Keep Peddling

When he was growing up, we all thought Harlan was crazy.  Oh, hell, he was crazy.  When he was five he rode his tricycle three blocks over to 16^th Street so he could ride down Peterson hill like his 12 year old brother regularly did on his full sized bike.  He almost made it to the bottom, too, except that according to Ned Clemson, our mail man and an eye witness, he hit a stray dog and went over the handlebars. “Flew twenty, twenty-five feet through the air,” Ned said. “And then bounced twice.  I thought he was dead.” That was the first time Harlan went over a set of handlebars; it wasn’t the last.

I was 16 and Harlan was 12 when he came up to me and my friend Paul outside of Paul’s house in Clifton Heights and asked us to dare him to take his banana seat, hi-rise 20” Schwinn down the ski jump that Paul and his dad had built in their back yard.  All the houses in that neighborhood were built backing onto a ravine with a creek in the bottom.  Paul’s dad was from Switzerland and had been a ski jumper so had built this steep track down into the ravine and then made a wooden ramp at the bottom that launched Paul about forty feet down the hill.  The problem was that, after landing, he had to turn sharply and stop before he hit the creek which was only another forty feet away.  “You’ll kill yourself,” Paul told Harlan. “Yeah?  So dare me then,” Harlan said.  “There’s no snow to cover up the little tree stumps and rocks in the landing area,” Paul added. “What do you care?” Harlan said.  I had lived three doors down from Harlan and his family for my whole life.  His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother raised their four kids.  I liked the whole family, but felt a little jealous of them. They always had the best toys and bikes and went on fishing trips to Wisconsin. “I’ll dare you,” I said. Harlan sneered at Paul.  “A buck,” he said to me.  “If I do it you have to give me a buck.”  I nodded.

We all headed into the back yard and to the edge of the ravine.  It was an overgrown jumble of trees and bushes so thick that you couldn’t see the creek at the bottom, except for the four foot wide swath cut right down the center which was largely bare dirt with hacked off stubble and stumps.  When covered in six or more inches of snow, the track would be even and smooth, but as it was, there was not even a clear path to the jump some hundred feet below.  The whole thing looked terrifying.  Harlan hopped on his bike and went over the edge without even looking back.

 “Jesus,” Paul said.  “He’s peddling!”

“Don’t pedal!” Paul and I both yelled.

Of course Harlan was already half way to the jump by the time he would have heard our yells.  “Harlan!” I added loudly, for no apparent reason and with no apparent effect.

Some people have unusual skills and abilities that go completely unnoticed in them by everyone around them. I had never realized that until I saw Harlan go down into the ravine. To be honest, it is only in retrospect that I became fully aware of his talent.  At the time, I thought perhaps it was just dumb luck.

Harlan guided the front wheel of his bicycle through the intricate maze of stumps, stubble and rocks with a series of tiny twitches of the handlebars and a heavy dose of body English.  He was still upright when he hit the ramp.  From our standpoint, Harlan appeared to rise fifteen feet off the ground, but that would be a measurement taken parallel to the slope.  In fact, at the point when he was flying over the deepest part of the ravine, he was probably fifty feet in the air. At about that point, he seemed to realize that his landing might be better made without his bicycle under him, and he jettisoned it to his left. When he landed, he was on the far side of the ravine, about eight feet up the slope in a thick tangle of wild raspberry bushes massed between two large cottonwood trees.

Later, Paul said, “I told him not to pedal,” and added, “I thought he was dead.”

When I visited Harlan in the hospital, his left leg and right arm were in traction and his face was bandaged from the cuts he had sustained from the raspberry bushes. As soon as he saw me he said, “Where’s my buck?”

After I graduated from high school, I went away to college and didn’t spend much time at home.  To be honest, I wasn’t that interested in maintaining relationships with my high school friends.  They all wanted to stay where they were; I wanted to see a lot more of the world.  I lost track of Harlan, though I saw his picture in an issue of Cycle World that I had picked up in a barber shop in Boston. The photograph had caught him in the middle of a huge endo while practicing for the Springfield Mile. The caption said that he had broken a leg and was recuperating in a local hospital.  They quoted a corner marshal who had witnessed the crash.  “It was incredible! He almost wrestled the bike upright and back into shape.  When he finally lost it, he somersaulted three times and then hit the wall. I thought he was dead.”

I was almost 40 when I heard about Harlan again. The head office of the bank I was working for had sent me to London.  I was in a coffee shop getting a cappuccino to take to work one morning when I heard my name being called.  I turned to see Harlan’s brother, Cliff, standing in the next line.  We sat down for a few minutes and he told me that Harlan was in a hospital a block away.  He had been racing on the Isle of Man and crashed into a stone wall at 120 miles per hour. The motorcycle had hit the wall first and, according to Cliff, saved Harlan’s life.  “It was miraculous! The bike broke through the wall first; when Harlan hit it, it was already half rubble, not nearly as solid as it had been. He sailed right through it.”  He paused, then added, “Even so, when the ambulance got there, the paramedics all thought he was dead.”

That afternoon, I went up to see Harlan.  He was in a room with four other patients, all of whom had casts and/or bandages covering parts of their bodies.  None had casts like Harlan’s; with one leg in traction, he looked like a mummy trying to walk up to the ceiling. He laughed when he saw me.

“I have to break something, I guess, before you pay me a visit,” he said. “Nice to see you.  Where’s my buck?” He laughed again.

I spent about 20 minutes with him, before the nurse came in to change his diaper.

We talked a little about the old neighbourhood but mostly about racing and motorcycles.  In the years since I had seen him he had raced in almost every kind of competition available: flat track, motocross, road racing, and in every case the people who had sponsored him had loved his potential but had nevertheless eventually always cut him loose.

            “I kept breaking their machines,” he said.  “They kept getting tired of paying the bills.” He paused for a second and looked hard at me.  “I always thought that the bikes had a little more in them than they did, that I could push them a little harder, that this time they would do what I wanted, what I could do... .” His voice trailed off.

            “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

            “This is going to take a couple of months they tell me,” he answered looking down the length of his plaster encased body parts. “They think they put everything back pretty much the way it is supposed to be.  I was thinking speedway might be fun to try.”

            I can’t say I didn’t expect it, but even so, it seemed preposterous to look at a guy, now in his mid thirties, wrapped in plaster, talking about more racing.  I was going to say, ‘You have to be kidding,’ or ‘Are you crazy?’  But I didn’t.  After all, I worked for a bank and wore suits and ties every day and had to put up with constant, relentless bullshit from other guys in suits and ties. And I knew that any thought of craziness had left me a long time ago. 

            “Well, I hope you can,” I said.  “It always looked like fun to me, too.”

  I better go.  I have a meeting in...” I looked at my watch.  I was fifteen minutes late. “...in five minutes.”

            “Thanks for coming, and thanks for not calling me crazy,” he added.

            I looked at him in order to give a good-bye nod, but he caught my eye and held it for a second.

            “It’s the speed,” he said.  “Only speed can do it.  You know?”

I didn’t, though standing there, I suddenly wished that I did, so I nodded.

“If I go fast enough,” Harlan said, “I can get to the point where...” He was looking for words.  “Where only my reflexes, my whole nervous system is fast enough, good enough to keep the bike up, and I know that I am going as fast as it is possible to go.   You know?”

I nodded dumbly again.

“Everything gets calm. It’s like being in an actual place, a self contained kind of...” He laughed self-consciously and stopped trying to explain.  I suppose he could tell from my expression that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

 “Of course, then I always try to go a little faster, and... well....”

A middle-aged nurse bustled in, interrupting him, and I used her arrival as an excuse to leave.  I think I said ‘Take care’ or something like that. It’s hard sometimes to say what you feel.  They say bankers are cold, objective, passionless. Maybe; all I know is I didn’t want Harlan to stop racing. A lot of people might say that wanting him to keep going was uncaring, even cruel, since the odds are that he would eventually kill himself.  I don’t think that’s it.  I just want him to have another chance to go as fast as it is possible to go, to enter that place he had tried to explain. To always keep peddling. Only a relatively few people can do that; none of them are bankers.

           

Pency O'Doule, Enthusiast Extraordinaire

Pency Meets His Match

As Pency and I wheeled into Falkland, Pency turned in his saddle to look back at me, his left hand on his hip.  I got the message.  It was my fault.  When I had set up the meeting with Big Ed, I had forgotten that this was the weekend of the Falkland Stampede, an important event on the calendars of both wannabe rodeo riders and wannabe outlaw bikers.  Everywhere one looked, there were Harleys, all along the main road, filling every front yard, lined up on every side street, Harleys as far as the eye could see. 

“A confluence of crap,” Pency always muttered about such events.  “Anachronistic excrescence.  An effulgence of flatulent Fatboys!”

Pency always made me nervous around Harley owners.  That’s because he wouldn’t keep his opinions about Harleys to himself.  Once he had passed fifty-five years of age, he lost all desire to restrain himself.

“It’s just too hard to keep it all to myself anymore,” he had once told me.  “Besides, I’m old enough now so that they won’t hit me more than once, and I think I can still take one shot to the head.”

It didn’t occur to him that his companions might be drawn into the fray, of course. Still, here we were in lovely Falkland, British Columbia, looking to make a deal with Big Ed on a new rear tire for Pency’s ZX-10.  Falkland’s five hundred permanent residents loved the annual Stampede.  They all made a fortune selling hotdogs, parking spaces, beer and marijuana.  Especially the owner of the hotel loved it.  He owned the only pub in town, and it was always full during the stampede.

We found a place to park around the corner from the hotel: two spots in a long line of Harleys, then walked back to the bar.  Pency never drank when he was on a bike; I never had more than one.

The place was jammed, cowboys and bikers were crammed shoulder to shoulder around about fifteen wooden tables and stood three deep at the bar. I was about to say that we would never get served when a middle-aged barmaid in overly tight blue jeans and  bulging breasts in a black leather vest sidled up to Pency with a tray of draft beer.

“You lads looking for a drink?” she said, in drawl that was half western and half British.  “Nice moustache, by the by?”

For some reason, women have always liked Pency’s moustache, particularly when he turned up the corners like a World War II, English Sergeant-Major.  Even now, drooping slightly and almost completely white, the moustache had obviously piqued the barmaid’s fancy.

“Coffee for me, Luv,” Pency said, almost smiling.

“Bud Light,” I said.  “Just a glass, please.”

“Sorry, dearie, but we only serve mugs at stampede.”

“Okay, a mug.”

Three large men wearing sleeveless black leather jackets bearing “Satans Spawn” patches got up from a table and brushed past us.  Percy immediately took the place of the nearest spawn before a silver bearded biker with a cane could sit down.  I sat in the chair opposite him.  Silver beard was not to be denied.

“Hey, I was going to sit there,” he said to Pency.

“There’s still one empty chair, mate,” Pency replied.  “Be my guest.”

To my surprise the guy sat down.

“Name’s Ziggy,” he said, holding out his hand.

Pency took it.

“Pency O’Doule.  This is Jim.”

I offered my hand.  Ziggy’s was rough and calloused.

“What do you guys ride, anyway?” Ziggy asked.

“A ZX-10 and a GPZ 1100,” Pency said, looking Ziggy in the eye.

“Rice burners?“ he snorted.

“Yes, it’s amazing what modern technology can do.”

“I couldn’t stand the buzzing and whining, myself,” Ziggy said. 

“I know what you mean,” Pency said.  “Though I usually go by so fast, I can’t hear the Harley riders whine. And the acceleration is particularly annoying.  I almost did my neck an injury last week.”

“Acceleration is one thing,” Ziggy said, “but it’s torque that gives a bike that feeling of power.”

“Ah, torque,” Pency responded, “the poor man’s horsepower.  What have they got the 1500 Harley up to now?  Eighty horses?”

“Eighty-four.”

“Well, only 82 more and you’ll match mine.”

“Boomer’s got more horsepower than that under him,” a man standing behind me said.

“Pull up a chair,” Ziggy siad. “This here is Frank. This is Pency and Jim.”

Frank grunted hello and slid a chair in next to mine.  He was about fifty with a greying pony tail and curved sunglasses.  His leather jacket had bug carcasses all over the front.  He reeked of marijuana.

“Really?  More horsepower?” Percy asked.  “What did Boomer do, load the hog onto his pick-up?”

“Very funny!  He put in a Stage Four Screamin’ Eagle engine,” Frank said.

“Put it into what?” 

“A Durango Brothers soft-tail custom frame.”

“And the forks?”

“Stanley springers with custom damping.”

“Tank, fenders, wheels?”

“Howard, Clean-line and Decourcey.”

“I thought we were talking about Harleys?”

“We are.  A custom Harley.  Those are just custom parts.”

“What parts aren’t custom?”

“Hey, it looks like a Harley and sounds like a Harley; that’s what counts.”

“Yes, indeed; my sentiments exactly. Well, good luck to Boomer then; I’m sure he’s happy.”

“He loves that bike,” Ziggy said, grinning. “He’s got over sixty thousand invested.”

“Chrome plating and custom paint was twenty alone,” Frank commented in a hushed whisper.

“My, god,” Pency blurted. “He could have bought a Ducati race replica for that!”

“That’s one of those Eye-talian crotch rockets, isn’t it?” Ziggy said.

“Boomer wouldn’t like them,” Frank added.

“You boys talkin’ about me?” a deep voice said from behind Pency.  A very large bearded man in a black, sleeveless tee shirt with a picture on the front of a large cobra wrapped around a naked woman hove into view.  He looked like Bluto, gone to seed.

The bikers at the table seemed glad to see him.

“Hey, Boomer!” Frank said. “We were just telling these boys about your bike.”

Boomer grinned.  “Yeah, well, it’s not quite finished.”

“What’s left to add?” Pency asked.  “Streamers and a raccoon tail?”

Boomer’s smile disappeared.

“Who’s your little friend, Frank?”

“Just met him, Boomer; I wouldn’t call him a friend,” Frank said in what sounded like a verbal retreat.

“Pency here doesn’t think your bike is very fast,” Ziggy said.  I detected a little goading taking place.

“Oh, yeah?” Boomer responded, not very enthusiastically.

“Maybe you should drag race him,” Frank suggested.

“Think so?” Boomer asked.  He sipped a little more from the beer in his right hand.

“Actually,” Pency said, “I never really thought much of straight line racing.  I prefer something with a few turns.”

I expected Boomer to make a disparaging excuse and change the subject.  He didn’t.

“Really?  Turns you say.  Hmmm.  I could fancy that.”

For the first time I noticed a slight Scottish burr in Boomers speech.

Pency smiled.  “You want to race me around corners on your your Harley chopper?” he asked with a grin on his face.

“Maybe.  Do I get to choose the course?”

“My friend, you can plot any course you wish as long as it has...let’s say...more than four corners in it.”

“How much?”

“You really want to lose money over this?” Pency asked.  “Well, I don’t wish to take advantage of you, but if you insist...twenty dollars?”

“Well, I’m not greedy,” Boomer answered, “but let’s say fifty.”

“Deal,” Pency said.  He looked at me and smiled, shaking his head slightly.

“Frank, what time is it?” Boomer asked.

“Ten thirty, Boomer.”

“Perfect.  Let’s fire ‘em up.”

We all got up and headed for the door.  Frank and Ziggy spoke to a few men on their way out and before I knew it, there were thirty or forty people walking out the door.  Pency and I started to turn toward the side street where we had parked but stopped when Boomer stepped into the street and picked up a helmet off the seat of a motorcycle. 

His bike was a custom Harley all right, but not a typical chopper.  It looked like a modern interpretation of an old 1920’s board track racer: sleek, spare, with low bars, clean lines and a lot of chrome.  Pency was impressed too.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” he said.  “It’s actually quite attractive.  Oh, well.” Then he added loudly, “My bike’s over here, Boomer.  Which way are we going?”

Boomer pointed north out of town.

Pency and I put on our helmets, climbed aboard, started the bikes and headed in the direction Boomer had pointed.  I was expecting a trip away down the highway to a section that wouldn’t have much traffic where an illegal race could take place in relative safety, but we had only gone a block when we came up to Boomer, stopped at the edge of the road.  He pointed toward the rodeo arena off to the left and drove off.  Pency glanced at me but followed.  Up ahead, Boomer had stopped just past some bleachers and was waiting, his Harley engine thumping slowly and loudly.  Frank was hurriedly opening up a gate that led into the arena.  Pency pulled up beside Boomer and motioned to him to turn off his motor.  They both took off their helmets.

“What’s this?” Pency asked, a little annoyed.

“The race course, my little English friend.  Two laps around the arena: four corners.”

Pency looked into Boomer’s face for a few seconds.

“You’ve put on a little weight,” he said.

“Aye, about six stone.”

Pency unzipped his leather jacket, reached inside and pulled out his wallet.  He removed some bills and handed them to Boomer.

“I saw you in ’76 in London.  You won every heat you were in.”

“Aye, good times.  Thanks.”

Pency put his helmet back on. He had to paddle backwards a bike length in order to turn around.  The men who had gathered to watch were laughing and applauding, not very politely.  I followed Pency to the outskirts of town and a little garage that had a few motorcycles in the drive and an old Dunlop sign on the wall beneath the words: Big Ed’s Garage and Motorcycle Spa.

When we had parked and taken off our helmets Pency pre-empted my question.

“Boomer McGhie was the best speedway racer in Britain in the Seventies,” he said.

“Well, he tricked you though, Pency.  He couldn’t expect you to race your Ten on dirt.”

Before he turned enter the garage he looked at me.  “He could have.”

Looking for Zen in a Thumb-Driven World

I saw a motorcyclist on Main Street last week.  A hardy soul. My car’s thermometer read -2, but then, such is the lure of motorcycle riding.  I have been a motorcyclist for almost fifty years, seduced at the age of seventeen by a black BMW idling quietly outside a Boston coffee house. The allure of motorcycling has been misappropriated slightly by the North American concept of The Biker.  Most motorcyclists around the world don’t ride Harley Davidsons, wear black leather or even have tattoos, and the notion of freedom for most does not mean free to terrorize small towns or engage in organized criminal activity. Of course, most people who call themselves bikers these days don’t do those things either; they’re accountants and grocery clerks, but they like to dress the part.

The real freedom associated with motorcycling has to do with the combination of the physical and emotional responses generated by riding the machine.  Out of all the modes of transportation ever invented for land, sea or air only the motorcycle requires a real human being to operate it; all the others can be driven by computers or remote control. A motorcycle, however, without a human rider, just crashes. Riding a motorcycle requires focus and one’s full attention both at slow speeds in town so that you don’t get run over by a car driver who didn’t see you, and at high speed on a twisty country road so that you don’t fly off at a corner.  One uses both hands and both feet to operate the controls, and the inputs of sight, sound, touch and smell are always being monitored.  Almost every motorcyclist can tell you how the smell of rain made them fortunately slow down before a dry, blind corner that exited onto a section of wet, slippery road. Combine all that with the wind, engine sounds, vibration and the fact that the rider and the motorcycle both constantly lean into turns to balance the forces of traction and inertia and one has an experience that is exquisitely visceral.

Which brings us to an article in the December 8, 2011, Vancouver Sun by art critic Kevin Griffin. In commenting on an exhibition at the Or Gallery called Studies in Decay, he mentions the video exhibit by Jordy Hamilton of a burning motorcycle being riddled with bullets. Griffin comments: “Once portrayed in popular culture and in films such as Easy Rider as the ultimate freedom machines, motorcycles and their internal combustion engines can no longer be separated from oil colonialism and their role in global warming. Even if motorcycles were once marketed as embodying rebellion and freedom, they’ve become the exact opposite today. Freedom is no longer what it used to be.”

Alas, many things aren’t what they used to be. The physical and visceral have given way to the immaterial and virtual.  Children no longer use their imaginations to turn cardboard boxes into club houses and fairy castles, or sticks into swords and magic wands. Now they sit in front of screens and play in someone else’s imaginary kingdom, moving virtual figures with their thumbs.

Socialisation no longer involves being in the presence of anyone at all. Both conversation and confrontation are conducted in cyberspace where people hide behind avatars, and personality and character are figments of the latest YouTube upload.

Freedom, always an elusive abstraction, may not be what it used to be with cameras on every street corner, and human rights routinely discounted for the sake of political expediency, but I know that it exists still. And when I encourage my motorcycle to propel me down lonely roads at extravagant speeds, all those visceral inputs of wind and sound and vibration, of gravity and inertia, acceleration and deceleration convince me that the elusive abstraction can almost be made concrete.

I am sorry that global warming may be changing the world for the worse, but I am sorrier still that some people see humanity’s future in cyberspace.  And though legislators may eventually rid the planet of all internal combustion engines, the motorcycle will remain in the minds of the last surviving riders a creation that was always far more than some marketing consultant’s illusion of freedom.  It was the real thing.

And it took more than a pair of thumbs to ride.

Pency O’Doule, Enthusiast Extraordinaire: Pency Traumatizes a Troglodyte

            I had told Dave Owen that I would meet the guys on the 1999 Tour B.C. run at The Goldpanner Cafe on Highway 6 between 10:30 and 11:30 on Thursday.  It was 11:45 and I was wondering if I had misunderstood.  Still, I knew that eventually they would have to pass by because it was the only way to get to Nakusp and the other fine British Columbia towns on Dave’s itinerary and still take in the best of the twisty, Southern B.C. roads.  As I glanced up from a dog-eared copy of the Coldstream Advertiser, I caught a glimpse through the cafe’s fly-specked front window of a ’96 Connie slicing past.  I slapped a toonie on the table to pay for the coffee and pushed through the front door.  By the time I had picked up my chaps and wrapped them around my waist another Connie, a ’94 had zipped by, followed by an ’86.  I had put my jacket on and was just sliding into my helmet when an ’87, identical to mine flashed by, on the back the tell-tale red waterproof stuff sack of Pency O’Doule.

            I launched myself out of the parking lot just in front of a fully loaded logging truck that was jake-braking on the slight downhill past the cafe.  I didn’t want to get stuck behind that kind of a rig as I began the chase to run down Pency and the others.   With a minute or so edge on the relatively traffic free highway to the Needles-Fauquier ferry, they would be able to crank on the k’s.  Obviously, I would have to crank on more. 

The rear tire skipped a little to the right as took off.  The road immediately dipped into a short left hander and then a long right around an outcropping of rock.  The mountains extended up a thousand feet here on either side of the creek.  They were covered in second growth pine and fir.  For most of the sixty kilometres to the ferry at Needles, the creek would be down to the left and the uphill slope on the right.  I settled into the rhythm of the winding road, trying to be smooth, to minimise my braking, roll the throttle on and off with a bit more finesse, give the sidewall tread a little more work to do. 

Out of nowhere, the realisation popped into my head that my Concours buddies had almost ridden right by me!  Why hadn’t they stopped at the Goldpanner as arranged?  Had they not seen my bike?  It had been parked right in front.  Pency must have seen it; Pency never missed anything.

Hardly had those thoughts entered my mind, when I exited a corner to find, a hundred yards in front of me, the red-bagged backend of Pency’s motorcycle, which had slowed to about sixty k.  Pency was half turned around on his saddle in the hurry-and-catch-up position familiar to all motorcyclists.  I waved him on with my left hand and we were off.  He hadn’t missed me after all.

The ride to the ferry was fabulous: sixty kilometres of twisty, traffic free, smooth and silky asphalt; thirty minutes of pure pleasure: swooping through a gradual left and right, hammering up an inclined straight, braking over the top and down, around again, throttle on, left and right, then braking, braking, bending it hard and harder still as the radius tightened, out, blasting out and down toward some little bridge, over, up, a glance at Pency’s stuff sack, still there, damn getting smaller, throttle on...  For thirty minutes: eyes wide, heart going, wind, air, heat, noise, both hands and feet playing the two-wheeled calliope just as hard and fast as I knew how to play.  As I said: fabulous.

We passed the other Connies one by one on the way, and another guy and his girlfriend on a twenty year old Yamaha 1100 cruiser.  By the time they caught back up to us at the ferry terminal, Pency and I were sitting at a little picnic table eating some of my stash of beef jerky, still grinning. 

Ferry terminal is a little bit of an exaggeration.  The highway just sort of disappears straight into the water of Arrow Lake.  It re-emerges on the other side, about eight hundred yards away.   A set of three, three inch cables runs across the lake guiding a twenty car ferry back and forth.  We had about fifteen minutes to wait until the ferry came back.  Ken McNair, Dan Paulsen and Wayne Stirrett were the other three Concours riders.  We took a few pictures to pass the time.  Within about five minutes, the Yamaha pulled up and the two riders got off.  The guy introduced himself as Phillip and his wife as Irene.  They appeared to be in their late thirties.  Philip was pleasant enough, but Irene had hardly taken off her helmet before she launched into a tirade about excessive speed and passing on yellow lines and bad name to motorcycling not to mention endangering life and limb and besides how could anyone see the scenery, they might as well be on a race track.  Phillip seemed a little embarrassed which is probably why he started diligently searching in his saddlebags for something. 

“Do you suppose he’s looking for a gun?” Pency muttered to me.

“Why don’t you just slow down so you can see something,” Irene concluded, and though she was not directing her comments to him specifically, Pency glanced at me, rolled his eyes and responded.  I was pleased to note that he employed his best, clipped British accent.

“You err, madam, to assume that the acuity of one’s vision decreases with speed.  The joy one gets from riding briskly is infinitely enhanced by the very scenery you so quickly assume we cannot apprehend.”

I bit off another chunk of jerky to disguise my grin.  Phillip looked up, a slight smile on his face.  Irene frowned.

“What?  What has all that got to do with just slowing down instead of being an idiot?”

There was a slight pause.  I looked at Pency whose eyes, I noticed, were now locked onto Irene and no longer blinked.  He took a small step toward her.

“An idiot?” he said.  “I see.  Madam, at 80 kilometres per hour, the speed at which you choose to travel, one engages the senses in the usual fashion, one at a time, as did the troglodytes of old.  One sees, or hears, or smells as the case may be.  Occasionally, the tactile sense makes itself known as the droning vibration of the motorcycle slowly creeps through the foam and then the cellulite to the lower pelvis.”

Irene opened her mouth to speak; Pency kept going.

“At 110 kilometres per hour, all the senses blur together in a charming cacophony of sensation which, while enjoyable, eventually becomes tiresome: one hears and feels and smells and sees everything in a vibrant blend of fuzzy feeling.  At 140 kilometres an hour, the speed at which I choose to travel, each sense in that blur separates into a very distinct rainbow of sensation; the speed requires that I see everything, hear everything, feel everything, smell everything.  Not a colour, whiff, click or vibration escapes my notice.  In the last sixty kilometres we passed one eagle, a red-tailed hawk, two dead racoons, one dead king snake, you and three deer, one of which was a buck.  The eagle was flying back to its nest with a small kokanee, the buck had four points, the bum of your jeans is starting to split, and the Yamaha is burning a little oil in the third cylinder.”

Irene hesitated.

“Oh, right.  As if!” she finally said, and turned away.

Pency wasn’t through.

“Did you, for example, at your sedate speed happen to notice what the last road sign said?”

“Yeah, I did, as a matter of fact,” she said turning back.  “It said ‘Fauquier: 3 kilometres.’”

Pency smiled.

“Actually, it said ‘two kilometres.’  And by the way, the name of the town is French, and its not pronounced FOKE-ee-yer.”

Ah, Pency, I thought, you just can’t resist, can you.  I looked at a smiling Phillip and wondered how he would take this.

“And I suppose you are going to tell me the correct pronunciation,” Irene said with a slight sneer.

“If you insist,” Pency said, and then, in his most charming, phoney, Pink Panther French accent replied: “Een France wee say: Foke-ee-AY.  Een British Columbia, wee say: Foke-ee-YOO, eh?”

Pency O'Doule:Enthusiast Extraordinaire

Pency Makes New Friends

            We were late as usual.  Pency’s rear tire was starting to hop under braking and he was beginning to lean his shoulders into the corners, a sure sign that he was trying to make up a little time.  I knew I’d be able to keep up, though, as long as his left knee didn’t start poking out into the air stream in the left-handers. He couldn’t poke his right knee out because his right hip was a little stiff from an encounter with a bullet when he was serving Her Majesty in Borneo in 1959.  Once Pency started poking out that skinny left knee of his, I knew he’d slowly pull away.  He was comfortable with about four more degrees of lean than I was, and whenever I became uncomfortable, I began to visualise the grills of Kenworth’s appearing suddenly around blind corners as I drifted across the yellow line.   Pency never seemed to think about things like that.

            The road we were on followed a winding river through the Rossland Range of mountains in the interior of British Columbia.  There was little traffic and the weather was brilliantly clear and warm.  Just ahead was a series of short, wide radius turns, one of my favourite sections of Highway 3.  It was new pavement: black, pristine asphalt, and the short curves were all about the same size and distance from one another.  Pency was on his ZX 9 and I was on my GSX 750.  On a road like that, even ageing riders could still feel like Mick Doohan.

            We were late because Pency had had another encounter with a radar gun.  He was usually pretty observant, seeing not only down the road, but all around as well.  He had great peripheral vision and even managed to somehow pay attention to the sky.  If he was in front, he’d often shoot a black gloved forefinger into the air,  off to the left, or right.  I’d look and there, flashing by at great speed, would be a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, or a somnolent moose staring up from some marshy stream, or a grazing mountain goat perched on a rock above the road.  I don’t know how he managed to see all that and still ride faster than I did.  Today, however,  he had missed the ghost car coming toward us with the telltale red and blue lights down low on the grill.  I had fallen a little behind and so was out of sight at the moment of the bust, fortunately for me.  The RCMP enjoy whacking everyone with a ticket in a tight group of motorcyclists.  By the time I came around the bend, the car was already slowing for the U-turn.

            Pency was laconic as usual.  No doubt the young female constable was surprised when he removed his helmet.  In his leathers, Pency appears young.  He only weighs about one hundred and thirty pounds.  He has escaped the middle-aged spread of his peers through heredity and reasonable eating and drinking habits: small portions of food, generous amounts of red wine. 

            “Ahhh, out grappling with the forces of evil once again,” I heard him say to the policewoman as I pulled up in front of them and turned off my motor.

            He always sounded pleasant, though the irony of his remarks ensured that he would never get off with just a warning.

            “Mr. O’Doule,” she said, looking at his license, “I clocked you at 125 kilometres an hour in a 90 zone.”

            “Indeed,” he replied.  “Since yours was the only car we’ve seen in the last forty kilometres, I must have been lulled into assuming that the road was safe at that speed.”

            Three points and a hundred dollars later we were back on the road trying to catch up to Dave Owen and his Tour B.C. group as they headed toward Lillooet and lunch.  The rendez-vous was scheduled for 12:30.  I hoped that we wouldn’t overtake any Harley riders before we joined them; Pency couldn’t afford another ticket and yet he was incapable of pulling up behind anyone on a Harley and not blasting past them at least a ton. 

            “Nineteen thirties technology!” he loved to sneer.  “Archaic crap ridden by troglodytes!”

            Pency didn’t mince words and rarely backed down.  He attributed that behaviour to his Irish ancestry and Jesuit education. And having to live down his nickname.  Few people realised what “Pency” was short for. 

 “Pencil Neck,” Pency confided one afternoon.  “Richard Dungate named me that at university, the miserable bugger!  But I got even with him when I out drank him at a party, and he wet himself in front of all our friends.  Everybody who was there still refers to moments of ultimate embarrassment as ‘a dungate.’”  

The road straightened out into a long uphill stretch; Pency opened it up to 150 k.  We came over a rise and immediately swooped down into a long right hander.  The pavement was still good and I knew Pency was dying to carry as much speed through the sweeper as he could.  The skinny right knee creaked out about four inches, all the hip could take.

A yellow sign appeared just past the apex of the turn, announcing a left hander and a reduction in speed to 60 k.  Pency’s brake light came on briefly and his left foot twitched down through the gears.  In smooth cruising mode, Pency would have gone through the turn at 100 k. in fourth, but I knew he’d be working harder this morning so I dropped down into third and kept the revs up.  We came out of the left hander hard.  There was a dusting of sand on the far side of the turn.  I saw Pency’s rear wheel hop six inches and I backed off a hair.  As I refocused my eyes further down the road, I saw two black forms disappear around the next corner; the squat, pendulous rear ends were unmistakable: Harleys, with wide bars and wider highway pegs that stretched the riders out until they looked like they were either about to be drawn and quartered or had just suffered a violent explosion in the front of their pants.

Suddenly, Pency was pulling away from me.  He had seen them too.  In an instant we were diving into a 120 k right hander, and then into a decreasing radius left.  I muttered an expletive as I saw Pency’s left knee jut out into the air stream.  He cranked it over hard, and I held my breath and followed.  The pavement was clean through the corner, but I flinched and tapped the brakes anyway.  Pency was fifty feet further ahead of me now, and the Harleys were in plain view.  They were riding side by side at about three-quarters of our speed.  The bike on the left appeared to be a hard tail with fairly flat bars; the one on the right had leather saddlebags and medium height ape-hangers.  There was a short straight stretch up ahead, followed by another left turn.  I expected Pency to keep on accelerating and pass the Harleys at high speed before the turn.  Instead, he backed off and shifted down, and I had to apply a little brake to stay behind him.   While I was trying to anticipate what he was up to, I saw the Harley rider on the left glance into his rear view mirror.  Suddenly, there was a little puff of smoke and a blat from his exhaust as he, and then the other Harley, began to accelerate.  Ah, Pency, I thought, you crafty old bugger; they’ve taken the bait.  Here we go. 

I wasn’t sure what gear I was in, but I dropped down two and grabbed a fist full.  Even so, Pency was accelerating away.  I could imagine perfectly the severe little smirk on his face beneath his grey moustache.  They tried, of course, thinking perhaps that with their three thousand dollar Screaming Eagle Mark III add-on high performance kits and their Lightning cams and their chrome-moly doo-das they could out straight-line Pency into the corner and then maybe hang on until the next straight.  Who knows.  With me following, he pulled out to pass them, still accelerating, as their brake lights went on in preparation for the corner; prudently, they took their running boards into account before entering.  Fifty feet further on, Pency  tapped his brakes and downshifted; out went the knee as he started to bend the Kawasaki into the turn.  Then, in a little flourish, he took his left hand off the bar, bent it behind his back, and waved his fingers, a gesture to which he referred on occasion as “the inverted bye-bye.”  As I followed him around the Harleys I caught in my mirror a glimpse of another gesture, not inverted and not bye-bye.