Motorbycle in the Police Car!

Jay Kristeller     Period  4   ELP    2-20-08

“There’s a motorbycle in the police car!”

“What?”

“There’s a motorbycle in the police car,” whined a two-year-old kid.

Those words confused my mother until one of the best days of my childhood, my third

birthday. On the third of the fifth month in 1997, all the questions from the confusing dialogue that came from my mouth for the last couple months were answered.

The grass was just appearing from the melted snow and the air was crisp. Little streams were trickling down the driveway from all the melted snow, forming groups of muddy puddles. The final of all my presents rolled out of the 1964 Land Rover with an 88 inch wheel base that in my description was the “police car” or “ambulance” because, it had one yellow light on top. The semblance of the little white wheels and the cushioned blue seat on top of its wonderfully built 50cc Yamaha motorbycle made my moms expression turn from excitement to frustration just by looking at it. Of course my mom doubted the idea because; I’d never ridden a bike before. So every time I wanted to ride the motorbycle my dad would get a great exercise running behind keeping the bike up.    

            It felt so good when the zephyr gently brushed my hair across my face and cooled my overheated body with its gentle wind after riding for a whole hour on my new bike. It wasn’t to long before I zipped across the yard on a slippery day and flipped that brightly shined bike over my body and on its handle bars. That was the least of our worries because while it flipped over me it broke the fragile starter so we had trouble starting it again. The valuable starter would cost about forty-five dollars and to me that was like one thousand and I’d never be able to come up with it, I was four. So on my seventh birthday out came a green 110cc Kawasaki motorbycle. Also from mom I got a brand new starter for my old bike, and again that same look crossed her face.

            I wasn’t the only one who crashed my new green bike with cool racing stripes. My dad thought that he could ride it up on a thin piece of board about five inches thick.

“It will be easier than picking it up and lifting it on the trailer, plus it’s fast,” replied my dad in an arrogant manner.

“If you break it you fix it.” So there he went up the board in to the back trailer light and off the bike onto the ground. The bike was upside down with a crack down its side and he was all over the ground rolling around in pain and agony. It looked as if the bike was enmeshed with the trailer because, the cracked piece was wedged between the trailer walls and the wheel was under the back. It was all just a big, tangled, mess. My dad subverted the new bike in to a cracked mess and scratched paint. While the gas dripped from the gas line of the bike I helped dad get up with a smile saying,

“I knew that was going to happen.”

A little squeak came from my dad’s bent mouth,

“Ahh… I wasn’t expecting that.”

            When my dad and I go motorbycling we don’t always crash into stuff but we do topple over sometimes. We often fly down the pipeline hills often spotting moose or porcupines. The funniest thing though is when dad gets on that little 50 and goes full bore up a hill. You’d think he’d just fall backwards, but it actually goes up about two miles an hour until he pushes it with his legs. That’s not the only thing we do that drives mom mad. The mud we track in and the nasty stench of gasoline embedded in our clothes that radiates all over the house just adds to a few of mom’s pet peeves because mom has to smell it for weeks. It didn’t take long till my dad got tired of that 50 bike and came home with another blue Yamaha 125cc bike. This Yamaha was almost an exact replica to the little Yamaha because it was the same color, same type of engine, and every thing same except the fact that it was bigger.

            The 125cc Yamaha was too big for me; the first ride made sure of that. I pulled the gas a little bit and we found out that it was subjugated for a nine-year-old, because there I went uncontrollably in to the woods. Thump. I didn’t quite grow up to that size of bike for a while so my dad got to ride it with me. We got to splash each other with the dirt as if the dirt was really water. We’d spin the tires as much as we could right before a corner and watch the dirt fly over the ground in excitement. The three middle sized jumps right in a row that my dad and I created while my mom was out of town, helped me learn how to jump but not quite land. Every now and then you could hear a loud yelp and see my bike flipped over and me on my side, but other than that the jumps were awesome. There were times when we would drive through the goat trails that would usually lead us to long strands of grass that could reach up to four feet above our heads. Some goat trails were sinuous because they curved up 45 degree hills. The goat trails emanated from the source of Murphy Dome and spread for miles and miles over the Alaskan barren land. Before we go on our rides we usually replete our gas tanks so we don’t have to run in to the problem of NO GAS. Somehow we did though and it turned out to be a debacle when we did in the middle of the woods. Thanks to a drunken idiot, who left his beer bottle on the ground, we were able to siphon the gas from one bike to another through the bottle and get on with our wondrous journey through the beautiful terrain of Alaska .  

            The best memory of riding on our motorbycles with my dad was going on the black diamond trail on Moose Mountain . There were times when dad would just about lose me in the tall grass that was moist with droplets of water. Those droplets would soak our clothes straight through by the time we would reach the bottom. My dad told me not to stop and I finally found out why when I did. I couldn’t start the kick start when I was five feet of the ground with the hill so steep. The worst of it was the bear poop at the end of the Black Diamond hill’s massive decline. All the branches were laid down and the bike tired would nestle down in them and when ever you’d try to get it by putting your feet down bear poop would always find its way to them. The last little hill we had to get up in order to get back home wasn’t little at all. We had to get of our bums and push like crazy. In fact dad pushed so hard he broke the back fender which made him hate the black diamond hill and to never want to go on it again. So the whole way home dad had a big line of mud on his back, all over his coat, and even up to his neck. To me it was the best motorbycle trip but to dad it was the worst. After that long arduous bike ride I was somnolent the whole way home because my eyelids felt like weights and I was just about to fall asleep.

Even though we kept buying new bikes they never superseded the littler bikes, so if a friend came over they could ride a motorbycle.

“I don’t want a pickle; I just want to ride on my motorbycle.”