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Iron Ponies and Horse- Drawn Buggies
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© 1995-2007 Carla King | All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. |
I COASTED INTO A GAS STATION and
stopped next to the mechanic, who was pounding on something under an
Amish farmer's tractor. The farmer looked on. His face was shaved except
for a long fringe of beard around the edge of his jaw. His eyes were
clear and hard and the same color blue as the checks on his shirt. He
glanced up at me and nodded, then turned back to the mechanic, who still
pounded.
The phone was inside, next to a large Naugahyde chair that leaked stuffing at the seams. I sat down and called Bob Gerend at Ural, who, after emitting a disbelieving epithet, told me to hang tight and he'd call me back. In a couple of hours I was rescued again. This time it was Ron who came to help, from Akron. He arrived fuming. "Traffic was awful," he said. "These roads, and all these damn Amish buggies." He maneuvered his tall, lanky frame around the Ural, trying single-handedly to move it into his trailer. I helped, and called over one of the gas station attendants to give us a hand, but Ron still managed to throw out his back. He was a new Ural dealer, and he hadn't even gotten the tool kit yet. We drove away, and I told him about my problems. "Urals aren't all like this, I hope," he said. "I'm just not up for service calls all day long." "No," I said. "I just got lucky." He swept a wild lock of steel-gray hair from his eyes and leaned over the steering wheel. "Well, these things can happen to anyone, any machine," he said. "It's too bad it had to be you." I'd been thinking about that during the time I sat in the overstuffed chair in the gas station, watching the Amish go by. So far I'd had a bunch of interesting experiences because of the Beast's little electrical fits. Without them I would have ridden right through North Dakota in a few days, the way most people do it. I was thinking that it had all been for the better. ON THE WAY OUT OF TOWN, Ron maneuvered around a horse-drawn carriage. "These damn Amish," he raved, hunching over the steering wheel. "They could get into the present century. They could drive cars. They use tractors. So what's the difference?" It is true, the Amish somehow find a way around the rules in order to use engines for commercial purposes. I think their rules are contradictory. They hire taxis, but don't drive cars, only the quaint horse-drawn carriages. And they do use tractors and engines on their farms. "Did you see the women's dresses?" Ron asked. "They're not allowed to use stitches, so they're pinned together at the seams." "And you've got to watch out when you're dealing with them, you know," Ron continued. "They'll rip you off. If you're not one of their own, they don't hesitate." That really surprises me, if it's true. It seems to me that people who live so adamantly according to their relegion would be inherently honest. We were soon out of Amish country and in the completely modern world of freeways and engines. I had liked the rolling hills and the horses and buggies, but Ron was much more relaxed in this 65-mile-per-hour environment. This way, it took only an hour to get to Akron and to Ron's Harley shop, the Iron Pony. THE IRON PONY is a hip little shop that deals in after-market and parts. Ron, who is semi-retired, has a few Harleys for sale on the floor inside, but he's not set up for repair. He wasn't yet set up for Ural repair, either. "We're only just learning," he said. "But we'll work together and try our best." We unloaded the Ural, and since it was late in the day, Ron dropped me at a nearby motel. "I'll pick you up in the morning at 8:00 or so," he said. The motel was an old depressing place with dubious activities going on in the hallways. I stayed in and watched TV, made phone calls, and read my email. I'd talked to dad from the gas station about a noise I'd noticed, and the fact that one cylinder was running richer than the other. He replied:
My brother Jeremy was checking up on the PowerBook 520 he sent me in Michigan:
THE NEXT MORNING Ron picked me up and took me back to the Iron Pony. With the shop manager's permission, I set up my computer on the desk behind the counter, got a cup of coffee from the tool bench, and went into the garage. Ron worked on finding the electrical problem while I started taking off the right cylinder. Ron found a short, but couldn't duplicate it, and so replaced the battery and cable, using the ones from his demo model. We took the bikes for a ride and compared engine sounds. Mine was much louder than his -- the clack I'd been hearing ever since Michigan and the repaired cylinder. Now they heard it at the Iron Pony. Somebody was sure it was piston slop. Somebody else said it was time to lap the valves, and somebody else said it was a collapsed hydraulic lifter (the Ural has solid lifters). Dad emailed me:
We sat on the cement floor of the garage, listening, taking apart, and putting together. We took more engine parts from Ron's demo model and crossed our fingers. Late in the day I took a coffee break and looked around. The Ural was in a few pieces near the front of the open garage door. The frame, the seat, and the engine were in different piles. Tools were scattered, and coffee cans separated categories of nuts and bolts. People walked by, glancing in, and away again. The sunlight made it difficult for them to see inside the dark garage. In the cool of the garage that day I had learned how and why to space piston ring gaps. How to extract valves, seat push-rods, and replace a rocker arm assembly. This made my education fairly complete, as far as the Ural went. I sipped my coffee and looked on, feeling the power of my newly acquired knowledge and skills. It was exhilarating. BEFORE THE END of the next morning the repairs were made. The engine was quiet, the battery was charging, the brakes were tightened up and all the little details like turn signals and lights were working just great. I rode past the shop a couple of times, beeping. I was elated. I felt like I had a new bike. I had spent three nights in Akron and hadn't seen the city, so I decided to go downtown to the new Inventor's Hall of Fame. As I walked around I thought of Randy and all the stuff he tinkers with. He would like this place. So would my dad, and come to think of it, so would all the mechanics I'd met on this trip. The top three floors are pretty much just plaques with inventors' photos and brief descriptions of their inventions. But the bottom level is a hands-on floor with a take-apart area full of PC boards, cameras, radios, tools, strobe lights, woodshops, and mechanical marvels you can add to and experiment with. It could keep an imaginative kid busy all day long. I was mesmerized by the strobe, and the demonstration of the technology behind it. And then I rode out of the city and into small-town Ohio -- cow-pie cornfield roads, little pink houses, churches, and funeral homes. Corner stores with live bait advertised in childish scrawls on a screen door splattered with flies. Darkness came before I was ready for it, and I looked for possible places to stay. There were none, so I drove on out of Ohio and cut into a corner of Pennsylvania and then into West Virginia. Here I rode into an industrial town with nightfall hanging over smokestacks that were spewing glowing white clouds of steam. Whisps of warm steam blew through the chill, dry air and past my face. Monster machines rumbled in a subterranean factory under my wheels. Streetlights shone starkly on the empty street and illuminated steam coming from manholes. In the distance, a group of stacks spewed fire, orange and blue that cut through the black sky. HOW HAD I MANAGED to find myself a place like this, I wondered, as I rode by railings and a twisted maze of pipes and tunnels hanging over and between buildings. The only other person in sight was a worker dressed in overalls and a blue cap. He was Everyman, faceless in his uniform. His footsteps might have echoed on the cement, against the metal pipes, but the engine rumbled, and his boots fell silent. I rode under another maze of sinewy metal twisting through the air from a building on one side of the street to a building on the other. A traffic light turned red for no apparent reason, and I obediently stopped. A jet of steam, suddenly released from somewhere, spooked me. Opening the throttle wide, I ran the red. There was no one around, and now I wanted out of this Kafka-esque depiction of an American industrial city. It was 9:00 at night. But it could have been 3:00 in the morning. Then there was a string of bars and restaurants, and I found a motel with one last vacant room without air conditioning and a phone that was broken. A group of men who were there to put in gas lines said the woman at the front desk drank beer around a work truck in the parking lot. They leered at me and asked for a ride in the sidecar in a way that made me nervous. I wished they'd ask what I've got in there so I could give them my standard flippant answer -- "The body of my last boyfriend" -- but they didn't ask. Too bad. It would have gone over well. At a Bob's Big Boy restaurant across the street, I made my phone calls and had the all-you-can-eat soup and salad bar. It was a cool night. The gas line guys had disappeared, and I crossed the parking lot in peace and collapsed thankfully in a bed with a scratched wooden headboard and a quilted white spread. I wanted to get through Shenandoah State Park, then to Wallburg in North Carolina to be with my family. I was so tired, and my uncles, who are mechanics, could help me figure out what was wrong. The rest of my trip would be mechanical perfection. In my mind, Wallburg was my only destination. Never mind California, which was another 5,000 miles of backroads and detours away. North Carolina would be the halfway point, and I couldn't think further than that. |
