Its been a roller coaster ride.
A month ago it warmed. Earlier than expected! Huzzah!
I started my dirt bike, gingerly squished through the icy mud, and rode to town for the ceremonial “first tank of gas for the season”. A few days later it got very cold. Then it snowed. It was nice while it lasted.
Things started thawing again but I had other tasks. I ignored the bikes and went on a 3,000 mile road trip. I expected to get home well after spring breakup. When I got back the planet was still dithering. It hadn’t made up its mind. Even so, all the snow was gone and the driveway was dry. Light at the end of the tunnel? I rejoiced. But then it snowed again. Hard!
It wasn’t just a flurry. It snowed until my tractor could scarcely handle the weight. It was a short wet sloppy whole ‘nother winter! I was exhausted.
It melted again… in fits and starts. Because of all that drama, the ground has had its fill. It’s as much liquid as solid. Yesterday my tractor’s front tire sunk a full 10” into a wet spot. I was hauling wood. It would be easy to get truly stuck and shred my already “questionable” lawn. Luckily, I was watching carefully. At the first sign of “quicksand” I backed out. Disaster averted.
Today the world dawned anew. It is April after all. It was nearly t-shirt weather! The driveway is battered but more or less passible. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I charged out to the garage, fired up my cruiser (Honda Shadow 1100), and made my way from our muddy homestead to blissfully clear pavement. It was going to be another “first tank of gas” day!
I planned to drop some mail at the post office; which I did. Then, as sometimes happens, the motorcycle refused to go home.
I though I’d ride a while and then find a coffee shop to do some blogging; another test of my pipsqueak Linux toy. Alas, every coffee shop was closed. It’s still winter season and it was late afternoon. God fearin’ folk were up at 6 am drinking coffee, not ambling around at 3 pm like a degenerate.
Not that I cared about the coffee. I wandered back country roads with no particular aim. The pavement is treacherous with winter’s accumulated grit so I rolled slow; which suited me just fine.
The landscape is still frozen. Lakes are ice (though the ice shacks have been pulled). But it’s achingly close to ice out. Nobody is dumb enough to be out there with a truck on the weak ice. (There’s usually some ass nugget who’ll drive a leased SUV onto a quarter inch of slush and sink it. But not today. The ice is so weak even the idiots received the memo.)
The grass is dead. It’ll burst forth very suddenly when conditions are right. They’re not right yet… but will be soon.
At my house nature is stirring. The wild turkeys are strutting about in twitterpation. There’s a huge Tom out there and he’s looking to score. He looks like a Thanksgiving piñata. The only cranes so far are a couple holed up in my swamp; and those two are incredibly pissed. They bet on the earlier warm pattern and lost. They’ll survive but they’re grumpy about their lot. Ruffed grouse have started drumming. Skunks are stinking things up. We had a trio of chipmunks invade our house!
As I rode, I was hoping to see more cranes. I have not yet mastered their migration pattern. I stopped at a wildlife refuge but saw none. I did see a bunch of snow geese. There are hints that the migration is started and some swans have shown up. But nothing migratory is here in full force. It’ll happen. Soon. Big birds will head north in a great armada. They’ll eat every invertebrate they can hoover up, reproduce, then flee south. Dinosaurs still rule the world, in avian form.
I ride through all this; contented at a level some may never know. Possibly because I’m paying attention to God’s creation instead of a cell phone screen. I witness the last bits of the season of death; not in regret over the cold but in joy at the rebirth. Winter is neither bad nor evil, it merely is.
Optimistic and bundled against the chill I grin at it all. I’m on my motorcycle. Even this simple fact is a thing I thought I might never attain. The odds weren’t good for it. It took me a long time to get one. I wasn’t fortunate to have such things in my youth. But I didn’t fuck up my life too much. In fact I did OK. I acquired one as soon as I had the funds and my wife was happy to see it. It felt late in life at the time but it’s long ago now. I freaked over financing “a luxury” but I needed it and could handle it.
Everyone (except my wife) thought I was nuts. What do they know? If you want to do something and are physically and financially able… do it. Don’t chain yourself to the level of other people’s fears. You are not them; exercise freewill.
Motorcycles are as fabulous as I dreamed they would be. Better even! I wish I could go back in time to a child watching Fonzie and reassure him. “Take heart young Curmudgeon. Your first bike will have twice the displacement of the Fonz’s Triumph. And Henry Winkler is just an actor with a nice jacket. He’s a pipsqueak that can’t even ride. You will ride!”
The bike and I wander post-apocalyptic terrain. Is that not what winter is? If you didn’t know about “winter” in advance you’d think the world was ending. In a way it does. Every year almost everything dies or goes dormant. Up north, it’s the way of the world. Our planet has an axial tilt. It is what it is.
Does every apocalypse seed the rejuvenation that follows? It feels like it might. I smell spring in the air and see it in the plants and animals. A frog hops across the lane and I carefully miss him. I’d never see such details were I hermetically sealed in an SUV.
Farm fields are thawing and smell of cowshit. The buildup accumulated during months of icy stasis is thawing all at once. It’s spread on the fields, returning to the soil from whence the cow’s feed came. Biology hasn’t had time to break down the material, but it will. In a few weeks, those same farms will smell sweetly of grass and flowers. Canadian geese will be prowling amid the corn stubble. My buddy the frog had better watch out. Thawing cowshit is the smell of commerce, of wealth, of another year when winter didn’t kill me. It means I’m where the food is made instead of where its consumed.
Eventually I turn back toward home. I stopped at a grocery store with a coffee shop in the corner. It’ll do. That’s where I’m typing this.
Enjoy your spring.
AC
I’m not a rider, but my wife is. She was not allowed to own a motorcycle due to both her parents fear of them, but after they passed, she bought a used dirt bike and learned that dirt bikes require work to haul out before they are used. Street bikes can be ridden from your driveway – way less work. So a Yamaha Virago 250cc to wet her feet and learn the ropes (now gone). Then a Honda Shadow 750cc (now gone). Then A Harley-Davidson 886 Sportster. Then a Honda – Roadsmith 1800cc (?) trike. And when I thought she was done, a BMW 1200 Motorade showed. So three bikes, all needing some road TLC every now and again. Sunday mornings are hers to drive, her group driving to distant cafes and enjoying themselves. No riders less than 50 years of age, but some of them are speed demons, ripping along at 80 mph for the hell of it.
She enjoys the road, but is mindful that driving defensively is very wise. She has had a few accidents, only one requiring surgery on installing pins in her ankle which she broke completely. The others were dropped bikes, due to that road dust and turning all coinciding.
I had to look up “Phenology”. It would be wholly out of character for a master wordsmith as our esteemed AC to misspell in a post title. So, he wasn’t referring to measuring lumps on skulls. I have a library north of my eyebrows for the adventurous; as long as they’re into back issues of MAD! magazine and other vulgar glossy periodicals, with a seasoning of obscure technical manuals and ignored safety warnings.
The little songbirds are back from their southern holiday. Yay! It amazes me that a hyperactive featherfluff ball about the size of my thumb navigates thousands of miles for winter, and returns to the same hedges and trees. Very humbling. Is it my neighbourhood or theirs? All without gps and overpriced junkfood and drooling homicidal imbeciles and all the other essential delights we higher primates blend into our travels.
Traversing the surface of large bodies of water is far preferable. The Venn diagram candidates have already been filtered, and further culled by drowning and fire and running aground or getting arrested, or forgetting to unstrap the boat from the trailer while parking the tow vehicle under the lake.
Yes, that was a subtly concealed inquiry as to the likelihood of a certain plywood vessel containing an old grump and his canine to new old adventures.
Stefan v.
If the vessel can be easily repaired I will definitely sail it.
It is upside down and outdoors. Has been for almost three years. Life got ahead of me for a while there!
I don’t know if it’s in good shape or dead. Nothing much to do about it until the lakes thaw. I’ll open that Pandora’s box when I’m back from my trip. If (and I dearly hope this is the case) all it needs is a fresh coat of paint I’ll do so. I could be sailing mid summer. Also the trailer I used to haul it on has lost a wheel (hub and all!) So that’s a bit of a challenge too.
Even though I live in Texas and can ride most of the year, December to March is a crap shoot for cold temperatures and ice. You could head out in the morning in spring like temps, and three hours later find yourself in the 30s.
That said, end of last month I got the mighty Kawasaki Concours out and let it holler. Went on a trip to Wimberly, 4 hours or so. Got to roll through the hill country, see the sites, smell the smells.
It was glorious.
That said, I’m thinking of getting a smaller bike for toodling around town. The Kawasaki is a monster to back out of a space, or move it around and back in. It has a long wheelbase where if you aren’t careful going into a driveway, or over a gully in a parking lot, you can find your feet a foot from being able to touch the ground.
A big cruiser / tourer is sweet but smaller displacement (and lower weight) bikes are awesome too. At first I was blind to this truth. My first motorcycle was an 1100cc and for a long time the only bikes I hung around were cruisers. It gave me the false impression you need the motor from a locomotive to move a motorcycle. Then I bought a weak little single cylinder Yamaha TW200 and saw a whole different world. Now my beloved 1100cc Shadow seems bloated. I still love it but compared to other options it seems goofy and impractical. I never knew I’d come to vastly prefer smaller displacement bikes.
I really didn’t expect the Yamaha’s 200 cc to have enough grunt. But I can get myself into all sorts of off road mayhem. It’s almost comical how much fun I have. It’s like 12 horsepower or some shit yet it can move me and far too much camping gear. I often ride it with a shotgun for grouse hunting or carry a fishing pole. It’s not fast but for a solo rider exploring a forest road it’s perfect.
I think you’re on the right track. A Concurs is awesome but there’s something about a bike that’s the “right size” for purpose.
I’ve ridden the Shadow cross country dozens of times but my new (to me) “road trip” motorcycle is a Honda PC800. I’ll admit it’s a portly bike but it feels more manageable than the several used Goldwings I test drove. I also prefer the simpler more relaxed “user interface” of a PC800. The Goldwing dash seemed “busy”. The old PC800 is half the displacement, smaller, lighter, cheaper, and weirder than a Goldwing, but I it’s perfect for my intended use of solo motorcycle touring / camping on mostly pavement.
I also did half the WYBDR on the tiny little TW200 and it was awesome. I was solo and I knew I could pick it up… and beat it to death if I felt like it. (It’s a tough little machine.) I’m super glad I wasn’t trying to balance a monster ADV out there! The little TW200 is slow on the road but when shit got rough it was absolutely perfect. I could put it in second gear, park my ass on the seat, and tractor through shit that would have a big BMW tilting like an ankle breaking Tower of Pisa.
Also, I’m “scooter curious”. For a while I owned an “antique” moped. It was a Piaggio(?) I got for $50 at a lawn sale. Back then I swear nobody in Montana even knew what a moped was. It was great for a broke ass student! Decades later (last year), I did a little day trip around part of the island of Maui on a rented scooter. Twisty turny one lane paved cliff road that was like riding on a pretzel. The little scooter was the boss for that purpose. I can’t imagine a more perfectly suited machine for one person riding solo for fun on that kind of road.
Never hesitate to get another bike, especially a cheap little puddle jumper. Little bikes are fun!
In fact, if I ever find a cheap salvageable Honda Helix I may have to buy it. I’m broke but a Helix in good working order looks like an absolute blast.
The thing about a Concours is once you’re moving, it’s light as a feather. I need to come up with a way to back into my garage. I may need to cut across my front lawn to do it. I live in a rental house and the numbnut owners tried to fix the driveway with what appears to be concrete patch. This has all busted up and has gravelly pieces all over. Not the thing you want under your feet paddling a big bike backwards out of the garage.
When I first got it, I took it out to grab a hamburger and tried to park in a spot on a slight incline with a rain gulley in front. I paused and there was nowhere for my feet to go so over it went. Luckily, I’m fit for a geezer. But it was an ordeal to get it back on it’s paws.
I’ve been eyeballing Royal Enfield. This things are used all over the world and supposedly pretty rugged. New they aren’t all that expensive, used they appear to be a deal.
What I’d like to find is a 700 – 800 CC street bike, a garage find. You know, the kind someone bought and scared themselves and put it away. Or got married and the old lady told him to get rid of it.
There’s a used bike dealer not too far from me I’ll check out.
Your odds are good. Right now is a good time in history to find a decent old UJM for a pretty reasonable price. Lots of miles left on a well maintained ujm. Or even something lightly used and more modern (though I prefer not modern). Just don’t pick up a used CF Moto… yammynoob in YouTube hilariously mocks their used market. 🙂
I like the Enfield too.
You really need a Millyard Viper!
To park next to the Boss Hoss I also don’t own?
Speaking of scooters, We’ve been two weeks in the Florida Keys in the RV with our trusty Honda PCX150. It is so much fun to ride and park! Not to mention 95 MPG. It’s a hoot to just head out and explore. A great grocery getter.
Also, your writing about the smells of spring (manure spreaders and skunks) brought me right back to 12 years before now when we left northern VT for warmer climes and lower taxes. Thanks, AC!
That sound like fun.
JFC, leave the wasteland. Join us in NC where the grass is already getting burned out by drought and 85 degrees. Plenty of roads, ice free, for going on a road trip.
I caught a flight south. It’s not perfect but it is a lot hotter where I am this week.