Category Archives: masochism

Off-Road Fun

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It was time to take the 1991 DR350 out for its first dirt-riding experience with me as it’s rider.

When you own a bike, you do stupid things. Those stupid things are usually spread out over many months, or years.
Yesterday, I covered a few of them in one day.

A few of my friends and I planned a fairly easy route that would take us down some very pretty Forest Service roads. The whole trip would take about four hours, including a lunch stop somewhere in the woods.

I packed a lunch of champions and got ready.

The DR is hard to start when cold. It’s kickstart only and the previous owner suggested that the choke channel might be clogged in the carburetor. I haven’t had a chance to pull the carb and clean it out, so I have to be patient and practice a few tricks (like not pulling the choke all the way out and kicking like mad).

Out meetup time was 10:30am, so I got up around 7:00am to get ready. I packed my food into my rigged up tail-bag and got my riding gear together.

At 9:00am, it was time to get the bike warmed up and make sure everything was mechanically sound.
I kicked.
and I kicked.
and I kicked.
Whew.

After about half an hour of kicking, resting, kicking, I was able to get it to burble up and catch but then it would die again.
Why won’t it start? This is unusually difficult.

It helps if you turn the gas on. (1)

I turned the petcocks on, kicked it over and Whooomp! it started right up.

Ready to go!

My friend Peter came by and we set off to ride to the meetup location together.
We got about five blocks from my house, and my bike died.
Adhering to the K.I.S.S. rule, I first checked the gas level.
Whaddyaknow? Out of gas. (2)
I put the tanks on reserve and went to the first gas station, just a couple of blocks away.

Freshly gassed up and a little tired from the mornings exertions, we rode the rest of the way to the meetup location – a gas station further down the road.

We pulled in to park and wait for the others.

As I was trying to shift into neutral with my big, new-to-me dirt bike boots, I lost balance.

Dirt bikes are tall, and I had to do a number of things in order to make this one fit me. Even with the 2″ lowering links, dropped forks, and lower stock seat, I was still on my tip-toes.

Down went my bike, and to add insult to injury, it fell into Peter’s bike, knocking him over. (3)

Gas went spilling out of my tank before we were able to pick the bikes back up.

Luckily, these bikes are pretty decently protected for spills. Dirt biking isn’t always the most upright sport. Both our bikes were fine, my ego and left arm were a bit bruised and I was starting to feel a bit fatigued and hungry.

A few minutes later, the rest of the group converged.
11:00am, kickstands up, time to ride!

I had a difficult time getting my head into the ride. There was a brisk, chill wind buffeting us, my 7:00am breakfast had long worn off, and I’d had a fairly physical and tiring morning. Luckily, the first part of the ride was pretty easy. Pavement to a wide, raked dirt road, up into the hills. I wasn’t exactly having fun, but I wasn’t miserable either. At this point, I was mostly there because I said I would.

After about an hour of riding, we stopped in a lovely little spot for lunch.

It wasn’t the best view, but it was sunny and remote.

I found a rock to sit on, ate some lunch and warmed up.

One of the guys noticed that my license plate was a bit loose. I had wanted to drill some holes in the rear fender and attach it, but had run out of time. The previous owner had duct taped his plate to the fender, so I did the same but with gaffers tape (couldn’t find my duct tape!)
A couple of zip-ties later and with help of my bungee net, the plate was re-secured.

It ain’t pretty, but it works.

After lunch, I was reinvigorated and had a blast. The next section was woodsy and rocky. We rode through a wash with a foot of water and I managed to soak myself. It was great fun!

A couple of hours later of great riding, we returned to pavement and decided to stop for lunch. Two of the guys needed to split off before town, so we went to a gas station/deli nearby for some fine dining.

While we were enjoying our sammiches in the outdoor seating, a couple of other dual-sport riders pulled up.
Turned out we knew them. Small world.

We finished up our lunch and as we were getting our gear together, a few more other riders pulled up.
We knew them too!

Seems this Texaco gas and deli in the middle of nowhere is a popular hangout for the dual-sport crowd.
Good to know.

Even with the morning difficulties, it was a great day.

One of the major things to remember is how much your head-space affects your experience. The roads we were on before lunch vs. after lunch weren’t much different in terrain, difficulty, or grade but I was in a completely different mood for the two different sections and they were completely different rides.

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(1) Really? That’s so basic I hardly want to comment.

(2) We all run out of gas on occasion, but it’s still a rookie move. Check your fuel levels! Set your odometer and know at what number you need to refill.

(3) It happens. You slip on a rocks in a driveway, put your foot down in a pothole, knock your bike into your friend’s bike…. It’s always embarrassing no matter which way you slice it. I have dropped a bike once in the past ten years. Well, twice now.

All three of these things do happen, but usually not in the same day.

DR Seat

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Got home after dark to find my new lower seat for the DR waiting for me! (thanks FedEx!)

This evenings workshop where I took off the Big Blue.

Kind of a wonky self-portrait, but trying to show that I can finally touch the ground – and with both feet even! I’m not flat foot, but good enough!

Lookin’ good!

Tomorrow I’ll shorten the kickstand (somehow? with a little help from my friends….) so that it doesn’t tip over when I try to kick-start it.

ambiance

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There is a lot of ambient noise in my house.
The tv, fridge, microwave, computer, monitor… all give off this high-pitched whine.
I’m sure you’ve heard it, or felt it on some level. It’s an extra bit of high tension current oscillating in your living room.
There are plenty of days that I never notice this intrusion. Those are the days that should concern me.

My dad and I had a tool we called, “Damage Assessment”.
The way it worked was you go into the country, somewhere with only trees and fields and a night sky full of the Milky Way.
The measure of how weird it feels to be disconnected from all your phones and tvs and cars and radios and fluorescent lights and microwaves and jack hammers and neighbors and everything you are used to from living in a city is your “damage assessment.”
If you don’t feel odd at all, good for you! You aren’t damaged from your city livin’.
However, if you feel nervous, or vulnerable, or disconnected – the intensity of that feeling is equal to how much living in the city has fucked you up.

Do you remember how quiet it was the afternoon of 9-11 and the following days?
I remember walking my dog and wondering about the odd silence.
I was living in Chicago at the time. A city that gets just a wee bit more sleep than New York. Alyosha doggie and I went outside. There was something different, but I couldn’t exactly place it. There were fewer cars on the road, and not as many people walking on the sidewalks, but that wasn’t it.
I looked up and realized that there were no airplanes in the sky.
Chicago has a highly trafficked airspace. It has two major airports (O’Hare and Midway) on opposite ends of the city, plus some smaller airports (well, Mayor Daley took care of one of those in 2003) With no air traffic, there was a solitude to the city sky. It was unnerving to have a quiet in that vast blue overhead.
There is something intrinsically wrong with feeling weird because the sky is silent of machinery cutting through it.

When there is a power outage in your home, block, neighborhood, it is quiet. Storm-related power outages were not uncommon when I was a kid. I cherished those times. It was so peaceful, and exciting at the same time. We kept a heavy yellow flashlight magnetized to the fridge. Mom or I would retrieve it, then we would open the drawer with the thick white emergency candles. We lit those candles and placed them strategically around the house. We didn’t want to challenge the darkness, we welcomed it (but still wanted to be able to read).

Elie Wiesel wrote in his book, “Dawn”
“Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn’t know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.”

I think that all these gadgets and noise and electronics act as a buffer for us against the night. We have an instinctual fear of the dark, but like many of the residual animalistic instincts we still have buried in our reptilian brain, over the millennia it has gotten distorted and misshapen into a caricature of what it started off for us: a protective device. Now we Masters of The Physical World fight back against the dark, our unknown assailant, by flooding it with neon and spotlights and noise in hopes that will keep the shadows at bay.