A Day In The Life Of An Iron-Boy

These cobalt blue skies of September, so typical of Colorado, are much rarer an occurrence in the Northeast of Pennsylvania between Scranton and Carbondale. Still, they transport me back to the days of dirt bikes and the iron-boys with whom I rode motocross bikes. We, that piloted them, were the grandsons of Ellis Island immigrants who scraped their way to America aboard steaming, lurching ships to mine coal, build skyscrapers and grow gardens and grapes for wine. We had the luxury of navigating those same mining roads, not on our way to work as our fathers had done but in leisure, pure ecstasy in fact, on two wheels and even more often, one. 

These were also the days that followed the burning of three of the ancient high schools built in those days order to speed the budgetary approval process required to build a new one. The result was a time/space conundrum that allowed us to live in Nirvana. Namely, three years of half day school session for our 7th, 8th and 9th grade years. This meant we were only required to learn in confinement from 7:30am until noon or 1pm until 5:30. It was that first morning session that I met my buddy, Jeff. It changed my life.  

Having every 7th grade boy in three school districts dismissed at 11:30 am wreaked havoc on our community, taking an especially hard toll on our mothers and grandmothers. Those who worked day jobs could not focus, always waiting for that next "call".  Those who did not, lost every moment of peace and quiet they had ever known. 

The jocks just did their sports. The ruffians wandered about and stole things, burned things in the back alleyways, chased feral cats, snuck around with girls and smoked cigarettes. The mothers whose sons owned dirt bikes were lucky. Their sons only needed to not wander too far down one of the many open mine shafts yet to be capped and get lost, not shoot themselves or one another with 22's, not ride off any of the countless cliffs or strip-mining pits at high speed, or not try to detonate one of the many bags of explosive pellets they found scattered in and about the mining construction trailers. 

Occasionally one of the cranky construction workers would try to mow us down with a pickup truck for borrowing their tools, but a pickup was no match for a dirt bike in those rocky hills.  This was a magical place deemed "Up the Back".

It was up the back, on the way up to the top of the mountain, where the high-tension transmission lines ran, that I crossed patch with Jeff and his buddy Cobbs. Riding a new red Honda SL70, he was a giant mounted on a pint-size version of the lime green SL125 I had acquired with my paper route money. By giant, I don't refer to his stature, rather his presence. Jeff's daily was a Rupp 80, another miniature motorcycle. They were coming down to explore Echo Canyon. 

As it turned out, Jeff lived right on the line and was now annexed into my school district and so also on the variant schedule. Cobbs was about 14 going on 40. He was an old soul. I'm not sure if he even had parents. If they were killed in a car crash or something, Hobbs wasn't the kind to tell anyone. That would be a nuisance. He was the kind of kid who would just continue to attend school, get good grades, chop wood, butcher hogs, make money, pay the bills, take out the trash and keep the farm operational. He never complained about anything. Hobbs knew everything. Corn, cattle, science, astronomy, biology, chemistry, nature, trees, birds, reptiles, 2-stroke engines, macro-economics, mechanics, whatever. 

Jeff had six brothers and sisters. Two of his brothers literally sleep-fought. Jeff took to somnambulating one cold February that I spent the night. After listening to Cheech and Chong's Big Bambu a dozen times, we fell asleep. I woke up to pee and was startled to see someone standing outside. I jumped, thinking it was a burglar. A second glance revealed Jeff was not in his bed. He had walked outside in his sleep and the door locked behind him, so he was just standing there looking down with his hand on the knob. It was like 10 degrees out. I opened the door and eerily he just walked past me and climbed back into bed. He said he remembered being cold but couldn't wake himself up enough to knock. 

His mom had the bluest eyes of any person I's ever met, absolutely sparkling, and she loved us boys. Spring on a dirt bike in Pennsylvania was the best. We were always showing up covered in mud and unannounced and she was always ready for us with food, conversation, interest and laughter. She remarried a good guy named Dick, who took care of the kids as though they were his own. He was a mechanic and there were 2-3 minibikes for every kid in the family with guests. The pile of busted minibikes was always 2/3 larger than the one that ran. I remember seeing Dick standing by the minibikes all lined up only once, smiling to himself. When I asked why he was smiling he said quietly. "They're all running." That lasted one day.

During that same, particularly bitterly cold February, I bundled up and took my trusty SL125 out for ride just so I could brag to my buddies that I was more committed to riding than them, thus proving how soft they were at their core. I was numb in five minutes, but I pressed on. It was about a ten-minute ride up to Echo Canyon, which was not really a canyon at all. Echo Canyon was a strip-mining pit. In the bottom of the pit was a shallow muddy pond that teemed with Peepers in the spring. We skated on it in the winter, blew things up in the summer and rode our dirt bikes in and around it. On the east rim was 'the four hills' where we camped out with fires and kegs of Genesee Creme Ale. At the base of the four hills was a hut that Grouse and the others built from a tarp that covered a PennDOT Salt pile.  They swiped it near Scranton-Carbondale Highway. It was so big thay had to drag it with two Honda XR75's. 

On the north and south sides of the 'canyon' were steep, rocky faces. They were our crown jewels; wicked hard hill climbs that devoured both the foolhardy and the inexperienced. Broken plastic and metal littered the sides and bottom as a testimony from those who wrote checks they could not cash.

Wimmer was a football jock and one year, he put a toe into our world. The fiery debate between us and the jocks centered on the physical demands of football vs. motocross. He showed up with his brand-new Honda 350cc twin. It was a bloated pig compared to what we rode. It had exactly 3.7 miles on the odometer. It was still sporting the blinkers and mirrors. We laughed and pointed. He watched as we mounted our dirty Suzuki TM125's, Husqvarna and CZ 250's; motocross bikes that climbed with seemingly little or no effort on the rider’s part. His misguided assumption? That the little 350 sticker boasting more cc's meant more power and guaranteed a ride to the top of the Widowmaker. He did not consider motorcycle riders true athletes, nor did he heed our warnings. On the contrary, he laughed them off calling us a bunch of panty-waste. We licked our chops in anticipation.

The runway to the base of the Widowmaker was fine sand in the summer when the pond dried up. It had a smooth curve as you started your climb. The hill itself was about 200 yards to the top. About 40 yards up, there was a steep bit and a large, flat boulder right there, protruding sharply at the base from erosion. We called it the Pope's Nose. 

Arguably, it took some badass, moto-gymnastics to crest the Widowmaker and the majority would not even attempt it. If you let off the gas, and shifted your weight back for a split-second your front wheel would hop over it and immediately, when your rear wheel made contact, you threw yourself over the bars, gassing it hard to get the tire spinning for the next section which protruded like an elephant’s back. At that exact moment, you needed to be standing up leaning your thighs into the handlebars, putting your weight right over the front wheel, so you could let the rear tire do its work without performing the dreaded wheelie of death. 

Both sides of the Widowmaker were lined with boulders, ranging from the size of a football to the size of a footlocker making it the original tower of terror. If you weren't going to make it, your only option for survival was to wait until the engine was just about to quit, turn the bars hard to the right, grab the front brake and jump off the bike on the left and sit your ass on the hill, digging in your heels and holding onto your bike for dear life, lest it pinwheel itself to pieces all the way to the bottom. Then you waited until the spotters could climb to your assistance and slowly help you drag it back down to safely, gather your wits and try again. This was simply how you transitioned to manhood in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Over time, when you got strong enough and became an absolute stud of a rider, you waved them off, got on the bike as it sat sideways with the rear brake locked and turned your bars back and forth until the front wheel was headed downhill. More or less. Then in an instant, you jumped on, straightened it out and rode the hell out of it all the way to the bottom. You kept your weight waaaay over the rear wheel, otherwise you'd go over the bars when you dropped off the Pope's Nose on the way down and face plant in the sand at the bottom. We saw that happen more than once; Burb did it attempting a descent on his Schwinn Flyer bicycle and knocked himself out cold with a mouth full of sand since he was screaming at the time. He was even a bigger braggart than Wimmer, and didn’t own a motorcycle. He paid dearly.

Again, easier said than done, but a thing of beauty to witness. Riders like Vit, Corazzi and the Bilsky brothers performed such heroics repeatedly without hesitation. Malcolm Smith was both our model and hero. 

Wimmer didn't have a motorcycle helmet yet. He snapped the chin guard from a retired Blakely Bears football helmet. He resembled an inmate. One with a dirty, brass spittoon pounded on his head with a bat, like Jack Nicholson in ‘Easy Rider’.

After watching him sit there staring at the Widowmaker for what seemed an eternity, we finally waved and tapped our wrists. He stomped it into first and dumped the clutch. We would have let him off the hook, but as much as we knew he wanted to just turn around and gun it for home, his pride would not allow it. 

"Shift, Shift!" we all yelled, but he wouldn't. It was the last piece of advice we could offer. He never got out of second gear. As he approached the bottom of the climb, he was revving the engine so high, we thought it was going to explode. Wimmer's face was frozen in a sardonic grimace as the enormity of the Widowmaker filled his visor, but there was no turning back. 

There were four possible critical errors in judgement and execution: Downshifting too early, improper body position, throttle timing and knowing when to bail. Violating any one of them might resulted in catastrophic failure. That day, the cruel hand of fate, dealt Wimmer four Jokers. He made every fatal mistake in the first 10 seconds. As he began to climb, the weight of the bloated pig caused the revs drop and Wimmer immediately downshifted to first and gunned it. It threw his weight back immediately forcing his throttle right hand to the WFO position. Now, he couldn't let off or quit even if he wanted to. 

We watched in great anticipation as this tragic event unfolded slowly before our eyes. 
The Honda shot up the hill like it came out of a cannon, but this momentum would be short lived. When the front wheel hit the Pope's Nose, the pale green pig was launched into the air. Wimmer was in turn, launched into the infamous "Flying W”, hand in a death grip on the bars and his knees somewhere near his ears. Next, the rear tire, with zero traction spun freely to its maximum speed! This was roughly 40 miles per hour when, in fact, Wimmer was now mid-air traveling zero miles per hour. He just hung there for a second. Then the rear tire landed. With the full weight of Wimmer and the Honda over the rear wheel in the middle of the Pope's Nose a lot of bad things happened quickly.

The clean, hard rock and new semi-knobby tire were the perfect marriage for traction and Wimmer's body position had now transitioned from Flying W to Superman with his feet straight behind him. Nonetheless, he hung on defiantly.  He got air for a second time. Reconnecting with terra firma, the rear tire spun furiously and fishtailed him sideways immediately into the boulder field where glancing contact between front tire and a footlocker sized boulder changed his direction. Wimmer was now headed straight back down the hill, still giving her the gas. We all took a deep breath and held it. 

He was splayed out the entire length of the motorcycle. Later that night at Tony's Pool Hall, Bones likened that moment to Rollie Free on his Vincent Black Shadow during that historic Bonneville Salt Flats Land Speed record attempt. But this would not end with the same celebratory victory dance. The ride down the boulder field lasted but a nano second and Wimmer was lucky to be pitched of at the first buck of the bull.

The Honda however continued at full speed downhill, but the rubber side was most definitely not down. It went every which way possible, and the Honda began spitting off parts like a Russian Sputnik during re-entry. First to go were the blinkers, then the seat, the taillight lens, both mirrors, the brake and clutch levers, and finally the gas cap. Fuel sprayed everywhere. We crossed our fingers, hoping for just one more scrape between metal and stone. The tiniest of sparks and we might witness our first ball-of-flame crash in the history of the Widowmaker. But the flying pig missed the last boulder and hit the sand. It lay there dead on its side. All went quiet. 

Our eyes turned back up the hill to Wimmer emerging from his point of impact. He looked as if he was waking from a bad dream and had wet the bed. The football helmet, now down over his eyes, had done its job. There was no blood, no broken bones. Just a few scrapes but he didn't notice them. He first words were, "I busted my nuts!" He began to make his way down the hill slowly, picking up bits and pieces along the way as though he intended on putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. 

To our amazement the Honda started up and was still rideable, more or less. Wimmer’s biggest fear now was getting the bike home without his Pop seeing the damage. This was highly unlikely.

But I digress. 

Back to that frigid February day on the rim of Echo, when my hands were so numb, I couldn't feel the throttle or squeeze the clutch. I popped out of the woods and was going to take the shortcut back home. But as I made the turn, there at the bottom of Screw-U, the steep little u-shaped valley by which you launched down into Echo, sat Hobbs!

He was kneeling behind his little Honda, revving it with one hand while thawing the other in the hot exhaust. First one, then the other. I couldn't believe my eyes, my tears now frozen to my cheeks. I was less than two and a half miles from home and Hobbs was at least twenty. But there he was. As I descended, he stood up, gave me a half sideways grin, a wink and a thumbs up. It was like he felt guilty for giving in to weakness and warming his hands. I don't even remember what we said, but it was only the two of us out riding that day. He was a man of few words. It was only a minute before I sent him on his way. It was cold and he had ten times the distance to ride than I.

There are certainly worse things than growing up in a strip-mined-dump-of-a-town with a dirt bike, but as Hobbs disappeared over the top of Screw-U on that little Honda, I knew, without question, that I had been in the presence of iron-boy greatness and for just a moment in time, he considered me his equal.

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