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by Robert “Puppy” DeGroat, Jr.

Sitting in one of the most beautiful, most serene little parks I’ve ever had the pleasure to enjoy, the river rapids broiling by in front of me, I keep trying to feel down. The 1937 Harley Davidson motorcycle that I’ve been riding for better than thirty years is broken again. I’m stuck, yet not only do I have family here in this small back-country town that my motorcycle brought me to, but it is a pretty neat place to be stuck.

The town curls around the bend of the fast running Kern River, and is nestled deep in the valley surrounded on three sides by tall mountains. The natural inhabitants of the town are friendly, helpful, and genuinely warm to outsiders.

During certain periods of the year, it becomes a bustling tourist community, and everyone, including the locals, has a blast. The roads in and out are mostly great motorcycle roads, with canyon walls and drop-offs, and lots of twisty-windys, and lots of pull-outs to enjoy the incredible views.

The fishing is great. The swimming is nifty, though the water is cold, and the Kern River does have a ‘rep’ as the songster Merle Haggard sang “I’ll never swim Kern River again.”. The camping and hiking in the surrounding mountains is almost un-matchable. The sky at night is so full of stars that it seems as if a person could reach right out and grab a handful. In a setting like this, it’s hard to be down, even though I need either a rear cylinder or a sleeve and some other equally hard to find parts for this antique.

I keep thinking that we each pay our dues, sooner or later, and since this old flathead has given me such good service for so many years, it is time to pay my dues. I’ve also found that the more I know about my machine, the more things seem to go wrong. It may be my imagination, but I used to do things to my motorcycle that I wouldn’t even consider now, and it always ran fine. The more technical data I fill my brain with as I work on other models, mainly the newer ones, the more I realize that the antiques I grew up with, like this one, did just fine without all that technical knowledge. The more I try to adapt technical data and advanced techniques to my flathead, the more time I spend working on it and the less time I spend riding it.

“Break out the yardstick. I need to set my points!” was a joke to most of us who’ve been riding for a while, but we listened to it laughingly for years as we adjusted our points with a matchbook cover. “Oh, a couple three-four thousandths’ll do”, used to be the average spec for everything, and our machines ran steadily, noisily traversing the United States with a minimum of maintenance.

I always related my motorcycle to the tractor family, fixing it with a prybar, crescent wrench, screwdriver, and a pair of channel locks, more correctly called water pump pliers. And, it wasn’t uncommon to see me in Sturgis S.D., Washington State or Daytona, Fla, New York, L.A., Chicago, or Canada, at least once a year. Each year, I could be found dragging my tail home to Florida through the freezing cold of November in the longest state in the U.S.. Then in March of the next year, I started all over again, heading to New York, via Daytona, Myrtle Beach and points north.

Today I own a huge toolbox, just filled to overflowing with high-tech tools and equipment, and am always just shy of the right tool to do the job. It almost seems I could build rocket engines with the high-tech stuff I own. I guess I’m wandering, though I’ve been doing that for years. I’ll get my bike fixed, get back on the road and be gobbling up asphalt soon enough, and then I’ll probably be saying I wish I was back in Kernville, California, dangling my fly rod over the rapids, or slipping over them in a tube. Have a nice day, America!

John “Puppy” Smith

http://www.facebook.com/ulflat

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