Through the past brightly
“Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty Been down, isn’t it a pity? Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city All around, people lookin’ half dead Walkin’ on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head”
— The Lovin’ Spoonful from
“Summer in the City”
REMUS 6-15-22
It’s a bit of a stretch referring to Remus as a “city,” it’s not even incorporated. It’s run by the Township Office which I think is open 9 to 1, every other Wednesday. Be that as it may, it was the only hot weather song I could think of.
Yesterday it reached 80, a proclamation I’ve been looking forward to making since last September. We heard last night that it was going to be in the 90s today (it is) so before we went to bed, Debbie, who hates to give Consumers’ one more penny than absolutely necessary, stated she’d be getting up early to shut all the windows in the house and turn on the AC.
I woke up early this morning to, you know, for like the third time. As I lumbered out of the bathroom, half awake, half naked, disheveled and looking like a refugee from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I encountered Deb in her nightgown. I looked at her blearily.
“House is secure, Cap,” she said.
I cracked up, partly because it was so quick and off the cuff and partly because in 43 years of marriage, she’s never before referred to me as “Cap.” It’s like being married to Katherine Hepburn, except Deb’s cuter.
At this point I can hear half of you saying, “What happened to Part 4 of your First Motorcycle?” Am I right? The other half of you are groaning, ‘Not more motorcycles.”
Well, I can’t stop in the middle of a story so here’s how I ended up embarking on what turned out to be a 2,000 mile trip on an ancient hunk of British iron I’d only been riding for eight weeks.
“Let’s go on a bike trip,” my friend, Mike, said, flush with excitement after swapping his Honda 450 for a brooding black 750cc BMW. Mike had already been on three trips, one down to Florida, one to northwestern Ontario and another, in early fall, all the way to Quebec. In a café in Magog, Mike knew just enough high school French to hear the word “fools” tossed in his direction. Snow was in the forecast.
Our friend, Rob Shackler had accompanied Mike to Canada both times. On one of those trips, Mike glanced in his rearview mirror in time to see Rob and his Honda part company and bounce spectacularly down the road before settling in a tangled heap. Miraculously, neither had sustained serious injury and both man and machine were able to reestablish enough equanimity to continue the long ride home.
Before we could leave, there were a couple things I needed to attend to. The first was insurance. After purchasing all my motorcycle dude gear, I was pretty strapped for cash so Mike took me to a cutrate agency in town, namely — Lloyd’s of Lansing. I’m not kidding. I can’t recall the cost or the coverage but it wasn’t much.
After that, I raided my savings and purchased a new rear tire and rubber fork boots. Mike showed me how to take off the rear wheel for one and the front wheel for the other. Using my crack reverse-engineering skills, I was able to reassemble the same on my own.
A couple weeks and two paychecks later, I was ready to go. It was early September and as we were heading to Canada, there was a real possibility we’d encounter some cold weather. The rest of the country thinks of Michigan as “up north” but look at it this way — we’re in Canada’s Gulf of Mexico.
It was a brisk early morning in Lansing when we assembled in Mike’s driveway to check our gear, then headed north on U.S. 127 on three vastly dissimilar bikes, a ’76 Honda 450 scrambler, a ’71 BMW R75 and a ’69 Triumph Daytona 500.
We’d been on the road for nearly five hours when, just south of the Soo, my clutch cable snapped. A “pickle.”
And so it went.