Tommy in Harley Davidson's magazine

This is a story about two riders who left
town and rode west 40 years ago. The trip didn’t set any distance
records. The riders didn’t visit remote and exotic locations around
the globe, and no single thing they did was anything most riders
haven’t done on some road trip before or since. So what was
unique about this trip? The answer can be found in this question:
When did you last set out on a 3,500-mile
run without a cell phone, a roadside assistance card, a GPS device,
or a motel reservation – instead carrying the tent you would sleep
in and food you would eat after making camp at night? Also,
would you make that run on a bone-stock ’70 Sportster® or ’56
Panhead hardtail chopper?
Well, there’s your answer right there.
The year was 1972, and my good friend
Jerry Mehl and I had a big idea: to take a motorcycle trip across
the Southwest to backpack into the Grand Canyon. Friends since
junior high, “Deputy Dawg” and I shared many interests, including
photography, camping, motorcycle travel, and a desire to see the
country off the main roads. This was our chance to do it all.
Two years earlier I had purchased a 1956
Panhead from my friend “Snake” Ragland for $200. He kept it
under a shower curtain outside his apartment, and, needless to say,
it needed some work. Over the course of about a year and a half, I
fixed it up from a near basket case to a classic 1970s-style chopper.
In those days, that meant fabricating most
of the parts myself – custom parts catalogs were rare. By the time
I was done, my new ride featured, among other things, a modified
Sportster fuel tank with hand-carved Maltese cross; a custom
metal-flake airbrushed paint job, with 50 coats of hand-rubbed
lacquer; a hand-welded chain-link sissy bar; and handmade
twisted, square, stock highway pegs to match the nine-inch-over
Springer front end. I also had the motor and transmission totally
rebuilt by the local H-D® dealer.
Jerry’s bike, a 1970 1000cc Harley-Davidson®
XLCH Sportster, was less exotic than my own, but nearly as
impractical for making a 3,500-mile journey. Saddlebags? Tour-
Pak® luggage? What are those? We just strapped what we needed
to whatever we could find to strap it to.
Camping equipment has changed a lot since
then. Have a look at the size of the bedroll and jungle hammock
on the front of my chopper. Today, these things would fit inside a
touring bag. But there was something about having your bedroll
strapped to the front of your scooter that gave a rider a feeling of
going somewhere when where didn’t matter.
On that warm and humid morning in June,
where was the Grand Canyon. But just about everything else was
yet unknown. So a definite excitement hung in the air as we did
a few last-minute checks on our equipment and scooters. When
we were satisfied that everything was as ready as it could be, Jerry
started his Sportster with his right thumb; I cranked the Panhead
with my right foot. After stopping to fill our gas tanks, we were on
our way west but not before making a couple more stops: We both
had to tell our mothers we were off and to not worry.
Our plan, to the extent we had one, was to
leave Monroe and make time to somewhere around Dallas, Texas,
then slow the pace and stay on two-lane blacktop after that. Jerry
was in charge of our navigation system, that being the Texaco
road map he picked up to help find our way along the back roads.
I liked him being in charge of that because it let me sit back with
my boots on the highway pegs and enjoy the ride. All I had to do
to make sure I was headed in the right direction was listen for the
Sportster’s pipes.
(The pipes, by the way, were black. The
chrome was sand-blasted off, and the heat-resistant paint was
cured in his mother’s oven. She was not pleased. Remember, in the
early 1970s there were no catalogs to order such things.)
As a rule, we made our camps miles from
nowhere. No KOA campgrounds, no state parks, no “Mom-and-
Pops” – just a remote spot away from lights and sounds. In terms
of excitement, making camp the first night ranked right up
there with kicking the motor through to begin the trip. We were
somewhere west of Jacksboro, Texas when Dawg and I started
looking for a place to stop. With the sun low on the horizon, we
pulled far enough off the road to put a stand of tall grass and short
trees between us and the two-lane blacktop. After setting up the
tents, gathering wood, and cooking supper, we settled beside the
campfire to let the day end quietly while our scooters cooled down
in the night air of the Texas plain.
HOG 35