Chapter 4 - Three for Texas
We arose early, determined to get an early start and put some miles
between Fort Bragg and us. After coffee and Danish at the motel, we
prepared for our ride. My bike was wet from dew and I spent a few
minutes wiping it down with a motel bath towel. It was chilly and damp
but the sky was blue. The first hour would be cold, but the day promised
to warm quickly. It is a shock to feel the cold go through your body
after you roll onto the highway and get the bike up to 70 miles an hour;
less than an hour ago, I was in a warm bed. We only went about 45 miles
before I needed to pull over and have a coffee; I really wanted a break
to warm up a bit. I topped off the gas tank while we waited and drank
the hot beverage slowly. But the sun was rising and the day was warming;
after 20 minutes or so, we were on our way west again. By mid-morning,
we were in Atlanta, and the traffic was heavy still. We continued around
the city and picked up I-20; it felt like some sort of milestone to
reach this road, a road that would take us into the West.
After Atlanta came the Alabama state line and we crossed into the
Central Time Zone. At the state line was an impressive sign, more like a
billboard, that proudly proclaimed “Welcome to Alabama, George C.
Wallace, Governor”. There was a picture of Wallace there as well, along
with other officials names and pictures; the sign was in good shape and
unmarred by graffiti or other vandalism.
The next obstacle was Birmingham, Alabama. The highway was not complete
so it took some time to work our way through the maze of construction
and conflicting signs to finally reach the highway on the other side and
get the bike back up to speed. It was warmer now, and we made good time.
As we entered Mississippi, we passed a white stone obelisk with the
vertical words “Mississippi State Line” emblazoned on it. Our goal was
Jackson, and if we could make it that far we would have completed a
travel day of about 500 miles, a long day on a motorcycle. We pressed on
and entered Jackson in the early evening. We checked into a motel and
unloaded our gear. That was a long day on the Honda and I was ready for
a hot shower, and a shot and a beer. We were all ready for something hot
to eat.
We walked over to a bar and restaurant that had a large and loud
clientele, and we quickly joined in with a few of the locals in small
talk and drinking. We talked with some patrons and the people there
seemed interested in hearing about our recent discharge from the
service, and what the Army had been like at Fort Bragg. When they
discovered that the three of us were Vietnam veterans we found a few
more rounds set up on the bar in front of us. We had hot sandwiches and
a few more drinks with our new friends; we then called it a night and
walked back to our motel. I was getting tired, being out in the wind and
traveling fast like that for a long day can take it out of you. It had
been a good day, we had covered a lot of miles and dinner was an
enjoyable evening. I was soon asleep.
The next morning it was the same routine, wipe off the dew on the bike
in the early morning chill and dampness. Just as I did yesterday, I
pulled off the highway after 30 minutes to have a coffee and warm up. I
topped off the gas tank while we waited. Heading back to the highway we
were soon riding through Vicksburg. Talk about southern areas that were
still fighting the Civil War, Vicksburg did not officially celebrate the
4th of July until 1944, almost at the end of World War II. War wounds
heal slowly.
We drove out onto the old Vicksburg Bridge and for the first time I
drove across the Mississippi River. I had flown over the great river
twice, once on my way to Vietnam, once returning. The bridge was long
and narrow with a steel-cantilevered truss construction style. Pulling
into Louisiana there was a simple sign on the side of the road
indicating the Louisiana state line. The sign was a vertical pole rose
up six or seven feet to where a horizontal arm extended off towards the
road. This arm had two chains that supported the sign suspended below.
One chain was broken and the sign dangled in the wind as it hung from
the remaining chain at the other end. The quality and pride evidenced by
the Alabama sign was in no way evident here. I thought back to the movie
‘Easy Rider’, Captain America and Billy were senselessly killed in this
state; I felt uneasy wearing my Captain America motorcycle helmet. That
movie was still fresh and controversial in 1971. I turned the throttle
on, the sooner in Texas the better.
Early in the afternoon we pulled off the highway for lunch and gas. I
also had to change the oil, something I always tried to do every 1000
miles or so. It was hard to grasp how fast these engines were, how high
the RPM. It was a wonder they held up, but the Honda was a great
machine. I put the bike on its stand, it would be good to have lunch
first and let it cool a little before changing the oil. I looked at the
bike fondly and remembered when I bought it, and the events around my
first oil change.
*** July, 1970 – buying the Honda and the first oil change ***
I had looked at some other bikes before settling on the Honda. A friend
of mine introduced me to someone selling a big red used BSA. It had a
lot of chrome and a fearsome sound. It sat high off the ground and I was
short. The British bikes also had a temperamental reputation; you needed
to be a mechanic to own one. This bike was several years old, and one
person discreetly told me that this was not a machine that a person
could depend on. This bike would not hold up to being ridden many hours
over long distances. This was a local street machine, good for fast
trips between cafes. I continued my search. Next, I followed up on an ad
in the local paper that touted a used Triumph 500. I went to look at it
and take a small test drive (something I was very uncomfortable with). I
quickly realized that to own this bike would be to invite the kind of
problems one might encounter with the BSA, but in spades. I deferred.
Soon after, I decided on the Honda.
I purchased the bike one July evening in 1970, and got it delivered and
unloaded at my parent’s house in Manchester. Early the next morning I
wheeled it out to the driveway and propped it up on the work stand.
Although Connecticut did not have a mandatory helmet law at the time I
figured that it was a good idea for a beginner. The one mandatory
accessory for all riders was eye protection.
I put the helmet on along with some sunglasses, and climbed on to the
bike and started it. It was a weekday and my father was at work; my
mother looked out of the living room window. I put it in neutral and
rocked it off of the work stand. Waiting until the road was completely
clear in both directions I pulled in the clutch and gingerly put it into
first gear. With a just a few jerks and a little riding of the clutch I
entered out on to a street for the first time, just barely negotiating
the left turn out of the driveway without stalling it. I headed down
towards a Methodist Church with a large parking lot area. I got up to
third gear and felt the wind in my face for the first time before
reaching the turnoff to the church. I carefully made a right turn into
the church lots as I noticed the small line of loose gravel I had to
cross.
For a solid hour I rode the lots, turning left and right, stopping and
starting, occasionally stalling, until I began to feel a little
accustomed with the weight and power of the bike. The smallest patch of
sand brought back memories of dumping my bicycle as a kid and I was
afraid of it. As the time went by my confidence grew. I left the lot and
drove back home. My mother drove me to motor vehicles where I got a
motorcycle riding permit, signed up to take the written exam and road
test the following week, and got a book on safe motorcycle operation. I
had one hour of operating time under my belt, there were many more to
follow.
With permit in hand I set about getting some serious riding time in and
I quickly left Manchester for the rural roads of the surrounding towns.
It did not take long for me to realize that I did not like the busy city
areas with four way intersections and lights. The trials of the previous
year and half seemed lost in a distant past; cruising through the
countryside on those warm July days made me feel incredibly alive. In a
few days I added night riding to the experience. I would seek out the
roads that crested the high hills in the countryside. Some of these
roads would allow views of Hartford or other cities and towns lit up in
the distance.
I read the operators handbook that I had received from the motorcycle
licensing section at the state motor vehicles department. Actually, I
read it through a couple of times since I could not afford to fail the
upcoming test. It was filled with general information but the new rider
could learn something in there as well. Of course there were the
passages on driving defensively and looking, and thinking, ahead. But it
also talked about the road surface and divided a single driving lane
into three distinct parts: left, center, and right. It strongly
cautioned the rider about being in the center section of the lane
because that section could be very slippery as it was more likely to
accumulate oil and fluids that leaked down onto the road from autos and
trucks. It told the operator to drive to the left or right of the center
of the lane; this was good advice, especially if a little bit of rain
was added to the mix. It strongly cautioned the new rider against riding
with a passenger until they had attained a certain level of proficiency
with their machine and gained enough experience. This seemed only
logical. It also cautioned against riding abreast of another bike, and
how easy it was for one rider to react to a situation on the road and
cause both of them to go down.
I chose to drive on the left side of the lane that I was riding in.
Everything in life that is a choice has a pro and a con related to it.
The con was that you were closer to oncoming traffic by being in the
left third of your lane. You especially felt this if you were leaning
into a left hand turn and an oncoming car was drifting a little across
the center lane. For me, the pro side of the decision was that I did not
like to be so close to the guardrails and other types of fencing that
lined the roadways. The edge of the right side of the lane was also the
side of the road where the gravel would accumulate from the sanding of
icy roads in the winter. The left side seemed to offer more reaction
room and therefore more options in the event of a crisis. I chose the
left side; many of my friends rode in the right. It was a matter of
personal preference.
Every day, sometimes several times a day, I would experience the “close
call” that would bring my heart up into my throat: someone pulling out
in front of me, the person who drifted into my lane on the highway, or
the slide of the rear wheel in gravel as I was leaning into a turn.
Driving defensively really meant something on a bike, and I began to see
escape lanes or buffers around certain riding situations in case I had
to react to something in a hurry. I met some other riders during this
period, and I learned from them by both watching them ride and listening
to them as they recalled their experiences and near misses. I was a
sponge to everything two-wheeled.
I made some longer jaunts as well; I traveled down to the shore and over
to the rolling hills in the western part of the state. I loved to stop
by a river or an overlook at night and, after shutting the machine down,
sit there in the darkness on a rock or picnic table and listen to the
night around me. The hot metal of the engine would make soft ticking
noises as it cooled. The red of the Honda would be black in the
darkness, but the chrome and polished steel of the machine would pick up
the smallest bit of light and show the outline of the four hundred pound
beast as it sat there, waiting to be let loose again. Eventually I would
once again throw my leg up over the seat and ease it up off the
kickstand; with a touch of the starter the big machine would come to
life. The headlight would send a bright beam forward into the night, all
the brighter now with my eyes adjusted to the dark.
It did not take me long to realize what a wise decision I had made in
purchasing the Honda. It was a beautiful gloss candy apple red with a
black seat and plenty of chrome. It weighed over 410 pounds and it had a
solid presence on the road; at 450cc it had a bigger look and feel than
other makes with larger engines. Though it was too heavy a bike to be a
scrambler, I enjoyed the looks of the upswept pipes on the side, as well
as the additional ground clearance that came with that configuration. It
produced about 45 horsepower at 9000 rpm and could do the quarter in
just over 13 seconds. It handled beautifully and was a joy to ride. And
there was one other thing that I was just now learning and would
appreciate through all of my riding years, the dependable reliability of
the Japanese motorcycle and the quality of their engineering.
I quickly put 500 miles on the Honda and so I prepared for the first oil
change. After changing the break-in oil this first time, the interval
would then be every 1000 miles of riding. When I thought about the high
rpm these bikes pulled I felt that that kind of interval between oil
changes was pretty reasonable. I pulled the bike up on its work stand;
this held it securely with the rear wheel off of the ground. I took the
tool that fit the drain plug from the little rolled up tool set and put
it on the plug at the bottom of the bike. It would not budge. I yanked
and pulled and tried a hammer but all these attempts failed to loosen
the big plug. I put the tools back in their place on the bike and drove
it over to the Honda dealer in Manchester. A sales clerk approached me
when I entered and after I told my story of the plug he directed me to
the rear and the area where the mechanics worked. In an outdoor area
that was fenced off in the rear of the dealership I found a mechanic
working on a bike with his back to me. He turned to face me as I came in
and we were both shocked.
Sitting at the bike in front of me was Buddy Linders. He was a year or
two older than I was and when we were in high school we moved in
different crowds. I had run in to him one day somewhere in Vietnam and
we were glad to see each other. At the time it was unusual to see a
familiar face, a face that made you think of home and let you know that
home really existed as opposed to just being a distant concept somewhere
in your memory. We chatted briefly about the normal things soldiers do:
what unit we were with and where we were stationed, how much time we had
left in country, how we were, if we had seen anyone else we had known.
We shook hands, smiling and wishing each other luck, and went our
separate ways.
Buddy was now out of the Army. He had been drafted into the service and
if you did a tour in Vietnam as a draftee they basically let you out
upon your return. A draftee would report to a training depot, get fitted
and issued all his gear, and then wait to be assigned to a basic
training company. After basic came a leave and then a training stint
that lasted at least two months. If you were going to Vietnam you then
had, after travel time, a thirty-day leave at home before you had to
report to Oakland for shipment overseas. And if you told them that you
took ground transportation from Connecticut to Oakland as you reported
you could add six days to your time. Leaving Vietnam meant that you came
back to the states to a post on the west coast. If you now added up the
travel time to get home from the west coast and the thirty days leave
you would have there, followed by the travel time it would take to get
to your new post after your leave, you would find that you would have
about five months or less to serve. So instead of reissuing a draftee
all of his stateside gear and paying him for five months to sit in some
Army post, feeding and housing him, while he bitched and moaned and
complained about the Army prior to his discharge, the Army chose to just
let them go. Not surprisingly, not enough of them were re-enlisting to
make keeping them for their entire hitch cost effective. So it was with
Buddy. I felt a pang of jealousy talking with him. I wanted to be out as
well.
We were smiling at each other as we stood face to face and talking in
our hometown. We caught up on what had transpired since our last
meeting. I told him of my coming trip to Ft. Bragg and of the time in
the Army I had yet to serve. We both agreed that the prospect of
spending another year and a half in the Army stationed at the home of
the 82nd Airborne was a major drag. He was a motorcycle mechanic and it
seemed to him to be a great trade. Honda’s bike lineup was really
becoming popular. He was seeing a girl I knew from high school; I said I
was happy for him. I told him about my new 450 scrambler and the stuck
drain plug. He said that Honda was notorious for sending their bikes
from the factory with that plug virtually frozen in. I brought my bike
around back and he opened the gate for me to come in; I stopped in front
of the bank of tools. He grabbed a long wrench with a socket on it that
was made for the drain plug. He put the socket on the plug then slid a
four-foot length of steel pipe over the arm of the wrench to serve as a
breaker bar. Even with that kind of leverage it took a grunt and a grown
to loosen it up. Since I was there he changed the oil and showed me how
to use a pair of snap-ring pliers to remove the ring that held the oil
screen. He cleaned it and returned it to its place, snapping the ring
back into place above it. I appreciated his friendliness and attention.
He looked great and it was really good to see him. The world is big and
strange, and we now shared an unspoken bond because of a chance
encounter some six months earlier in Vietnam. Neither of us had the
words for it. I said thanks and we shook hands and said our goodbyes.
Yes, we would try to get together again sometime in the future, when I
was out of the Army and back at home. I wheeled the bike out through the
gate, threw my leg over the seat and fired it up. We nodded to each
other and I left.
*************
So that was the memory of my Honda’s first oil change, almost a year and
a half ago in Manchester, Connecticut. Here today in 1971 and in
Louisiana, I prepared to change the oil for the first time as a
civilian. I got a pan from a mechanic at the garage and rolled the bike
over to the side of the garage where the grass and dirt was packed down
hard. I put it up on the work stand and threw a piece of cardboard down
on the ground to lie on. I got the tools out and. arranged everything
else I needed, then I got down to get to it. In less than a minute I
jumped up yelling and flailing. I was covered with ants! I yelled to
Gerry and Dave for help as I ripped off my sweater and T-shirt. The
three of us swatted and picked the biting insects off of me for what
seemed an hour. I was bitten many times, and my heart was pounding.
After cleaning them from my body I sat in Gerry’s car to gather myself.
My heart finally calmed down and my composure returned. Dave and Gerry
had cleaned the ants from my T-shirt and sweater. I put on my clothes
and moved the bike to a new location on the hardtop where I finished the
oil change. My hands were not steady; I was still shaking.
After what seemed an eternity we got our show back on the road. We had
spent a lot of time during the ant episode and our travel plans were
going to be cut short. We decided on Tyler, Texas, for our destination.
If we made it there it would mean that we would only make about 300
miles that day, not the kind of pace that we had planned on. So we
pressed on into the sunset, three for Texas. We made our way through
Shreveport and headed for the state line. I, for one, would be glad to
leave Louisiana. It was not an ‘Easy Rider’ experience, but the bastards
had got me nonetheless. Shortly we crossed the state line into Texas
where we passed a high quality sign stating: “Welcome to the Lone Star
State, Welcome to Texas.” Soon after was another sign that read, “El
Paso 802 Miles.” We were now in the West.
We passed Longview and came to the exit for Tyler. Tyler is not right on
I-20, and we headed down the state highway towards town. Eventually we
found a nice clean motel with some local food choices in walking
distance. We registered for a room and went to unload and take a shower.
I had red welts from ant bites everywhere, like measles or a rash. After
we cleaned up we walked down to the office to enquire about a place to
eat and have a beer, and where we might fill up our empty traveling
cooler and bar.
“Sorry boys,” came the reply, “you are in a dry county.”
My thoughts went back to the great time we had had in Jackson,
Mississippi, the night before. What a warm time it had been, what a
great dinner in a fun bar. We walked over to a restaurant.
Dave said, “I never even thought about that. We need to stay stocked up,
we’ll stop up near Dallas and take care of loading the cooler. What a
drag.”
“It’s just one night,” said Gerry. “If everything goes OK we’ll be at
Dave’s in Phoenix in 3 days. We’ll be ready for that.”
We had dinner and returned to the room, where we watched some TV and
drifted off to sleep.