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.