100 Years of Motorcycles - Hair Of The Dog

If the green bike strewn around in the pictures of this story look familiar, it should. It was first featured on the pages of Street Chopper a couple years back. In the interim, it had a little mishap. The owner, Sean Kinney (of Alice in Chains fame), loved the execution of the project, but never really took a liking to the right-side-shifter setup common to early '70s Ironheads, so he left it in the care of builder Steve Huff. Steve's not one to let a bike sit, so he put it in his rotation of bikes he rides around the streets of Seattle.

To make what would otherwise be a long, gory story a little shorter: the single-cable internal throttle showed the one weakness of its design by sticking wide-open at a red light. Steve clipped a car, sending the shifter peg almost all the way through his ankle. Somehow, he managed to keep the green machine upright, despite a pulverized ankle and a foot dangling limply and tenuously from his leg. His last acts before going under from shock were to pilot the bike to a curb and flop off of it, then request that a friend try to set the ankle before the paramedics got there.

Luckily for Steve, there are some damn fine orthopedic surgeons at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center, and he got to keep the foot after several surgeries, an induced coma, and months of physical therapy. Steve's a racer, so while this was easily his biggest trauma, it was far from his first. In fact the multi-record holder was on the salt at Bonneville just a few months after the accident with a hole drilled in his cast to slide over the footpeg of his V-Rod racebike. But the Greenie had gotten in his head. It hadn't moved from the corner of the garage where it had been parked months before. It took almost no damage in the collision, and was in perfect running order.

Fast forward to last summer. Still parked in the garage a year after the mishap, the Greenie was pressed back into action for the 100 Year of Motorcycles Rally in Spokane, Washington. This being a rally that people accept and honor rare, weird and old bikes, he could have brought his '60s NSU, but the fact that the Greenie almost took his foot still haunted him, and he wanted to push beyond that.

The haunting part for Steve was not that he had been hurt while riding (he's done that on more than a few occasions). Instead it was that he was doing something routine and not pushing the edge of performance when a mechanical failure almost cost him a limb. So just riding the bike in a normal manner was far spookier than doing a quarter-mile in seven seconds, or speeding almost 200 mph across the salt flats.

Naturally, he wasn't so cavalier as to just load up a bike that hadn't been ridden in a year and take it on a 300ish-mile journey, so he first took it out on the town in Seattle. The carb needed to be cleaned, the battery charged, and it still took some doing to get it underway. Ten miles from home, in an industrial district near downtown, the shift lever clattered to the ground. A bagger pilot with a toolkit came to the rescue, and it was back underway in minutes. Other than these little annoyances, the bike was a runner. Purring along at a nice clip and even having enough poop to fill trendy downtown bar Cowgirls full of rubbery smoke. The owner of the bar was not impressed.

So into the bed of a well-preserved '70s Ford F-150 it went. You didn't think he was going to ride a little rigid with a steel seat to Spokane did you? Really, other than the first few miles of crossing the Cascades, then later crossing the Columbia River, the road from Seattle to Spokane is mostly a featureless plain. Once out in Spokane, he decided to really "do" the 100 Years of Motorcycles Rally, and the town of Spokane itself. It turns out there's a rousing nightlife scene in Spokane, with a number of bars and clubs that are packed to the gills until closing.

The rally site was filled with dirt track races, lots of cool bikes and vendors, and a motorcycle rodeo; it was very entertaining. Steve, wanting to push the envelope with the lil' Greenie, entered it in the rodeo. Just a tip if you were planning to attend next year: entering the rodeo is the best bang-for-your-buck at this rally, as it costs about the same as admission (which it includes), and lets you take your custom creation (or stocker) out in the horse arena and tear it up. For Steve it was a good bonding experience with the bike. Granted, being an ultra-low-slung rigid with a right-side shifter and a raked-out frontend, there was only so much it was going to do in the dirt. It performed way beyond expectations, with Steve capturing the silver medal in the barrel-roll competition. Steve was on his way to a win in the slalom when the crappy turning radius and lack of ground clearance made for a wide turn.

After the rodeo, the arena was converted to a short track layout for the evening's flat track races. Steve did not enter the Ironhead in that, but there was a sweet XR-750 entered along with hordes of lightweight converted motocrossers and old singles.

On Sunday, Steve took a lap of lake Coeur D'Alene, possibly the longest single ride of the little green bike's long life. With sinuous well-paved roads twisting to every nook and cranny of the large glacial lake, it was a little slice of heaven. The cool lakeside watering holes catering to the legion of boaters didn't hurt either. In the end, with another 500ish miles under the wheels of the old Ironhead, Steve finally made his peace with it, and banished the demons to the faraway place where a racer's fears are kept. SC