From 1983 to 1985, my family lived in upstate New York. To be exact, it was actually Morrisonville, a tiny ‘burb of Plattsburgh. It was a pretty stark contrast from where we had moved, because Plattsburgh was most definitely what one would refer to as either The Sticks, Boonies, or East Bumsomething. Plus, there, there wasn’t a lot to do. Not for a twelve-year-old, anyway. By the time you were thirteen though, you were typically introduced to such pastimes as the many forms of tobacco, hardcore alcoholism, and unprotected fornication. I had the pleasure of having a run-in with a vindictive, shotgun-wielding father who was a subscriber to all three of those.
Good times.
To be fair, not all of Plattsburgh was like that. There were some great people and other exceptions that made the place rather nice, like the area itself. It was beautiful. And VAST. But let me back up a bit here.
When we lived in Pennsylvania, my older brother and I would take what seemed like epic bicycling journeys to Montgomeryville Cycle Center to check out the dirtbikes. More accurately, we went to go sit on the dirtbikes, grab a brochure, and pine for these machines that provided a guaranteed thrill. For my brother, it was all about motocross bikes. For me, it was all about trikes. More than anything, I wanted a
Honda ATC200X. It was too big for me, but like any kid with aspirations of something cool like that, I aimed high. I would read my issues of Dirtwheels over and over again, as if digesting article after article would make a 200X appear in my living room. It was a pointless quest because even if one descended from the heavens and into my life, I’d have no place to ride it anyway. A couple months later, my father informed me that we were moving.
Again. And this time to some weird town in New York I'd never heard of.
Within months of moving to Plattsburgh, I got my first trike, a
Honda ATC125M. Fortunately, my father had the cooler head in picking one out for me. I’m sure he recognized that I would’ve killed myself on something bigger like my first love, the 200X. More on that point later.
Riding a trike (or more universally accepted,
3-wheeler) is an interesting study of physics. Most are familiar with Newton’s Third law of Motion:
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. With a trike, if you turn left, the left rear wheel will come off the ground. To counteract that, you must always lean into the turn. Once you’ve mastered that one simple premise, everything else falls into place. To the uninitiated, failure to abide by that one simple rule often resulted in a rollover. Perhaps it was due to the inherent fearlessness that little kids possess, but I seemingly mastered that machine in no time and quickly outgrew it. I simply rode it too fast for what it was intended. The only suspension it has was three balloon tires, and they did the job for low-speed stuff, but try anything remotely spirited and it would beat the hell out of you. After a multitude of crashes due to either the trike bouncing higher and higher as I bound down railroad beds, ultimately ending in me losing control and turning into a big, tumbling ball of machine and boy, or a faulty transmission that would pop into neutral as I was in the middle of scaling a wall, it was decided that I need to upgrade to something more suitable to my riding style. Enter the Yamaha 225DX.
My father caught the trike bug. My brother (owning Honda XL100 by this point) and I would ride whenever we could, wherever we could. I imagine my father got envious at some point and wanted in on the action, so he bought a
Yamaha 225DX. Compared to my wee 125, this thing was a Cadillac. It had full suspension, a bigger engine, and shaft drive. Lordy. He didn’t ride it much and when he did he typically scared the crap out of himself, so I kind of insinuated my way into its ownership.
So now I have the right machine. It still wasn’t the more race-oriented 200X that haunted my dreams, but it was a damned fine compromise. I got to be pretty good on that thing and virtually rode the wheels off of it. I even toyed with the idea of racing...
...until the the day came when my father said we were moving yet again. For posterity’s sake, he had the idea of videotaping my brother and me riding in one of our favorite spots, an abandoned quarry. The picture you see above is from that day, and the videotape is highly cherished between us.
Moving was old hat to me by now and I wasn’t too worried about it. What I didn’t realize was that my new home, Massachusetts, was woefully devoid of places to ride. There were a couple places like the odd state forest or two, but when you’re used to just riding for hours and hours on open land, a confined space like a state forest is nothing short of a huge disappointment. I rode on power lines and cranberry bogs whenever I could, but it was, um,
illegal. Hell, I even got roughed up by a bog owner because of it. I still haven’t figured out how he cornered me, but I totally deserved it. Fast-forward about a year, and I sold the trike for a fraction of its actual worth. It was just sitting unused under an army pup tent because I just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of having to outrun cops, environmental police, and bog workers anymore.
Almost immediately after I sold it, I learned of the countless lawsuits against the manufacturers of pretty much anything with three wheels. To summarize, people were getting killed while riding them. The reason? It can be attributed to three things: Parents buying the wrong size machine for their kids, inexperience/lack of training, and lack of helmet. Your eyes couldn’t fall on any part of those machines without seeing a warning label of some sort. It boggles my mind to this day that an entire market segment was wiped out because of people’s refusal to accept responsibility for their actions. All the crashes I had? My fault. All the times I rolled a trike? My fault. You’ll see in the picture above that the headlight is sheared off. That was from an accident weeks earlier when the trike rolled down a sand dune because I had to avoid someone who was about to crash into me. Was it Yamaha’s fault? Of course not. In all cases I knew the risks, and I took them anyway. But those were MY decisions. Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki, and hell, even Troy Bilt—none of those companies held a gun to my head, telling to go beyond my limits.
All the manufacturers were instrumental in informing the public how dangerous the machines can be if you’re careless and don’t take the time to learn to ride correctly. The parents are to blame, plain and simple. They see a machine that looks cute because it has three cartoonish tires on it and figure it’s completely harmless. My father had the foresight to know that putting an eager kid with zero experience on a motorized machine too big for him would end in tragedy in one form or another. It’s just common sense, for crissakes.
Score another one for the uninformed, litigious society.
Last night LF I watched P.S. . We saw a trailer for it on some other DVD we were watching a couple nights prior (just you wait, it’s trailers now, but not unlike actual cinema, there will be ads for Coke and other useless crap on the DVD too). I rented it mostly because Topher Grace is in it, which probably sounds pretty odd coming from a thirtysomething, heterosexual male. When we actually had a TV, LF and I would watch That 70s Show. We were fans of Eric, who reminded us of my little brother, and once we found out he could actually act beyond the character of a sitcom (try it, Ashton), we started looking for movies that he was in. Laura Linney is also in the movie, and she’s just great in her own right anyway.
