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.  :-{)}

A Tree Grows...

If you travel southbound on Interstate 5 through Seattle there is an exit from the right lane at the south end of the Duwamish valley that crosses back over the freeway and joins Martin Luther King, Jr. Way as it cuts across the Skyway hill into Renton.  The exit lane becomes the left lane of the overpass, and curves into its junction with MLK on an arc from east to south, leaving a narrow median strip on the left shoulder that disappears as the two roads merge.

Almost every day, for twenty seven years, we traveled that road, singly or in carpool combinations that included my wife and I.  And almost every one of those days, on the southbound trip, I would be eating the apple from my lunchbox as a snack on the road home.  And almost every time, I would open the driver’s window as we passed that narrow strip of land at 50 miles an hour, and throw out the apple core, aiming for the vegetation beyond the railing.  My wife would criticize me for littering, and I would respond that apple cores are organic, and I was feeding the critters that undoubtedly lived there.  Each day they would huddle by the rail and wait for the manna to fall from heaven, I theorized.  This went on for years.

One day, about spring of 2008 or so, my gardener wife spotted a new plant growing in the median strip.  Sure enough, it was an apple tree!  Over the next several years we watched it struggle to survive in an environment heavy on fumes and road dirt, and grow large enough to bear fruit.  I kept waiting for it to be whacked by a mower, but to date that has not happened.  It’s still there, you can see it on your left as you cross over the freeway, or as you drive north on MLK from Renton in the left lane, if you know where to look.

One of these days, maybe, I’m gonna stop by and pick an apple off my tree.  I’m not sure how to do that without getting run over, but it’s a thought.  Another thought that occurs to me is that, if you do something good for the environment every day, even the smallest thing, even if there are no obvious short term results, your actions in the long run can surprise you.  I suspect there’s a moral to this story, but I’ll let you supply your own.  :-{)}

Edit:  The tree in the story lasted until sometime in January of 2016, when a county road crew came along with a brushwhacker mounted on the side of a tractor and wiped out everything on that little spit of land.  As luck would have it, the above story was published in the ARSCE newsletter the following week.  :-{)}

Coffee and Soap

When I look at our culture, and specifically how we do things differently when we try to sell stuff to men and women, and the resulting trends that flow out of targeted marketing and analysis of shopping behaviors, I am struck by the differences. Take coffee, for instance. A man walks up to a barista (what the heck is that, anyway, a sales clerk who knows how to pour a cup of coffee?), what’s he gonna ask for? “Coffee, black”, or maybe even “cuppa joe” if he’s old enough. The most you’ll get out of him is maybe, “tall mocha, please”. Simple, to the point.
Next up is a woman. “Double split shot vente soy macchiato with sprinkles, hold the whip, please”, she spits out, like it’s nothing. Those baristas eat that stuff up; it’s why the coffee costs $3.50 plus tip. And why the menu on the wall by the ceiling has 32 entries for what is at heart a cup of coffee or tea.
Then we come to bar soap, and that’s another story. Somewhere in this great land of ours are many little cottages, and in those cottages are women doing things like making soap out of the most outré of ingredients, then selling the results to other women, who place them in convenient drawers in their bathrooms so that their significant others, in desperation when the last bit of Ivory crumbled into particles just when they were about to tackle those Klingons, will tear off the artistic floral wrapping inside the artistic floral box and attempt to use what’s in there as soap, an often useless exercise given the apparent lack of water solubility exhibited by said soap. There are two bars of soap in my shower stall currently that exemplify this trend. One is a hard brick with sharp edges that appears to repel water and is somehow related to the fruit of a mango tree, which means it’s good for me, and the other is a shapeless mass of green goo with sharp little particles of ground up apricot pits or walnut shell or something equally abrasive embedded throughout. Try applying that to your tender parts, I say, and you’ll learn a new shout.
And the names they come up with for these bizarre soaps! Irish Spring, is it? I guess that fits, it rains all the time in the shower… If it’s for women, the name is floral and flowery, with artwork to boot, and scent, oh, the scent! Lavender, mango, corpse flower, you name it, so have they.
Now if it’s a man’s soap, the name is a dead giveaway: Gunk; Lava; Borax; whatever is closest to a grunt, that’s the name.
How about deodorant? If it’s for a man, what’s it called? Old Spice High Endurance Pure Sport! Axe! Mennen! (no Womennen?)
What about if it’s for a woman? Secret! Sure! Here’s one even I can’t believe, but I swear it’s really a name for a product on the shelf at your local drugstore even as we speak: Secret Clinical Strength Stress Response Women's Advanced Solid Serene Citrus Scent Antiperspirant and Deodorant! Really! Do you need a hazmat license to dispose of something with that many names?
George Carlin must be rolling in his grave at all this material going to waste. I doff my hat to him for the leadership, and look to the likes of Lewis Black to keep it rolling. It is to laugh. :-{)}