Excepting go-karts and an adventure in a “borrowed” Mustang II when I was five, my first real taste of motorsports occurred shortly after I turned ten years old, when my stepfather introduced me to minibikes. I had the woods of western Washington state to ride around in, a helmet, and enough common sense at the time to be scared enough of the equipment to respect it, something that I would lose by the time I was a teenager. Everybody has to have a start with a hobby, and ORVs were how I really got into wrenching and speed as a kid. I was taught that I had to maintain the bike and do the work on it if I wanted to ride it, and was shown how to read spark plugs, how to tune carbs, and how to deal with frustrations instead of just walking away from the project.
My first bike was a Honda Z50. The sprightly little bike had just barely enough power to be interesting, and nowhere near enough power to be dangerous. It was neat little bike to learn on that would build up my confidence quickly. The two-speed semi-automatic transmission was a peach and it was tons of fun zipping around fire roads. Even my younger brother, who has never been into motorized things like I have, loved that bike and rode it a lot. The problem with it was that it was designed for a six-year-0ld, not a ten year old. Even back then I looked like Magilla Gorilla riding around on a Shriner’s motorcycle. When the chain adjuster finally broke, it was decided that I could stand to step up to a bigger bike.
Bike #2 was a Honda Trail 70 that offered more of everything: it had a good ride height for a kid, it had more than two forward gears (if memory serves me right, it was a four-speed), it taught me how to work a clutch, and it taught me to never fully trust the machine. The Trail 70 could get up to speeds that would result in a major hospital trip quickly, but again, with the baby steps and given the opportunity to figure out what the bike was truly capable of, I made good headway and by my 11th birthday I was trail riding with my stepdad and his friends. Two incidents really stand out for that bike. The first was when I realized that the throttle liked to stick. Tooling around in an open field near my house, I was coming up a slight rise when I shifted into third and the throttle hung wide open. The bike drug me into blackberry and salal bushes and finally came to rest with the muffler laying on my right leg and my body laying forward of the bike. I hit the kill switch, but getting the bike off of me took some work and a bunch of pinpricks on my hands where I pushed up from the ground. That muffler’s grill pattern was burned onto my leg. The second one was on a muddy trail ride…I rode into what should have been a shallow puddle and sank to the handlebars. Whoops. I had stalled the bike once I realized that I was going swimming by sheer stupidity, so once we made sure there was no water in the cylinder, we kept on going.
Round three was the most ill-advised next step: an 1981 Yamaha YZ80. Compared to the two Hondas, the YZ was a banshee, one that would certainly screw me up properly if I mis-stepped, but I didn’t care and soon I was figuring out low-level flight on two wheels. I got to be pretty good at it, but complacency causes bad things to happen, and sure enough, late summer of 1995 I pushed the boundaries too far. By this time that field had been carved up into a track and it had plenty of room to run. I had come out of a corner and was making a hard charge for a downhill curve when the front end completely washed out on me. The nose went one way, I went the other, I’m pretty sure I rolled like a rag doll, and then…I woke up. One collarbone, a sprained wrist, plenty of road rash, and a beauty of a concussion put me down for awhile, while the Yamaha needed new handlebars. Rebuilt, and with me ready to ride again, I went straight back to my old ways. An incident that involved a stuck throttle and a Douglas Fir put me down hard for a while, and since most of my attention had turned to a 1979 Cutlass that was for sale, I made the call to sell the bike so that I could have the money to purchase the Olds.
I still like to mess around on bikes, quads and three-wheelers every chance I get, but I’m nowhere near as wild now as I was then. I’m pretty sure if I tried any of the stunts that I used to do that I’d wind up with more broken bones…if not from the crash, from my wife after she saw my absolute display of stupidity. It was fun while it lasted, and I’m glad I got it out of my system while I was still able to bounce off of things without getting hurt. Who knows…maybe I’ll find another Honda 200 three wheeler someday. Maybe this time one that doesn’t have the pull starter…
(And no, none of these photos are of me. Those photos are lost to time.)
I remember my first two stroke an old yammyhawhaw 350 enduro lots of go no whoa , unless you hit a tree rock or fence .