A Year Later

 Thoughts from an ex-motorcyclist a year after selling “everything” and calling it quits. 

I started riding motorcycles when I was 14, with a bottle of booze, a gray lie about my age and motorcycling experience, and my first low speed, minimal damage “crash.” That was in 1962 and, other than brief interruptions due to our many cross-country moves and a couple of moments when I thought I’d stumbled to the end of my motorcycle enthusiasm, I have owned motorcycles since. But due to a collection of age-related medical issues that hammered me almost into giving up a lot more than motorcycling, I sold what was likely my last motorcycle a year ago. Not long after that, I emptied my basement and two garages of all the motor gear, tools, and odds and ends (and there was some pretty odd stuff, too.) I am infamous, in my family, for ripping off bandages before the wound has healed and when I sold two of my all-time favorite Aerostich riding suits it was traumatic. When I was a motorcycle instructor for the state of Minnesota, I’d often advise new riders “Buy the best gear you can afford and, if you have any money left, buy a motorcycle with the remainder.” My Aerostich suits represented an almost $4,000 investment and I am highly unlikely to put that kind of money into riding gear again. I’m not likely to pay that much money for a damn car, let alone motorcycle gear.

I’m a bit past a year since my last motorcycle ride, which was traumatic at best. As that “Done and Out” Geezer post described, my last ride was relentlessly depressing. I haven’t sucked that badly since my first, foolish “test ride” on a borrowed BMW (“or Guzi”) when I was 14. My turn off of MN19 to the road that leads to my home was so tentative, so cowardly (thanks to severe carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands) that it was obvious to me that I did not belong on a motorcycle. It wasn’t just motorcycling that seemed to be coming to an end either. I had some of the same limitations on a bicycle, driving a car for any length of time, writing with a pen or pencil, typing, and playing guitar. That short list just about wraps up my whole life’s interests and work. Couple the previous years’ problems with vision and myasthenia gravis and it felt very much like I was driving out-of-control toward my father’s last, awful 20 years of life. The days between selling the Suzuki and my gear and November of last year were downbeat, at best.

Thanks to my brilliant and dedicated primary physician, Dr. Thomas Meyer, and the Mayo Clinic team that he referred me to during those months, in late October I had carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand. Less than two weeks later, I was able to securely hold a guitar pick and play for the first time in at least 10 years. In early December, I had the same surgery on my right hand and two months later I was able to play guitar, painlessly, for well over an hour without once having to shake my hand until the feeling returned. Before the surgery, Neil Olmscheid, D.O. (the surgeon), estimated that I should be able to play guitar, type, and ride a bicycle within a few weeks of the surgery. I, seriously, thought he was either joking or that I’d misunderstood his time estimates or he’d mistaken my activities for something way less strenuous. He was right, I was wrong, and I’m glad.

It’s possible that I could ride a motorcycle again, now. Since I self-identified as “a motorcyclist” (not “a biker”) for about 62 years, it was hard to let go of that, but it seems almost as difficult to think about starting over, too. I no longer commute anywhere and commuting was the core of my motorcycling transportation purpose. Most every year between 1972 (the year I bought my first street-legal bike, a 1971 Kawasaki 350 Bighorn and put a license plate on the damn thing), I rode to work almost every day that I wasn’t required to haul equipment. There were few months, even in the Minnesota winters, when I didn’t motorcycle commute more than half of the work week. I lived on two wheels for a decade in California so completely that I practically had to take a driver’s ed course when I needed to drive the family cage.

I bicycle almost that much today in my small Minnesota retirement village. But not in the winter. Early in my ebike “education” I did a face-plant on a slushy trail, undercoated with a layer of ice, and that convinced me that I’m “too old” for riding on snow and ice. I don’t like it that much, anyway. (Sorry to disappoint you, Wolf.) Thanks to the “effects” of being nearly 80, a bunch of things are in my life’s rearview mirror:

• · sleeping on the ground,
• · sleeping through the night without having to take a piss at least twice,
• · decent reflex response time,
• · running or jumping without injury,
• · remembering any sort of math formula or learning a new programming language,
• · doing a brake job on my wife’s car without being crippled for a couple of days afterwards,
• · playing guitar with anything other than light gauge strings,
• · working with 4’x8’ plywood or sheetrock thicker than 3/8” (especially if stairs are involved),
• · and a whole lot of other stuff I don’t want to think about.

When I taught motorcycle safety classes, I often tried to subtly discourage the over-50 crowd from chasing their motorcycling bucket list dreams because it’s not an activity for the disabled. Most Americans are disabled (grossly overweight and weak) by the end of their 30s. There were a few wonderful exceptions to that advice, but most of those pitiful youth-chasers were going to buy (or already had) some kind of cruiser/girl’s bike to join up with an existing gang of incompetent wannabe-biker-posers. The odds are, overwhelmingly, likely that they’d soon be dead or disabled from a crash and I didn’t want to be part of the “nobody warned me” crowd. So, I warned them, but almost nobody listened, even when they failed the disgustingly easy MSF motorcycle endorsement test at the end of the class. The latest version of the MSF’s Basic Rider Course is so simplified and passive that I couldn’t choke it down. My bout with MG in 2019 was enough to convince me that year would be my last as an instructor.

There are lots of things I miss about no longer being a motorcyclist and a few things that I don’t miss. I don’t miss changing tires, wallowing in grease and automotive chemicals, or trying to find a tool I had in my hand a few moments ago. I certainly miss being young enough to think I can improve with practice. I miss the near-total independence (except for fuel) of being in a moderately remote area by myself on a motorcycle with a full tank of gas, riding with camping gear and a couple days of dehydrated food in my side cases, and no particular destination in mind. Some of that has been replaced with the comfort and security of retirement from a lifetime of frugal living that has left us with decent savings and no debt. Living in a rural area with dozens of miles of traffic-free bicycle trails is some compensation, too. We all know “everything ends,” but we don’t all know that means us, too.

You Are No Cowboy

I grew up in western Kansas and spent a lot of my K-12 years working on an uncle’s eastern Kansas ranch. My cousins were actual cowboys, even winning state roping and riding championships. I liked the work, but it turned out that I don’t like horses all that much.

In the late-60s, my wife and I rented an apartment from a dude in Dallas who desperately wanted to be a rich guy and had bought a “ranch” that he planned on turning into a horse breeding business. Since my wife loves horses and I had spent some of my youth working on a ranch, our landlord thought we’d be cheap ranch help.  For two years, I trained, fed, castrated, exercised, and got tossed on my ass by a motley collection of thoroughbreds and some wonderful, world-class quarter horses. Most of which were almost as smart as a two-stroke motorcycle; especially the thoroughbreds.  I have documented my horsie experience before, in Geezer with A Grudge: “#48 An Attempt at Understanding.” The end result is that I have enough trouble keeping track of one scatterbrain and I generally don’t ride horses or want to ride horses.

At the beginning of my electronics career, I was a tech, then an engineer, in commercial ag equipment; electronic scales, to be precise. Most of my customers were feedlot owners from Louisiana to North Dakota and all states between and west to the Rockies. Many of their employees were cowboys at the tailend of both a career/life and a way of life. I met a lot of working cowboys in that job and saw a lot of rodeos. I am not one, but I know a cowboy when I see or hear one and I know a great rider when I see one.

There are two things that are guaranteed to piss me off are Nashville country singers wearing cowboy hats and Harley assholes pretending that their idiotic motorcycles are throwbacks to “western riding style.” (Obviously, there are more than two things that get that reaction.) Nashville and the southeast are no more likely to produce a “cowboy” than Wisconsin or Minnesota. If you own a horse and you live in those places, the horse is a pet and your “ranch” is a hobby farm and your “western style” is a costume. Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you Charlie Daniels, Garth Brooks, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Clint Black, and the rest of the limp-wristed spaghetti-western country star pose-alikes.

 

My wife’s grandfather and great-uncle Kye (pictured at left) were eastern Colorado real-life cowboys. This picture has hung in our homes since the early 1970s. Kye McKeever worked as a ranch hand until he died. My wife’s grandfather, Ira McKeever, was the Monford Ranch range manager until he quit to start his own successful cattle ranch in the 1940’s. His ride of choice was a 1950’s Ford pickup, but he had a horse or two mostly to entertain his grandkids. Several of Ira’s Colorado neighbors still used horses for daily work and transportation well into the late-60s (1960s). Those men would be as likely to submit themselves to a gynaecological pelvix exam riding position as they would to wearing a ballerina outfit to a cattle auction. You’ll notice a cowboy has his feet under his ass, so he can stand in the stirrups when necessary and guide the horse with his heels and toes.

 

This kind of idiot crap is for handicapped fools who could no more negotiate a parking lot turn than ride a motorcycle functionally. This isn’t “western style,” but it might be Hollywood or New York-style. (Donny looks about as “comfortable” sitting on a propped-up Hardly as he did catching a soft-underhanded toss baseball.)  I don’t have any objection to the Village People or any other kind of reverse-macho posing you’re up to, but I do object to hearing that this kind of motorcycle is somehow connected to American cowboy history. It isn’t. In fact, nothing about the cruiser heritage has anything to do with horses or cowboys.

 

If you look at the idiot extremes, like the picture at right, it’s hard to imagine what sort of weirdness is being imitated. My best guess is some sort of handcuffed-to-the-ceiling fantasy. Creepy.  It’s not cowboy, though, in any way, shape, or (especially) form.