Internal combustion therapy

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

Every spring for the past 20 years or so, around the time when the weather turns warm in earnest, I mark a personal seasonal resurrection: the starting up of my old Kawasaki motorcycle.

It’s been an annual tradition since the mid-2000s, when I purchased the bike using all the tip money I earned bartending during a busy Lost in the ’50s weekend. It remains the best $600 I’ve ever spent.

I felt an immediate affinity toward my 1980 Kawasaki 750 LTD. It might be the fact that it was born the same year as me. Perhaps it’s the simple, utilitarian design, or the power and vibration of 75 horses purring beneath your butt as you speed down a lonely highway. 

Whatever the initial draw, my motorcycle is the closest thing I have to a child. 

I learned to ride years before, on a Honda dirt bike when I was in sixth grade, but my Kawasaki was the first road bike in my life. In good times and bad, I’ve relied on that machine to put enough wind in my hair that I don’t lose my mind once and for all. Consider it internal combustion therapy. 

It was on the back of this bike that I rode off on a January morning bound for Mexico about 15 years ago. It was a mild winter, so the roads were clear of ice and snow, but when you’re moving 65 miles per hour, the winter wind chill is enough to cut right through your bones. I pulled over several times the first few hours just to dig into my gear and pull on more and more of the clothes I packed. By the time I reached the Blue Mountains of Oregon, I was wearing everything in my pack, including two pairs of gloves. It was so cold at times, I had to hunch over while riding down the road and grab the engine block with one hand at a time just to get some warmth back into my fingers.

After 4,000 miles of wandering and living the best life I knew how, I returned north and, just miles from my destination in Portland, Ore., my drive chain broke and caught in the rear wheel, causing the bike to lock up. I weaved between five lanes of freeway traffic, narrowly avoiding every car until I wrestled the bike to the shoulder and got off with a sigh of relief. I could have wrecked the bike or myself, but instead I just needed a ride to the shop for a new chain.

Each season with my motorcycle brings its own challenges and glories. I used the bike to run errands when I was still a bartender, often bemusing passersby as I whizzed along with three boxes full of liquor bottles strapped to the back of the bike, alongside two CO2 tanks for the beer taps.

“One of these days, we’re going to see a giant explosion from across town when you run into someone with those tanks on your bike,” the liquor store clerk would say every week. 

It never ceased to amaze him how much I could strap onto the bike.

Every fall, as the weather turns cold, I reach the time when I have to put a cover over the bike and wheel it into the garage to hibernate for the winter. Then, when spring finally turns the corner and leaves winter behind, it’s time to uncover the Kawasaki, wheel it outside, install the freshly charged battery, put in some new gas and cross my fingers that the engine turns over.

Some years there’s no life at all. The battery might be shot, or the gas petcock valve was left open and all the remaining drops of fuel had emptied from the tank over winter. Other years, it fires up like it’s been waiting for me. Then, still wearing my greasy coveralls and, now, a smile from ear to ear, I’ll fly down the road and feel the crisp spring air in my hair. The engine roars like a sentient being, angry for being dormant so long, but ecstatic to be out in the world again.

I’ve almost died on a motorcycle several times, but it’s never stopped me from resurrecting it every spring.

It is my most favorite tradition.