Introduction

The American travel stories, some readers may notice, often have something to do with music. I’m a Blues fan and I play the guitar—as best I can—in a garage band that shares a floor space with my car and bike projects. So naturally my first long road trip for CW was a late-seventies musical odyssey on my Honda 400F down Highway 61 through Memphis and the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans. I repeated parts of this trip with editor Mark Hoyer—another hardcore music buff and guitar player—when we rode a couple of new Indians from Memphis to the Big Easy.

But perhaps the best part of this lifetime of riding bikes has just been the people. Barb and I threw a big party for my 70th birthday and realized that about 70 percent of our friends had some connection with motorcycling, without which we probably would never have met. There were some car racers, musicians, and airplane pilots (our other vice) in there as well, but bikes were the glue that seemed to hold it all together.

The Freelance Stories: 1977–1980 - Garage Ikebana

All i can say is I’m glad there’s no such thing as a surprise psychiatric inspection. You know, an unannounced raid on your home, a Freudian version of what the fire inspector does when he suddenly drops in on your place of business and writes you up for having oily rags smoldering in uncovered cans. If psychiatrists did spot checks, I’d have been taken away for sure.

It was a Thursday night, and there I was, out in the garage all by myself (wife gone visiting), drinking hot sake, positioning a chair in each corner of the garage like points on a compass, and moving three vehicles around into various experimental poses and juxtapositions—just like a Japanese ikebana artist arranging fern stalks and lotus blossoms in the most pleasing and Zenful way.

And—speaking of Lotus—one of the three machines was a car by that name, a 1964 Lotus Super Seven. The Super Seven is a lightweight English roadster that has been called 'a motorcycle on four wheels,' which, of course, it isn’t.

The Eighties - Alas, Albion

I Woke Up In The Night feeling uneasy, half dreaming something in the house was wrong. It was an odor. The human nose has a way of sending wake-up calls to the brain, probably dating back to the caveman’s fear and loathing of wolf breath, and mine had phoned a message that something was not quite right.

I sat up in bed and sniffed the air, confused for a moment. Then I relaxed. It was only the Triumph.

Ah, the British.

The aroma that filled our house had its source in the garage but had somehow found its way to the bedroom through a 5-by-7-inch cat door, across an entire dining room, and down a long hallway to the exact opposite corner of the house. Still, there was no mistaking it for anything other than the distinctive fragrance of leaded gasoline leaking past the float-bowl gasket of an Amal Monobloc carburetor, and from there dripping its way onto the engine cases beneath, like slow Chinese water torture. Even in the dark, I could picture the entire process.

The Nineties - High Finance

Novelist D. H. Lawrence once asked himself how it was possible that so many young Englishmen were able to leave the green, pastoral beauty of their farms to work in the coal mines, living deep underground for all their daylight hours. His answer? Motorbikes.

Young men wanted motorbikes, he said, so they could return to their villages and farms, take their girlfriends for a ride, and generally Be Somebody.

Personally, I never worked in a coal mine to get money for a motorcycle, but I did plenty of other odd things. So did my friend Denny Berg.

Denny owns a motorcycle shop called Time Machine, only a couple of blocks from my office. I’ve been spending a lot of time over there lately, partly because it’s a good place to hang out in the presence of Gold Stars, Harley XRs, Royal Enfield Interceptors, and other treasures that are being restored with meticulous care, and partly because Denny is building my Triumph engine.

Decade One Of The 21st Century - A Town Too Far

When I Rode Into Town about two hours before sunset, it occurred to me that Jackson, Wyoming, had everything a touring rider could want at the end of a long, hot day.

Motels, movie theaters, Mexican restaurants, invitingly cool bars with invitingly cool drinks, camping and fishing stores to browse in, bookshops full of books on Western history, and a large number of mixed tourists to gaze upon while eating an ice-cream cone on a park bench. The place was jumping.

Not that I’m normally drawn to places with hordes of tourists, but it is nice to be able to walk around town at night and get some exercise without being followed by the police car because you’re the only guy who isn’t home.

I cruised the entire length of Jackson to scope out the motels, riding all the way to the western city limits and noting that several inns still had 'Vacancy ' signs burning.

The Teens - Zen And The Art Of The Oil Change

These Days, a lot of younger, less experienced riders come up to me and say, 'Mr. Egan, you have an almost legendary reputation for being able to change the oil and filter on your motorcycles without spilling more than about 30 percent of the oil onto the garage floor or your own clothing. How the heck do you do it?'

I tell them, 'Well, kids, part of it is experience. I worked for almost a decade as a foreign-car mechanic, and I’ve also owned and maintained a lot of motorcycles in my life. But basically, it’s a Zen thing; you have to work thoughtfully and carefully, planning every move and wasting no motion. You have to be at one with your motorcycle and the molecular flow of lubricants in the universe.'

I’ve been asked this question so often, I thought it might be beneficial to our readers if I walked them through the stages of one of my typical oil changes. Let’s take the case of my Buell Ulysses, whose oil I changed just last weekend.