shinysideup No worries?
By Ron Davis #111820 JUST
WHEN IT
seemed we were going to remain snowless last December here in Wisconsin, winter storm warnings starting scrolling
across our TV screen, and sure enough, just before New Year’s, a blizzard pack- ing high winds and a foot of drifting snow crept in from the southwest under the cover of darkness. Tempera- tures stayed in the 20s, but the wind chills were dipping into single digits. Some- thing, maybe
that loose
shutter I’d been meaning to fix or a downed tree branch started slapping on the out- side of the house, but what- ever it was, I decided nothing was going to lure me out on a night like that. It apparently was an eve-
ning that called for a good book, but I was out of new stuff, so I went to my own little library for something worthy of a second look. Scattered among the shelves were a good number of motorcycle tomes, many of them contenders: Peter Egan books, Paulsen’s Zero to Sixty, Noren’s Storm, Bill Stermer on the R 100 RS, Pirsig, Pierson, Ron Ayres. But my finger finally came to rest on a well-worn copy of Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels. What better way to spend a snowbound evening than sharing a trek around the world on a motorcycle? For those who haven’t yet read it, the story opens with Ted running out
12 BMW OWNERS NEWS August 2016
of gas after taking a wrong turn in India near the end of his trip. His calm reaction to a breakdown like this (and his confi- dence in the prospects for the adventures it would lead to) really sets the tone for the whole book. The author’s memoir soon flashes back to the beginning of his jour- ney, and about 80 pages in we see a differ-
riding. I have to admit it, I’m a worrier. Maybe
it’s because I’m so hopeless when it comes to mechanical issues, or maybe it’s just in my DNA (my brother used to spend hours driving around at night when his heebie jeebies got to him, my dad drank martinis). Like Simon in the early part of his trek, once my thoughts are cloistered in my helmet, I think I tend to obsess a bit over what could go wrong. Is that the sound of a valve going south? Does that rear tire feel low? My tailbag’s still there, right? And is that a rain cloud? Re-reading Simon’s book, I started thinking back to my own past “misadventures” and how, in retrospect, maybe things going wrong might just be…all right. Take for instance when I pan-
icked as my Honda 350’s rear wheel began squirming around with my first flat. Sure, it was an aggravation, and it meant talking one of my college roommates into chauffeuring me around on his little Suzuki dirt bike for a patch kit, but how else would I have learned (from the same room- mate) how to break a bead or the nuances of setting the final drive chain tension correctly? About twenty years later, a drywall screw stranded me for a while at a BMW dealer in Green Bay, but while I was waiting I met a GS
ent Ted Simon. Tracing a rutted excuse for a road in eastern Africa, he describes a growing sense of dread about his fate on the trip, and he begins to fantasize about the countless things that could go wrong— crashes, injuries, mechanical failures, extreme weather. For some reason, the contrasts in Ted’s attitudes from the begin- ning to the end of his odyssey made me consider my own mental state when
owner who was in for bent rim. He enlight- ened me on the concept of “target fixation” (he had failed to avoid a chunk of 4x4 on the highway).
I also remember him
describing his 1150 GS (a bike I knew prac- tically nothing about at the time) as “heavy and slow” but still the “last bike I’ll ever want.” Coming back from a MOA rally in West Bend, Wis., my buddy and I pulled into a
the club
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