when I was born, and I remember when he died at Warm Springs, GA. The museum's main emphasis was WWII, with very little mention of Roosevelt's domestic agenda, which I think is equally important. Two roads we traveled on this trip, the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Taconic State Parkway, were built during his administration to put people to work during the depression. Social Security, which I'm sure most, if not all, of my readers are intimately acquainted with, was his work and met fierce opposition at the time.
When we finally pulled into the Blackthorne Resort, it was like coming home. A bunch of Nortons parked around, Chuck Contrino and the Tri-State Norton Riders guys organizing stuff, and Suzi meeting and greeting. It's hard to believe it's been three years since we last did this. At most of our ages, we don't need to take three-year breaks from our friends.
There was talk again about having the rallies at a different time of the year since 100-degree plus weather in July all over the southern part of the US has become the norm. Suzi remarked to me that what needs to happen is for a chapter to come up with a proposal. Some of you guys down south need to get busy.
I think a rally in Alabama, before or after Barbers Vintage Days in October would be great. The Texas hill country would be an excellent place for a rally, in the spring, around the time of the MotoGP in Austin. Call it the Blue Bonnet Rally. We've never had a rally in Florida. I'm looking at you, Maggie Elmore.
Suzi announced next year's rally will be in the Cascades, hosted by the Northwest Norton Owners. There shouldn't be a problem with the weather there, but you never know.
The bike show was full of beautiful Nortons. As I always say, we're getting older and uglier, but our bikes are looking newer and more beautiful. As many of my readers know, my birthday usually happens during the rally but this year it was the day after the rally ended. I turned 83 and it’s a good age. I don’t think too much about my health, I am living proof that bad habits don’t matter so long as you give them up soon enough. When asked, "How are you," I always answer, "Never better," which is inoffensive and maybe even charming, though untrue. I don’t sit around dreaming of what I might do someday. Someday is now, and what I shall do is whatever I'm still able to do and I shall enjoy it fully.
At this age you become irrelevevant but the secret is to learn to step back and enjoy your irrelevance.
Two more days of open-air motoring found us in Dayton, Ohio, at the US Airforce Museum. It's a fascinating place to visit, and, as always, the accelerated development caused by WWII was amazing to me. Having the whole of US resources concentrated on the war effort caused a technological boom we're still living with. It's hard to believe we went from bi-plane, open cockpit fighter planes to jets in less than ten years.
We turned off the Interstate just before the Iowa state line and followed the Mississippi River to Galina, site of the Vincent rally. Roads like this are what Vanderhalls are made for; smooth concrete, flowing curves, and lots of views of the Mighty Mississippi. The little towns we went through were all clean and neat, looking much like they did seventy-five or eighty years ago. The farms we passed were all tidy, with well-painted fences, silos, and barns. The whole area looked prosperous without looking ostentatious. Very few new mini-mansions but lots of old, well-cared-for brick homes on big lots with big shade trees. Charlie and I kept remarking on how nice it looked but how bad the winters probably are.
When we arrived at the Chestnut Mountain Resort, site of the Vincent rally, most participants were already there. Tom Hill was one of the first people I saw before we even got out of the car. Just like the Norton rally, folks were milling around, catching up on what everyone had been doing during Covid, and checking out each other's bikes. One bike that caught my eye was a Brough Superior, or so I thought. Then someone told me the man who owned it had built it himself. I went over and asked him about it, and he gave me the whole story. It seems he found a set of unfinished cases someone in Australia had cast, found some replica heads in England, and the rest of the engine he pieced together with Harley parts. He built the frame and tank. I don't remember what the rest of the bike consists of, but he's a very skillful craftsman. Looking at the bike, you would never know it was all fabricated. He started the bike and rode it around the parking lot, and it looked and sounded just like a real Brough.
Charlie and I rode up to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to the House on the Rock, a rather bazaar attraction few people know about. In the 40s, a man named Alex Jordan saw a rock spire in the forest of southern Wisconsin and started picnicking there with friends. The farmer who owned the land offered to sell it to Jordan, and he bought it, not really having any plans for it other than visiting it with friends. Then he decided to build a summer house with the spire as the centerpiece. Over the next fifteen or twenty years, he worked on the house and his collections until he finally opened it to the public in 1960. The place is tough to describe because his collections are so varied. He was especially interested in machines that make music, like player pianos, but on a much larger scale. In just one example, he has a complete, life-sized circus orchestra that all play their instruments. It's quite impressive, as is the whole place. If, like me, you enjoy obsessive persons, it's well worth a visit, if you're ever in the area.
Thursday morning, we packed up and headed back east. Somewhere around Lexington, Kentucky, we got tired of Interstate driving and decided to seek a more interesting and scenic route. Turns out, scenic and interesting are easy to find in eastern Kentucky. We discovered a road that took us through Hazard and Norton. We ended the day in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, certainly an interesting and evocatively named town. The next morning, during breakfast at the Huddle House, we met the unofficial ambassador for that part of the mountains, a richly bearded old gentleman (of about my age). He informed us that the road through the pass we came over was started by President Johnson as part of the War on Poverty to aid people in that region and was only finished about ten years ago. It must have done some good; the towns along the way seem quite prosperous.
We were about ten miles from Tazewell, Virginia, where we were due to turn the Vanderhall back into its owner when our weather karma finally failed us. We had driven over 3000 miles and only had to stop once, for about thirty minutes, for rain. Suddenly we were in a cloud burst. As I was coming to grips with this turn of events, I hit a large puddle of water, and the car hydroplaned and went sideways. My second thought was, "Three thousand miles, and you're going to wreck this thing within sight of home." Luckily that didn't happen. The car straightened out, through no efforts on my part, and I motored on, slower and much more cautiously. We delivered the car back to Emory and Mosie with a sigh of relief.
Our simple plan, which turned out not to be so simple after all, or easy, came to fruition. We made both rallies, saw some interesting museums, drove some fun roads, and got to visit with friends we hadn't seen in three years and make some new friends we'll probably see at rallies in the future.
We started going to rallies all those years ago for the bikes, but now the rallies are much more about the people. Finding out what ol' Joe has been doing during the Covid years is just as interesting as the new Amal Premiers on his Interstate. Having dinner at the Blackthorne with a group of friends you've known for over thirty years is a treat not to be treated lightly.
This is a privilege of growing old; looking back, and recognizing one's good fortune. Close calls, motorcycle crashes narrowly averted that would've obliged my friends to speak at my funeral about my young life tragically cut short. Instead, we meet at rallies and talk about hearing loss and knee surgery.
I think by now, most of us realize we're all in the same boat, a sinking ship. A lot of what fills the headlines is of very little importance to us. Climate change? It might affect where we plan to have rallies in the next few years, but we're not going to be here for the worst of it. World Peace? Ain't gonna happen in my lifetime. Monkeypox?
Hey, I survived Covid; I can probably get through this.
My thoughts right now are, "Cascades? Next year? How am I going to top this trip?"