I learned to ride on one of these bikes that a friend was kind enough to let me ride. He took me to the top of a small hill, gave me some basic instruction, “one down, three up, this is the clutch and this is the front brake and this is the rear brake. You twist this to go faster … now turn this key, make sure it’s in neutral and kick it ‘til it starts”. I got the bike started, put it in gear and let off the clutch. The fact that the bike was pointed down hill kept me from killin’ it and away I went. My first ride was both thrilling and frightening at the same time. The bike kinda went where I hoped it would and I practiced shifting, stopping and starting until I kinda had a grasp of things. I immediately started looking for a bike to buy.

When I bought one of the bikes that a friend of mine had built I didn’t have a lot of experience. I had ridden a few times and was lucky that I hadn’t crashed. I later learned that crashing is part of riding, it’s just part of the sport. The idea is to crash at low speeds and not to hit anything that’s hard. For about three-hundred bucks I bought one of these Honda Scramblers and started riding with my bros … except we didn’t call them bros back then. I was still a teenager and the term bros wasn’t used in the movie that was our inspiration. The movie was “Wild Angels”. It came out in 1966 and starred Peter Fonda as “Blue”, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd and Michael J. Pollard. The plot went like this: a bike club goes to Mexico to recover a stolen bike and ends up getting in trouble with the police. One of the group steals a cop bike and is shot in the chase. He’s rescued from the hospital but dies and then the club buries him. The character Blue makes the profound statement that all they want is to be free to ride their bikes and not get hassled by the “man”. The film had a great sound track that my roommate and I would play before we got on our bikes and went out to terrorize the small Ozark town that we grew up in. We’d ride up and down the streets and around the town square looking for adventure, whatever came our way … we were, indeed, born to be wild!!!.

I was the new guy, kinda like a prospect, who hadn’t made his bones as yet. I didn’t ride up front cause I was still a little cautious and the older fellows; the ones with more experience rode up front. But I was still in the pack when we rode the forty miles to Branson, Missouri or to the State Line for beer or to the Lake to party and swim. We did the same things that bikers do now: we rode our bikes, drank beer and picked up broads. Our adventures were usually measured by how much beer we drank and how accommodating the girls were that rode with us. A few of these experiences no doubt solidified my views on life and ensured that a big part of my life would be focused on motorcycles.

As time went on the Honda Scramblers disappeared, most of them died when we blew the motors up and larger bikes took their place. My next bike was a BSA 650 cc Lightning and the guys I hung with rode Harley Pans, Norton Commandos and Kawasaki Ninjas. I still didn’t make it to the front of the pack. The BSA lasted for a year or two and was eventually replaced with my first Harley. This bike was bad-ass, it was a ’67 Sportster XLCH (California Hot) and was a nasty little bar hopper. It was kick-start only and it was a handful. About six months of that bike was all I could stand so I traded it for my first brand new Harley, a 1981 FXWG … a flame painted Wide Glide with a Shovelhead motor. I was now ready, both with this machine and with a lot more experience to move towards the front of the pack. I learned that, unless you ride at the front of the pack, the view never changes.

Now, at nearly sixty years of age and with nearly forty years of riding experience I hardly ever ride in the back. I’ll do it to show respect or when I’m in a large pack or I’m out ranked but I’ll also make the guys at the front of the pack work to hold their positions. I ride faster than the flow of traffic and am convinced that I’m a lot safer when I can blow by the idiots on four or eightteen wheels that are talkin’ on their cell phones and struggling to stay in their own lanes. I jam past them and keep going. When you’re at the front of the pack you can read the highway in front of you. When you know what’s in front of you, you’re a lot safer. Who cares what’s behind you anyway … you only need to be concerned when what’s behind you is going faster than you are and they threaten to overtake you when you’re not paying attention. I only look in my mirrors to make sure nobody’s goin’ to pass me or to make sure that there are no troopers chasing me.