Harley Davidson Adventure

Before I begin this true story, I must admit that the above photo is not the actual motorcycle we rode. I have pictures of it packed away somewhere, but can't take the time to dig them out. I found this one on the Internet and it's very close. We added a much more comfortable seat to ours. I hope you enjoy our adventure. Some trips are more memorable than others for various reasons.

In 1976 my husband, Joe and I embarked on a motorcycle trip that became more like an endurance run than a vacation. We had just purchased a black Harley Davidson full dresser with a showy bald eagle emblazoned across the fairing in honor of the bicentennial. It was a cool looking machine and a head turner. We both loved the Harley sound. The rumble that is unique to the machine is matched only by the vibration. Of course, we were eager to take to the highway despite some of our earlier biking misadventures. We both felt confident that this time it would be different. We were on a Harley for goodness sake.

I don’t believe we were aware at that time that Harley Davidson had been taken over by AMF. This, as you will see as events begin to unfold, is a pertinent part of the story.

We began making our plans for the trip not knowing how far we would go, but hoping to reach the West Coast. We carefully packed and thought about packing. We’d been told some horror stories by a friend concerning biker gangs, so we thought it would be wise to carry a weapon or two along to be on the ‘safe side.’ The more I thought about this, the less I liked it.

Strangely enough, a day or two before our departure an older, fat guy on a motorcycle visited our island and came in contact with one of the people we were going to be traveling with. When he learned of our plans, he tracked us down with ‘a message from God.’ It turned out that he was a preacher who specialized in ministering to bikers and the biker gangs. The message was like a line out of a Johnny Cash song: Don’t take your guns to town, son. He said that if we did, we’d have nothing but trouble. On the other hand, if we left the weaponry at home we would encounter good folks everywhere. I was ready to buy into that message and my husband agreed. We had all kinds of problems on our journey, but none of them had a thing to do with people. We met wonderful, kind, people everywhere we went and to this day I still believe that little fat guy was an angel.

Finally with all the preparations made, maps purchased and studied, the big day arrived to go. We were excited. We were riding with some of Joe’s relatives and I’m pretty sure their idea of a vacation and mine were worlds apart. Their goal, apparently, was to cover as much territory as possible as fast as possible and get back to Swan’s Island in one piece to plunge full swing into lobstering ( known as shedder season in Downeast, Maine). I, on the other hand, liked to look around a little more and get off the beaten path. Tearing down the interstate at ninety plus miles an hour wasn’t all that relaxing.

We left in the afternoon and the first night we stayed in Portland, Maine with one of my husband’s cousins. That was enjoyable, but I was beginning to notice something uncomfortable. I was experiencing an ever so slight toothache. How can this be possible? I wondered. I visited the dentist the week prior to the trip and everything was fine. I shrugged it off and figured it would go away. It didn’t.

To be continued…

We began our journey in earnest the next morning. I said nothing about the nagging toothache. Why spoil everyone’s trip? As the day progressed, so did the pain. I remained silent about it. Needless to say, I was not enjoying the scenery. All I could think of was the throbbing. It seemed like every bump intensified it. By nightfall, I’d reached my maximum for pain tolerance and I have a fairly high threshold. After we'd found a room, I broke down and mentioned it to my husband. We’d stopped just outside Philadelphia to spend the night, so he began looking through the phone book to find a dentist. He made a call to one of them and an extremely inebriated woman answered. She was nearly incomprehensible, but he managed to learn that her dentist husband was out. Perhaps, she was the reason why. He tried another number and another woman answered. This one was at least speaking intelligently and rationally. She soon put her husband on the line and he told us that he wasn’t going to get dressed, but to come on over. This was slightly disconcerting, since we weren’t sure exactly what he meant by not getting dressed.

When we left the motel, a steady rain was falling. This only added to the biking experience. By the time we arrived, it was around ten at night. The dentist let us in and I was relieved to note that he was wearing shorts and a tee (I’m not talking underwear). He went straight to work and soon determined that I had a badly abscessed tooth. He informed me that I had two choices. Come back the next day for a root canal which may or may not work in my case or pull it. I told him to yank it.

He gave me several shots of Novocain and tried to begin, but had to keep waiting for it to take. After a few more, it was deemed safe to pull the tooth. When the tooth was out, the relief was instant, but I began to cry from the stress and the fact that now I had a hole where the tooth should have been. The dentist informed me that I made a wise decision, because the abscess was so bad that a root canal wouldn’t have worked. One of the more aggravating pieces of information was that the tooth was perfect without any cavities. I was given antibiotics and codeine for pain and sent on my not so merry way. Almost before I got back to the room, the Novocain had worn off. My husband told me we could go home if I wanted, but I was determined to press on.

The next morning we hit the road and decided to head for Virginia. We took a cavern tour which proved fascinating and then we decided to ride the Blue Ridge Parkway for a while. It was lovely, until we discovered our rear brakes were gone. It was an ‘oh, crap’ moment, as my husband began gearing down and gingerly applying the front brakes. Too much pressure could lead to disaster and it goes without saying the process is a tricky one. Somehow he pulled it off and once the overheated brakes had sufficient time to cool off, we were back in business. That, of course, happened after we got off the Parkway.

By this time, it was getting late in the day, so we decided to ride on a little further and find a place to stay for the night. We saw an attractive looking motel situated back from the road on the side of a knoll, so we pulled in. My husband and his two male cousins went into the motel office to check in, so I got off the Harley to stretch my legs for a bit. I was sort of wandering around the parking lot with his cousin’s wife. Her husband and his brother came out of the office with the sad news that the motel was full. There was no room at the inn, so we’d just have to travel on down the road until we found something with vacancies. They got on their bikes and started driving back to the interstate.

My husband was evidently still gabbing with the desk clerk inside, which for him is not uncommon, so I continued walking around. Finally, I watched as he hurried out, jumped on the bike, and sped off toward the interstate leaving me stranded in the parking lot. This was long before the day of the cell phone folks, so I had no way to contact him. His bike had a CB, but I wasn’t carrying one. I was getting a little angry. I’d heard my great-grandmother tell a story about her husband having a flat tire on his car. He got out to change the tire, so she got out, too and sat to wait on a rock by the side of the road. When he completed the task, he got in and drove away leaving her by the side of the road in an ugly frame of mind. This was an example of history repeating itself, but in her case, she was only a few miles from home. My situation was not quite the same. It wasn’t like I was going to hoof it back to Maine without any money. I started trudging down the long drive toward the interstate and trying hard not to blow a gasket. It wasn’t long before the group returned.

My husband had rushed out of the office and in the dusky conditions didn’t notice that I wasn’t on the back of the bike with all the other stuff. In all fairness, I had to admit there was a lot back there. He’d reached back to pat my leg and when there was nothing there to pat his heart came up in his throat. I climbed on the back and settled down. I didn’t say much, but at least I didn’t rant and rave.

We quickly got back on the highway to search for the nearest motel. It had been a long day. We were tired and longing for a bed and a decent night’s sleep, so we picked up the pace. Little did we know the excitement was far from ending; it hadn’t even begun.

To be continued...

We rode on and pulled into a gas station to fill up and be ready to roll in the morning. We were planning to visit relatives in Knoxville, Tennessee for a day or two before hitting the road with a real vengeance. As we rolled up to the gas pump, we heard a rattle and clang, clang, clang. To my husband’s embarrassment, the heat shield had fallen off from one of the exhaust pipes ( a pretty chrome one) and made its noisy way through the island until it finally clanked to a stop. He got off the bike and tried to appear nonchalant as he strode to pick up the heat shield with a gloved hand. He brought it back and placed it in a saddlebag. It was the first of many examples of the poor quality under the new AMF management of Harley Davidson. There would be a lot more to come on the trip, a whole lot more. We saw another pattern developing. With every tank of gas, Joe had to dump in a quart of oil. This also required frequent stops at Harley shops to get the right kind of oil. We kept hearing that it was necessary until the bike got broken in. Okay!

As soon as the tank was filled, we got back on the road. We had developed the habit of trying to stay ahead of the big rigs. We hated breathing the smoke and fumes they belched, so we were traveling at a good clip and passing everything in sight. All we wanted was to find a room for the night. My jaw was aching, swollen, and many shades of purple. I was looking forward to some sleep.

We were out in front traveling in excess of 85 mph with the other two bikes following. All of a sudden the rear of the bike dropped and my husband thought it had broken in half. Then it began to fishtail violently down the road. It was what I would imagine riding on the back of a Blue-fin tuna would be like. We had a rear tire blowout.

My husband yelled, “Hang on!”

I answered, “I’m hanging!”

I didn’t even have time to be scared. We hung on for dear life and somehow he managed to keep that bike upright until we came to a stop by the side of the interstate. When the others caught up, they said that the bike looked like a Roman candle going over the road. Sparks were shooting from the exhaust pipes like crazy. The bike had been riding on them and those exhaust pipes helped keep us on an even keel. Upon inspection, we saw that the bottom of them was completely flattened out.

Since it was before the cell phone, we sat by the side of the interstate as the big rigs we’d passed barreled on by. We needed to find a tire somewhere. The other two guys went in search of a place to find one and returned with a truck full of young men following them. They were quite a crew. They were polite, kind, and helpful, but I’ve never seen so much tobacco juice fly in my entire lifetime. I tried to stay out of spitting range and watch where I stepped. Since there were no Harley shops around, they loaded the bike on the truck. We asked them if they knew of any nearby motels. They said everything was full up for miles around. It seems a big revival was going on in town, so we were ‘plum out of luck’ in the room department. They did recommend a nice field off the highway where we could camp out for the night, so that’s they took us. They off loaded the bike and left. An old abandoned warehouse sat there in the field on the side of a hill which overlooked the town. It was a lovely spot. We did have sense enough to bring some tarps along and so we circled the bikes spread them out.

As I sat there on that blue tarp with my purple, swollen jaw, I said, “I don’t think biking is all it’s cracked up to be.”

My understatement cracked everyone else up and they started laughing. I really didn’t see that much humor in it at that point. That made them laugh harder. I think it must have been the exhaustion that made it seem funny.

We actually had a great night’s sleep. It didn’t even rain. I felt comfortable and safe, that is until the next morning.

To be continued...