My “Own Personal Potlatch”

Ms Day has known me for all but 19 of my 76 years and she, clearly, knows my triggers and moods better than me. Even as I wrote them, I knew that it would seem like my last three or four essays were self-pitying whining old man drivel. At least to me, I felt like I was expressing my confusion and disappointment in this phase of life. As I've written a few times, I'm a long ways from somebody who is rich in self knowledge. As a 1950s male, "suck it up and move on" would be pretty close to the motto I've lived by.Yesterday morning, after observing my mood, Ms Day asked me, "So how was your own personal potlatch?" Almost instantly I felt pretty good about the last couple of weeks. Seriously, just that question put the entire “end of motorcycling” in a different light that made me appreciate not just my lucky past but the enjoyment I got from passing my treasures on to people who will also enjoy them.

If you are looking for a guy filled with white pride, you'll need to keep moving . . . a long ways from me. Mostly, I think European males have been a plague on the planet and Mother Earth will be glad to be rid of us if she finds a neutron bomb-way to get the job done with minimal damage to useful lifeforms. The best and most honest thing I've heard about my race (and species) is Ms Day's reminder, "Beware of the Ice Age Hunters." We may not be smart, creative or inventive, pretty, industrious, or reliable, but nobody is more ruthless, brutal, and efficient when it comes to making war. Whatever you can build, we European males can break, destroy, steal, and claim for our own. European immigrants to North America upped that game so dramatically that the Nazi’s studied our Civil War for tactics and Hitler’s version of Jim Crow.

When I was in my early 20s, I got seriously interested in North American Native religions, culture, and government. We were living in Dallas and the downtown Dallas library was the kind of intellectual wonderland that I had never expected to discover. The North American Pacific Northwest Coast tribes (Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Coast Salish, and Kwakiutl) practiced various forms of the potlatch ritual and I have tried to honor that whenever possible in my own life.  Wikipedia says, “During a potlatch, the host may lavishly distribute gifts or even destroy property to demonstrate wealth and generosity. These gifts can include real property like food, blankets, copper shields, canoes, and carved items. . .” There is a lot more to the potlatch custom, but that bit fits my feeling as my equipment and motorcycle was leaving my garage.

While I was piling everything from weird motorcycle parts and paraphernalia to the Aerostich gear that has been my copilot for several hundred thousand miles onto my buyer/guests, I was weirdly happy to see my things go for very affordable prices to people who might appreciate and use them. Some of those things had been nearly gifted to me by friends, vendors (when I was a magazine columnist), and simple good fortune discovering great products early in a company’s start-up stage. I don’t think I’ve ever gone through this ritual to “demonstrate wealth,” but I can be accused of deliberately trying to demonstrate generosity in an attempt to “pay it forward.”

Since leaving my father’s home when I was 15 and when Ms Day and I joined forces when I was 19 and she was 17, I (then we) have moved 31 times. Every time I have moved, lots of stuff was left behind. Sometimes those things were precious but too bulky to be kept. Sometimes things were accidentally left. Often, we knew people who might put our excess to better use. Rarely, we made the effort to sell off our excess. My father used to have a tennis rule, applied ruthlessly in his later years, “When in doubt, out.” I modified that to “When in doubt, throw it out.” For a lot of years one of my personal goals was to own no more stuff than I could fit into a well-packed utility van (I always visualized a 1970’s Econoline E150). Being an electronics engineer in the 1970s and 80s meant chasing our floundering manufacturing economy as it deteriorated from the center out to the coasts. The 80s were particularly hard on my kind of “skilled labor” since Reaganomics moved capital from work (manufacturing) to idle money (investment and speculation). My poor kids probably thought getting to know anyone was a waste of time, since we’d be moving soon and, pre-internet, staying in touch with friends at a distance was a complicated project.

Since retiring and having taken part in dissolving the estates of my father-in-law and my own father’s property, I have tried to constantly re-evaluate my own stuff looking for things I no longer use to sell, give away, or throw out. Ideally, the day Ms Day and I no longer need “stuff,” there won’t be anything to fool with that our daughter’s don’t want to keep for themselves. And I hope to continue enjoying passing on this potlatch tradition to the end.

How do you love a riding suit?

This is one of my favorite pictures of me (Thanks Scott!), from 2018, and one of my all-time favorite motorcycles (my 2004 Suzuki 650 V-Strom). All of this stuff and me spent just short of 100,000 miles together. This past weekend, the last of those things surrounding me went out of my life. Knowing that my old age infirmities had got the best of me, I let my two Aerostich Darien suits go to a new owner.

The Darien suit I’m wearing in this picture is a prototype AD1 HiViz jacket and a pair of AD1 Darien pants. You can’t tell from the picture, but I am armored to the max with every piece of TF3 armor Aerostich sells for that gear: hip and knee pads, elbow, shoulder, and back pads. I also have a pair of Aerostich elkskin gauntlet gloves, a Shoei X1 helmet, and my Gaerne Goretex boots. Along with every other piece of riding gear, special motorcycle tools, and my last motorcycle (a Suzuki TU250X) every thing connecting my 60+ years on a motorcycle found new homes this past week.

I am finding it difficult to choke down how emotionally attached I had become to my riding gear; even more than the motorcycles. In late 2020, I had sold my two all-time favorite motorcycles and clung to the unlikely possibility that I might find my way back on to a motorcycle. I hadn’t let go of any of my gear, which turned out to be more precious to me than the actual motorcycles.

My physical problems were compounded this summer and I could no longer justify pretending that a comeback was possible. I failed my baseline test and, worse, found myself riding with almost no confidence when I lost the feeling in my hands at the end of a piddly 20-mile ride. When our water heater began to leak and I started looking at the opportunity to replace it with a heat pump unit, I had to clear out the storage shelves surrounding the water heater to do that work. That was when I decided it made no sense to put all of that stuff back in the same place. It was time to do some Swedish Death Cleaning. Unlike the characters I met during my Cheap Bike Challenge hunt, I was not going to be clinging to my stuff hoping for some fantasy price. I was emptying the basement shop, my two garages, and my closet of everything I will never use again.

I would be lying if I said that was a fun exercise. It was almost as painful as I imagine giving away a favorite pet would be (something I have not yet had to do). I have pictures, memories, stories chronicled in this blog, and friends to reminisce with, so nothing is really gone as long as I am alive and my tiny brain still works. I lived in and with my Aerostich gear for so many years, miles, and hours that my relationship with that clothing became very personal. I hope the new owners get as much fun, satisfaction, protection, and adventure from my equipment as I have had.

My Pace, My Path, My Objectives

For more than 60 years, the ONLY time I have been in total control of what I’m doing, how fast I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it have been on a motorcycle. I came from a fairly large (5 brats and two semi-adult parents) family and I was the oldest and designated babysitter, cook and bottle-washer, and the official family black sheep. When I abandoned my father’s nuthouse the summer I turned 16, I went from that over-complicated situation to even crazier 1960’s rock-and-roll bands, marriage at 19, and the next 40 years of occupational and parental over-stimulus non-stop; unless I was on a motorcycle.

Other that a few trips with close friends and one decidedly wrong start to the trip of a lifetime with someone Ms. Day had picked to babysit me and one anniversary trip with Ms. Day and a small portion of my 2008 Nova Scotia Canadian tour, I have always traveled alone by motorcycle. Even when I have been on a ride with a friend, my preferred plan is to designate a general time and specific place to meet at the end of the day and for each of us to find our own way to that location at our own pace.

For almost all of my 76 years I have been the poster boy for failing at “to thine own self be true” because I had no idea who I was. In the early 80s, in a “Career Planning” class at OCC, I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. Say what you will about how obsolete that test is, but when I received my dot-matrix printout of my personality results (INTP) it was all I could do to keep from crying during the class. It was the first time in my 35-years that I felt anyone actually “knew” me and that “someone” was an 8-bit, IBM mini-computer.

I am not just “a little” INTP, either. Those measurement bars were pinned to the far end of each characteristic. The intended outcome of that test was for us to plow through a 4” thick book of occupations and find jobs that were suitable for our personality types. INTPs are fairly rare (not in a good way) and, at that time, that giant book of occupations recommended only four occupations. Not helpful, especially for me since “engineer” was not one of the four and I had been making a living as an electronic engineer for a dozen years by 1984.

Worse, everything about being a 1950s kid ruled against the “I” characteristic in my personality type. When I grew up, in the age of How to Win Friends and Influence People, “introversion” is old psych-jargon for homosexual or worse. Giving in to my natural inclinations was the fast route to unemployment and social stigma. So, for the next 40 years I ignored the “I” and concentrated on making the best of “NTP” (my Intuitive, Thinking, and Prospecting traits). And that, occupationally, worked for me right up to when I retired, mostly. It kept me employed, anyway.

For my family and friends, however, ignoring my introversion meant that i spent a lot of my “off-camera” time suffering from an “introvert hangover”: “a metaphorical state of emotional and mental exhaustion. It occurs when an introvert has spent an extended period interacting socially, leaving them drained and depleted.” “Drained and depleted” enough that I would rather risk being bitten by a rattlesnake backpacking alone in the Texas desert or left injured and stranded anywhere from Baja, Mexico to Alaska to the empty backroads of Newfoundland and New Brunswick to Montana or Wyoming’s empty, abandoned wastelands than talk to one more person, no matter how much I loved them. And that is where motorcycles came into my life in a dominant way from around 1969 until a few years ago.

I had been backpacking the wilderness of every place I’d lived, from Kansas when I was a kid to California when my daughters were teenagers, but backpacking usually required a lot of prep time and energy and, often, I didn’t have those resources in any quantity. At the most hectic period of my life, when we lived in California and our daughters were teenagers, I would often have to escape for a weekend or a day or two more and my trip “planning” involved stuffing camping gear into saddlebags along with a couple changes of clothing and flipping a quarter while I sat on my motorcycle to decide if I was traveling north or south out of Huntington Beach: often as far as well into Baja, Mexico or right up to the Canadian border on PCH. Sometimes, I’d make the same trip (with the same planning) in my ‘73 Toyota Hilux with a kayak tied to the rack and a bed full of scuba gear. (“Fuck a lot of ‘dive buddy’ crap, I need to go where nobody else ever goes.”)

If you peruse this blog, you’ll see “reports” of my solo travels that cross about 50 years of my life. I have never had a job that didn’t generate substantial “introvert hangovers” and busting out of my life alone and mostly directionless has been the cure until I retired in 2013. When I retired, two friends gave me copies (one paperback and one eBook) of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, And I thought, “Why the fuck do you guys think I need a book about introverts?” Seriously. After being trapped in a screwed-up VW camper for several months in a New Mexico campground waiting for parts, information, or shop time I started to read the book. By the time I had that crap VW Eurovan back in running condition and we’d relaxed into our original driving and camping

In 2018, myasthenia gravis put an end to that hangover cure, but being retired also diminished the requirement. It got a lot worse before it started to get better and, assuming it wouldn’t get enough better to matter, I sold my beloved 2004 Suzuki V-Strom and my even more precious Yamaha WR250X. Thinking that the worst was past, I gambled on a Suzuki TU250X in late 2019, but it didn’t get better as the eyesight problems were soon replaced with hands that refuse to function usefully or reliably and riding skills that had deteriorated to the point of no return.

Bicycling, my primary transportation for as many Minnesota months as I can stand it, is not the same.

Thinking about Things I Will Never Do Again

This morning, I drug myself out of bed around 6:30AM (I know!), poured a cup of coffee, and waddled out to the garage to change the oil in my wife’s car before a trip to the cities later today. As I assembled the usual culprit tools, drug the floor jack to the front of the car, organized the oil and filter for easy access while I was under the car, I flashed back on 60 years of motorcycle maintenance. A few days ago, I emptied a large milk crate full of assorted motorcycle parts, tools, and accessories into a grocery bag and, now, most of that stuff has been claimed by the various people who bought my more expensive gear over the past week. I am, apparently, one demented Boy Scout. I was still prepared to do an oil change on at least a half-dozen motorcycles that I’ve owned over the past 30 years. But I will NEVER do that again.

A few weeks ago, when I decided to sell my Suzuki TU250X, I did a ceremonial last round of maintenance. I changed the oil and filter, checked the valve clearance, adjusted and lubed the chain, checked the tire pressures, and did a thorough detailing job one last time. As I did that job, I recalled a moment when I thought I might be passing on my motorcycle experiences to my grandson, Wolf. I about to do a pretty serious rework of my Kawasaki KL250 Super Sherpa after coming back from a 2010 North Dakota Ghost Town tour (that I’d planned on doing on the Kawasaki before the idiot shifter oil seal design dumped all of the bike’s oil on my boot during a pre-trip shakedown ride).

My idea was that Wolf might enjoy knowing something about how a motorcycle worked before I ran him through the MSF Basic Rider course and helped him get a motorcycle endorsement (and a driver’s license). He lasted about as long as it took for me to demonstrate chain maintenance and the beginning stages of an oil change before deciding that kind of grubby work was not for him. I wish I could say, “I get it,” but I don’t.

While I was going through the steps of the Honda’s oil change, I had flashbacks of doing that kind of simple-minded basic maintenance on everything from my first car through my last motorcycle. I’m too lazy to count either the number of cages or bikes I’ve worked on, or to even think about that hard, but as long as I have the right tools for the job I kind of love that work. I have a hard time understanding why everyone doesn’t, in fact.

I am a rapidly retreating introvert and as I’ve learned more about that personality characteristic post-retirement I realize that one of many things that I’ve appreciated about vehicle maintenance is that working on, around, and under a vehicle is a really effective people-repellant. If I go into my office to write, play music, or read, Ms. Day feels totally free to pop in, ask me questions, drop another honey-do project into my lap, or just ask “What’ca doin’?” If I am working on any kind of vehicle, she stays as far from that area as possible. The same went for my daughters, neighbors, and, now, grandkids. Nobody has any interest into being roped into handing me tools, holding on to a piece of metal while I weld it, being involved in a greasy, filthy project, or listening to me bitch about whatever stupid thing some factory engineers screwed up. I have never had a more isolated man cave than my garages and that has been true for almost 70 years. When I was a kid, working on my coaster brake Schwinn (or his lawnmower), my father would avoid his own garage until I rode off to test my work.

When we bought our 140-year-old “Ugly House” in Little Canada, I hadn’t seen the inside of the house until after closing, but I’d already made big plans for the 850-square-foot garage. I practically lived in that garage for 18 years and it was worth every penny of the $106,000 I paid for the house. The rest of the house belonged to Ms. Day and, for all I cared, if a tornado ripped the house out of the ground and tossed it to Kansas I’d have celebrated. Anything in the US built before 1947 should probably be scrapped for the raw materials. There was plenty wrong with that garage, too, especially the moronic drainage “plan,” but all the things that were right with it (especially after I installed a big window and skylights) made up for it. Mostly.

But today I’m down to simple maintenance on a twelve-year-old Honda CRV and my ebikes. It is highly likely that I’ll never see the inside of another motorcycle engine, reassemble another gearbox, repair or replace another non-bicycle tire, or do any of the things that gave me peace, quiet, and privacy for 60+ years. Thinking about that also reminded me of the moments in my 76 years when “the last time” passed unnoticed:

• After a practice crash that left me with a dozen broken ribs and PTSD so demented that I repeatedly hallucinated similar crashes every time I caught a few inches of off-road air, I never raced motocross, enduros, or cross-country again (age 28).
• When my youngest daughter and I returned from a wonderful trip up the coast of California in 1989, when she was 16, that would be the last time she and I ever took any kind of trip together. Three years later, my oldest daughter was visiting me in Colorado and we died a 3-day ride on my Yamaha Vision to Durango and around the mountains and that was the last time any of my kids and I would travel together by motorcycle.
• When Ms. Day and I celebrated our 40th anniversary together with a two-up ride to the North Shore, that would be the last time she would ever ride with me on a motorcycle.
• In 2018, I “celebrated” my 18th year as a Minnesota MSF instructor with a forced retirement due to double-vision and myasthenia gravis. Back then, I thought I was through with motorcycling and I sold my beautiful V-Strom and my WR250X. I definitely noticed that one, though.
• After a fantastic 2016 trip through the Colorado mountains where I met a good friend and we explored a bunch of hot springs and our peculiar style of “riding together,” (Breakfast and, then, “I’ll meet you at . . . tonight”) I would never take a motorcycle trip longer than 100 miles again.