16 July 2008
 
The K Lot

Trish from Australia. Vic at far right in white shirt.
Photo by EVA RUSSO/Richmond TIMES-DISPATCH
 
It is impossible to forget what happened here in Richmond, particularly if you live in a city that calls itself the Capital of the Free World. This city had the same aspiratio n, to be known in the same status as Paris and London and Washington.
 
It was crushed by force of arms, but the longing and sadness is still palpable. The rest of the world has moved on, but old times are not forgotten here.
 
It hits you hard with the names of things. The baseball Stadium near the Department of Motor Vehicles K-lot motorcycle range is The Diamond, as if there could be no other.
 
The directions to the DMV routes you down Boulevard, which the old city fathers apparently thought needed no further amplification.
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Monument Drive has a statue of tennis great Arthur Ashe, but that barely dents the point of the road, which is to showcase the equestrian statues of the Heroes of the Lost Cause.
 
I was assigned to a group of twelve citizens of random origin to take the basic motorcycle safety class, sponsored by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. It is one of the ways to get a Motorcycle endorsement on the basic driver’s license, the other being to show up at the examining station and schedule an appointment to take a written and road test=2 0when an examiner happens to be available.
 
The state views the mandatory training as a way to influence public policy, since our right to hurtle along the public highway on two wheels did not exist in time to be included in the Bill of Rights, like our handguns, and therefore is one of those things closely regulated for our own good.
 
The state mandates six classroom hours of study, and an 80% passing grade on a written test in addition to ten hours on a state-privded motorcycle on a controlled range under the watchful eyes of certified rider-coaches.
 
Taking the course is one of the best things I have ever done. Dad was opposed to two-wheelers, since he had to lay one down years ago on a Long Island road and said “Never again.” That edict was transferred to the kids, and was one of the two or three dozen conflicts of the teen years, as other kids got the cool little Honda 90s that started to come on the market in the mid-sixties.
 
They were so popular in California that Brian Wilson of The Beachboys wrote a song about them; his studio session buddies recorded it as "Little Honda," under the temporary name of a band called The Hondells. It was an absolute craze.
 
The bike was cheap and cost virtually nothing to operate, which made it a hit from Malibu to Hanoi and the outback of Australia. They were marvels of simplicity and innovation, like the Piper Cub airplane- a technology inherently so handy that it barely operates fast enough to kill you.
 
Dad was having none of it, tough, and that is why there was a hole in my skill-set. I could ride a bicycle well enough, but had no clue on how to operate a motor-bike, much less one of the big Harley Davidsons that roar into town for the Rolling Thunder review in the Spring.
 
I did this all backwards, which I have come to recognize is the usual way I do things. Since you cannot operate a motorcycle without special state certification, it probably would have made sense to take the course and then try to figure out whether a motorcycle made sense.
 
Nah.
 
Bikes are really popular these days. The certification courses available in Northern Virginia were full for months. The one in Richmond was available, and that is how I fond myself in the K Lot in back of the old train station in downtown Richmond.
 
You could read all about it in the Richmond Times Journal this morning, if that is one of the stops you make in preparation to getting out of the house and doing something productive.
 
That is why the second day of the riding training was so interesting.  We were used as a prop in a State DMV press conference.
 
It had been hot and sultry on Sunday, when we reported to the Harley Operators Group (HOG) meeting room at the North Richmond dealer. There were twelve of us, a marvelous cross section of America. There was Mike, the IT student, and Mark, the Sergeant First Class from the Old Guard. He was just back from Afghanistan. Patricia, the blonde Australian gal with the dark roots had driven a semi-trailer rig in Queensland before emigrating, and now was in Richmond real estate. She wanted to ride Harleys with her husband, a middle-aged man with long dark hair that hung below the state-provided three-quarter safety helmet.
 
There were two father-son teams, one of them both named Glen and loud and the with different names and silent. Kwame was a lanky young African-American man from Petersburg, and DaNeace, who wanted to ride with her husband. Ray was an older guy, like me, who looked like he would be more comfortable on a tractor.
 
Skill levels ranged from extensive to complete ignorance.
 
Our primary class-room instructor was a soft-spoken retired soldier named Curtis, who seemed to work well with his range partner Glenn. There were so many “Glens” in the crowd that we defaulted to “Big and Little Glen,” though the younger was the bigger and “Sir” for the jolly Vietnam vet who strode around the range.
 
The first day on the K Lot had been drenched in rain. I don’t know what I was thinking when I packed in the sunshine on Sunday morning, but rain gear was not one of them. Jeans, boots, leather gloves, eye protection and a long-sleeved shirt were the minimum requirement.
 
They were all soaked in short order, and if you had told me that I would be shivering and soggy in Richmond in the middle of July I would have said you were nuts. So, as I sat astride the black Suzuki 250, just shy of three times the displacement of one of the perky little Hondas, wet to the skin, I contemplated the nature of misery.
 
Clutch work, shifting, and multi-tasking were the objectives of the first day, with “quick stops” concluding the evolution around lunchtime. The key is to be head’s up, and to remember that the bike will go where you are looking. If that happens to be the ground, so be it.
 
There is wild exhilaration in the first time you can kick the bike up shift and begin to slalom through the cones. The motion is not unlike skiing, in terms of center of gravity, if you forget for a moment that you are not on top of forgiving snow but something with the consistently of #2 sand paper.
 
The basics were the first day, and it is quite remarkable, how to learn something on a machine built for one. The only parallel for something this potentially hazardous would be flight training in World War One, w hen pilots were checked out in less than ten hours of flight instruction, and then directed to fly against the Red Baron.
 
We left the range with the bikes lined up neatly for the afternoon class, who would get to ride them in the sunshine. We did the coursework, highlighting the key safety tips in yellow, and then taking what instructor Curtis called “The celebration of Knowledge” at the conclusion.
 
Mark and I nailed the fifty questions with 100%, and we got out of class in time for me to participate in a long conference call back at the office that wrapped up in less than two and a half hours.
 
The next morning was coming up bright and sunny when we straggled into the K Lot in our trucks and sedans. Motorcycle riders apparently only back in their vehicles, and that is how I put the Hubrismobile next to the dumpster.
 
Curtis looked resigned as we organized our water bottles on the picnic table to stay hydrated. “We are going to have visitors,” he said softly. “There is going to be a press conference at eleven, just about the time we are doing the Evaluation phase of the morning.”
 
He was careful to not use the “Test” word.
 
He and Sir started us off in The Box, which is an impossibly small rectangle painted in white on a corner of the asphalt lot. The point was to enter the box in first gear, feathering the clutch between the “2” and “4” finger positions and maneuver the bike in a figure eight without touching the edge of the painted boundaries.
 
I was not lucky enough to even find the edges of The Box, the first time, and improved only marginally the second time. I cursed at myself, telling me to look up, like Sir said, and to relax. If I could not do something this simple, how could I expect to pass the Evaluation that was coming in just a few hours, with Ralph Davis, Deputy Secretary of Transportation in attendance?
 
There were a total of sixteen separate riding evolutions. We did the first nine in the rain on the first day, progressing from the basics of starting through quick stops.
 
After the humiliation of The Box, we rode over obstacles and around curves marked with cones, shifting and braking. We learned swerves, which is a remarkable and quite pleasurable jolt of adrenaline.
 
These are all a common enough set of tasks when you are sitting in an easy chair with four wheels underneath you, and something much more like being a rock drummer with all hands and feet doing something. If the base drum and snare were moving, of course.
 
It was a blast, altogether, though I wished there was more time moving and less time sitting in line waiting with the bike vibrating between my legs to do something. When I was moving, I was free.
 
They started to set up the cameras around ten, when Sir ran the last practice run through The Box. I almost made it that time, and told myself that it would come together just fine when the time came, cameras and Assistant Secretaries notwithstanding.
 
The Moment of Truth came in three parts. The first was a run through The Box in the figure eight, then accelerate out of the exit, upshifting to second, hitting speed and then swerving around a simulated semi-trailer and coming to a controlled quick stop.
 
Linday Machak, ace reporter for the Times-Dispatch, interviewed Tricia as we waited in line. She was undoubtedly the most typical Virginian in the class, being20female, blonde and Australian. There was no question about that, but the delay as we waited with people standing around watching us made the stress level rise.
 
She got through The Box well enough, interview direct to Evaluation. DaNeace followed, and dumped her bike at the swerve. She was uninjured, but that was an automatic disqualification. When my time, four riders later, I lost timing and put a foot down, touching the white line as I exited The Box. I got it to second, and entered the swerve with enough speed that I was not directed to take a second attempt.
 
I sighed. That was at least five points off, between touching with a foot and brushing the line. I thought this was a wasted three days. But the last two graded evolutions were skills I thought I had mastered pretty well, the controlled panic stop, and the brake to sharp curve. The reporters and the dignitaries drifted off to leave us in our line of bikes alone on the asphalt, with Sir and Curtis with their clipboards at the critical grading points.
 
No further disasters occurred, and I thought they went pretty well, though it was evident that these things are skills that need a lot of practice. I was directed to park the bike in the two lines by the picnic table, and the thing was done.
 
Curtis and Sir went off to confer with one another, and then after a half hour, began to call us over, one by one for a private debrief of how we had done.
 
I passed, though Sir seemed dubious as he handed over the temporary permit to operate a motorcycle on the public roadway. I lost six points for The Box, five for failing to downshift to first on the panic stop, and five for not accelerating aggressively enough after breaking to enter the turn. I thought I had really been moving, but did not say anything.
 
Twenty demerits is failing. I had sixteen. As they used to say in Destroyer School, “If it wasn’t good enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum.”
 
I told Sir that I shared his skepticism, promised to practice a lot, and thanked then both profusely.
 
I had achieved a marginal grasp of a new skill. I thought about that on the drive back up to Washington, passing a couple on a big Gold Wing, dressed in shorts and tank-tops, and particularly at the Occuquon River bridge, where traffic stopped at construction, and I witnessed two accidents, and the consequences of a third.
 
People are nuts.
 
When I got the Hubrismobile back in the garage, I left enough room to move the Harley out from in back of it. I took the cover off and sat on the thing, five times bigger than the little bikes we rode on Lot K.
 
I had reserved a corner of the garage in which to=2 0keep the bike, and had resolved not to move it until I was legal.
 
That corner is up by the elevator, half the distance from my parking spot.
 
Sitting on it, I marveled at how big the engine was, and how different the controls felt. I unlocked the front fork, and turned the key to “ignition” on the tank. Then I pushed it up the length of the garage, parked it, and went upstairs to think about things.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com