Fifty Years of Kicks - Motorcycle Documentary (full-length)

I used to know a man from home, wrote some songs and played guitar. Tried to be a honky-tip-toe girl, the tulips moved out west in Vortica. And bound a ticket for the love boat, but it wouldn't sail in silence in the park. My first motorcycle, it literally came out of a chicken house. You've always heard these stories about somebody getting a motorcycle out of a barn or chicken house. This thing came out of an old chicken house and we had to rebuild it. Had a rod out of it, piston out of it. We used the machine shop at the University of Arkansas in the evenings when we'd get our homework done. We'd slip over there and sometimes work till midnight. In the 60s and early 70s, everything was standard suspension. A cantilever shock to a point and the brakes were all drummed. The problem was staying on them because they were thrashing you around so much. And it was almost impossible to stop them. What about you, Paul? With the early bikes, they didn't even have foot pegs to fold it up. Wait till you put a foot down in front of a solid foot peg. Motorcyclists or off-roaders will spend literally thousands of dollars to try to take 10 or 15 pounds of weight off their bike. And young guys are the worst. They'll spend a fortune replacing a part. Levers, I remember this one, Steve was his name, great kid. And he was paying like $100 for a brake and clutch lever. Some young kid come up to him and said, hey, I just bought a new motorcycle and this and that and I've got $300 left over. What do you think I should spend it on to make me faster? And I looked at him and told him, $300 worth of gas through it will make you a lot faster. Larry's a very talented rider. I am absolutely sure he has more talent than I ever did. I've known Larry for about 10 or 11 years. I'm older than he is. I watch him ride and there's just something about the way he does it. And Larry just seems, no matter what he hits, he just seems to float through it. He always gets the good line. Aggravates you, you know? Why can't I do that? I had a friend of mine, a guy that kind of took me underneath his wing, Bert Irwin was his name. He was a flat tracker, a pro in the U.S. And Bert took me up to the Rouge River up in Quebec. And all we did the whole day was learn how to ride dirt roads very fast. And I mean like crazy fast. Like probably 130, 140 kilometers an hour on twisty, windy roads. Just follow the Rouge River. And all the steering was done with the throttle. Rider position, don't even move the bars. So you'd drive the whole bike just like a flat tracker, skidding all the time. It was just one great big afternoon of a controlled skid. My first real bike experience, big accident on a bike, big incident, was I was 4 years old. And there was this red brick bungalow with this porch on it with cement steps going down to the sidewalk. I'll never forget it. And the prettiest little blonde girl, she probably was 3, I was 4, maybe going on 5. And we were riding tricycles around up on top of this porch. And I looked over here and I thought, I bet I can ride my tricycle down those steps. And sure enough, I did. But at the bottom step, of course, I tumbled over and I cut my lip. I cut my lip from here almost to my ear. And they put 20 stitches on the inside, 20 stitches or 20-some stitches on the outside. I still have a big scar and a little bit of a slur in there from all the scar tissue. I got my first bike, I was 15, and it was about a 3-year-old Honda 90. 90cc, little street bike. My God, I put that thing through the test. It was like, pushed it to every limit the poor thing had. And learned very quickly that for my attitude on a motorcycle, I needed a much more controlled environment where I wasn't going to be doing 100 miles an hour, 160 kilometers through some school zone. So I quickly got into dirt biking where I could get all of that out of my body, I guess, all that speed out. Because you can go slow and still be scaring yourself to death in the woods. I saw Paul at the Highlands Golf Course for the first time. And somebody mentioned, you know, this guy Paul is going to ride with us. Yeah, lots of people often join us. And Paul comes in and he's like, old. Like, old, old. Not just kind of old, but old. Like, 70-old, you know? And I kind of couldn't compute for a second. I was like, this guy's going to ride with us? I kind of was thinking, oh, there goes the ride. Honestly, because when we usually go, we're usually cooking with gas. You know, we want to have fun out there and haul the mail. And I thought, okay, well, obviously we're just going to have a casual ride. That's fine, whatever. And then he starts suiting up and he's got all the appropriate gear. And by the time he was all dressed, it really doesn't matter anymore. We get on the trail and the guy is handling the bike just like any one of us. Clearly super experienced. Paul's been riding off-road motorcycles most of his life. And he has figured out that the secret to being a good off-road rider is the physical side of it. Being in good physical conditioning. There's a story out there that Paul has a logbook that he keeps on all his exercising activities. And every day he writes down what he did. Whether he went riding, rode his bicycle, or went running. Well, the doctor told me with my balance problems that I shouldn't be riding. And they actually told me that 10 years ago when it first started with this ear. He didn't think I should ride my bicycle. He didn't think I should ride the motorcycle. And there are times with this type of disease when you have the very violent spinning. Yeah, you need to be careful because it could hit you. But I'm at the point now where mine is just a nuisance. It's a merry-go-round feel. It's not quite connected. A bad hangover feel, I guess. Sometimes it's not a lot of fun. But it's getting better and it's got to get better. I mean, you can't quit, right? Get on with riding or get on with dying. One or the other. I got to thinking about Larry's brakes. He kept talking about brakes. I kept talking about suspension. Well, maybe that tells me something. Maybe Larry was going fast enough. He needed brakes. And I wasn't going fast enough. So brakes weren't a problem for me. Yahoo! Good day! Almost. My attitude is so positive while I'm riding. I don't know. It's because it's fun. Sometimes, if I'm in a race or even when I'm riding, I'll get disgusted at myself. Because I get off line. I don't pick a good line. I miss a gear. I do something. And sometimes I'll do a little gritching or cussing. Why did I do that, dummy? The hill climb yesterday. I ended up dumbing up and not quite making it. But what we were doing out there was we were having fun. A little bit of it was poor maintenance on my part. I didn't have my auto clutch set up quite right. And it kind of bit me. But it's a hobby. It's supposed to be fun. You're supposed to be out there having fun. And truly, if you're not enjoying it, go load up. Well, look at that. As you get older, your vision is not near as good. And what amazes me is I watch Larry. I follow him. And it's like kind of the faster you go to a point, the better it is. Because you're bouncing over some stuff. You don't want to just slam it. But you want to pick the smooth ones. And that's the difference between the fast guys, I think, and the people that just are riders, good riders, is they see things different or something. Because I get to riding even now, and it's like everything's coming at me as fast as I can respond. I can't see it. I can't respond any quicker. And if you're with a guy like Larry or somebody, they just. . . How can they do that? I can't see it any quicker. I can't respond to it any quicker. And if I go too quick then, then I don't see it. And that's when I start clipping this stuff and ricocheting off things and not riding smooth, solid, like you're on a rail. I like to feel like I've got the suspension right and it's just floating on. . . basically on a rail. Even in the choppy stuff, you know. When it lands, you feel it. It's planted. Don't assume that because people are older than you that they're going to be slower than you, in big time. Because coming from the mountain bike world and being like a cyclist who rides road bikes and mountain bikes on competitions, I thought, it's going to be a walk in the park, you know. Just give me three weeks, a month, you know, with the dirt bike and I'm going to be keeping up with the fast guys. Mistake! The Husqvarna motorcycle's manual, it came with the new Husky when you bought it. You know, it's how to change your oil and all of that stuff. And it was just this manual. And I would say half of the manual was dedicated to personal conditioning. You know, the owner's manual for your motorcycle is half dedicated to conditioning. So I can't, you know, I can't tell any more than that. Like, look at Paul, right, 71. Yeah, got the guns. How do you do that, you know? So for guys like Paul and I, and I'm like a decade younger, you know, we still, when we go into a room with our peers in age, you know, there's no diabetes here, right? There's none of that stuff, you know. We eat our vegetables. Dr. Curran, Dr. Dan Curran, 225. A lot of them have significant arthritis, so their knees are really sore and their hips are sore and they don't move very well because a lot of their joints are worn out. That's probably the main thing that limits people in their 60s and 70s from doing very much. But riding off-road is a totally different thing. I mean, it's an incredibly physical experience. And I think it's hard to get a sense for it unless you have experienced it firsthand. But when you're on the bike and you're trying to balance this 400-pound machine as you're weaving it through the forest and you're trying to avoid obstacles and lift the wheel up to get up a steep hill climb, and the bike, despite the sort of moderate suspension, is getting pounded every which way, and you're standing the whole time and your whole kind of core is contracting and you're trying to make sure that you stay balanced on the bike, which is, again, going back to the Meniere's thing, that's an amazing thing that Paul can do that, stay balanced, because that's really his problem, is the balance issue. But that whole experience of riding on a trail, within about 20 minutes, if you haven't done it before, a new rider would be absolutely cooked. The best way I can describe that is to use myself as an example because I've been riding off-road for a couple of years and one of the things I noticed very quickly is that I would get tired really quickly and I was unable to finish a trail or unable to finish a day without really slowing the group down. So I had to start training and running and for about a year I had to train on a treadmill up to the point where I could run 30 or 40 minutes without stopping every day before I got to the point where I could ride and keep up with guys like Larry and Paul, which really surprised me and I think surprises a lot of people when they don't know how hard it is to ride off-road. Gonna kill it! That was fun anyway. Yeah. I'm glad it was you. Sorry I dropped my bike. Yeah, you should have thrown me a tow rope. I threw you a rock. You were riding too slow. Had nothing to do with rider ability. No, it had nothing to do with rider ability. Actually, I was in second gear and I should have been in first. Probably the second or third oldest guy in a club with about 275 total members, right? And I've made tons of friends. My friends are 30 and 40. I don't have any close 50, 60 year old friends that don't have motorcycles. I don't have them. I don't have any old people friends. Nor do I want any. You know? Except for Paul. A good friend of Paul's and mine died here a year and a half ago. Steve Garnsey. Being out on the trail on a nice afternoon and falling over and having a heart attack and dying. I'm okay. I talked it over with April and my wife and she's okay with it. I'm okay with it. The family doesn't suffer. You really don't suffer too much. You can go out with a smile 30 minutes ago on your face. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that. There's one side of that story I never considered and I happen to be the guy that was with Steve that day that had his heart attack. I've often said I've probably said it a thousand times what a way to go just out there riding and whatever it happens to be whether it's an accident or a heart attack or whatever just check it out on the trail. Well, that's fine and I still to myself but what I didn't realize was the stress that it puts on the person with you and I still to this day wonder did we, did I do the right thing? I can't second guess it. I can't change it and I'm sure we did the right thing. I don't see quitting if I can keep my balance thing working a little bit. I just don't see quitting riding at any time in the near future. I'd like to think I can go on another six or eight years. I look forward never stopping. My dream would be to be able to ride right up until I die. I cannot even imagine an injury that would keep me off the bike. I think I could ride with one arm I think I could ride with one leg I can ride definitely with a half a brain.