Barber Motorsports One

I have long wanted to visit the Barber Motorsports complex outside Birmingham. I got there thanks in large part to my wife's help getting out of the city using her GPS equipped iPhone. Grrr. Modern technology helping me feed my nostalgia... But then you walk through the doors and there is a pristine Ducati 750 Sport sitting in a display case like a model, and who care how you got here?The museum is set in the pine forests east of Birmingham, south of Exit 140 on I20 towards Atlanta. They carved this incredible place literally out of the forest and it was open and operating and for $12 (three dollar Triple A discount) I pretty much had this whole place to myself. I think there were three or four other visitors on a weekday afternoon. It was utterly fabulous and I only two and a half hours to see it all.No one actually showed up by motorcycle, these were displayed from the collection. There was a ton of Triumphs everywhere in the museum and I wanted them all.The five storey building only displays half the collection at a time and the machines are strewn about largely at random, at least they appear at random to the overwhelmed gaze of a first time visitor. The ticket taker suggested taking the elevator to the top and then walking (slowly!) down the circular ramp in the middle of the building to the next level down. Motorcycles everywhere, with a few Lotus race cars thrown in (the largest such collection anywhere we are told). I was there for the bikes of my youth. This Bianchi was a bit before my time but men in the village where I grew up used to use bikes like these as daily riders (!) when I was a kid.I will doubtless repeat myself over the next several essays in this blog which will be dedicated to the Barber display, but I would love to see modern Triumph build a modern 500cc single like the old BSA B34 series, Reliable, light, economical and easy to ride for the 21st century. I remember when this Benelli appeared on the market to take Honda on head-to-head. Italy used to have import quotas to protect the Italian motorcycle market of the 1970s. The protectionism produced some lovely machines.The original 1957 Sportster. I hate the handlebars!This Triumph from the 60s has the original flatter English style bars. You can buy a parcel rack for the tank of modern Triumphs which sticks to the tank in imitation of the original. I've thought about adapting it as a map carrier for longer trips (I'm am not a GPS fan despite my wife's success as a navigator!).Another Italian single from before my time (Parilla). I love the clip ons. Motorcycles to the ceiling.

A 1924 Moto Guzzi Normale 500, This was the original flat single motorcycle that was still for sale in modern dress when I was buying my first motorcycle in 1974. I always wanted a Nuovo Falcone Civile but it was one of the many bikes that got away from me. I went with a sporty twin instead.

A more modern version in the more traditional red, behind the very early Moto Guzzi.

I bet you've never heard of a Hesketh motorcycle but I remember when Lord Hesketh started offering these exclusive machines for sale. They are still for sale in England, hand built by Broom Engineering.On this trip I took very little time to check out the really old machines but there they were, the origins of our sport: The Water Buffalo, a Suzuki GT750, featured in a cross country trip in the current edition of Motorcycle Classics magazine. This was an amazing, water cooled two stroke motorcycle at a time when gas was cheap but didn't seem to be cheap, especially if you barely got 30 miles to the gallon.I'd have liked to look at this iconic 1970s motorcycle up close but the Barber displays often don't permit that as the machines are displayed at heights not convenient to people walking by...Below we see my all time favorite before-my-time-motorcycle, the Brough Superior, about which more in another essay to come.The Norton frame with the Vincent engine, another icon from the past:Can you imagine being close enough to touch these delights, for the first time in your life? Touching is strictly not allowed but you are close enough to, and being allowed to be so close gives you a freedom that produces reverence, such that you would no sooner touch them than set light to these fabulous machines. How the hell did they get this Harley in original Guam military livery?This was the Super bike of my youth, the Kawasaki 900, four cylinder of raw power and wobbly frame.Fair enough, but barber goes one better with this wild machine on display. All machines are said to be in running order, as there is a complete restoration shop on the ground floor. I never heard of this machine before even though the original 900 was very famous:
A modern V-Max by Yamaha and an ancient...er...in-line four (Pierce). Next to each other. Why? I haven't a clue.I did own a Gold Wing briefly, the 1200cc version of this which is the original 1000, and a water cooled flat four was an amazing leap forward when I was a kid. I had a dream once that I was riding a Gold Wing (this is a true story) so I figured...better try it once in my life. It was huge, heavy and difficult to throw around the Santa Cruz mountains. It was even difficult to push out of the garage and down the gravel driveway. I sold it quickly, and at a loss as usual.They tried to sell the original as a sport bike then they realized it was a tourer and started tarting it up with fairings and bags, but it was the Benelli 900 six cylinder, still competing with Honda, that made me drool.It was the throughly uncomfortable Ducati Sport that I lusted after, among others and here it is in the flesh.And the most super super bike of them all, the BMW 900 complete with hard bags and shaft drive, super expensive and utterly fabulous. Never could afford one though.As I wandered they were outside practicing driving boring old cars on Barber's in-house race track. Is this place amazing?That was when I came across the motorcycle that one day I will own before I die, or when my wife gives me $12,000 to waste on whatever I want. Whichever comes first.This machine tried to be as reliable as the BMW, as fast as the Kawasaki and as uncomfortable as the Ducati. That it failed at all of those goals does not make it one iota less desirable.Even down to the bizarre orange stripe on the nose cone fairing. I want it. And we close with a quick look at Britain's answer to the 1970s super bike challenges. The venerable X75 Hurricane designed for the US market.I took 220 pictures at Barber and I want to showcase a few dozen more over the next couple of days. Come back next week for pictures of something other than classic motorcycles. Wieners, all those that can pass up these lovely machines.

At Home In The Garden

While I continue to unspool my pictures of our recent road trip to Alabama life in the Keys goes on. For some of us it involves more work, for others more observation. In my own yard I am under constant surveillance. I had wanted to build a small patch of grass for my last Labrador who had enjoyed our California lawn, but I procrastinated so long that Emma Goldman died before I built her a patch of lawn. Cheyenne is benefiting from my guilty conscience. A week after I got her I went to the garden store on Rockland Key and bought four pieces of $2 turf (Augustine grass for those that care) and laid them in a surplus vegetable bed I built two years ago. Now she has a cool spot to stretch out on and observe my comings and goings. Yesterday I was working to fill some surplus trash cans with yard waste as the pick up is on Friday mornings. I was raking the huge dead dinner plates we call sea grape leaves. It's been very windy, typical for the spring around here, and these huge acidic leaves blow everywhere. It's a dog's life watching the Old Man rake and lift, as he doesn't much care for leaf blowers and the like. The crop of fallen palm fronds is much reduced as prudent pruning has cleared the dead and dying fronds from around the house.I am not one to desire the impossible so I didn't look to create a perfectly organized space around my house. I just hope to keep things more or less under control. My wife is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz and she wears a UCSC Slugs license plate holder on the back of her Sebring Convertible. When she was in Santa Cruz a couple of years ago she went by the campus bookstore and brought back a few souvenirs of her under graduate days including this:
Banana slugs are prolific under the redwood trees of Santa Cruz County and when the campus Chancellor wanted to create a school mascot (the campus only participates in swimming and has no ball teams) his suggestion of the Sea lion as a mascot was voted down and to his chagrin he was forced to swallow hard and accept the Banana Slug as the campus mascot. Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer was a decent man, and very involved in the promotion of science on campus that led eventually to the mapping of the human genome in large part at UCSC, but he didn't understand the hippie rebels my wife grew up amongst. Sinsheimer left soon after and the mascot remains. As far as I know this is the only banana slug in the Florida Keys but I am ready to stand corrected. Herewith a picture from Wikipedia of the brute in question:How we got there from sea grapes remains a mystery to me.

Johnny and Karl in Birmingham

For many of the early years of my married life Johnny Coley was a myth. My wife had happy memories of her youth spent in the city of Birmingham, Alabama with a tight group of friends learning to be young independent adults. They lived in the kudzu mansion and they planned to save the world, as one did back then. Johnny Coley still lives there.My wife loved Birmingham but she became a lawyer in California near her parents who lived in Santa Clara in what is now known as Silicon Valley. She thought the California she had grown up in was a cold and harried place compared to Birmingham. Johnny Coley hung on there but Karl also moved to California in move that took him far from his family in Birmingham. He still lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains and would live nowhere else.That he was back visiting his mother in Birmingham to visit his mother was just a coincidence, but that coincidence was one of the driving forces that...forced us to drive to Birmingham despite the Nissan's reluctance. This was what my wife was afraid of missing out on, had we abandoned the journey, wine on Johnny's terrace overlooking Birmingham.I had done a lot of driving and was sucking up the plonk like a dried sponge. Cheyenne did the honors for me.Karl the artist was busy taking pictures of animals faces very close up for a project. He was sitting in the doorway to the terrace because of his fear of heights. He figured if the cantilevered terrace were to fall he would have time to roll back into the apartment. He is quite athletic so it occurred to me he probably could have saved himself in any event with a graceful leap because he runs his own dance company:

http://www.schafferstern.org/
Karl still remembers the story I did about his company which aired on Morning Edition decades ago when I was a stringer for NPR. We have known each other for a while.

I wanted Karl to perch on an empty water bottle for me, and he was game but we lacked the equipment so I used this picture from his flier. Dance is his passion and math is his profession as he teaches at a Community College in California. His dance company combines math with movement in a particular way. A conversation with Karl is always an exploration from a different angle.

A conversation with Johnny is on a whole different plane because Johnny sees the world from his very own perspective.Johnny sees the world as it is and questions everything, more so than even I do, and to be around someone who can force me to see things from a different angle is refreshing. He lives on the margins of life, working in the library, keeping an eye on his mother who lives in another apartment in the building and in his words "being lazy." His laziness involves activities that would exhausting to most. he reads voraciously and is always on the lookout for things that might catch his eye. He thought of me when came across (where did he come across this?) this card revealing Italian anarchists' subversive goals:
Johnny's laziness is actually an acknowledgment that his interests, and there are many of them, are of the kind that don't generate money. "I feel embarrassed by the economic downturn," Johnny told me with his self deprecating smile and his thick southern drawl. "My neighbors worked hard for everything they had and lost it all. I had nothing to start with and now we are in a Depression and I still don't have anything even though I lost nothing." He does have an apartment with great views of the Magic City.

A pleasant afternoon of conversation as the sun headed to the horizon. Then I had to nap because the day wasn't yet done.Napping in progress.

If you have a dog you have to take her for a walk and Cheyenne luckily loves elevators, as we were on the ninth floor.

And happily Highland Avenue has three parks open to dogs about which more later when I take Cheyenne for neighborhood walks. One reason we didn't go to California form Spring Break because of the expense and the cold, after a winter of being cold we wanted to be warm on vacation. Birmingham came through after the cold front blew itself out and temperatures rose steadily the longer we stayed, even though trees never did get properly leafy.

After our walk I gave Cheyenne her dinner and put her in the car for the evening, her familiar safe place while we went out to dinner.

Dinner was at Karl's mother's place with Karl's siblings and his mother presiding. These kinds of events cause me high anxiety but my wife is there to steer me and I follow her lead. I rarely have dinner with people who practice tap dancing before the meal. We got a lesson from Karl:The household got busy producing an impromptu meal that Karl's mom pulled out of her head at the last minute, baked fish in mustard sauce, roast potatoes, grilled asparagus, and lots of hard work.

Then Johnny Coley arrived to be greeted by the dogs, the ones that meant it was better for Cheyenne to stay in the car in town for the evening.

Karl's brother lives in new York City, actually in Brooklyn a place he loves and sparked my interest in the place. Usually one hears about Brooklyn in the movies as a place where people go when they are banished from Manhattan but he loves the community and neighborhood where people work together. It sounds very unlike New York, the frenzied.

Karl's mom presided over a dinner table filled with conversation and plate passing......under the chandelier.After dinner we checked out a school project from Karl's brother who hands out six inch squares of paper with ink outlines. Each piece of paper gets colored at will and at the end of the year the pieces are restored as one and a mural is the result.

This year's theme is apparently the First Family:

It will be a hell of an achievement, and it was quite apparent in it's early form laid out on the dining room floor. Karl's family is talented.

The proud artist. His t-shirt reads "Develop, don't destroy."I took pleasure in being the passenger in the back of Johnny's car as went back to the city and woke Cheyenne up for her evening walk.

The old friends had lots to talk about.