January 2023 Free Wheelin'

FREE WHEELIN’ BRIAN RATHJEN

Like many people, I tend to be on the computer and the web far more this time of year compared to the warmer months when, like all good riders, we’d be out riding. But, even with the electrics, climate change making the riding seasons warmer and longer (see it’s not all bad), and my constant desire to take my bike everywhere… I still spend far too much time where I am right now; in front of a large iMac tapping away at a keypad so old I had to re-mark the keys.

Like most of you, I get inundated with all sorts of stuff, scam, and silliness; and like most of you, I have learned long ago to quickly dispatch said Triple Ss. But I also have developed and latched onto a few sites that I nd enticing, curvaceous, exciting, tempting, and seductive. Like some of those adult sites that I once read about. Really.

Almost daily I see email messages come in for Bring a Trailer, Iconic Motorcycles, Bike-urious, and the like. These sites have a daily serving of some very interesting machines, gear, and motorcycle-related bits and bobs.

Although sometimes, when at the keyboard, I am a little too busy to dive deep into these sites; then there are other times I go brew a deep, dark and avorful coffee and dive right in. You never know what will show up as you scroll through these sites.

I got dreams to remember – Otis Redding

When I was a teen growing up in Queens, New York – along with Spider-Man, the Ramones, and the New York Mets - there was not much going as far as places to dirt ride and to ride legally was never going to happen.

Where many of you who were raised in the burbs or what we admiringly called the country, seemed to have miles of trails to ride and, just as importantly, parents who seem to encourage you to get out and do just that.

Where I lived the trail was the narrow bit of dirt in between the 30th Avenue exit on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and St. Michael’s Cemetery. The riders who seemed to show up each afternoon were of 2.5 kinds. The Jackson Heights crowd – mostly middle-class – would be riding Honda SL70 and Yamaha GT60s. To my 12-year-old eyes, these seemed to be real motorcycles. The second component of the 2.5 were the other kids - upper lower class as my Mom would say euphemistically call us - that hobbled together some old lawn motor engine into a crappy tubular frame – the Rupp Roadster-style mini-bike or worse.

The .5 of the equation was me. Although I think my mom, given the chance, would have been out of Queens and to the country in a second, my step-father would never have it. Mini-bikes, motorcycles?

Never gonna happen.

Hell, he did not even have a driver’s license; so my dreams of owning any machine as a kid were just that – dreams.

Half a century later my situation has changed… just a bit.

Yet these sites – moto porn for the longing rider and would-be rider – tempt us each day like a Siren calling out to us through an open Yoshimura exhaust.

The man behind Bike-urious and Iconic Motorbikes, Abhi Eswarappa, Continued on Page 7