I just passed through another major transition in my life. Some will probably think I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill. Some will understand exactly what I’m talking about. The fact of the matter is, I recently said goodbye to a friend that had been in my life longer, and that felt closer to me than just about anyone I have ever known. In the aftermath, and because of the circumstances, I find myself both a little sad and completely elated, all at once, and woven into all of that is a strange sense of betrayal on my part.
Sherman, set the Wayback for 2001.
It’s a sunny and very breezy fall in Aurora, Colorado. I’m cruising home on my 1997 Kawasaki Concours. At the time, it was considered one of the best (and certainly most long-lived) production sport-touring motorcycle platforms available. The design had gone mostly unchanged for twenty years, and with good reason. The bike was comfortable for one or two passengers, it had a ton of carrying capacity, it could blow the doors off most other bikes, and it cornered like its sport bike pedigree suggested.
So, I’m cruising home in the right-hand lane after a long day at the office. It’s rush hour. I’m rolling by a solid line of cars in the center lane on my left. The shadow of a tall straight curb rises to my right. For argument’s sake, we’ll say I’m doing about 50 mph in a 45. That’s about when the guy in the moving truck occupying the center lane motions for the lady I can’t see (and who can’t see me) to cross in front of him—and me—so she can turn into the shopping center.
I’m sure he was just being nice.
I have no doubt he never saw me.
I’m sure she was grateful that someone had let her make a turn during rush hour.
I’m certain she never saw me either.
I wouldn’t have minded so much, but when she heard my wheels shrieking as I tried to stop in time, did she just complete her turn and get out of the way?
No.
She slammed on her breaks, halting her car partially in front of the truck that had let her turn, part way into the parking lot, and completely across the lane I was in that had suddenly become a bowling alley.
After saying, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit!’ about as fast as I could repeat the phrase, Newtonian physics took over. I managed to get the bike turned to a slight angle just as I slammed into her, and I can still remember two very distinct sounds: the bike hitting her car… my body hitting her car.
That last sound was the last thing I heard before the universe hit my CNTRL+ALT+DEL buttons and the screen went black.
I regained consciousness probably about 15 or 30 seconds later. I know it couldn’t be much more, because when the lights came back on, I realized two things: there wasn’t as much pain as I would have expected after slamming into a car at 40 mph, and, more importantly, I couldn’t breathe. That last part is a curious moment of panic. I’d had the wind knocked out of me plenty of times before. No problems there. However, in those few seconds before my autonomic system finally kicked in and I was able to draw in some precious oxygen, there was the very clear notion that I was about to check out for good.
Yes—panic.
I didn’t, thankfully. A few gasping breaths later, and I was quickly learning what it’s like to be hustled into an ambulance and taken to the hospital. There are details in that story that I won’t go into, simply because it’s not germane to this story.
Suffice it to say that I managed to walk out of the hospital that night, with only a very slight limp, a bruised shoulder, a cut on my left knuckle from where my arm went through her back window, and one little addendum to my big “motorcycle wreck story” that makes it a real keeper.
When the cop came in to take my statement—yes, the lady was a fault—he held something up and asked me, “Is this yours?”.
I peered at it and confirmed with a good deal of surprise that it was, indeed, my watch.
Without skipping a beat, he said, “I found it in her back seat.” There was a curious smile on his face.
I know all of her windows had been closed when I smashed into her, so that explained the cut on the knuckle of my glove and in the actual flesh below.
Now, I told you that story, so I could get to this one.
Before I walked out of the hospital, I knew I’d have another motorcycle just as quickly as I could manage it. There were only a few problems. The insurance claim for my totaled Concours wasn’t nearly enough for the brand new sport-touring platform I’d had my eye on since I first saw a picture of it the previous year. It wasn’t a Concours, and it was magnificent. Instead, I was able to get a Yamaha FZ-1 that the dealer wanted to clear out.
I won’t lie, I really enjoyed that machine. It did a lot of things right, and I hung on to it for a number of years. However, I was born to ride sport-touring machines.
I’m a big guy; I love chewing up highways hours at a time to see distant places and carry my gear with me; I like being able to carry a passenger comfortably; and I love being able to strip the bike down and do twisties like I’m on a liter superbike. There is one bike in all the world that does all of that perfectly.
I mentioned before that sport-touring bike I’d had my eye on. Well, in 2004, after a job change and a significant IT pay increase, I was finally able to walk into the showroom and ride off on my new 2004 Yamaha FJR 1300 ABS. It was love at first sight. It was a dream come true. It was everything I’d ever wanted out of a motorcycle and more.
It was mine.
I went everywhere on a machine that I very quickly came to think of as Rocinante to my Don Quixote or, even more apropos, the ship The Rocinante, made famous by Rush in the song “Cygnus X-1.”
And yes, I called my bike Rocinante long before Holden named his spaceship.
Over the course of the next seventeen years, the only constant in my life was Rocinante. It carried me everywhere. It was the one thing I kept after a divorce. It was the only thing I absolutely could not leave behind in Colorado when I moved to North Carolina. It helped me turn my querida, Vicki, into a true-blue motorcycle enthusiast. Rocinante saw me through thick and thin. It traversed the miles between three different jobs, two careers, sixteen-hundred-miles of America, and more ups and downs than life before it had ever seen.
Rocinante was always there for me. When I needed air time, it carried me where I willed it to go. It saw me through snowstorms and thunder and hail. It traversed the Continental Divide I can’t count how many times. Like a perfect hound or trusted steed, it was always there when I needed it.
So, this past week, I took Rocinante in to get it ready for another long trip. My wife and I (she on her CanAm RT) had scheduled a ten-day bike trip from our home in North Carolina, down to Key West, and back again. The logical thing to do was take Rocinante in to replace the oil and filter, have the fluids and tires checked, and make sure it was ready for a long voyage.
I must add here that in recent years, I’d already replaced the front shocks and fork seals. I’d replaced the seat. I’d gone through a few windshields, the others too scratched to see clearly. I’d planned on replacing the rear shock after we returned. And recently, about every fourth time I stopped at an intersection, I’d begun to feel a faint “bump” that seemed to traverse from the final drive gear, through the chassis, and up into the clutch lever. It was very faint. It was very intermittent. But it was there, so I asked the shop guys to take a look it and see if they could feel it too.
After dropping off the bike at the shop, my wife and I decided to take our usual stroll through the showroom just to see what was bright and shiny. We both like to window-shop.
That’s when I saw it.
On the other side of the sales kiosk, sort of sitting off by itself, away from the other bikes, was a Gen 2 FJR 1300 that looked flawless. I remember thinking, “Someone must have really taken care of it,” because the last Gen 2 FJRs were manufactured and shipped in 2012. I was truly impressed. The blue, metal-flake, paint didn’t have a scratch on it, there wasn’t a scratch or blemish on body, forks, or windshield. It was as if the guy had kept it in a garage somewhere and simply rubbed it with a cloth diaper every once and a while… just like the Ferari that got Cameron into so much trouble.
I turned to the nearest sales guy and said, “Hey, how many miles does this thing have on it?”
He perked up, and with a bright smile and a quirky expression on his face, he said, “Zero.”
I said, “Whut,” and blinked a few times.
“That’s right,” he replied almost gleefully. “Zero miles.”
“How is that possible?” I couldn’t believe it. It simply wasn’t possible that the last of the Gen 2s could have been miracled directly into my path at a time when I wasn’t looking but would have a hard time refusing.
I need to add here that only a few months earlier, I’d test ridden a 2021 Yamaha FJR 1300 Gen 3 and realized I liked my Gen 1 better. The fit, feel, and weight were better on the Gen 1s, and the Gen 2s were basically the same bike, but with the kinks worked out and the refinements added as standard. I wasn’t really interested in a Gen 3, because I’d be giving something up… a few somethings, in fact.
There I was—staring, face to face—with what would otherwise have been called a Unicorn in the FaceBook FJR groups that I’m involved in. Zero miles? It just wasn’t possible. Such a thing couldn’t exist, could it?
And yet, there it was.
To my credit, I told my wife that yeah, it was pretty, and yeah, it’d be nice, but, “We don’t need to be getting another motorcycle do we? I mean, trade in Rocinante? Spend money on another bike?”
It’s important to note here that my wife is the bread winner. She brings home the bacon, and I hold up my end in all the ways I can while continuing with my writing career. It also means that I’m very cognizant of the fact that the bacon she brings home should never be taken for granted, especially not for a “new” bike, no matter how perfect, when I was literally having an older version of the same machine getting an oil change not 100 feet away.
So we left.
Did I mention she’s become as much of a motorcycle enthusiast as I am?
The drive home from the motorcycle shop was somewhat more subdued than normal… as we both chewed through justifying a new FJR in place of Rocinante. I must admit here that I felt guilty, but not in the way you might think. I felt guilty that I was actually considering getting rid of Rocinante. We’d been through so much together. Even my wife knew that bike held a special place in my heart. It would be like trading in Old Yeller for a newer, younger dog before you knew he had rabies.
It was a sort of betrayal, in many respects, and I actually did feel that way.
Once we got home, Vicki and I talked about the new machine for the rest of the night. Back and forth we went. Both playing devil’s advocate. She’d say, “Sure we can” and I’d say, “I just don’t know.” Then I’d say, “Yeah, it makes sense,” and she’d say, “Are you sure?”
The following morning, I spent the entire day going back and forth on the phone with the sales guy. Ultimately, it came down to two things: 1) price, which I made clear to him from the get-go and 2) what happens to seals if they’ve been sitting in a crate for eight years, which I didn’t.
By the end of the day, we were $700 away from agreeing. He couldn’t come down anymore. I wasn’t willing to go up anymore, and mostly because of principle driven by item two above. It was risk. Sure, the FJR with zero miles would come with a very solid Yamaha 1-year manufacturers warranty. But what if the head gasket started to blow oil in thirteen months?
So, I actually said, “No.” And I actually meant it.
About an hour later, the sales guy called back and asked my straight up, why? It was only $700 difference. So, I told him my concerns about aging gaskets and hoses. He said he understood, although, the bike had been in a crate in a climate-controlled warehouse, and there was no real reason to give it that much worry. I knew perfectly well that my ’04, out in the elements, had never blown a seal or lost a hose. Never.
But I stuck to my guns.
An hour later, he called back and said the sales manager would throw in an additional two years extended warranty for nothing.
That clinched it.
I’ll admit we paid probably a thousand dollars more than we should have for a 2012 Yamaha FJR 1300 A, zero miles or not. However, with the ride ahead of us, the age of and increasing wear on Rocinante, the trip in the immediate future, and a planned trip from North Carolina to Portland Oregon in the next year or two, this moment—and unicorn—suddenly felt like a perfect one… a unicorn that never should have crossed my path and never would again.
So, I double-checked with Vicki, mentioned the extended warranty, and after a bit of good-natured laughter on her part, I called the guy back and dropped the hammer.
But the story doesn’t end there, because I still had to say goodbye… and yes, I just teared up a little just writing that. Seriously.
The following afternoon, I loaded up Rocinante’s side cases (taken off for the service) into Vicki’s car, put on some riding gear, and we drove to the dealership. I won’t go into the details, because the only thing that’s important is that I literally said goodbye to Rocinante with a tear in my eye. I patted the gas tank and ran my hand over the seat. I remembered all the good times. I said thank you for all the miles my trusted steed so dutifully carried me over for almost two decades.
The clincher was taking the plate off. You see, I’d had a customized plate done up: R0CNANT.
With both a heavy heart and a sense of elation, I carried that plate over to the new Rocinante, and bolted it on. The deed was done. The betrayal complete. And yet, nothing can last forever, especially not a machine.
I’ve told you all this to make two requests.
If you have it in your heart, could you please say a fond farewell to Rocinante Sr. and wish it a safe journey over the Rainbow Bridge where all good companions go? It would mean a lot to me.
And once you’ve done that, say hello to Rocinante Jr. Here’s where hopes and prayers have real value. Give it a good tiding or two, so it may carry me further and faster than its magnificent, relentless, and noble progenitor did.
I think they would both like that.
