Five Things you should never say in a For Sale Ad

I’ve written a few ads that sold a few things over the years, and I’m getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t.  It occurred to me to write some of these things down to share with others, and save you the time and trouble of learning the hard way.

First, a bit of philosophy:  We sell things for many reasons.  Maybe we don’t like that thing anymore, or it doesn’t fit, or we bought a newer, better one or we stole it or whatever.  Once the decision has been made to sell something, we are immediately faced with two questions:  How fast do we want it to sell, and how much do we think it is worth?  Most of the time, the answer is, “I’m in no hurry, and I want to get the most I can out of this thing.”  That’s the best position for you to be in as a seller.

How much it’s worth is a whole nother essay that I’m not going to try to slip in here.  Two things, though:  Forget NADA or Kelley blue book for car values, check the WA DOL website for access to the official state valuation service, called Price Digest.  The numbers you will get from them are lower than NADA or Kelly because they are based on sales reports from every sale reported to the state, both private and dealership, where the NADA guys are just reporting dealer sales.  Kelly’s Private Party values are estimates, I believe.  The other thing is that Craigslist will only tell you the asking price for a thing, but EBay, if you have an account, will tell you actual sale prices in most cases.  The difference between asking prices on Craigslist for cars and bikes and actual sale prices on EBay are dramatic.

Then you have to ask, “Am I willing and able to ship this thing to a buyer, or do I want them to come lay cash in my hand and take it away?”  A related question is, “how much does it weigh, and who gets to pay for shipping?”  The answer to these questions defines your sales approach, as in EBay vs Craigslist, or some other venue.  It’s a given in this day and age that print advertising is pretty much reduced to little old men and women browsing the back pages of the Little Nickel with their reading glasses on, and not worth your time or money as a sales outlet, generally.  The various Auto Trader magazines are better, because people pay for them, meaning they are more likely to be a serious buyer, but even they have driven their cost up and dropped the run-till-it-sells approach that facilitates my favored reverse auction pricing strategy.  Even if print ads are your chosen method, though, good wording is still, if not even more, critical, since you’re paying by the word and each one must work for your money.

So, now you’re ready to sell, and you have the item all cleaned up and presentable, because you know that good pictures are everything in online advertising. Clean cars sell for more than dirty cars.  Craigslist used to allow hosted pictures in their ads, the ones that filled the screen with nice full color pics of whatever it is, but they got tired of sending customers to Photobucket or one of the other hosting services and cut that out.  Now most pictures on Craigslist and EBay look pretty much the same.  I used to think that cell phone pictures were a bad way to go, but even those have been getting better and better as camera quality improves with each new generation of phone.

So you have to clean things up to sell them, and you need a good clear picture set that is taken against a neutral background so your pictures have no competing images to distract the buyer or confuse the outline of the thing.  The last thing you want is someone trying to figure out what part of town you’re in based on the territorial view behind your car for sale.  I like to use the closed garage door or a hedge or something that is uniform in color.  For indoor pictures I use a pastel bedsheet hanging on the wall, or a sheet of tissue paper on a table to blank the background as much as possible.

Ok, now it’s all cleaned up, you’ve taken your pictures, and now you have to sit down and write the ad.  So here’s what not to say:

1.  Price is firm. – This is a dangerous thing to say, unless you are absolutely sure your asking price is low enough to attract a buyer.  Typically, in a barter transaction, which a private sale most resembles, even though the thing being bartered is cash, you have to leave your buyer some wiggle room, and you need to reward them for taking the time to actually show up and look at your thing.  When you say the price is firm the message becomes, “Don’t even bother me if you are willing to pay $50 less than the $9000 I’m asking, because I’m telling you in advance I’m not willing to take it, so don’t waste your time.”  Variations on this theme are, “I’m in no hurry to sell, or I don’t have to sell”, all of which may be true, but the buyer doesn’t need to know that.  So that’s the first principle of ad writing:

Only tell the buyer what they need to know to make a decision to buy your thing, and no more than that.  I take that one step further and try with each ad to tell the whole story of the thing for sale, but that can lead to verbosity and an overload of superfluous detail, as in this sentence, so observe restraint as much as possible.

For example, the following, while true, could actually reduce your chances of selling the thing, in this case a motorcycle:  “…Owned by an 1%er motorcycle club member who only rode it back and forth to his lawyers office, and to and from the clubhouse on meeting nights, and the drags on weekends.”  The foregoing sentence can be entirely replaced with the words, “low mileage”, and that’s all the buyers really need to hear, isn’t it?

2.  Another thing that’s the kiss of death in ad copy is, in the case of a vehicle, “No title”.  No title on a motorcycle means you’re trying to sell a pile of parts and call it a bike.  The state patrol is going to want to inspect the bike before they will allow you to get a title, and they won’t do that until you’ve spent the time and money making it road-worthy, and why would you do that only to take a chance that it was stolen, and you lose it?  If it’s a car or truck, without a title it is a liability to you that you can’t even donate to charity or scrap it out legally without a bunch of effort.  So get the title before you try to sell anything that needs one, or be ready to accept bottom dollar, rather than top.

3. “…or trade for whatever.”  Now the message is, “I want to buy a whatever-it-is , but I don’t have the money, so I gotta sell my whatever-it-ain’t to buy my new whatever, which tells you something about my general approach to life, which is, always look for the easy way out, so rather than sell my whatever-it-is for as much cash as possible, then searching for the best deal on a new whatever-it-ain’t, now I’m gonna restrict my potential buyer list to only those who might have one of the whatever I want, and they also want whatever I’m selling, and their whatever is worth way less than my whatever, otherwise why bother, so now I need someone who fills all my conditions, plus wants to give me a helluva deal.”  Yeah, right, you can count the potential customers for that deal on the smaller toes of one foot, probably.

It is always, always better to sell your thing outright and use the proceeds to buy a new thing.  Trades and swaps always devalue the item, unless one of the traders is a fool, and cash talks better than any line of patter.  This is especially true when trading in a vehicle at the dealership.  By the way, did you know that the average markup on a used vehicle sold off a car lot is $2500.00?

4. “… must sell, or desperate, or getting divorced, or married, or having a baby, or all three at the same time…”  All bad wording choices, for sure.  “Must sell” is code for “I’m ready to give away this piece of junk, sock it to me, daddy”.  If you’re really up against it, just drop the price, and say nothing.  Drop it a little bit every day or every week, and you’ll quickly find out what the bottom dollar is.  Any personal information included in the ad is too much information, especially the getting divorced one.  That scares people off because they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing and set you off on a tantrum about your ex, or go postal all over them, and who needs the drama?  Keep it about the car, or the T-shirt, or whatever you are actually trying to sell.

5. “I know what it’s worth, don’t bother to lowball me, Blue Book says it’s worth x amount…”  Here’s a great recent example from Craigslist:   “I have this beautiful bike, it's in great condition but the clutch handle needs to be replaced, not the clutch itself, the handle needs replaced because i fell on it in my garage. It's a total of like 15 or 20 dollars and 5 minutes of work, all you need is a wrench. Anyways I'm selling/trading because I don't have the time for it anymore and it's just sitting in my yard rotting away. never laid down or wrecked and she's a beast. Call or text anytime, im down for a trade or just straight sell. This bike books for over 2 grand in the condition it's in. Just want it gone. $800.”

Heh, heh, looking at the picture on Craigslist, it’s a thoroughly thrashed twenty plus year old Kawasaki Concours of indeterminate mileage (he doesn’t say) with all the fairings and saddlebags removed, making it into a very strange looking naked bike, and he knocked it over in his garage but now it’s rotting away in the back yard, probably for the last several years, but it’s worth 2 grand because the book says so.  “All you need is 20 dollars and five minutes of work” is the most obvious bit of disingenuous mendacity you would expect, and the natural reaction is to turn the page.  Not a good way to sell anything.

Even if the whatever-it-is is really nice, and the price is good, and all is well, save all discussion of price till you have a buyer standing in front of you with cash in their hands.  That’s when you lay it on, whatever it takes to close the deal, but that's another story...  :-{)}

The Great Warehouse Fire

Early one morning in mid December back in the late ‘90s, as I recall, the employees of the City of Seattle complex known as 805 S. Charles St. arrived at work to find a wondrous sight in their normal parking lot.

At the time, employee parking was about an acre or two of land underneath the southbound Airport Way exit from I-5, at the base of the shore where Beacon Hill on the east and Dearborn street on the north sloped down into what had been tide flats in the early days of the Duwamish Delta.

On this particular morning, as I pulled in to the lot, there was a pile of stuff down the center of the lot that was close to 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and at least 50 yards long.  As I watched, another Engineering Department dump truck pulled in and backed up to the growing pile and added another 14 yards of consumer goods to the pile.  As the driver told the gathered employees, there had been a fire the night before at a warehouse in Sodo that was used to store piles of consumer goods waiting for the holiday shopping season to commence.  In the process of fighting the fire everything was damaged by smoke and water, so they cleared the building, which was done by scooping up everything with a front loader into a series of dump trucks, and our parking lot was the closest available open land to the warehouse.

I gazed in wonder at the pile.  There was a tent; no there were a hundred tents!  There was a pool cue in a case; there was a baseball bat, a sleeping bag, an umbrella, a huge pile of stuff, all brand new there on the ground in front of about 25 guys.  It was getting close to starting time, and everyone was here.  We looked at each other and, without a moment’s hesitation, threw ourselves at the pile.  Guys were coming out with armloads of stuff that they threw into their open trunks, then scrambled back for more.  The man with a pickup was king in a situation like this.  One guy filled his station wagon, then drove home and emptied it into his garage, then came back and filled it again.  By that time, an unfortunate security guard from a private outfit had been dispatched to stand over the pile, and word had spread throughout the neighborhood.  People were coming out of the woodwork.  Standing at a vantage point halfway up the back driveway to the shop, it looked like nothing less than one of those nature shows on TV where the ants are swarming around the corpse.

The security guard would stand at one end of the pile and politely chastise those who were rooting through the damaged goods, whereupon their buddies would be in full scavenge mode at the other end of the pile.  The guard would see this and walk to that end to repeat his ineffectual warnings, while the folks at the first end would dive in headfirst.  Christmas had come early, with a vengeance.

By the time the claims guy had mustered enough backup security to stop the looting, the pile had shrunk about 20 per cent, I’d guess.  They had to scoop it all back up again back into the same dump trucks and haul it off to South Transfer Station, where the scene was no doubt repeated minus the security guards.

So, were we thieves?  Did we steal?  I guess we did, really.  At the time it felt like a windfall out of the sky, and nobody raised a hand and said, “Excuse me, folks, maybe we shouldn’t be helping ourselves to all this largesse, eh?”  Somebody could have said, “Naw, it’s all on someone’s inventory, and the insurance company is gonna pay off, but they won’t go broke, and we’re just helping them out by reducing the pile they have to pick up again, so where’s the harm?”

It says something about how we deal with things that have no value left.  None of the stuff in the pile could have been sold as new after that, so they discarded it.  Why couldn’t they just give it away?

I asked that same question once after a Seahawks football game at the Clink one time.  Aramark is the vendor that has the concessions on all floors there, and we were part of a group that staffed a food booth to raise money for our high school football team around 10 years ago.  At that time, and I assume it’s still the case, we were told to throw out any leftover food at the end of the night.  In our case, that meant about 25 hot dogs, 15 burritos, a few chimichangas and some prepared salads all went into the garbage can in our booth, as every other booth on all floors at the stadium did the same.  I asked at the training session why they couldn’t donate the leftover food to the Union Gospel Mission three blocks away, and suggested the mission would be glad to bring a van over and load up.  The response was legal liability prevented that, somehow, some lawyer’s fever dream turned into a nightmare of wasted food.  We were told we could only take the leftovers home in our stomachs, so of course I stole two burritos on the way out every time that season.  One time I was accosted by a panhandler on the way to my car after a game, one of those scruffy far-gone wasted individuals with few teeth who can barely form a coherent sentence in the best of times.  I asked him, “Are you hungry?  Want something to eat?”  Of course, he didn’t, he wanted money for drugs, but he couldn’t say that, so he nodded his head.  I whipped out a still warm burrito that would have cost him $5 at Taco Del Mar, or $11.50 inside the stadium and said, “Here, eat this!”  His partner stumbled to his feet about then and I asked him, “You hungry too? Here!”, and whipped out another one, which he took with a stunned look on his face.  Then I walked on.  At least they ate well that one night.

Both of these incidents are connected by the idea that value is separate from price.  In both cases, the warehouse goods and the leftover food are being discarded, not because they are worth nothing, but because whoever owns them can’t make any money selling them.  The warehouse fire was a rare event, but the food waste happens at every event at every stadium throughout the country, if they all operate with the same bureaucratic mindset, a mind boggling tonnage of perfectly good food going to the landfill.  I hope at the very least they compost it these days.  And I wonder, why can’t they give it away?  Why, why, why… :-{)}

The Pigeon and the Live Load Pier

The Fremont Bridge is the busiest bridge in town, due to the fact that it is the closest to the water of the four bascule bridges on the Ship Canal between Lake Washington and Elliott Bay.  In my years with the City of Seattle I have been on that bridge, and under it, many times.  When the drunken bridge tender set the south span down on the flying bridge of the passing tugboat, guess who got to crawl out on a plank over the water to repair the shaft coupling?  I made the evening news that time.

So one time I was down under the bridge on the south side, in the room with the main transmission.  The bridge was being held open for some reason, and the live load piers were exposed.

Down under every bridge, on each side, is a pair of big footings, probably 2 foot square, with serious concrete under them to handle the load.  When the bridge goes down the frame rests on these live load piers at the exact moment the two spans line up in the middle.  The bridge crews adjust that point by placing or removing ¼” thick sheet metal shims on the piers, but you can only do it when the bridge is open.

So I happened to be at the southeast live load pier under the Fremont Bridge one day during a full opening, when I saw the strangest thing.  It was the remains of a pigeon, feathers and all, spread out on the top of that live load pier in a constant thickness, a bird shim, if you will!

I tried to imagine how even a bird as dumb as a pigeon could be sitting there for any length of time and not notice the bridge was coming down.  I wonder what the bird thought when it realized too late that something was definitely wrong…

Then I made a critical error.  Assuming the bird had been there a long time, even though it was still recognizably a pigeon, since there was no smell in the air, I picked up a flat nose shovel that was nearby and proceeded to scrape the pigeon off the live load pier.  The stench that boiled up off that pier was enough to gag a maggot!  I swear the tip of the shovel turned brown and began to smoke.  I threw it down and beat a hasty retreat, as the bridge began to descend.  The stench followed me through the transmission shack, past the electrical vault and out into the yard where, realizing that nobody had seen me back there, I casually strolled back through the offices to the bridge deck to see how things were going.  Somehow, I forgot to mention to the bridge crew what had happened, so I never heard the upshot of it, if any.  I bet they had to call the haz-mat squad.

I wondered if the bridge deck was misaligned due to the removal of a shim.  I wondered who had to go put a new shim in.  They had my deepest sympathies.

The moral of this story is:  Forgiveness is sometimes easier than permission… and ignorance is truly bliss, for someone.  Whew!  I feel better now… :-{)}

The Military 45 Chopper Project

Long ago, in my young hippy radical days, I rented a room in a house on Florentia Street on north Queen Anne, a place I had found on an ad on the message board at a hippy radical bookstore in the U District that said, “heads preferred”.  Sure enough, it turned out to be a pretty cool place, I stayed there most of the summer and fall.

So one day Mike, my landlord, said, “Hey, I just bought a Harley, come help me pick it up!”  I said, “Sure!” and off we went in a 1961 Ford Galaxy station wagon.  Mike had seen an ad in the paper and agreed to give this guy $250 for the bike, sight unseen.  It turned out the house was in Top Hat neighborhood, right by where I was raised.  We pulled into a driveway off 1^st Ave S just up from 102^nd and there, sitting in the driveway, was a complete original military Harley 45 WLA two-wheeler.  It even had the old oil bath air cleaner still in place, and the military ammo box saddle bags and the windshield with the canvas lower section.  “Hang on”, the guy says, as he pulls out a ladder.  “I think I got some stuff upstairs in the loft”.  He went up the ladder and handed down the rifle scabbard and some other stuff.  This would have been around 1972 or so.  Easy Rider had been out a few years, and Mike wanted to build a chopper.

We broke the windshield cramming the bike into the back of the Galaxy on its side with all the seats down.  We tied it in with rope and drove back to Queen Anne with the ass end hanging out the back so low it’s a good thing we didn’t try the Counterbalance.  The oil bath air filter turned out to have oil in it, which leaked all over the back of the station wagon.  Shit.

When we got it home, I had to go to work, but the rest of the guys played with it, charged the battery, put some gas and oil in the tanks, and it fired up and ran!

The next day was Saturday, so Mike and I got busy on the project.  First thing we took off all the army stuff and tossed it in a pile in the corner, along with the crash bars, windshield, and front fender, everything that is now unobtanium.  Mike had bought a small oxy-acetylene torch kit and he was ready to go to town.  That and a die grinder was all he needed.

First we tore the front end off the bike, disassembled it, threw the rockers and everything in the discard pile, and Mike cut the lower legs off where they were originally welded at the factory, revealing the short pegs they were fitted over.  He had gone to a wrecking yard and bought two radius rods off a ’49 Ford.  When you straighten the two bent tabs on the end of the rods, they just happen to be 5/8” holes, just like the Harley front axle.  And when you cut them off at about 5 feet long, they just happen to fit over those pegs on the lower triple clamp of the Harley 45, making a rigid front end about 18” over stock.

Then he took the cutting torch and grinder to the frame, cutting off all the sidecar brackets and anything else he didn't need.  The neck was torch cut almost off from the bottom behind the bearing housing, and bent up by way of a water pipe cheater to about a 40 degree rake or so, eyeball straight.  A piece of flatbar was cut to fit the notch so created, and welded in using gas and coat hanger for welding rod.

Then a quick spray can paint job over all the welds and grinds, and it went back together nicely.  No front fender, of course, and the brake wasn't hooked up, but he needed it for a spacer.  Voila, instant chopper.

I remember standing there looking at that monstrosity, and saying, “Mike, you’re not going to actually ride that thing are you?”  “Naw”, he said, “I’m going to find some idiot and sell it to him”.   And that’s what he did, the very next week, for $600.  I hope the poor fool never got it running.

Many years later, I got to thinking about that long narrow back yard behind the house on Florentia Street, and the garage in back, and that pile of takeoff parts in the corner.  I was working in Interbay those days and thought, if I looked for it, I could find that alley again, and maybe, just maybe, the garage would still be there and who knows, maybe the pile of parts would still be laying where we threw them!  So one day, on the way home, I did just that.  I found Florentia street and figured out what house it was.  Nothing had changed, and I went around the block and turned into the alley.

The garage was gone.  The back yard was gone.  In fact, every back yard of every house on Florentia street that faced that alley were all gone, replaced by a series of two and three story condominimums, and the alley was a jam packed parking lot!  There are probably 500 people living in that alley!

I think it’s time to move to Spokane or something… I wonder what happened to those Harley parts…  :-{)}

Crowd Control

Somehow I found myself alone in the middle of a crowd of about 6,000 people that spilled out from the plaza of the Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle on 5^th Avenue across from City Hall.  It was the early ‘70s, and we were mad as hell about something, probably the War in Viet Nam.  There seems to be this pressure relief valve built into American politics, brought about by the Bill of Rights.  When times get tough, people know that, if we take to the streets in large enough numbers and raise enough hell, something will have to be done, one way or the other.  We’re just thankful that the police don’t have a habit of shooting us for doing so, unlike other countries.

As demonstrations go, this one was typical of many.  People streamed in to the area all morning long, many on busses, carrying signs and banners.  Then as now there were many competing groups on the Left, all raising their own banner high and proclaiming themselves the Vanguard of the New Revolution that was bound to happen if only enough people turned out.  They never did, of course.  The powers that be always opened the floodgates and poured a bunch of your tax dollars on the problem, which eased the pressure somewhat.  It’s hard to get too angry when you’re busy pigging out at the public trough, something I can say with a twisted smile after 27 years of service to the Citizens of Seattle and I hope they’re grateful.

Back then, though, I was as young and dumb as any of them, and for some reason, the Bank of America was the enemy of the people that week, probably as a result of their loan policies or some such.  They had this big black tower in the middle of downtown that was an easy target, and also had a nice big plaza on which to gather, so it all came together on this day.

There is a pattern and a routine to demonstrations, once you’ve done a few.  First you listen to a couple of unintelligible speakers shouting over a bullhorn, then the singer gets up and you all join hands and sing about how we shall overcome some day.  The volume and energy of the crowd seems to be proportional to the proximity and number of nearby taverns.  The Hare Krishnas, along with the usual downtown beggars, milk the crowd for spare change all day long.  Usually, after all the speeches and cheers, the crowd slowly disperses each little group to their own neighborhood to rehash the splendor of the day.  This time, however, there was still unfinished business after all the ceremonies, and someone shouted out that we should go across the street and take over the Columbia Tower.  That sounded right, so about 6,000 of us, who were already blocking all of 5^th Avenue for two blocks anyway, decided to do just that.

The 5^th Avenue plaza off the Columbia tower is fronted at the street level with a glass wall about two stories high, with two main doors.  For some reason, when the 6,000 of us reached those doors, they were locked, and the lobby in the background was deserted.  Maybe it’s because it was a Sunday.  So the crowd formed into a churning millipedial mass of sign waving slogan chanters standing about 20 feet back from the doors so we could be sure the TV cameras could see our signs.  I was in the middle of the crowd at that point, about in the middle of the street in front of the tower.

I watched a line of men, Seattle Police officers, in full riot gear, each equipped with a plastic shield and a night stick, come up the escalator inside the tower and form two lines inside each door.  There were about 20 cops in each group, maybe 40 in all.  Somehow, the doors unlocked, and the officers marched out in a formation that swung to either side just like the band at half time of a college football game, ending up in a double wide line facing the crowd.  They said and did nothing, just stood at attention.

The crowd was dead quiet, waiting for what was to come.  I remember a single empty beer bottle was thrown from somewhere near the middle of the crowd in front.  It described a lazy arc through the air and landed with a crash in the middle of no-man’s-land between us and the cops.  All of the officers in unison took one step forward, assuming a martial arts position with their shields raised and night sticks held high, and let out a loud, “Huh!”   6,000 people turned in unison and ran like hell.  I remember thinking, as I ran, “Why are we running?  There are only 40 of them!”  Somehow, this thought did not prevent my feet from doing their stuff, and I got away clean.  My attempt to lead the vanguard of the new revolution would have to wait for another day.

I think back on days like those, and it’s hard to see we made any kind of a difference in this country.  The banks are still screwing us, and the feds are using our tax dollars to bail them out, so it appears that nothing changed.

But to be out there in the street in a crowd like that, the energy and the atmosphere combines to turn a crowd of individuals into a single minded mass that carries a lot more weight than any one of us.  Each of us was marked by the experience internally and indelibly, and that’s where the real change comes from.  The fact that we did it without killing or being killed is a bonus, something we should not take for granted.  :-{)} 

The Fossil Rattlesnake

It was clear that Sunday morning on the side of the hill outside Fossil, Oregon, clear and cold.  Marty and I were packing up, getting ready to head out and beat the heat on the long way home.

We had ridden down the previous Friday for the annual Fossil Run put on by ABATE of Oregon.  This is one of the last of the family style runs, a bunch of hippie bikers and their kids and dogs camping out on a hillside outside of town.  No wet t-shirt contest, but lots of field games and a piñata for the kids.  A good time was had by all, but we were up early as usual and ready to roll.

At 7:00 AM on a Sunday morning, Fossil, Oregon is asleep.  There was not a restaurant open that early, so we headed south out of town on the John Day highway.  It was one of those clear, ice cold mornings in late summer with no wind, but a chill that takes your breath away and makes you grit your teeth every time you ride into a shady patch.  Thirty-seven miles later, we finally found an open restaurant on the side of the road.  Somehow a ride like that makes food taste extra good, as though you’re convincing your body you weren’t really trying to kill it after all.

By the time we got out of there, it was starting to warm up.  Within a few hours, it was getting hot, so we pulled off at a little parking lot off Highway 19 near the intersection with US 26 that turned out to be the John Day Fossil Beds national monument to gear down.

There was an interpretive loop trail that started there in the parking lot and went up along the edge of a cliff at the base of an ancient basalt ridge with lots of exposed stones and bones.  We decided to take a stroll.

Up ahead was a giant hill that formed the northern end of the ridge we were walking below.  You could see a line in the stone, a crack from top to bottom at about a 45 degree angle to the left where the entire hill, probably a million tons or so, was going to eventually slide down and wipe out anything below that was on the road at the wrong time.  I jumped up and down a couple of times, but nothing happened.

The trail wound up the side of the hill under an increasingly hot sun, and I got a bit ahead of Marty.  When I came to a boulder alongside the trail big enough to create some shade, I decided to stop and wait there for him to catch up.  It took a few minutes, and several times I started up the hill, but no, I’d think, I’ll just sit right here in the shade till he shows up.

When he did, we compared notes and drank water for a while, then headed up the trail.  Suddenly, Marty stopped dead, and pointed.  There, in the center of the trail in the shade of a sage brush, a large rattlesnake was coiled up in the classic pose, tongue flicking and tail rattling away.  And I couldn't hear a thing.  Deaf as I am, those rattles were just too quiet, and the snake itself blended in so well that I didn't see it until Marty heard the rattle and stopped about 6 feet shy of the snake.

We did a little stand off for a minute, after which the snake decided to get away.  I hadn't realized they could move that fast.

At that point, it made sense to just go back the way we came, since the loop trail went right on up that hill into prime snake country, and we agreed that one was enough.  On the way back, I’m thinking.  What made me stop there and wait for Marty?  It was probably the shade, but for some reason I could not advance past that rock until he showed up, and I will always wonder what coulda been.  There’s no way I would have heard that snake.

They say we’re all connected, one way or another, more so with those we spend time with.  Our guardian angels live somewhere within that connection.  When they send a warning, best heed it.  Every time I've gotten in trouble in the past trying some stupid idea that sounded reasonable at the time, I always had a strong feeling early on that this was a bad idea, but ignored it.  One day, I’m gonna learn that for good.

Marty and I got back on the road after that, and wound up connecting to Highway 97 back home through Yakima.  That whole section of eastern Oregon is full of great roads and scenery.  It’s only when you stop that you have to watch out for the snakes.  :-{)}

The Campground in the Little Belt Mountains

There’s a magical feeling I recall when I think back on that trip, the one I got when we were gathered around our campfire in the early evening as a light summer rain fell through the dying embers of the day’s sunshine on our camp in the Little Belt Mountains of Montana on our way to Sturgis in 1995.  We were listening to Craig Chaquico’s “Sacred Ground” from the Harley Davidson Road Songs cd on L.C.’s stereo as the rain fell and dissipated the heat of the day around us.  Something about the light and the music combined to form something special.  Then reality set in.

Our day had begun in the KOA campground in Glacier, Montana.  The five of us had decided to vary the routine that year by taking Highway 2 out of Washington State through Glacier Park, then cruising the back roads of Montana down to rejoin I-90 and the parade of bikers headed for Sturgis by the direct route.  It was our third day out.  It began when my bike wouldn’t start when we were packed and headed to breakfast.  I sent them on ahead while I fiddled with the starter relay and caught up shortly when that worked.  The old girl gave me a scare that day, but never let me down when it counted, then or later.

Breakfast was in a bar, of course.  Everything in Montana happens in a bar, (except for the Tastee-Freeze in Laurel, which serves the best biscuits and gravy in the whole state, but that’s another story), in a bar, or on the road.  After breakfast we saddled up and headed out into the morning, always the best part of a day on the road.  First thing we did was head up the Going-To-The-Sun Road, and we caught perfect weather.  If you’ve ridden that section in bad weather, as I have, it can be nasty, but in the warm sunshine it is impressive.  You can see the handiwork of thousands of farm boys from across the Midwest who the government put to work doing something useful, with lasting results.  Their work is evident in the scattered National Park Lodges, great timbered structures that drop your jaw every time you walk in the door, and hidden in the roads that lead to Sturgis and Mount Rushmore.

  On the way out of the park, we bore right at Browning and took Highway 89 south and east to Livingston.  This is a classic forested beautiful two-lane highway with few people living along it, the type for which Montana is famous.  No speed limits, no traffic, no cops – a biker’s paradise, and, at the end, a good lunch at a nice little bar in downtown Great Falls.  That’s where we made our critical mistake.

Leaving Great Falls on 89 you literally ride off the end of the earth.  There’s a valley that starts outside of town where the cliff wall drops a few miles abruptly, and, as you approach the cliff at 60 miles an hour and wonder where the road is, the downhill right that starts the switchbacks gets close enough to make you hold your breath and cover your brake until you see it.

We rode across that valley until early evening, then pulled into the first roadside campground we found as we left the grasslands and headed into the Little Belts.  Our mistake was, when we left Great Falls we were full of food and beer and just assumed there would be a place to stop for dinner, not a good assumption in the back hills of Montana.  When we arrived at what proved to be our campsite, it was early evening and a squall was forming over the mountains that promised to drive us into our tents for the night.  We held a quick conference by the fire.  Everyone was tired, we were miles from anywhere, and we had no food, and a little water.  I volunteered to run down the road a few miles and look for a truck stop.

As I pulled out of the campsite I remembered to look back and form a mental picture of what the driveway looks like coming back.  Hate to miss it at night in the rain.  Then I booked on down the highway.  That’s a moment when you really get to know your bike.  It’s just the two of you powering into the gloom on a hope and a maybe.  This was before the cell phone era, and if a guy disappeared out here on a blind curve they might never find him.  It’s a time when you feel fully at attention and alive.

About 14 miles down I spotted our salvation:  An obvious roadside store with an old gas pump under the canopy and a general store in one end of a long structure with outbuildings.  There were lots of cars and trucks in the lot. I parked and walked in the door.

I offered the two old ladies behind the counter a heartfelt, “Boy, I sure am glad to find you here, still open!”  They gave me funny looks, and said nothing.  Then I glanced to the side, and realized the long low structure to one side of the store was one big room, connected inside the building.  There were rows of picnic tables arranged inside, and at those picnic tables sat what appeared to be every man, woman and child who lived in them there hills, and they all sat quietly staring at me, not saying a word.  There had to be 50 of them.  They were all white folks, dressed plainly, and it seemed on that quick glance that all the women wore full length skirts.   I had barged in on a town meeting, or a revival, or a church service or something, and it was quickly evident that they did not want me in their midst at all, no how, no way, and I should leave at once.

I turned to the old ladies and said, “We’re camped up the road and we need food.  Is there anything you can sell me?”  “Sorry”, she replied, “we got nothing for you.”  I looked wildly around the room.  There on the bar was a display case with candy bars and potato chips, about 5 of each.  I pointed.  “I’ll take them”.  She rang them up, I said thanks, and out the door I went.

We had M&Ms, both plain and peanut, for dinner that night, along with Doritos for dessert and bottled water to wash it down.  It was a splendid repast.  The next morning we rode by that place on the way out of there, but not a creature was stirring.  We found a little town, White Sulphur Springs, about 18 miles down on the other side of the state forest, and stopped there for breakfast.  It was a lesson learned:  never leave lunch in Montana without knowing where your dinner is going to be, or take it with you.

The rest of that trip was a typical Sturgis experience, noise, heat, smoke, sweat, lines for everything and all prices doubled.  That’s why it took me 5 years to go back, the memories have to fade some.  But that picture, those 50 people sitting in silence staring at me, that is a picture I will always keep in my brain.  What were they doing?  What was their story?  Some things you just never will know.  :-{)}

The Doobie story

My Arborist wife and I were in Portland for an International Society of Arboriculture conference at the convention center, and stayed at a nearby hotel.  I was free to wander during the day, so I would walk down to the train stop and explore the city.

On this particular morning as I was strolling down a deserted sidewalk past a square block parking lot, I noticed what could only be a doobie laying on the concrete.  I picked it up.  The weather had been dry, and it was in perfect condition.  The rolling paper appeared to be Zig-Zag white, and it was obvious by the lumpy surface that inside was some pretty good bud.  I smiled at my good fortune and slipped it into my pocket.

Later, though, I got to thinking.  Did I really want to smoke this unknown thing?  What if it was soaked in PCP, or embalming fluid or something?  It’s not like I needed it for anything.  So, as I was returning by the same route, I flagged down a young man who was riding a BMX style bicycle down the sidewalk toward me.  As he came to a stop, I saw he was one of those arrested development, twenty-something sidewalk commando types, with a surfer tan and baggy shorts under a baseball cap, just what I needed.  I held out the doobie and said, “I found this on the sidewalk right over there,” pointing, “and wondered if you might help me return it to its rightful owner?”  A smile spread over his face, as he took the doobie and placed it on top of his head under his cap with a motion like one of those shell game shysters at the carnival.  “God Bless You”, he said fervently, and pedaled off into a day suddenly made just a little bit brighter.  Thusly is karma, or grace, or whatever you want to call it, earned.  :-{)}

The '72 Sportster that was actually a '66

We used to get the occasional call out of the blue back in the ABATE days, just because we were in the phone book.  For those who don’t know, ABATE stands for A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactments.  It was started in the late ‘70s by the editor of Easyriders magazine, and intended to be an organization for outlaw bikers and chopper riders, as we all wanted to at least pretend to be.  Later, political correctness crept in and the acronym was changed to American Bikers Aiming Toward Education, but us old guys know the real meaning of the word.  I was the Auburn Chapter Coordinator at the time and was the listed contact.

So the call I got one day was from a guy named Joe, or something like that - it was a long time ago- who had moved up from North Carolina that summer, and brought along his beloved Harley Sportster, which he had owned for the last eight years.  Much to his dismay, when he took it to the Washington State Patrol to change the plates over, they took it away from him!  They told him the bike had been stolen in Connecticut in 1966!  All these years it had been licensed as a 1972, and he wanted someone to help explain what happened.

So Grant and I went up to the old State Patrol office in Sea-Tac on Pacific Highway South by the freeway, which is the current site of the train station.  There we met Joe, and they let us in to look at his bike.  He had apparently rebuilt the engine at one point, and done lots of paint work and maintenance, and the bike was in good shape.  He showed us the title, and, sure enough, the VIN was clearly stamped into the engine case on the right side, the same number.

Grant was an old Sporty guy, and he moved to the other side, where he saw a second serial number stamped into the left side.  It turns out that, up until about 1970, Sportster serial numbers were on the left side of the crankcase at the base of the cylinders, just like the big twins.  After that, they moved the numbers to the right side of the case, and changed the format to the modern code still being used today.  Furthermore, the ’66 was a 900cc engine and the ’72 was 1000cc, so the case halves would not have mated up, thus proving that some thief had stamped the number in to match the title, and sold him the bike that way.  Joe was hosed, it seemed.

They told him the only thing he could do was contact the original owner and ask him to sign a release of interest, otherwise that guy could theoretically come and pick up his bike.  Later, we heard the rest of the story:

It seems the original buyer had ridden out of the local Harley dealer in Bridgeport or somewhere on this brand new Sportster back in 1966.  He rode around all day, then took it home to his apartment.  He didn’t have a garage available, so he parked the bike under his bedroom window and chained it to a post he had pounded into the ground there.  In the morning, it was gone.  He got to ride it exactly one day, and he had not bothered to insure it yet.  It vanished into thin air.

If motorcycles could talk, this one could have told us what life was like for it between 1966 and 1978, when our Joe bought it from a stranger in North Carolina with NC plates and the ’72 title.  This little mystery came to us in the mid ‘80s, and has remained a mystery to this day.

As it turned out, Joe got to keep his bike.  He had receipts for all the work he had done and was able to convince the original owner to accept $300 to release his interest, so he essentially bought his own bike back.  It took all summer to make that happen, but it did.  As far as I know, both Joe and the bike are still on the road somewhere.  As bike and rider go, they were mated for life.  You still run into that  from time to time, some old biker and his bike growing old together.  I remember one of them who actually got his bike buried in the ground along with his coffin, but that’s a different story for another time.  Keep the rubber side down, and the shiny side up.  Ride free.  :-{)}

A Traveler's Tale

I was out on a ride with my buddy Chris and a couple of his fellow travelers the other day when we ran across one of those happenstance encounters that make your head spin when you think about it.

It was the day after the Isle of Vashon TT, a sunny day in late September of 2013, and Jim, who rode Chris’ hooligan bike, a Triumph Speed Triple with a Daytona motor, was due to fly back to Florida the next day.  People are starting to come in from around the country for the TT these days.  The other Al dug out his ’70 Bonneville for the ride, I was on my FXRS, and Chris was on his Vincent Black Shadow.

So we wound up near the top of Chinook Pass, where we took a lunch break near that long parking strip on the left side just before you get to the top.  There is an informal trail through the mountain meadow that leads to a rock formation by a stream that has earned the name Chris’ Rock.  As we unpacked, stripped off riding gear and pulled out our lunches, I saw a rider coming down the hill toward us.  He pulled in and parked.  I wandered over and checked out his bike, a BMW 1150GS P-D model that looked like it had been around the world twice.  “Where you from?”  I asked.  His name turned out to be Mat.  “France”, he said.  I said, “Cool, did you have your bike shipped to New York?”  “Oh, no,” he said.  “I left France three and a half years ago, heading east!  I came into the US from Canada and to Canada by boat from Russia.”  We had stumbled upon a world traveler, and the kid looked to be in his late 20s.  He represented every biker’s vicarious dream standing there in a worn Aerostich.  We invited him to lunch with us.

It turned out he was living on tuna fish and old bread these days, because he was running low on money and his final drive unit was failing, again.  He had been on Highway 97 in Yakima when he realized he had to repair it, and was heading back over the pass to try to make it as far as the Seattle BMW dealer when he made that fated stop in the parking lot.

At that point, this was the situation Mat was in:  He was running out of money, using his GPS to guide him into a strange town he had never visited in hopes of finding the parts to patch his final drive one more time, a place to work on the bike, and somewhere to stay.   He did what bikers always do on the road, see another group and pull in next to them, get off and stretch, say hi, admire all the bikes.

Mat himself is this amazing personality, open and friendly, self-deprecating and charming, even in his broken English.  He came off to this bunch of old-timers as a true saddle tramp, so of course we took him in.

The group escorted him to Chris’ house, which would be the center of operations for the next 5 days.  Chris put him up in the spare room and cleared a bike off the work stand to make room for the BMW.  The next day, Mat and Chris tore the final drive apart, and verified his worst fears about the bearings and u-joints.  They were toast.  I brought over some pulling equipment, and we disassembled everything, then Mat and I jumped in my truck and headed for the BMW dealer on Lake City Way and 15^th NE in Seattle in the middle of rush hour.

I found an ad in Craigslist for some different BMW parts, and called that guy.  He heard the story, and gave me the name of one of the mechanics at that same BMW dealer.  So at the dealer, we talked to that guy, whose name we do not forget.  He showed us what can happen when the biker community pulls together to help one of their own.  He spent the rest of his shift, and much of his evening, helping Mat get the parts he needed, even going so far as to notice that one bearing we picked up was the wrong one, and met us in Renton on his way home to swap the bearings!  Everybody who heard the story, and met Mat, wanted to jump in and help.  From the sounds of it, this had been happening to him everywhere he went.

He got back on the road the following Sunday, heading south.  I have had one email from him so far, indicating he found a refuge in a hippy commune in the backwoods of southern Oregon, but that the wild geese were calling, and Guatemala sounded like a nice place to visit on your way to Terra Del Fuego.  Off he will go, a true wandering blithe spirit, and we wish him all the best.  His full name is Matthieu Hammelburg, he’s on Facebook as Mat Ham, and if he passes your way, tip your helmet to a man who is doing what you read about, thought about, maybe even dreamed about, but never quite actually went out and did.  More power to him.  :-{)}

Retirement

I used to go to Sturgis every 5 years. That’s how long it takes for the memories of the heat, the stink, the noise, the crowds and the high prices to fade enough for the idea to become attractive again.
As I’m sure it still is, there was a regular circuit followed by the Sturgis crowd who wanted to get there quickly in a straight shot. For many in Washington it starts with the Sun & Surf Run at Ocean Shores in late July. Monday morning you get up, break camp, find breakfast, and then head East. 
I-90 is the artery if Sturgis is the heart of things, and at every intersection with another major highway more riders feed into the stream, down from Canada, up from Oregon via 84, 15, 25, 80; all roads lead to Sturgis in August. For us coming from the West Coast with our tents and gear strapped on our bikes, the target each day was the KOA at the end of the road.
The first night out was in Missoula, a butt-burning 550 miles if you’re not used to it on a regular basis. Everybody seems to get off at the big fuel stop just over the Idaho line, long enough to pull off their helmets. I got wise after the first couple of trips, when I noticed that my face and lips were burnt to a crisp and weather blasted by the time we hit Rapid City and bothered me for weeks after the trip, but if I kept my full face helmet on I was more comfortable on the road and arrived fresh and unburnt to the party. There are lots of other reasons to stop along the way, most related to Casinos and alcohol, not to mention the whorehouses in Wallace, Idaho, but you have to keep pushing along to get to the Missoula KOA and get a spot for the night.
This is one of the older KOAs, well established and organized, down on Tina street, which is off Peggy Lane, off West Broadway. They have lots of open grassy trailer sites planted with trees and gravel pathways. They keep building little cabins, but for a motorcycle to camp for the night was only $7 if anyone in your group is a member, so that was the ticket for us. Normally it would be one vehicle per site, but on these weekends before and after Sturgis Bike Week we would pack ourselves in any way that fit. By the mid ‘90s the KOAs got smart with their marketing and had full service food available right there in camp, and a store that sold beer, so the party started the first night, and got wilder as you approached the Black Hills.
Montana is a big state, so you have to get up early and hit the road from Missoula if you want to be at the KOA in Billings before dark. We would head out through Bonner and up into the mountains, veer south past Deer Lodge through Butte and Belgrade to Bozeman, where we stopped for lunch once and found the Museum of The Rockies on a back street. From there we would pick up the Yellowstone River at Livingston and follow it all the way through Laurel (home of the best biscuits and gravy in the known world, at the Tastee-Freeze, but that’s another story) and on into Billings, where the KOA promotes itself as the very first one, set along a lagoon on the back streets of town where all the mosquitos in Montana live. That was where we met Roxie one year, on her solo way from Springfield, Oregon to meet up with some Aussies at Buffalo Chip, and Stuart and Livvie, two Canadians from a remote sawmill town on a fiord in upper British Columbia on their annual month long road trip. From there is where you jump off I-90 at Crow Agency and Little Big Horn, where Custer died for his own sins, and the blast across Wyoming and South Dakota on Highway 212 through Alzada and Belle Fourche, coming down into Sturgis from the north. If you don’t waste too much time at the former cowboy bar turned biker ripoff joint in Alzada you can make it by early evening in time to line up for a campsite, along with everyone else.
But the point of this story is that KOA in Billings, and a different time on one of my solo journeys, this one homeward bound through Wyoming on my way back from Milwaukee in 2003. I had left Papa and the group in Wisconsin and dropped by my sister’s place in South Bend, Indiana for a visit before heading home through Iowa and Nebraska and wound up at the Billings KOA after a long day bucking the infamous Wyoming crosswinds. After setting up my tent and eating their food, I sat around the picnic table and struck up a conversation with a couple fellow travelers, each on solo runs from different directions. Bikers on the road are a shared community, and everyone you meet at a campsite is a neighbor. One of them, Jim, offered an observation that has stuck with me ever since. We were yakking about this and that, about two beers into a fine conversation, when it came up that he was retired, and had been so for the last couple of years. He was about my age, so I was surprised he was already retired, and I asked him, “So tell me, what is it like being retired?” He smiled and said, “Every morning, I wake up and grin!”
That was about 4 years before my first retirement (I’m on my fourth right now), and the idea stuck in the back of my head. Every morning, wake up and grin. Yeah! That’s why I say to myself, and all of you: When you get a chance to retire, which means you finally get to do what you want rather than what you have to do, on your own schedule rather than anybody else’s, reach out and grab on to it with both hands, and don’t let go! Every morning, you can wake up and grin! :-{)}

The Fight

Mike had a great idea.  We were gonna rob the cash box at the little grocery store on the right hand side of the sweeping curve of Meyers Way as it heads north through Top Hat and crests the hill that curves down to South Park and the First Avenue Bridge to Seattle.  We were young and dumb, of course, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

That old store, at one end of a building that later would be considered a strip mall that included Pat’s Top Hat Cycle, run by one of the old Seattle legends from the days when Harleys and Indians duked it out with Triumphs and Nortons on the main drags of places like White Center or the parking lots of the Red Feather Tavern, was an important resource for those of us in the neighborhood who were ready to party, but too young to vote.  It was where we got our beer on a Friday night when there was a dance at the field house in the old projects down on 8^th Avenue off 102^nd.

Before it was a store, it was a bar, and the side door was into the parking lot through a passageway that was not visible by the bartender, and they put a cigarette dispenser right there by the door!  We would slip in, put a quarter in the machine and pull the handle, and out would drop a Lucky Strike or a Pall Mall or a Camel, and we’d be outta there.  I remember being shocked when they raised the price to thirty-five cents.  I swore I was gonna quit when they raised it to fifty.

The way it worked with the beer, we would stand out in the parking lot between the store and the barber shop, kinda leaned up against the wall so as not to be too obvious.  One of us, usually the one who had the $2 it took to make this work, would size up the customers as they came and went, and approach a likely prospect, usually a guy old enough to buy a beer but young enough to remember standing in the same lot, and say, “Hey man, can you do us a favor, and buy us a six pack?  We’ll buy you one, too!”  Nine times out of ten they would say, “Sure, gimme the money,” and off they’d go inside, usually coming back out shortly with a six pack of cold Heidelberg lagers, the beer that tastes the same whether you’re drinking it or puking it back out.  Once in a while we’d pick the wrong guy and he’d buy a half rack with our money and slip out the back door, but that was the price of tuition.

Then we’d beat feet down 108^th to the schoolyard where everyone gathered, stopping on the way to huddle in the bushes on the southeast side of the park to slam down one Heidelberg each to give us the courage to face those dangerous girls in there, and maybe even dance with one.  The room would be dark, with various flashing lights, and one of the local garage  bands blazing away at one of the latest top 40 tunes with the amps set to 9.  “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals was a favorite, and “Louie, Louie”, of course.  The dance floor would be crowded with boys and girls making with the latest moves from American Bandstand while a steady stream of people circulated in a clockwise direction constantly, feeding and being fed by the dance floor, while the walls were lined with flowers, mostly of the male persuasion.  Everybody was there.  All the popular kids were on the dance floor, or gathered in their cliques.  Outside, the bad boys and the tough guys squared off with the occasional jock in a constant testing of status typical of the young breeding male.  After the bands finished their battle – there was usually three bands on any given night, more due to the fact that none of them had more than one set memorized than anything else- there was always a fight or two in the parking lot.  We’d gather to watch that, then we’d head back through the woods to sit on a log and drink our second beer, which we hid in the bushes when we went inside.  One time somebody found our beer, and that sucked.  After that we’d head for the lake to see who was there and play footsy with the cops.  Life was sweet in the summer of 1967.  We had it made…

But back to the robbery.  Mike was the ringleader of our little neighborhood bunch, most of the time, and he always came up with good ideas.  He explained to us how it was gonna work.  “Okay, you two guys”, pointing at me and Lefty, “are going to walk in the store and get into a big fight.  You have to really make it look good, maybe one of you go in first and the next one come in, then you pass in the milk aisle, and you slap him, then you deck him, then it’s on! Meanwhile, while everyone is distracted, I’ll slip in the back door, which the old man always leaves open in the summertime, and grab the cash box, which he hides under the counter, then I’ll run out the back.  After a while, you two work your fight up to the front door, then you run out, and you call him a name, then you run after him, and chase him down the street.  We’ll meet up later and divide the loot!  So whaddaya say, you ready?!”

Lefty and I looked at each other.  The problem was, we had been buddies for so long, grew up together, really, but we never had actually come to blows, so we really didn’t know which one of us was tougher, and probably didn’t want to, either.  So I said, “It sounds good, Mike, but how about you and Lefty fight, and I’ll grab the cash box?”  Lefty said, “Bull Shit.  You two are the same size, and I’m smaller than either of you, so a fight with me won’t be convincing.  I’ll grab the cash box, while you two fight.”

The longer we negotiated, the farther we got from a solution.  So we decided to wait until dark and throw a rock through the plate glass window of the fruit stand/grocery on the other side of the old Flying A gas station by the actual Top Hat instead, and steal all the cigarettes and candy the old fool that runs the place displays in that window.  I tell ya, life for a juvenile delinquent in White Center in the early ‘60s was tough.  You hadda be on your game.  :-{)}

My First Harley

I bought my first Harley from an old guy named Vince that I worked with back when I was an apprentice machinist down on Harbor Island.  He was the helper who ran the cutoff saw in the back corner of the shop, did a little cleanup, whatever was needing done.  He was pushing 65 hard from the wrong side at the time, but still working, had been around and done a lot, but didn't have much to say.  That’s one of the things we lost as a country when we dismantled the American manufacturing capability and shipped it overseas.  Back then, a guy like Vince could have a decent life without a high school diploma, own a home and make enough to get by.  Nowadays he’d be stuck in a Walmart somewhere, standing on aching feet and trying to smile through the minimum wage pain.

Vince had bought the Harley from a guy who bought it from King County at auction.  It was a 1971 model FLH with drum brakes and a Bendix carburetor, an old cop bike, pretty much stock except for a lovely purple rattle-can paint job that Vince applied himself one day.  He was particularly proud of the fact that he didn’t have to take off a part, he just lifted the seat up off the post, laid on the masking tape, and blasted away.  It was different, that’s for sure.

Vince liked his beer, and spent a fair amount of time at a tavern off Ambaum Boulevard in Burien that was only a few blocks from his house.  As I got the story, he would come out of the bar late at night, a bit tipsy, if not three sheets to the wind, climb on his Harley, start it up, and promptly fall over on the crash bars.  The guys from the bar would come out and pick him up, hold him steady a bit, then give him a little push to get started, after which he made it home all right.

His wife took a rather dim view of this habit, for some reason, so one day, as we were yacking by the saw, he says to me, “Ya know, I think I just might sell my bike one day.  Yep, first $1200 takes it”.  I decided he was kidding, since he always swore that’s the one thing he would never do, and let it ride.  About a week later he said to me, “Yup, I guess I’m gonna put her up for sale.  First $1400 takes ‘er”.  “Wow”, I said.  “I’d sure love to have her.  Let me see what I can do.”

That night over dinner I mentioned the bike to my sweetie, who shocked the hell out of me by suggesting we sell her car and buy this bike!  Of course I married her, but that came later.

By the time the car was sold, to a different co-worker, several weeks had elapsed during which I had said nothing to Vince about the bike.  So when he sidled up to me one day and said, “Looks like it’s time to sell my old Harley” again, “first $1800 takes it”, I figured I’d better move fast, and that’s what I paid for it in 1976, $1800.  Riding it home that first time was an adventure, because the right side fork tube had leaked out all its oil, so when you took a right it wanted to fall over and you had to muscle it through a left turn, but I made it.

That turned out to be a good old bike.  I rode it for more than 12 years, and knew every nut, bolt and washer on it.  There’s no Harley quite like your first Harley.

At the fall closer ’83 I put my daughter on the tank in front of me and rode around the campsite down by the river outside of Orting. My picture from that is priceless.

My son used to fall asleep on the back as we cruised through Maple Valley.  It’s been to Glacier Park, all over Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and never once failed to bring us home.  It’s been to every Spring Opener, Fall Closer and Olympia Toy run for every one of those years.  After I repainted it and changed a few more things, I rode it to work one day and showed it to Vince.  He walked around it some and allowed as how he guessed I hadn't fucked it up too bad, so that felt good.

When the time came to replace it, in 1989, I found it a new home in Joyce, outside of Port Angeles, and rode it there one last time to deliver it.  I sold it for $3500, 12 years after buying it for $1800.  Not bad for an old ’71.  Though the bike is gone, I have the pictures, and the memories of all the good times that will keep it with me forever.  That’s about all you can ask from a machine, I guess.  That, and hope it’s still out there somewhere, bringing somebody home again.  :-{)}

Old Benson Road

Everywhere you go, you travel on ground with a past, with an untold story or one that has been forgotten.  This is most evident in our roads, the old roads.  Some, like the Beacon-Coal Mine road that takes off from 128^th Avenue in Skyway past the trailer court and winds down the Black River Valley wall to come out on Monster Road by the transfer station, have faded into the background, travelled by few and forgotten by most.

Others, like today’s subject, Old Benson Road, and in particular one stretch of it from Cascade Vista on top of the South Hill to Main Street in downtown Renton, are travelled daily by thousands of us on our way to work.

Old Benson today is not the same road it was, thanks to the recent “improvements” to I-405 that did hand those of us who live on the hill our own private onramp to get us to the traffic jam quicker and easier.  The new Old Benson that emerged from that project was higher and jogged to the East as it went under the new offramp.

For years, like so many of us, I noticed some kind of platform structure on the east side of old Benson at a wide spot in the road just up from the building that became City Hall.  It had some kind of plaque on the base of it visible as you went up the hill.  I always wondered what it was about, but you know how it goes, there’s always something to do and gotta get there soon, so who had time to stop and read the plaque?

Finally, after at least 15 years of driving by on a daily basis, I stopped off one Saturday morning on my way to McLendon’s and actually read the plaque.  What it said was that the plaque had been affixed to the base of a foundation for the steam donkey that ran the winch that brought the ore cars from the inside of the coal mine whose adit was under what is now the S-curves of Interstate 405 directly to the east.  The top of the base was at about level with the road surface, and appeared to be made of solid concrete cast in sections, or mortared in place like giant bricks.  The date on the plaque was 1949.

I went to the Renton Historical Society museum down on Main street for the rest of the story.  It seems that there was actually a dedication ceremony for the Coal Mine Hoist foundation, as it is officially known, last August, but we missed it.

There was a man named Smithers who found coal on the side of Talbot hill back in 1873.  With financial help from Capt. Renton, the Renton Coal Company dug into the hill right there off Benson Road and, by the time they quit in 1918, extracted some 1,300,000 tons of coal from a mine that went a full mile east of there, with some 22 branchings and many air shafts, one of which opened up under a Renton Hill garage in 1981.  They rediscovered the mine entrance in 1963, when the I-405 was built, and sealed it up again.  The rest of the mine is still there, full of water, mostly.

It’s a good thing I stopped to read the plaque when I did, because you can’t get there anymore.  With the relocation of Old Benson, the plaque is still there, but now it’s down below the road surface behind a fence on your right as you crest the hill before the bridge over 405, and the wide spot in the road is long gone.  You’d have to park at City Hall and walk up the hill to see it now.  Who’s gonna do that?

Like the aerial photographs of the Cascade Vista neighborhood that used to be on the wall at Willie’s Tavern, like the woods full of deer around Philip Arnold Park, things that are part of the history of our neighborhoods are disappearing around us.  Keep telling yourself to stop and enjoy them while you still can.  If you wait 15 years, they may be gone.  Then all you’ll have left are the memories.  :-{)}

The Herd

Hicks Lake is a small pond in south Seattle where we grew up.  It sits in a bowl with hills on the east and west sides and Evergreen High School taking up all the land on the south side from SW 116^th to 108^th, where the main entrance to the county park is an extension of 8^th Ave SW.

When we were kids, the swimming area and surrounding grassy hillsides was the focus of most of our summer days.  The younger kids would take swim lessons from the lifeguards, and when we were older we congregated on the dock and socialized with the other kids.  The lifeguards were the kings of the beach, as I recall, long and lean with movie star tans that developed as they sprawled out on their elevated chairs with no sunshades on the hot afternoons.  I imagine they’re all dead of skin cancer by now; this was the ‘60s, and everyone smoked tobacco, too.

Back in those days, Evergreen High School did not allow smoking on campus, so the kids would run out to the fence between the schoolyard and the park and gather under a big tree near the fence.  That became the unofficial “smoking section” during the school year, and an informal gathering spot for the local bad boys and juvenile delinquents who had nothing better to do all summer but hang out at the park and get in trouble.

This group grew cohesive enough to be considered a gang, depending on who was talking.  Someone tagged us, “The Herd”, and it stuck, because we liked it, and didn’t give much thought about what it really meant.  We used to give ourselves the one fingered salute, but reversed, so the message became, “F*** Me”.  We were cool, and we knew it.

There was a regular routine to a hot summer day.  If you had no money, which was most of the time, you’d hang around at the lake most of the day and bum cigarettes from your friends and ogle the girls while at the same time offending the straight types who herded their children like baby ducks down to the swimming area and the sandy beach in front of it.

If you had a couple of bucks in your pocket, though, the sky was wide open.  You could go downtown and race your car at the slot car track on 16^th, or shoot some pool in the pool hall next door.  The pool hall had a row of coin operated Pinball machines that we became expert at cheating.  One of them in particular, we knew, had a spot on the underside where the plywood base was worn through, exposing the sheet metal under the body, because it would rack up 10 or 12 free games if you gave it a precise kick in exactly that spot when the manager was not looking.  You could play for hours on one quarter.

The roller rink was down the street on the same side, and there was a shooting range in the basement.  We were much too cool to do the Hokey Pokey any more, but it was still fun to skate, and lots of girls went there, too.  For fine dining, we had our choice of Lou’s .29 cent Ratburgers, a Root Beer Float at Dairy Queen or Frostop, with a burger and fries for $1.25.   At night, the hot rodders came out and the parking lots were hopping.

Back in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s Hicks Lake was a busy place every day.  The water was clean and clear, and the natural drainage supplied by the Little Lake on the north side of the park kept it that way.  Little Hicks was swarming with lily pads, bullfrogs and polliwogs in those days, and we used to hunt them with BB guns and kill them by the dozens in our ignorance.  People would catch crappie and bass in the big lake, and turtles were common.  Then it all died, through overuse and a series of bad decisions by the County.

We had regular joyful duels with the County Mounties who had the unfortunate task of keeping order down there.  At night the park would close and the Herd would be outstanding in their field most of the night, drinking beer and partying.  This offended the cops, and they would drive in with lights flashing, but none of us had cars, so we would run up to the upper parking lot and gather in the light from their spotlights and give them the Bird while doing the Monahan shuffle, so named after a teacher at Evergreen.  That would make them mad, and they’d drive back out the gate, then come tearing up the driveway to the upper lot while we ran back down to the lower lot and repeated the performance.  The banks along the shore of the lake on the south side between Cascade Elementary school and were steep and brushy, giving us many hidden spots to sit and drink beer while the cops cruised around looking for anyone who would volunteer to be caught without actually having to leave their cars and run after us (though that did happen, on occasion).

So the police complained to the Park department, and they sent a crew down to denude the hillside and take away our hiding places, which also had the affect of greatly increasing the washing of the muddy banks into the lake water and fouling it.  Then some genius at the County came up with a plan to fill the Little Lake and create a parking lot there.  That killed off the rest of the frogs and completed the ruination of Hicks Lake as a place where kids could come and swim and play in the summer time.  The water quality got worse and worse, and swimmer’s itch was frequent, so they spent a bunch of our tax dollars and built a chlorine- filled pool up on the hill, which remains the only swimming spot in the area.  They don’t even have lifeguards at the lake any more, nobody goes there.  Sic transit Gloria mundi.

Jody and the Gazebo

State Highway 2 starts in Everett, Washington and travels all the way across the country until it runs into Lake Superior in Wisconsin.  Marty, Rachel, Dennis and I rode that route in its entirety in 2003 when we went back to Harley’s 100^th Anniversary in Milwaukee.  It’s one of my favorite ride memories, and roads, both for the camaraderie of those good people on that trip and the encounters we had on the way.  Ask Rachel about the rabbits at Devil’s Lake, that keeps growing larger, and Dennis about the Hot Sexx.

A particular favorite part of that road is the stretch along the east shore of the Columbia River up from Wenatchee.  It starts out as Highway 97 combined with 2 up past Lincoln Rock to Orondo, where 2 turns off and goes up the canyon to Waterville, where the high plains start.  It’s that section of road up the hill that prompts this story, which is based on a tale by Ron about our mutual friend Jody.

Now Jody was a true character, who’s Pappy was a pistol, a son of a gun who was raised in Waterville by a sympathetic aunt.  Bunny and I had ridden to Glacier Park with Jody on his Kawasaki H1 two stroke 500cc triple back in the late ‘70s, so we knew him well.  He was one of those helpless types who always meant well, and started every project with the best of intentions, but something always came up, or happened, and it was just one of those things, you know?

He had been stabbed in a bar fight while out drinking in Auburn with his father and brother, and it somehow severed a nerve in his left side that would not allow him to upshift with his foot, so he rigged up a rod through an aluminum tab with a grommet under the tank that came up in front of his left knee.  When he wanted to shift, he would pull in the clutch with his left hand, reach over with his right and pull up or push down on the rod, which had a knob stolen off a drill press at work on the end of it.  He rode that thing all the way to Montana with us and back.  We learned to make him ride in back up the passes, because of the blue smoke.

The first night out we stopped in Waterville and camped out in the yard of his saintly Aunt, who regarded us with the air of someone who is inwardly whimpering, and only allowed us into the house to use the bathroom.  While there, Jody went to a bar to have a few beers while the rest of us slept, where he got into a fight, and somebody stole his leather saddlebags off his bike that had all his clothes and tools in them.  The next day he found some castoffs at Aunties, wrapped them in a garbage bag and off we went.  He was that kind of guy.  In Salmon, Idaho, we had incredible steaks for dinner in a tavern in town, and he sent a $5 tip back to the chef in appreciation.  Later, he had to borrow money from us to get home, but we expected that.

So anyway, as the story goes, Ron was giving Jody a ride home to Waterville one day to rest up at his Aunt’s house after his latest adventure went awry.  As you recall, Highway 2 goes up a pretty steep hill on the way, with a sharp bend near the top after which you can see the town up ahead.  As Ron and Jody came around the bend, Jody said, “See that gazebo up there?  I built that.”  “That looks nice”, said Ron, and continued to drive.  After a few seconds Ron said, “Jody, that gazebo looks crooked!  You can see it from here!”  “I know”, said Jody, “but it’s not my fault.  My level was off.”

So the next time you ride up the hill from Orondo to Waterville, look for that crooked gazebo on the side of the hill if it still exists.  It’s a monument to a home town boy who never did make good, but always made us smile, if only in disbelief.  :-{)}

Cleanup Duty at the Spring Opener

Back in the day, when the ABATE of Washington Spring Opener was the social event of the season for bikers, all the various chapters used to stand up at the board meeting and take on the various responsibilities that had to be accomplished to make it run smoothly.  Auburn Chapter, our home chapter, was always one of the doers, and this year we had cleanup duty.

The run site in those days was down the hill by the water intake for the City of Cle Elum in the old quarry site on the river.  To get there you rode past the Old No. 3 tavern a ways, then took a left on the dirt road where the road bends to the right.  That led through a pine forest to the edge of the cliff overlooking the quarry site, now overgrown with doug firs starting to get big, shrubs and grass.  A steep downhill led to the floor of the pit, which covered about 80 acres or so.  In later years, when they filmed the scene in “Northern Exposure” where the guy drives his Harley off a cliff, it was that cliff they used.  My brother-in-law rigged the stunt, and he used a Honda Shadow as a stand in for the Harley, because the Harley was too valuable, and besides, it would be sacrilegious, they all agreed.

This is also the spot where the guy drove his pickup truck into the river because his girlfriend dared him to and the resultant rescue made the pages of Easyrider magazine.

Usually about 3,000 bikers would gather at the site for a typical Spring Opener.  They would camp all around the center area where the stage was erected and the vendors would set up, and at night the smoke from the campfires floated through the trees and crowds of people would stumble from campfire to campfire trading stories, hail-fellow-well-mets, drugs and alchohol in mass quantities, until an atmosphere of general craziness prevailed.  Security was known to tie guys to trees until they came down enough occasionally, babies were made, weddings and divorces happened, loud rock and roll was played till the wee small hours.  The ABATE folks would take in about $50,000.00 over the course of the weekend, and spread much of it around the surrounding communities for things like sani-cans, water trucks and beer, lots of beer.

Sunday morning dawned like the aftermath of a battle.  Smoke drifted from the many abandoned campfires and the ground was littered with an incredible mash of beer cans, cigarette packages and butts - lots of butts, and just general trash.

People would start stirring about 10:00 in the morning, and by noon the exodus would be in full swing.  The cleanup crew was already planning on spending another night on site, so we had the luxury of kicking back and watching everyone else pack and leave.

Then the gleaners began to arrive.  Local folks, mostly, some of who had attended the party, others who simply waited for the crowds to disperse.  One by one, they would drive down into the site in their pickups to snatch up the leftover firewood along with anything anybody left behind.  There’s no lost and found here, only lost and gone forever.  By the time they were done there was nothing left but the smoke and the garbage, and we got to work.

In later years we would get smart and make a healthy donation to the Boy Scouts Activity fund and invite them to pick up the garbage and keep all the aluminum cans, but in those days we did it all ourselves.  One crew took my Chevy pickup and filled the back with garbage cans.  Those we would fill with water dipped from the river in 5 gallon buckets, then drive all around the campsite looking for abandoned campfires.  We would douse and shovel all of them, some of which had spread in unpredictable directions under the soil, only to pop up 10 feet away.

The other crew was filling many garbage bags with trash and collecting all the ones we handed out during the event.  All the while, the crowd was slowly dispersing, down to a handful of people on the cleanup crew, or just the ones in no hurry to go back to reality.

Late in the afternoon I saw what turned out to be a white 1959 Cadillac hearse slowly coming down the steep entrance road.  They pulled up to our area, and two young country boys got out.  After exchanging the usual pleasantries and introductions, they told us their story.

They lived in Oregon, on a commercial rabbit farm with thousands of rabbits grown for food, mostly.  A cousin had told them about the Spring Opener, and they sensed an opportunity to go to a great party and make a little money at the same time.  All they had to do was take along some rabbits and sell them to the campers for $5 each, and they would cover the cost of the trip and have some fun, too.

They took us to the back of the hearse and opened the doors.  Where the casket would have been was a large electric chest freezer, which had been unplugged for three days at that point.  Inside the freezer was about 300 pounds of dead, skinned, butchered rabbits, looking pretty slimy by then, but still good.  “Help yourself”  they said.  “We broke down in Yakima when the wheel fell off the front, and we had to get a backing plate from somewhere in Toppenish and that cost $100, and now we gotta cook, eat or toss these rabbits and hope we have enough gas to get home.”  So we had a rabbit fry that night.  The next morning the kids drove back in the back by the base of the cliff and spilled enough food on the ground to keep two local coyote packs busy for a week, then tucked their tales between their legs and headed for home.  The coyotes had a hootenanny, I bet.  :-{)}