Ribbon & Lime
My Memoir of the...
1981 Check Chase
Billy Dean

A hush sweeps across the line. My heart stops and time freezes. But the seconds melt away... the banner is up! Sixty agonizing seconds. Dead silence. Unbearable suspense. My left hand hovers near the clutch lever, ready to pull it in and pop it out the instant my left foot jams the bike into gear. My right foot is poised precariously on the kick starter and my right hand grips the throttle like a vice, ready to twist it to the stop when the banner falls and my bike starts. My eyes lock on the guys standing in the back of the truck holding the banner up.

Waiting for it to drop, I remind myself that this won't be another parade from Barstow to Vegas for anybody who can swing their leg over a dirt bike. This is the Race to the River across the toughest terrain in the Mojave. Just finishing it will take all the experience, skill, courage and fierce determination I can muster. More than even that, I will have to remember who I am, what I can and cannot do. "Come on Bill," I whisper. "Read the ground in front of you. Watch for changes. Don't ride over your head."

I know the other riders are giving themselves the same pep talk. But this is my last River Run and my last race. When I cross that finish line in Parker, the bike goes up for sale and I move on to other adventures. So I convince myself that I am more motivated than any of them to make it one of my best. I'm ready. Very, very ready.

A bike springs to life somewhere to my right. Damn, somebody got careless and pushed his lever through. Geez, what an idiot. Hope they don't drop the banner now. I join the shouting with "Shut it down dummy!"

It's fall here in the Lucerne Valley. The breeze is blowing gently -- just enough to make the banner ripple with life but not enough to cause a false start. When those Checkers drop their banner, we'll know it. And just as those thoughts blow across my mind, they throw the banner down to the bed of their truck like tossing a shark into a boat. The silence is broken by the roar of two-stroke engines coming to life and hundreds of riders racing into the desert to challenge the rocks, the cactus and each other.

My brain pops out of gear and my body takes over, legs and hands synchronize in one fluid motion. Kick, stab, pull, pop, twist and my bike leaps into gear and off the line like a rocket. I'm through the gears in a heart beat, and mine is pounding as hard as the bike is crashing through the rocks and cactus. The guy to my right starts to cut in front of me. I veer left just enough to avoid a collision without losing sight of my trail. Everybody has one; that's why we practice our bomb runs. Mine is to the right of the smokebomb, because the breeze is coming from the south this morning, and that means the dust will move to my left.

The three or four miles between the start and the smokebomb are unmarked. After the smokebomb, the course narrows to a single, marked trail, so the "bomb" is the target of every rider when the banner comes down -- time to fight for position. Years ago, burning tires identified the beginning of the marked course, but now, for environmental reasons, the bomb is simply an array of surveyor's ribbon wide enough and tall enough to be seen from the starting line.

I see it now, just minutes away. My heart is already pounding in my chest but it quickens even more as I anticipate dozens of riders converging on the same trail. "Hey Bill!" I shout. "You got a great start. Catch me if you can, suckers!"

My competitive aggression always surprises me. Where did that come from? My relatives used to kid me that I was Vernon reincarnated. Vernon was my father's older brother. He was killed on a 1925 Harley in Long Beach when a grabage truck backed out of an alley just as he came around a corner and gassed his big hog. He was 19. My father was 16. Their father was a drunken bum. With his older brother gone, my father was responsible for his mother and three sisters. He eventually booted his father out of the house. I wasn't there but I can hear him saying "Hit the road, Earl, you're no longer welcome here!"

Probably why my father never drank. Wouldn't even have a beer with me. Never knew him nor found a reason why he couldn't get from father to friend. Even when we were both grown men. Just couldn't make the transition, I guess. Always Father. Never Dad. Perhaps his childhood, the one he never had, is reason enough for why we never connected.

I charge through the dust hovering around the bomb and pick up the trail to the first check. As always, things get tight and dangerous with everybody converging on one trail. But my legs and knees are pressed to the tank as if they belong to a gorilla. The bike tells me what to do, and I tell it what to do. Instantly. No discussion. No argument. Whatever the bike does, I do. Whatever I do, the bike does. No longer bike and a rider, we are one.

With my body on autopilot, my mind is free to wander over the landscape of my racing days. It all started with a guy named Matt Moffit at Lockheed Aerospace in Burbank, California. I had been racing motocross but was getting tired of the short motos, dusty courses and my kids always pestering me with "Daddy, are we going home now?"

Even with a season of motocross under my belt, it had taken a while to hone the skills and develop the stamina to get up and down steep, rocky hills and keep my wheels down and my handlebars up in tight, nasty canyons. You can't win or place unless you finish, so judgment is vital. I had learned to go as fast as the terrain allowed -- no faster and no slower. You can ride a few degrees over your head some of the time, but, as we often joked with each other, they don't give trophies at the bomb!

I had met Mack in the technical writing group of the product support division. One morning, he said "Hey, Bill, you should come out to the desert and race with my club. "Desert racing? What's that, Matt?" Matt's attempt to describe desert racing was like trying to explain what a tree is to a Martian without having one to point to. But what he did say grabbed my attention, so I got up early the next Sunday, loaded my bike into my truck and followed Matt out to my first desert race. It took only one look at hundreds of motorcycles lined up at the starting line that Sunday morning in Red Mountain to capture my imagination. It was like a camping trip. With motorcycles. And racing. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. I rolled my Husky up to the starting line and waited for the banner to drop. It did, of course, and off I went, free as a bird...

Matt belonged to the Rams Motorcycle Club and I soon discovered that clubs are the heart of desert racing. They organize and sponsor all the races, battle big government to keep the desert open to competitive events, expose beginners to valuable experience and give the riders and their families a comradship unequaled by motorcycle competitors anywhere. Sharing a common enthusiasm for motorcycles in general, and desert racing in particular, builds understanding, respect and friendship. If you break down during a desert race, your buddies will come and get you! But you better have one helluva good reason why you couldn't fix the problem yourself, and ride it in!

Riding my bike across the desert in this, my last race, I hoped I wouldn't have any problems. Not today. I had been fascinated by two wheels as long as I could remember, and always enjoyed riding and working on them. I still recall my mother telling me the story of how her and my father bought me a bicycle when I was four or five -- a J. C. Higgins from Sears, I think. They took me and the bicycle out to the side walk, then steadied it as I got on. They started to walk along with me, but I just peddled away as if I had been riding for years. Something in me just connects with two wheels. Later, after my father moved us to Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley, I moved from bicycles to a Vespa motor scooter. "Maybe I really am Vernon reincarnated." I thought.

My eyes told my head "Can the chatter. The first check is coming up, and we got to do this right!" I looked for an aggressive checker. The skilled ones usually eye ball each rider as he comes in, or point to their spot. I spotted the one who had eye contact with me, shifted down, pulled the clutch and moved back to make room for him to reach in and mark my tank card. My tank card was my ticket to a finisher's pin, proof that I had not cut the course. He made the smooth move, and I popped the clutch, twisted the throttle and blew out of the check like I was being chased by the devil. I was. More than a thousand of them all trying to get to Parker before me.

And many of them would. I wasn't the fastest guy out there. But I might be the fastest in my class. Every desert race is more than 40 races taking place at the same time on the same course. Four skill levels, four engine-size divisions and six age groups. We all had number plates on our bikes with a colored strip to tell everybody whether we were a beginner (white) a novice (green), an amatuer (yellow) or an expert (red). Mine was red, and I had worked hard to get it. I would never forget the thrill of opening the mail in those early months of racing and reading that the steward for my division had transferred me to the next level. Nor the joy of removing the green, novice plate from my Husky and replacing it with a yellow one. And then a year later, replacing the yellow one with red.

In the distance, through the dust, I could see the first gas stop coming up. I had been a member of the Desert Knights, but the club had disbanded several years ago, so instead of looking for their club banner among all the others, I would have to find Dee waving at me.

Behind every desert racer stands a good mechanic, hours of practice and a loyal wife or girlfriend. She was mine. Her job financed my racing and its expenses. She cooked the meals, helped in the pits and waited anxiously for me at the finish. Racing into the pits, eager to find her, I could not have imagined that someday I would memorialize her love and support of my racing at a place called the Husky Memorial. I remember it now as if it were yesterday:

Explosions of dust and dirt rose into the air as riders pulled in and out of their pit areas. Club banners of every color and pattern wave in the hazy sky. Spectators ran here and there screaming and waving at their favorite racers. And pit crews work frantically to give their riders that racer's edge.

"There she is!" I lock it up, slide into her spot, snap off my gas cap and help her direct the nozzle on the can into my tank. She smiles. I smile back. She wipes the dust off my googles and hands me the water bottle. "You're about 20th overall and I haven't seen anybody in your class!" Most clubs use crayons so I had made a duct-tape "dam" between the card and the filler cap so when I stop for gas, the crayon marks won't become one big, colorful glob. It works perfectly. She pulls the nozzle out of my tank and gives me a kiss. Through the noise of pit crews yelling at their riders and two-stroke motorcycles pulling in and out of their pits, I yell "See you at the next check!" and charge back onto the course, knowing she would be there.

And she was. Pit after pit, I found her with the gas, the water and a kiss. Check after check I found the guy with that smooth move. And mile after mile, I found the strength and determination to stay on my game, pushing myself and that Yamaha as fast as I could without biting the dust.

But a few miles from the finish, I went down hard in a tight turn in a sand wash. I got up, cleared my goggles, and my head, walked over to the bike and noticed the front tire was flat. "Probably why I crashed." I thought. "Those damn rocks up on that ridge just after check number 4." I told myself "Relax. It's the front tire. Keep the throttle up and you'll get to the finish OK." I picked the bike up off the ground, gave the lever a kick, then smiled as I heard it come to life. I stabbed the gear shift and took off, glad that nobody had passed me while I was down.

As I raced through the chaparral just east of the sand wash, I saw the finish line a mile or so ahead. With the finish line in sight, I knew I had made it one of my best. As I rolled across the finish line, the guy working the chute crayoned "16" on my tank card, pulled it off, then stuck it onto the coat hanger he was using to collect all the tank cards. Sixteen. My favorite number. "Synchronicity had struck again!" I thought. "Like lightning." Later I would laugh at myself when the results came in the mail and I had placed 15th overall, not 16th because somebody in front of me had been disqualified.

Sitting there waiting for the chute to clear, I felt an arm around me and someone say "You made it, first 250 Vet Expert." Dee! I turned, and despite the dirt on my face, she kissed it. Ah, better than a finisher pin.

Desert racing had been my home away from home for more than a decade -- a sport and a people where I fit in, belonged. Whether sitting around a campfire with my buddies or trying to catch one of them in a sandwash, I had been home. My racing was over, but that "home" would always be there inside of me. My life, however, wasn't over, and I looked forward to living the rest of it with all the guts and gusto I had learned from racing motorcycles in the desert...