In the beginning, there was the road

[grado]

[grado]

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE ROAD, and it became our sanctuary. The Spring Valley Road rose and fell, snaked and weaved, twisted and dodged its way through miles of knobby hills. The terrain was tough and hard, but most of all, just stubborn. The road had fought its way into the countryside, running in and out of short valleys, skirting the highest reaches, and sidestepping any head-on confrontation with those squat hills.

The road and the country battled to a standoff. The country yielded territory but held the asphalt road to lower ground.
Spring Valley and its road was first our refuge by default and necessity. We were two friends, high in spirit and short on credit, who bought into motorcycling at the lightweight plateau: an ex-demonstrator 125cc Capriolo and a used 200cc Ducati. Memorable these little Italian singles were, but not for their brilliant speed. Motorcycles with huge cylinders simply whistled past our under-achievers. Tagging along on a big bike excursion meant living through an afternoon of agony. One clutched the gastank with his whole body and locked his kneecaps into his armpits. Even wrenching the throttle-grip hard against its stop and steaming away at a remarkable 65 miles per hour left us fair game on four-lane highways, where, in the airwake of passing cars and semis, our bikes bobbed all over the slow vehicle lane.

So we abandoned busy streets, highways, and all other places where paths went straight. The penny-league stoplight racing we left to hot VWs and quick Morris Minors.
We stayed clear of big motorcycles which always humiliated us. And one day we found the valley road it marked it as our special province.
The road was tailored to those small lungers. Corners came in quick succession, and the pavement ran along in roller-coaster fashion. A full charge on downhill runs would nearly carry the bikes over the following crests; given a flying start on most upgrades, the tops could be cleared in third gear. The road held surprises too. It would suddenly swing off to the left or right behind a rise, or unexpectedly dart out of view around the side of some hill. The motorcycles lent themselves to only one riding technique-blasting flat out in every gear, diving into corners and touching the brakes as late and as precisely as possible.

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 The great danger was scrubbing off too much speed. Since our machines had so little power and such poor acceleration above 40 or 50 miles per hour, it was impossible to compensate immediately for overbraking into a corner. A braking error would open a gap between the bikes, and it might take the pursuer a dozen corners to close the distance down again. The leader never politely slowed down to allow his shadow an easy catch-up; every man for himself.
Riding this way demanded full use of that narrow macadam road and a stoic outlook toward blind corners.
Normally fools and their motorcycles soon part under these circumstances, but in our case the Gods of Benevolent Probability must have loved stoics. Near misses, but no tragedies. So our unscathed egos worked a strange alchemy, transforming foolhardiness into bravery, dumb luck into skill, and recklessness into finesse. At the time, the transformation felt real; later, the alchemy just seemed a peculiar kind of road madness.
The rides never ended because they moved through a constant three-part cycle: prologue, road feature, and re-cap. The prologue hardly dealt with the preparation of equipment in any conventional sense, inasmuch as what went on inside forks, shocks, and engine casings was all a mystery to us. We possessed that faithful reverence born of sheer ignorance. Dreaded was the day when a well-placed rap on the headlight nacelle would not cure any electrical ill, since removing the headlight laid bare an ominous collection of wires which looked like four pounds of tangled spaghetti noodles. We poured over owners' manuals but never screwed up the courage to go poking around inside those caverns where parts turned, meshed, and went up and down.
Although old timers might bring out degree wheels and feeler gauges to prepare for their rides, our prologue had a non-technical bias. We armed ourselves with brushes, sponges, chamois, solvents, polishes, waxes— and went to work. After all, one felt obliged to go through some elaborate preparatory motions, if for no other reason than this ritual heightened the importance of the road feature. Nonetheless I had another secret mo-tive. Being without mechanical wit one, I considered this

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currying of bribing my Italian thumper into trouble-free service: if I took care of it, it would take care of itself. The ploy must have worked. The bike always ran. In a very fundamental way, the wash-and-wax routine was the very least-and the very most—we could do.
Since fear barred any internal tampering with the engines, necessity drove our
"speed tuning" into new channels. We sledgehammered footpegs, angling them upwards for more cornering clearance.
Western cowhorn handlebars came off, and in their place went short narrow bars which permitted a tighter and slipperier crouch. We marvelled at the topend bonus which this trick gave us: two or three miles per hour. Significant, we thought, for motorcycles which struggled to break 70 miles
Through the summer of 1963 and the ones that followed, an expansion and escalation began. We explored beyond the Spring Valley Road and eventually pieced together a half-dozen winding roads into a course which covered some seventy miles.
Before long, around us two developed a loose, shifting group of riders, bound together by an enthusiasm for motorcycling and an addiction for the road. Newcomers brought with them fresh equipment: lightweight Japanese twins, Spanish and Italian singles. We two, the discoverers of Spring Valley, stood in awe before these new 175s and 250s. The greatest puzzlers were the Bultacos which contradicted all of our vague technical ideas. To us, horsepower per cubic inch, mechanical complexity,
8%∞
and great speed were tied together in some unknown but valid way. Those motorcycles which were fast and powerful always gave external evidence of their inward complexity. According to our orthodoxy, one could spot the Elect within the congregation of motorcycles because the Elect looked the part. The Supreme Examples were European Grand Prix Roadracers, which bristled with outside plumbing, tow-ers, wires, tubes, and exposed whirring parts. Their external appearance vouched for their intrinsic excellence, whereupon it followed that those bikes had to be fast and powerful. Bultacos were heretics; they demolished our religious thinking about tech-nology. Without so much as a single overhead camshaft or second cylinder to offer, shiny and naked in their simplicity, the Bultacos flew. We knew our answer: only mechanical knowledge and internal modifications would save our Italian singles on the Spring Valley Road. We threw down our polishing rags and snatched up workshop manuals.
Strange how scrutiny dims a bright idea conceived in frenzy. Although the books dispelled a few basic mysteries, the workshop manuals-for the most part intimated us. They issued cryptic warnings which we could not understand, contained diagrams over which we pondered for hours, illustrated a dozen special tools which were far more expensive than they looked with tolerances we had no way to measure.

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We then devised our Beginners' Tuning-for-Catastrophe formula, wherein disaster equalled the cost of all speed parts plus the expense of special tools multiplied by the risk of ignorant errors and divided by any luck at all. The formula may have been poor science, but it was a grand rationalization for buying a new 250. The price of modifying the old single topped the cost of trading up to a Ducati 250 MK3. I was terribly elated. For twelve months I congratulated myself on avoiding the gallows-trap of novice engine building; these thoughts always cheered those days when another monthly payment for the new bike
Back on the road, where everyone stayed busy entertaining and scaring them-selves, the equipment spiral hit a ceiling of sorts. 250s and 350s reigned. Larger machines lacked the maneuverability, han-dling, and braking which racing on our roads demanded. Everyone agreed to this proposition, but perhaps it only masked the unspoken admission that we as a group had reached our natural equilibrium between skill and terror. No individual was really sure he could exploit a new super-bike fully on tight snakey roads, and no one cared to try it. So a tacit covenant of fair competition froze engine size at the 250-350 level.
No gentleman's agreement prevented a search for small edges. Low bars and high pegs became standard. Some chargers replaced their Japanese tires with British ones; other riders met this threat by switching to roadracing covers. Four stroke adherents snipped away at muffler baffles; here and there thinly disguised megaphones were slipped on. Two stroke enthusiasts countered with high compression heads. Soon brake backing plates were drilled for ventilation, and later brakes carried racing linings. Thereafter a contagion: racing tanks, alloy rims, hot cams, special pistons, porting modifications, huge carbu-retors, fairings. Challenge, Response, Re-taliation. Out of these machinations some friendly rivalries jelled; but through it all, feature events never degenerated into high-speed, low-blow grudge matches. The fellowship of the road prevailed
Adventure on the road lived on because we started talking when we stopped riding.
In quiet bars, roadside cafes, living rooms, basement workshops, and over the tele-phone, the group painstakingly recapped every ride: where the pavement felt slip-pery, how everyone missed all the chick-ens, what differences the latest engine mods made, why top speeds were down, who won the day's Lion of the Road award, where someone pulled a great riding coup on his fellows, why, why the racing brake linings failed to work, and how much new front forks might cost.
Above all we singled out crashes for particular effort, turning dangerous episodes into laughing stock. Once, in hard pursuit of a comrade

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who had just disappeared around a blind corner, I came upon him about two seconds later—he, hanging to his Yamaha's handlebars, and both hanging in midair. He did an all-points landing in a ditch. Startled and distracted, I immediately crashed too. This basic reality soon became elaborated, amplified, and elevated into our Comic Road Mythology. The original chase grew into a fierce, bumbling combat; cornering speeds rose 20 miles per hour; the altitude to which the Yamaha bounced went up ten feet; the position of my friend climbed yet another ten feet; and I got credit for a hectic slide before unload-ing. Six years after the crash, I listened to a complete stranger recount the heroic-com-ic version of the tumble. Everyone laughed, and that was precisely the point: to dress dangers up in funny clothes. Behind our laughter we realized what disaster could have happened, but that didn't mat-ter. Because it didn't happen: No one dwelt on grim probabilities as the latest recap opened into the next prologue.
Time caught up with the Spring. Valley Road. The highway department tore. up whole sections to eliminate some hazardous corners and to make the road run straighter and wider. So we forsook Spring Valley and chased down other roads. We didn't talk much about the destruction of our special province because grown men guard themselves against nose-blowing sentimentality. The magic of the valley, after all, was never hidden in its pavement, but in we who revelled on the road. Never-theless, Spring Valley was a very special meeting ground; we the congregation, the road, the sanctuary.
The repair work, which began in spring, stretched on through summer; by autumn the road still lay in ruin. Maybe the highway department won't ever repave the sur-face. And perhaps the stubborn countryside will some day reclaim its territory from the road.

Better that than a super highway.

[grado]

The above story credit goes out to the late Phil Shilling, at the time the managing editor of the now defunct CYCLE magazine.

[oldironnow]

Grado - Thanks for posting this.

It’s wonderful, and I’m nibbling at it.

[Fatfatboy]

I’ve not had time to read your story yet but I’m sure it won’t disappoint.

[grado]

Fatfatboy wrote

I’ve not had time to read your story yet but I’m sure it won’t disappoint.

It’s not mine, it’s out of an old CYCLE magazine. Early 70s
I believe. It, to me anyway, was a strong enough piece that I never forgot it, and finally tracked it down.

[grado]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_(magazine)

I think Phil has a mention in the past editors somewhere.

(If you pull up the wiki article, click on Cycle magazine).