Old Guys Talking Motorcycles at a Tavern

This is a photo of me at the local old biker guy gathering a week ago. Two tables at Sir Ben’s tavern pushed together + a dozen old guys. Mostly acquaintances, some friends. Once a month. I got there via e-bicycle.

There are several reasons I’m sharing it here. One is because graininess-and-all, this image captures the relaxed random feel of such gatherings, two is because I’m shown at the center of the age-old human story it tells, and three is because it’s low quality resembles lots of old-fashioned film amateur photography, which (even though it was made digitally) seems authentic to this moment. Old men talking motorcycles.

As my wife and these moto-geezer acquaintances all know, I go to monthly gatherings like this only a few times a year, even though I enjoy them. This was a randomly scheduled no-club-open-to-anyone meetup in my smallish community of Duluth Minnesota, a semi-remote northern plains town of approximately 85,000 souls within an overall metro area of maybe 150,000. The surrounding geography and biomes include forests, swamps, and lakes, with nearly zero nearby agriculture or husbandry. Our long difficult winters combine wetlands and rocky poor soil with a stoic Nordic immigrant culture which influences even local old guy motorcycle gatherings. I learned of this one only because I’m fortunate to be on someone’s cc-all email list, and though I’ve been riding with a few of these guys (only once, earlier this year), I’ve become reasonably acquainted with most of them by occasionally being at these types of gatherings across a span of over four decades. Normal small-town stuff.

There’s another monthly ‘bike night’ event here at ‘Clyde Iron’, a wonderful pizza + craft brew place operating inside a recently refurbished vintage industrial fabricating building (see photo).  And a third weekly old-guy rider 8AM breakfast which moves between half a dozen small home-cooking cafés. About a third of the regulars at that gathering no longer ride very much, if at all. Nobody cares.  

The day I happened to be at the event in the photo was particularly nice weather-wise, perfect for an e-bicycle ride, which I’d ridden to work that morning. I went directly from there, a distance of four miles, very happy to be outside playing hooky for an afternoon during what was certain to be one of the last warm(ish) sunny days before everything outdoors became northern Minnesota winter, I.E. miserably cold, cloudy, dark, and snowy. But this exceptional day was sunny and warm. Leaves had all fallen weeks earlier, but the temp reached sixty (15.5ºc), which was only a couple of degrees below the all-time high on this date. The gathering started around 4PM and ended about 5:30PM.

The antique flip-phone camera used to make this image is a hallmark of the fellow who likes taking such photos. I’ve never paid attention to the specific device he uses, other than noting it is a beat-up flip phone. He regularly shares lots of grainy in-the-moment photos with a small cc’d group of friendly moto-geezers. Most images record various motorcycling exploits, and almost all are about as rough as this one, whether they were made in his workshop to share some old bike mechanical repair project, or far out in the backcountry of Texas or Mexico where this guy winters as a professional varmint hunter/exterminator riding his trusty well-used dirt bike.

Behind the Coke can on the table directly in front of me is a worn piston from an ancient Norton P11. This one and its equally worn mate were brought to show how they had recently been ‘nuralized’, which is a way to make worn-out old pistons fit a bit more tightly into the bores of an engine so they could be used a little while longer. (https://www.enginebuildermag.com/2017/09/lost-art-knurling-pistons-takes-skill-guts/) You can tell a worn-out piston by its sound. The noise is called ‘piston slap’ and if you’ve heard it once you’ll be able to recognize it forever. It gets worse and worse, which means louder and louder, with time. For a geezer gearhead who’s got some tired old motorbike, it is a bad noise.

To fix this problem on a tight budget the engine’s pistons are removed so each piston’s skirt can be mechanically dimpled with rows of short, tiny bars pressed hard enough into the aluminum to cause the metal displaced by the bars to expand outward and upward, making the effective diameter of the worn-out piston slightly larger. At least for a while, anyway. There are a variety of machines and tools made to do this in several ways because it works quite well and is inexpensive. Necessity being the mother of invention, it’s the kind of thing one did back when they were young and poor when pistons didn’t last as long as they do today, and when replacement slightly oversized ones were neither easy to find nor very affordable.

When I was young, I had a machine shop do this nuralizing procedure to the worn-out pistons from a car I had and it worked reasonably well. Almost a lost art now, except maybe in economically ‘still-developing’ parts of the world and also for geezers on Social Security trying to get a couple more years out of some long-loved mostly worn-out old bike. It’s also a perfect example of why these guys come together to talk about their motorcycles and lives. Telling stories far too boring for youthful riders, but meaningful for those who’ve shared such long-lost experiences and are now old.

Whenever motorcyclists gather at a tavern, rally, or racetrack to share stories, the generic term for the conversation is ‘bench-racing’. The younger the riders, the more hairball/incredible/borderline unbelievable their stories seem to be. When I was young, I distinctly remember a fellow slightly younger than me who was at the time explaining in detail how he was able to ride very VERY fast for long periods in a variety of road situations and never receive even a single speeding ticket due to his advanced on-board anti-radar technologies and supposedly brilliant ultra-stealthy high-speed riding skills. After listening to him go on about this for a minute or two, and when he seemed to have finished his boastful account of high-speed heroics, I said “That’s impressive, but if you are not getting tickets, you are not really riding that fast, that much, that consistently.”  Which was my truth at the time, for despite having a nice radar detector and three (!) speedos on my handlebars (the one that came with bike, an added digital bicycle speedo calibrated to the exact circumference of the front tire, and the instantly calculated speedo function in a small early GPS), I was for a few years nearly always a single ticket away from losing my license. (Once during this period I’d done something stupid* while riding south toward LA on the I-5 freeway in California and got one where the CHP officer had written simply “100+” on the ticket, but that’s another story.)

As an old geezer-rider these days, the stories I hear going around the table are considerably gentler and far less heroically inflated. They’re also more wide-ranging and often involve wives, kids, grandkids, home maintenance and mechanical jobs, sailboats, fishing, hunting, cool tools, almost-forgotten or long-absent acquaintances, non-motorcycle travel experiences, and sometimes even politics (!!). Topics that go far beyond riding experiences and riding heroics.

Despite today’s easy and amazing technology for filming and photographing everything, and the general popularity of doing this now, very few visual records exist of one of these old-fashioned bench-racing moments. Unlike today’s youth, geezers seldom think about making visual records of ordinary events like this, unless a rider with a crappy flip-phone happens to still be as young at heart as he was fifty or sixty years ago. The old saying: “You’re only as young as the games you play.” is an eternal truth.

This image accidentally was well-composed and framed. Its grainy fuzziness captures the atmosphere around some old guys talking about motorcycles in a tavern. Plus, (repeating myself as old people do) I’m the old guy in the foreground.  Pontificating on something of crucial importance.

Happy Holidays, and good riding,
Mr. Subjective, Nov 2023

*That big ticket in California story is this: It was a gorgeous warm spring afternoon under a cloudless sky with extremely light traffic, often not another vehicle within sight either ahead or behind as far as I could see. There’d been enough recent rain that year so the nearby low hills provided a spectacular wall-to-wall display via hundreds of millions of colorful flowers in full bloom. I was enjoying all this while moving along happy and relaxed at +- eighty (mph) which was slightly over the speed limit, without paying much attention to anything. Just enjoying the overall bliss of this ride. The bike was happy too, thrumming along smoothly and perfectly. Suddenly, and somewhat surprisingly I was passed by a very black BMW seven-series sedan going maybe twenty-five miles per hour faster than I, which woke me right up from my blissful daydreaming. Those things were semi-exotic very expensive twelve-cylinder sport-oriented luxury cars favored by wealthy doctors or lawyers. They were easily capable of speeds around one fifty or sixty (mph) as they’d been designed for German Autobahns, which have no posted speed limits.  

In an instant I decided I could use this car as an effective ticket-blocking ‘shield’ if I sped up and matched its speed from about a quarter mile back or a little more, which is exactly what I did, settling in at something a bit over 100 (mph). From such a distance, all I’d need to pay careful attention to would be the brake lights on that thing.  If they flicked on, even for a moment, I’d need to grab a big handful of front brake and immediately bring my speed back down to the legal number, even it looked a bit comical or smoke curled off the tires (in my imagination).  This new higher speed would cut about half an hour off the rest of my trip that day and was perfectly safe because the highway was smooth and wide, the weather was perfect, and there were very few other vehicles around. I was looking forward to a playful, fun, illegally fast riding game for a little while. The bike was willing, too, seeming to enjoy it’s greater load and higher RPMs.

California did not use radar for speed enforcement at that time so if I was vigilant and played the game well, I should be ok. Wrong. Ten minutes later a CHP officer had us both cooling our heels on the side of the road. For whatever reason, the highway patrol car was positioned in front of the BMW and I was maybe twenty feet behind it. As soon as the ‘Chippie’ walked up to the BMW driver’s door, the driver stood fully upright on the car’s driver’s seat and took the ticket through the open sunroof, standing there calmly under that perfect California sunshine. Turned out he wasn’t some smart rich MD, business entrepreneur, or attorney. This guy looked a lot more like a clueless entitled kid in a worn t-shirt and long unkempt raggly hair. He would have easily passed as some spoiled Beverly Hills brat or performing artist from LA’s music or film industry. A few minutes later I signed my ticket feeling like a complete idiot for following this car under the mistaken assumption anyone driving such an advanced machine would not be a dummy and would know what the hell they were doing.  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

After I got back to Minnesota, I spent the next several weeks worrying if this ticket would cost me my driver’s license since I was already carrying two lesser (lower speed) speeding tickets. This big one was worth so much more on the ‘points’ system most states then used to keep track of such things, that if it showed up on my Minnesota driving record, I’d immediately become license-less.

Supposedly the ticket was serious enough to require an appearance before a judge at a traffic courtroom in California, but with the help of an attorney that requirement turned into a fine somewhere in the $500 range, so I didn’t need to go back and appear. But I remained fearful of receiving some kind of letter or phone call asking me to surrender my Minnesota driving license and stop driving for a year or two. Eventually someone told me I could simply go down to the driver’s licensing place, pay five dollars, and they’d run my record and give me the printout, so that’s what I did. It came back without listing the big California speed violation. I asked the person who handed me this paper if Minnesota and California had ‘reciprocity’, as many states did. “No.” was their answer, and an immediate huge wave of relief spread through me as I rode back into my everyday life feeling like fate just gave me a great gift, but this joy didn’t last long. Later that afternoon, or maybe the following morning, my insurance agent called and said in a familiar but slightly amused-sounding voice “I see you got a big ticket in California last month….”.  My policy was a bit more costly the following year. If you think you are riding fast a lot, and you are never getting speeding tickets, you are not really riding fast.