BACKROADS • JULY 2022
THOUGHTS FROM THE ROAD WHACKY SHI*T THAT HAPPENS ON THE ROAD
THE UPSIDE-DOWN MELTDOWN AND THE KEY THAT GOT HAIRY At the Frosty Nutz rally up in Vermont you would think that with temps in the low 30s and woolly capped sleepers frozen as popsicles in their sleeping bags, it would be almost impossible to have a meltdown. Let alone an upside-down one. But a meltdown is exactly what happened to my riding bud Larry the Engineer of Mishaps. It was a weekend of negative outcomes. Three other riding buds all checked out with bad motorcycle headaches. Moe’s battery died on his Ducati. Tom’s X-Challenger was nested by a family of burrowing mice that chewed the wires to his fuel pump, and Kurt was forced, against his will, to attend his mother’s 90th and niece’s 30th. Somewhere in the middle of the Green Mountain state, upon executing a U-turn because of an error in my errant ways, Larry’s red, white and black BMW K1300 decided it would have a dirt nap. Now I believe in naps. And I believe in pre-naps. But not on the road like the K1300. Larry pulled out his trusty bag of CruzTools, the best toolkit that ever lived, and proceeded to remove the battery panel, which if you don’t happen to know, sits handily on top of the tank. Larry was well equipped for the occasion with his CruzTool. A cheerless, bespectacled Vermont man came out of a yellow house to offer his help but he was useless without CruzTools. With the battery panel removed, you didn’t have to be an engineer to figure out what happened. Even I could figure it out. The positive battery terminal bolt was completely missing, leaving the charging system
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Victor Cruz incapacitated. We stared at it in disbelief. Three men in spectacles no less. WHERE DID THE BOLT GO? Being an engineer, Larry found it quickly in a place where I would never, ever have bothered to look in a hundred years. The bolt was melted to the bottom of the battery panel. Lo and behold! How did it get there? The VT man explained it brilliantly: “When the terminal gets loose, it creates a lot of heat.” The bolt vibrated upwards and had itself an upsidedown meltdown. Has this ever happened to anyone else in biker history? Wait! There’s more. One time Larry the engineer of mishaps lost his ignition key. We were coming off too short a ride around the Lake Placid area, my having overestimated how long it would take to ride a few Benjamins, leaving us with way too much spare time on hand for drinking cheap beer in an expensive hotel room. Losing your ignition key surgically removes your stomach lining. Which is to say the bottom drops out. All is lost in the world. Not to mention, one very long apply-for-a-mortgage tow back home. Larry searched everywhere for it, starting with his bags, his coats, his toiletries, even shaking his boots upside down. Couldn’t find it to save a penny. Then he found it. They were sitting on top of his head. Yes, his curly haired head. Which at the time was under his Red Sox cap. Apparently when he bent down to go through his bags the key fell right out of his shirt pocket and into his cap, which was on the ground. He put his cap on like you normally do. Super worried, super pissed, Larry went walking around looking for his missing key. The whole time the key was just sitting there, lonely on top of his head. I’m sure THAT has never happened before.
