The View from Two Wheels

About this time last year, I posted an article on a Red Wing Facebook page about “How to Build a City around Bicycles Fast,” with the intention of beginning a conversation about making this fading village attractive to 21st Century people. I introduced the video with the statement “If you want to attract skilled, innovative young adults to a small town, making it a bicycle transportation haven would be high on a lot of lists.” The generally hostile response to that surprised me, a little:

• “We don’t want it here they don’t follow rules now so that would make it even worse.”
• “If bikes followed the rules of the road, sure. But in my experience they don't. They don't stop at stop signs, don't ride on the proper side of the road, and even ride on sidewalks. They're vehicles, and are supposed to follow vehicle traffic rules.”

And so on. There were slightly over 30 negative comments about creating any sort of accommodation for bicycles in the city and exactly 3 bicyclists responding.

I have to admit, I love the cluelessness of cagers imagining that they “follow the rules.” As a lifelong bicyclist and a motorcyclist for the past 50 years, what I see from my unobstructed view of cagers is almost non-stop ignorance and arrogance when it comes to “the rules of the road.” Here are some examples of that behavior.

1. At least half of the traffic on a two-lane road will be unaware of where their vehicle belongs. For the most part, rural drivers know we drive on the right side in the United States, but they don’t seem to know what the lines in the road indicate. Trucks, especially, wander from the middle of the road to the edge of pavement, well into the scrawny “bicycle lanes” and skirting the gravel and, eventually, the ditch. As a bicyclist, you have to keep a close eye on what’s in front and behind you with a readiness to hit the ditch or jump a curb when you see a vehicle barreling from behind taking up the bicycle lane.
2. Pretty much no one in a cage or truck knows the rules for stop signs. {“If there is a stop sign with no pavement markings, stop near the intersection where you have a good view of approaching traffic. If there is a crosswalk without a stop line, stop at the nearest crosswalk line. If there is only a stop sign, stop at the stop line. If the crosswalk has a stop line, stop at the stop line.”] What actually happens is most drivers roll through the crosswalk, stopping with the nose of their vehicle well into on-coming traffic, if they slow down at all. If you are a bicyclist, you have to assume the majority of drivers will expect you to give up your right of way so that they don’t have to control their vehicle competently.
3. Stopping at stop signs and lights is, apparently, optional. This isn't just a rural thing because there is an intersection at 10th and Minnesota in St Paul where it is never safe to assume the vehicles heading northwest on Minnesota (a one-way street) will pay the slightest attention to the stop light. The police station used to be at that location and even that didn't slow down the goofballs who commuted through the area. In rural areas, lights and signs are regularly ignored and there are known areas of high crash incident. As a bicyclist or motorcyclist, it is never safe to assume cagers are competent, sane and rational, or not homicidal. 
4. Stop signs and lights pose another fatal attraction for two-wheeled folks: getting run over or rear-ended while stopped. Lane-splitting advocates argue that lane-splitting/sharing reduces motorcycles from being rear-ended at stops. My experience confirms that but any rational person should be nervous about anecdotal and hearsay evidence. I don't buy those arguments for loud exhaust systems and you shouldn't buy them for lane-splitting. However, it is a fact that drivers often run over bicycles and motorcycles at this interaction points and I will always opt for getting some serious mass between me and any on-coming vehicles when I'm forced to stop in traffic. On a bicycle, you are screwed no matter what you do: 1) stop in a vehicle lane and you're likely to be run over, 2) stop in the bike lane and you are at risk both from cars that roll over you thinking the bike lane is a turn lane and you'll also be at risk when a cager decides to turn in front or over you thinking a cage has the right-of-way when turning over a bicycle going straight.
   
5. Residential streets are a free-for-all zone, no rules apply to locals. Seriously, “random motion” describes what you can expect from drivers in these areas.
6. In the United States, noise pollution appears to be one of those “my rights override any other considerations” situations, like gun ownership. As a bicyclist, you should be wearing ear plugs for when you are passed by motorcycles, pickup trucks, and any other motorized vehicle driven by a noisy spoiled child. The country and most states have vehicle noise laws, but cops are too lazy to enforce them. You can, literally, suffer permanent hearing damage from being near some of these vehicles.
7. Speed limits are less than a suggestion if there isn’t a cop in the immediate traffic mix. Worse, most rural drivers are not competent to walk on a crowded sidewalk, but in a motor vehicle these idiots are rolling assassins but they all imagine themselves to be NASCAR drivers (including the inability to turn right).
8. “Bicycle lanes” are mostly considered to be fair game for parking, passing, and trash dumping. Not only that, but city workers often place obstacles in bike lanes that force bicyclists into clueless traffic.
9. Unplanned, sudden right turns across traffic lanes and, especially, bicycle lanes are snafu. This is true in urban and rural areas, but more true where drivers are unsophisticated, unskilled, and unfamiliar with sharing the road with anyone else. When a rube visits the “big city,” which can be a pretty small place if the rube is a total goober, everything is a surprise and their reactions are often totally idiotic and unpredictable.
10. Nothing about the “distracted driver” whining is in the least bit sincere. Occasional and random traffic citations for cell phone abuse is just a revenue generator. If society cared about the people, cell phones would be cut off when they are in a moving vehicle (easily done from either the phone or the cell provider). Drivers know nobody really cares if they are paying attention, so they don’t. From a bicycle viewpoint, I can tell you at least half of the drivers waiting at a stop light are staring at their phones or yakking way as if they were in their living room. When the light changes, that “100’ rope” that appears to tie each of the vehicles in the traffic-train of together is just the lag time between when the light changes or vehicle in front moves and the idiot behind looks up from his/her phone and resumes being a distracted driver. Autonomous cars can not come soon enough.
11. Drivers are not aware or skilled enough to be “out to get you.” Honestly, if drivers were intentionally homicidal they’d be easier to predict. Random motion is exactly that: random. So, guessing what kind of idiot move a driver is going to make is an infinitely complicated calculation. When I taught motorcycle safety classes, I would politically incorrectly tell students, “If cagers had any skill, they wouldn’t need four wheels to balance themselves.” That is still my position and I’m stickin’ with it.

I’m still riding, so the odds are good that I’ll be making additions to this list. If you have any favorites, add them on the “Comments” below.

RIP: Denny Delzer, A Collector/Restorer of Many Fine Things

In 2009, I did a North Dakota Ghost Town Tour that started weird and continued for the whole 3,000 miles of that state coming and going. About mid-way I managed to fry a back tire (I know, not the first or, probably, the last time.) and ended up backtracking to Bismarck and stuck with nothing to do while the shop I’d lucked into shoe-horned me into their shop schedule. Luckily, I detailed this amazingly cool day in a blog entry, “Got Friday on My Mind,” back then. Otherwise, my floppy memory would probably make a total mess out of the events 12 years ago. From Lee Klapprodt’s recommendaton of the Cycle Hutt for the tire to Cycle Hutt’s owner, Justin Bohn, introducing me to Denny Delzer by telephone, the day went from a little depressing to downright amazing.

Recently, my old Mac Pro 3,1 died and a friend sent me a 5,1 replacement, which I have been setting up and enjoying for the last month or so. Today, I decided to clean up the picture history on my Mac so that the super-cool screen saver Photo Wall would be more . . . entertaining and less repetitive. Afterwards, while I worked on my Dell laptop at the Mac’s desk, a bunch of pictures from that North Dakota tour popped up with a lot of the pictures I took at Denny’s shop and home and some that he took of me looking terrified on his $150,000+ Egli-Vincent restoration. (That bike was worth more than my entire net worth at the time.)

Denny and I had kept up an intermittent email friendship over the years and when I tried to look up his company, B3Hammond.com, and discovered it . . . looked weird. So, I did a search on “Denny Delzer” and discovered he had been killed in a single vehicle motorcycle crash (on his Vincent, of course) in June, 2020. There isn’t much information about the crash from official sources, but there are some stories on the Vincent collector sites. Apparently, “The day of the accident he was on the big engine Shadow and according to his riding partner, they were on a straight and smooth piece of tarmac and he suddenly went down. It appears to have been a blowout of his front tire that took him down.” I rode one of those “big engine” Vincents and it was as bad a motorcycle as I have ever experienced, with a heavy steering damper to try and disguise the steering deficiencies. A front tire blowout on that bike would almost certainly result in a crash with almost any ride.

I have nothing but good memories of the day I spent with Denny. He was incredibly generous with his time (and motorcycles), brilliantly technical, funny as hell, a good musician, and one seriously busy guy. Saturday night, I saw him perform with his band, Powerhouse (I think), before I skipped out of Bismarck and headed back west for the rest of my ghost town hunt. The last email between us in my email history was 2017. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but I guess it was. Shame on me. I have known very few old guys who were more alive than Denny Delzer. I’m sure he is missed because I miss him and I barely knew him.

Who You Meet on the Road

On my Sunday’s ride, I encountered a fair number of motorcyclists both on Highway 61 (slide whistle implied) and on the dozen or so county roads I traveled. The first group, or two groups, were a pair of very large cruiser pirate packs on Highway 61 a few miles north of Lake City. I’d estimate that there were about 50 loud, plodding and waddling traffic-clogging pirates traveling two-and-three-abreast in each of two groups. Or, maybe, it was just one huge pack of pirates with an intermission in the middle? There was a line of cars that went back at least 3 miles well into Lake City. Lots of pissed off cagers and not a cop in sight. If there were two legal exhaust systems in that flock of bikers, I missed them. That group pretty much reminded me of the greased-up “cool kids” from high school who would get jobs sacking groceries when they turned 16, buy a car a few months later, prowl the halls of school terrorizing the “geeks and nerds,” wearing their big brother’s letter jacket since they’d never played a sport successfully, and 20 years later they’re still sacking groceries, driving the same beater car, living in their mom’s basement, bitching about how their ex-wife(wives). screwed them in the divorce, and getting all dressed up like a pirate for their twice-a-year Harley outing with the other Born Losers. So many scowls in one place. You’d think they’d been drug to church on a sunny Sunday.

There were a few downed or stalled bikers along the road between Frontenac and Lake City and even more distributed throughout Lake City. There was a police car stopped behind one group of biker goobers, fending off traffic while the bikers tried to haul a hippobike out of a ditch. There were two hippos down in front of a Kwik Trip at the west end of town with a couple of riders sitting on the asphalt holding their heads as if they’d fallen down in the parking lot and cracked their un-helmeted skulls. Another half-dozen pirates stood around helplessly watching the Agony of Disability. As I passed that group an ambulance roared up behind me, sirens blasting, and pulled into the Kwik Trip.

On US 63, heading southeast out of town, two more hippos were being rescued from a ditch by a towing company winch and some black leather clad menial labor. One of the cruisers was some kind of full dress mess and there was a lot of busted plastic scattered along the roadside.

There is a weird-assed mostly abandoned mansion a few miles off of 63 on County 15 that I like to check out intermittently. Someone (or someones) have made irregular attempts at restoring this old place and I like to check out the progress (or lack of) occasionally. So, I did. It actually looks more disheveled than it did before the “work” began several years ago, but it does look like someone might be living in the carriage house.

After some mindless meandering around the twisty county roads south and west of Lake City, I started heading back home. A big pack of motorcyclists (not bikers) were congregated at the intersection of County Rd 5 and 2. Must have been 20-25 of ‘em, all decked out in leathers, Aerostich and ‘Stich clone gear, full-face helmets, and mounted up mostly on sportbikes. Passing that bunch of riders was almost like having a cheering audience for some performance I didn’t know I was doing. Without having the slightest idea who I was, I absolutely had the feeling they were happy, no delighted, to see me. I don’t remember ever having that many people energetically waving at me. I ride earplugged, but I’m pretty sure there was cheering and encouragement going on. Don’t know why, but they were definitely a friendly bunch. In high school, they’d absolutely have been in the glee club, probably the chess club, band, drama, and debate, too. Definitely nerds and geeks, my people.

Motoring along on a “limited maintenance” road west of Lake City, waved at a couple of guys (I think) on big adventure touring bikes as we passed each other in a cloud of dust. An Africa Twin and a big GS Beemer, if I remember right. Definitely geeks. I think one of them was signaling some kind of warning to me, but I don’t sign competently and I kept motoring along until I came up to a fairly slow-moving black pickup that, eventually, slowed to a stop in the middle of the road. Some California paranoia crept into my mind and I seriously considered blasting past the truck on the right to stay away from the driver’s side door and the weapon that can be. Most of my California reflexes have been dulled by witnessing too much Minnesota passive-aggressive behavior and I passed the pickup on the left at a moderate speed and got moving again without incident. A few miles down the road and I heard a police siren. I was approaching US 58 and initially thought the cop was ahead of me on the highway, but when I checked my mirror it was full of that black pickup and flashing lights. I pulled off and he passed me moving fast. I don’t know what the weird thing with blocking the road was about, but the sirens weren’t for me and that’s about all I cared about.

I managed to turn what could have been a ten minute ride home into another 45 minutes of meandering, but I still got home in plenty of time for the bicycle ride I’d promised my wife I’d do. There was absolutely no point in my Sunday ride. I didn’t go anywhere, didn’t stop anywhere, didn’t even need to stop for gas, didn’t do any errands, didn’t bring home lunch. Totally pointless and about as much fun as I’ve ever had on a motorcycle; at least on the street.

 

Recalibrating Expectations

Yesterday, Sunday November 11, 2021, was possibly the last really nice day of the year. Winter is coming and once it gets here it might stay for a while. I have done a crap job of motivating myself to ride my new (to me) motorcycle this season. I had some good excuses, cataract surgery in July that also sucked up a bit of August in recover, COVID made travel to many of the places I love to ride precarious, and a good bit of the Rockies were on fire during prime late fall riding season. But, mostly, I have realized that my primary lifetime justification for riding, transportation to and from work, is no longer in my life. I started off my “adult life” poor and remained pretty much on the edge of falling out of the lower middle class for about 3/5ths of my life.

I also fell into manufacturing and manufacturing engineering about the time I began to creep out of that precarious income bracket and ROI (Return On Investment) calculations became an everyday part of my life and remained so until I retired. I pretty much made every recreational activity I indulged in pay its own way, justify my participation and the activity’s existence financially. My band income paid for my musical instruments and the cost of being a musician. I got into “collecting” and trading musical equipment for several years and the money I made doing that paid for the recording studio equipment and facilities. First, my motorcycles were off-road recreational vehicles only, but I managed to pickup an Ossa dealership in the early 70s and I sold enough motorcycles to pay for my own and my wife’s dirt bikes. My garage was “The Dirt Shop” and I repaired everything from Ossas under warranty to street bikes. I started riding a street bike shortly before I moved to California in the early 80s and I made the move from Nebraska to southern California on my Honda CX500, carrying all of the clothing, books, and necessities I’d need for my first 3 months in California in a backpack strapped to the CX’s sissy bar. My motorcycles were my primary transportation in California for 10 years, in Indiana and Colorado for the next 6, and for at least 8 months a year for the first 22 years in Minnesota. I also taught the state’s Motorcycle Safety courses for 18 years, which provided about half of our family income for several of those years.

In Red Wing, I almost never have a compelling reason to ride a motorcycle anywhere. Downtown is 3 miles, an easy trip on my bicycles and an effortless trip on my eBike. After 50+ years of being on her own taking care of kids and a household while I worked 50-90 hour workweeks, my wife is doing everything she can to do the “togetherness thing” in our retirement years. We have taken more trips together in the past 6 years than in the previous 48 combined. Almost all of those trips have been in a cage.

Yesterday, I definitely felt that I either needed ride this motorcycle or admit that I have no good reason to own it. The previous owner put 700 miles on the odometer in the 9 years he owned it and, outside of some early summer trips, I’d have to do some traveling to rack up a 1,000 mile summer. Since I put 1400 miles on my eBike, that is more than a little embarrassing. After a bad start, fumbling around looking for some gear I eventually decided I didn’t need, I hit the road on the TU250X about 11AM. The weather was excellent and I’d forgotten how many terrific roads are within a dozen miles of my front door. We’d planned on doing a bicycle ride later that day, so I needed to get on it to push the odometer past the 1700 mile mark.

It was a weirdly eventful day, which I’ll describe in another post, and the weather and bike cooperated beautifully. Somewhere around the 2 hour mark, I realized that I was slowly losing my guilt complex about not having any particular place to go or reason for being out on the road burning fuel and cash.

2016 was the first year since I was 17 when I could file my income taxes on the 1040 short form. No outstanding invoices, no business expense deductions, no income outside of my Social Security checks and my required minimum IRA distributions, and a life with expenses that easily fall inside the standard deduction. After almost 50 years of justifying almost every expense, I’m suddenly in new territory; a life where just wanting to do something is justification to be doing it. And that, especially, applies to riding a motorcycle.

I’ve always ridiculed the Iron Butt competitions as something close to the ultimate conspicuous consumption activity: 1,000 miles a day to nowhere for no reason other than to say “I did it.” Honestly, living in retirement is not much different. We consume, but we don’t produce anything of value or importance. The old RV bumper sticker, “I’m spending my kids’ inheritance,” is pretty much what every day we’re alive is about.

A little more than 10 years ago, my grandson and I made a Rocky Mountain Tour and there was no income stream at all for that trip. I didn’t even try to line up a magazine to sell an article about the trip. We travelled to places I’ve been to a lot, but they were all firsts for Wolf. Ghost towns, weird back roads, tourist traps, geological and paleontology sites, and places I’ve lived and loved and even a few visits with relatives. The segment of the trip between the Black Hills and Steamboat Springs was a similar revelation to me as this weekend’s ride. It’s about 400 miles from Mt. Rushmore to Steamboat. I’d made that trip about a dozen times in the past decade and knew the route well. About half-way to Laramie I was beginning to question my memories, as the trip was taking a lot longer than I remembered. After a bit, I realized that I’d never ridden that section of the trip any where near the speed limits. With my grandson on board, I was sticking to 55mph even where I could see for miles and knew there was no chance a cop was running a speed trap. I’d practically flown that section of barely populated country in the past, but plugging along at 50-55mph changed everything about the ride. Good thing, too. A few miles outside of Laramie, the beat up farm-to-market road trashed one of my fork seals and the bike got a bit squirrely. At 55mph, that was easily dealt with. At 100+mph, not so much.

Now, I’m doing another kind of recalibration. Instead of riding for practical purposes, I’m going to have to try to become a recreational-only rider. That won’t be as easy as you might think. 50 years of habits and expectations are not easily changed. Stay tuned and any advice you have will be welcome.

Not Much Left

 In early 2017, Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly magazine ended its 20 year run as a print publication and and the publisher vowed "MMM is not dead. Just the opposite." And he went on to describe the rosy future he hoped the magazine might enjoy as an on-line magazine. It never happened. Some intermittent short articles appeared on the website and, eventually, the publisher managed to get most of the back articles posted to the new site, but the traffic and readers never made the transition. Sometime in the recent past the site, WWW.MNMotorcycle.com, disappeared. Today, the only on-line evidence that it ever existed is https://issuu.com/minnesotamotorcyclemonthly. 

Issuu.com is a site that publishes PDF editions of a variety of magazines. And that's all she wrote for a pretty cool period of my life and a magazine that more people than you would think was read cover-to-cover and anticipated by local motorcyclists and a few long-distance subscribers.

Internal Combustion Engines As A Musical Instrument? You’re Kidding, Right?

“Most motorcycles I’ve owned have been chosen, in large part, for the way they sounded.” I am, you might know, an audio guy. I’ve been a wannabe musician since I was 11 and an audio engineer in a wide collection of areas in the industry. But I have never picked a motorcycle because of the way it sounded. Mostly, for me, my motorcycle choices were made in spite of the sound. That opening quote comes from a mostly thoughtful ADVRider.com article about the politics and hysteria that was generated in an article about electric motorcycles and the Kawasaki plan to fully switch over to electrics by 2035. If you do think there is something musical about motorcycle exhaust noise, you have to also be a lover of rap and hip hop or what my wife calls “washing machine noise.”

All spring-summer-fall we’ve suffered the noise and associate pollution of piddly twins blubbering their way past our home and if nothing else makes me look forward to winter (and not much else does) it is the hope that the noise level dies down because bikers are fluffballs who can’t deal with rain let alone cold. I’d be riding an electric motorcycle if they were cost effective. When our local Zero dealer gave up the ghost and blew out the end of the 2017 inventory, I almost went for it. If I were 10-20 years younger, it would be a no-brainer even with the technology where it is today. The 2022 offerings from Zero really make the point that ICE technology is so far behind the current state-of-the-art that nothing could possibly happen to reverse that.

Both the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) fanatics and the current state-of-the-art is about to prove on of my oldest and most accurate “Rat’s Rules”: #2 When You Know It’s Over. Here’s the gist of the rule, “My theory is that as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.  Then it dies.  When a new technology is just finding its legs, the technology being replaced makes a wonderful collection of giant leaps; which will fail to stave off obsolescence, even for a moment.“ ICE engines are long past their use-by date, are destroying a livable atmosphere on this planet (for humans, life will survive us), and the fuel is a vanishing resource. We may not grow up fast enough to save the species from long term effects of global warming, but we’re going to leave ICE behind and technology is changing faster than the biker crowd can keep up. Leaving old people, uneducated and unskilled people, and stubborn people behind is how progress has always worked.

Buying a motorcycle because of the noise pollution it creates is . . . sick. And not sick in a good way. There is NOTHING musical or pleasant about the sound of exploding gasoline and a whole lot that is unpleasant about the sound of an illegally modified exhaust. Noise pollution is a real thing, regardless of your grade school politics. Look it up. I gave you one link there, but there is a long history of negative effects of noise and ignoring science won’t change it.