Motorcycles, Scooters, Guns, Adventures, Opinions, and More
I had a good look at a Zero motorcycle last week at my good buddy Art’s dealership, Douglas Motorcycles in San Bernardino, California. There’s more info coming, folks, but check out this cool photo of yours truly on an arm-stretching Zero…
My wife took that shot, and I processed it in Photoshop to convert the background to black and white. I like it. And I liked the Zero. It was scary fast. But that’s a story for a future blog. Keep an eye on the ExhaustNotes blog, because that story is coming!
Ah, the motorcycle forums. Truths, half-truths, and outright lies. When I worked for CSC, I used to watch the forums regularly for people who posted about CSC so I could answer honest questions and take on the trolls. After doing that for 10 years, I concluded there are a few mean-spirited people posting stuff on the Internet who don’t have a clue (I wrote an entire chapter about that in 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM). It didn’t take a full 10 years to reach that conclusion, though. It took about 10 minutes.
Having said that, there are three forums I enjoy visiting, and here they are.
ADVRider.com. This is the first forum I ever read. There are more than a few folks there who are full of what drops from the southern end of a northbound horse, but there are a lot more who are knowledgeable and helpful. My screen name on ADVRider is Gatling. If I had it to do over again, I would use my real name, but I chose Gatling several years ago (mostly because I wrote a book about the Gatling gun). My favorite threads are the Shiny Things thread, the Thumpers thread, and the Electric Motorcycles thread.
Chinariders.net. ChinaRiders is a much smaller forum focused on Chinese motorcycles. Yeah, there have been a few yahoos on that forum (as is the case on all forums), but the ChinaRider monitors do a good job and the flakes don’t last long. My screen name on ChinaRiders is CSCDude. I picked that name when I was working for CSC. If I had it to do over, I’d use my own name.
ElectricMotorcycleForum.com. My newest favorite forum is appropriately titled ElectricMotorcycleForum.com. It’s also a small forum, but it’s picking up speed and I like the place. It’s a good source of information on all kinds of things related to electric motorcycles. My screen name on that one is Joe Berk.
If you have a favorite forum and you’d like to suggest it, please include it as a comment to this post. We’d like to know about it.
I experienced something recently I had heard and read about in years past, but I had never personally experienced. I’d been wanting a .257 Weatherby No. 1 ever since they became available. To understand what that means if you’re not a single-shot rifle aficionado like I am, I need to start with a bit of background.
Roy Weatherby was a southern California entrepreneur who developed a line of ultra-high-velocity rifle cartridges in the 1940s and beyond. Weatherby built a rifle company around his proprietary cartridges, and they are fine firearms. Roy has gone to his reward, and he was one hell of a man while he was with us. I met Weatherby in the early 1980s and I know of what I speak, but that’s a story for another time.
Next bit of information: Of the several cartridges that Mr. Weatherby developed, his personal favorite was the .257 Weatherby. It’s a very, very fast quarter-bore (a .25-caliber cartridge) that has a huge brass case holding a lot of propellant, which vents all its fury on that little bullet when, as they say, the hammer falls. The cartridge is wicked looking. The thing resembles a hypodermic needle, and if you’re shooter and a reloader like me, you get all gaga over such things. The .257 Weatherby has muzzle velocities approaching 4,000 feet per second. To put that in perspective, consider that the 5.56mm NATO round, the one used in the so-called assault rifles and our US Army M-16, is “only” a 3,100 fps cartridge. The .257 Weatherby is super fast. It’s the fastest .25-caliber cartridge there is. In that caliber, there’s nothing faster.
Next bit of gun info: One of the most desirable and beautiful rifles in the world is the Ruger No. 1. It’s a single-shot rifle, which means you load one round at time. When I hear my gun buddies get their shorts in a knot about the “gubmint” limiting us to 10-round magazines, I have to laugh. That’s nine more than a real rifleman needs. One shot, if you’re doing things right, is all it takes.
Next point…last year, Ruger offered their No. 1 single-shot rifle in a very limited run chambered for the .257 Weatherby cartridge. I love the Ruger No. 1 and I always wanted something in chambered for the .257 Weatherby cartridge. For me, it was a no-brainer. I had to have that rifle, and I finally found one (at a good price, and with nice wood). It’s the one you see in the photo at the top of this blog. It’s awesome. Circassian walnut with nice horizontal streaks, a 28-inch barrel, and chambered for the ultimate round. The stock looks good from both sides, too. Take a look…
The excitement with a new rifle like this (beyond the pride of ownership and the dreams of distant hunting trips) is developing a load that groups tightly. Usually, I can get a rifle to shoot into an inch at 100 yards with the right combination of powder, powder charge, bullet, primer, seating depth, and the other variables in cartridge development. It’s a mini-engineering development program, and finding the right recipe is a big part of the fun. Maybe someday I’ll do a blog on that, too.
So I started with my first load, which consisted of 87 gr Hornady bullets, and varying loads of IMR 4350 propellant (what most folks would call the gunpowder, but we reloaders call it propellant). The rifle was grouping okay (nothing great; I haven’t found the perfect load yet), when I got to the last load to be tested. It was a max load, which means it had the highest propellant charge I was testing that day.
None of the loads showed any pressure signs (like flattened primers or difficulty opening the action). That’s what you watch for, to make sure you don’t create loads with excessive pressure.
Even the max load seemed okay, but when I fired the first shot I saw from the hole it made on the target that it was tumbling. After firing the next four, two more tumbled and, not surprisingly, the group had opened up significantly.
It was a lousy load from an accuracy perspective, but here’s where we get to the “never seen this before” before part of the story.
Here’s what the target looked like…
Now, for the really interesting part. Check out the bullet hole at the 7:00 position…the one at the lower left (the target was mounted on its side).
Here’s a closeup of that bullet hole…
The dark roostertail you see above is the lead spraying out of the bullet’s copper jacket as the bullet disintegrated in flight. Some of the bullets disintegrated sooner and started tumbling before they hit the target. This one was breaking up as it went through the target!
Like I said, I had heard of this phenomenon before, but I never actually experienced it firsthand. The muzzle velocity, according to my reloading manual, was just under 4000 fps. Just for grins, I calculated the bullet rpm at that velocity, and by my reckoning, it works out to something approaching 300,000 rpm. That little puppy was spinning, and between the centrifugal forces the bullets were experiencing at that rpm and the aerodynamic heating at those speeds, they were breaking up in flight. That’s fast!
Interesting stuff, to be sure.
Phase III (pardon the electrical pun) of our City Slicker testing involved riding Slick from my home up to Mt. Baldy Village. It’s a 2,500-foot climb over 9.2 miles, and it’s rough. It’s a challenging climb on a small IC-engined motorcycle, and it’s really, really rough on a bicycle (as I know from personal experience). I knew power consumption would be higher based on our Phase I and II testing (see those results here and here), but the earlier tests did not include steep climbs. Phase III was a fairly steep uphill climb all the way, and then a steep descent all the way down. Here’s the route I took, up and down…
I didn’t know how Slick would do, and I didn’t want to run the bike down more than 50% (you know, to make sure I had the juice to get home). I decided in advance that if the bike hit the 50% energy remaining mark on the way up, I’d turn around and head back.
I need not have worried, though. I sailed up to the Mt. Baldy Lodge (that first photo you see above) with 56% power remaining on the charge indicator. I stopped to take a picture, and then I turned around and rode home. Here’s what it looks like on a miles versus battery charge plot…
As you can see from the above chart, energy consumption on the way down was near zero. I used 43% of the battery’s energy (from 99% to 56%) to make the 9.2-mile, 2500-ft-elevation climb, and then I used only 10% of the battery’s energy (from 56% to 46%) to cover the same distance riding downhill. Cool.
I ran this test in the Eco mode, mostly because I didn’t want to use too much energy on the climb. In the Eco mode on flat ground, the bike tops out at an indicated 37 mph (don’t forget that the speedometer is about 8-10% fast, so actual speed is lower). On the climb, Slick slowed to an indicated 33 to 34 mph on the steepest hills, which is about what my 150cc CSC Mustang could manage.
On the way down the mountain, Slick ran 43-44 mph (still in the Eco mode), and the throttle became meaningless. The bike coasted downhill faster than the motor could drive it. It reminded me of my bicycle down this same stretch. On my bicycle, I topped out at the same speed and pedaling was useless because my Bianchi was already going faster than I could pedal.
Watching Slick’s regeneration function on the dash was cool. The red regen plug (to the left of the battery charge indicator) stayed red for most of the run downhill. I previously wondered if the bike only regenerated at lower speeds; I now know it regens at all speeds when Slick is going faster than the motor is driving it. Just like before, though, I never saw the charge percentage indicator go up (say, from 48% to 49%). It just stayed at a given percentage for a much longer time. I asked the wizards at Zongshen about this, and they confirmed it’s what they would expect.
The knee in the x-y plot at the 56% charge level is where I turned around (at the Mt. Baldy Lodge). It shows that Slick uses way less energy going downhill than it does going uphill. Like they say…duh. The slight changes in the slope of each line (for the uphill section, and then for the downhill section) are due to changes in the grade on Mt. Baldy Road. There were undulations in the road, and that’s why there are minor variances in the slope of the line on both the uphill and downhill portions of the graph.
Once I was home, I put Slick back on the charger for the ride back to CSC. I’m headed out on a road trip next week, and I wanted to return the bike to Steve.
I did the climb up to Mt. Baldy with the lights off. My bike is a preproduction sample, and it’s not wired to keep the lights on. The production City Slickers will have the LED marker lights on all the time(that’s a US requirement). The LEDs will consume a little energy, so the range will be somewhat less for the US bikes than what I’ve been reporting.
To get a feel for what the impact of having the lights on might be, when I returned the bike to CSC I rode there with the headlight and taillight on. This is a more severe test than would be running the bike with only the LED lights (the headlight and taillight consumes more energy than the LEDs). Previously, without the lights on the 16.4-mile ride to CSC from my home took 35% of the battery’s charge. Running the same route today with the headlight and taillight on, I used 42% of the battery’s energy. Note that this is more energy than would be consumed with just the LEDs (but it is representative of energy consumption when riding the bike at night). And, I was hotfooting it a bit. I wanted to stay at around 34-35 mph, but Slick was smelling the barn and I frequently ran faster than that.
So there you have it. Eco mode, Power mode, and a steep climb and descent on the CSC City Slicker. Stay tuned; there’s more coming on this fascinating new electric motorcycle. You’ll see it here first.
I thought I might take a minute and explain the other pages on the ExhaustNotes.us site. For starters, to get back to the main ExhaustNotes site, you’ll notice there’s a link at the top right of this page that says ExhaustNotes Home. Click on it and it will take you to our home page…
The photos on our Home page are cool. The one at the top was in the Gobi desert. So’s the Gresh photo…I shot that from the saddle of my RX3 as Gresh and I were riding into the Gobi for the first time. The one to the right is yours truly about to enter the Forbidden City in Beijing (Gresh shot that one). And the photos below? They are our advertisers, and they are all great companies. CSC Motorcycles is the North American importer of the greatest small-displacement motorcycles in the world. BajaBound is, hands down, the best insurance company when you’re going into Baja (and you need to have a separate insurance policy whenever you do so). RoadRUNNER is one of the world’s great motorcycle magazines, and the only one devoted exclusively to touring (this month’s issue has our China story). Douglas Motorcycles sells Triumphs and Zero motorcycles; my good buddy Art runs the place, and it’s where I’ve bought my Triumphs.
So, about that Gresh photo…click on it and you’ll be whisked to the Gresh page, which includes links to articles Joe wrote. Joe is one of the world’s great motojournalists. His writing is witty and captivating, and if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself laughing out loud as you read it. Joe wrote the “Cranked” column for Motorcyclist magazine, and you’ll find links to those here. What I like about Joe is he sees things other people don’t, and he captures his observations well. More good news: Joe started a series of “Wild Conjecture” pieces (articles written without a lot of actual, you know, facts). We’re adding “Wild Conjecture” links here. You’ll want to spend some time on the Gresh page, folks.
Although I’m not in the same league as my good buddy Arjiu, I’ve got a page, too. Click on the Berk page, and you’ll have a set of links to my stuff.
We’ve got an About page. You might want to take a minute to read it; it explains how the ExhaustNotes site came to be and what we’re all about. And the photo at the top of the About page? Ah, that’s a story for another time…
There’s our YouTubby page. Joe and I have done a number of YouTube videos and we’ve got them here. You might wonder why “YouTubby” instead of just YouTube. Visit the page, and you’ll find out.
The Books page is me bragging a bit, and you having an opportunity to buy some cool books. I’ve thought about this a lot, and you should buy all of them (several copies of each, actually). They make great gifts.
Ah, the Baja page! If you want to learn more about riding Baja, this is where you want to go. We are the ultimate resource for information about motorcycling in Baja. The routes, the roads, the restaurants, the hotels, the cave paintings, the legalities, the bikes, insurance, the missions, whale watching, and more…if it pertains to riding a motorcycle in Baja and what to see when you’re down there, this is the spot, folks.
Finally, there’s our Advertising page. The ExhaustNotes site has traction, and if your target market includes adventurers, here’s where you can reach them. Get in touch with us, and we’ll get you there!
We’ve already covered my favorite Baja places to eat from the border down through Ensenada in our previous installment of the adventurer’s guide to Baja dining. This next set of Baja dining recommendations covers the corridor south of Ensenada, through San Quintin, all the way to El Rosario. This region covers the wine country and the agricultural district, which ends in the San Quintin area. After San Quintin, Baja’s Highway 1 (the Transpeninsular Highway), continues south through low-lying coastal plains hugging the Pacific coast. Then it’s a brief climb through a set of twisties into El Rosario.
There are great places to eat through this stretch of Baja, folks. Let’s take a look…
Palomar
This is a cool little place that’s on the right side of Highway 1 after you’ve passed through the mountains south of Ensenada. The food is good, it’s reasonable, and it’s always fresh. I like their chicken tacos; my friends seem to always gravitate toward the shrimp.
There’s a little general store next to the restaurant, and if you need Baja kitsch, this is a good place to get it. More importantly, there’s also a Pemex station. I’d advise topping off here. If you’re on a motorcycle (and of course, you should be), this will get you all the way to El Rosario.
San Quintin
What can I say? I love this area. It’s one of the last vestiges of the northern Baja agricultural region. There are three places I like here. One is the restaurant in the Mision San Quintin. It’s a hotel restaurant (it’s pricey for Baja, but it’s cheap compared to US prices), and it’s good. I’ve stayed at the hotel and had breakfast and dinner here; both are great. The orange juice is always freshly squeezed, and it’s fantastic. To my great surprise, I didn’t have any photos of the Mision San Quintin when I prepared this blog entry. Sounds to me like a good excuse to ride down there again.
Another is the Molina Viejo restaurant, near the Old Mill Hotel, which is right on Bahia San Quintin. The good news here is that the 4-mile ride to Bahia San Quintin is now paved (no more white-knuckle soft sand or deep mud, thank God). Even before the road was paved, though, the ride out was worth it. There are two great restaurants hidden away back here (the Molina Viejo and Don Eddie’s), and the food at both is stellar.
Both restaurants are literally right on the bay, and occasionally a gray whale will find its way into the bay. When that happens, it’s an amazing thing to see and hear. The Molina Viejo has a fried mushroom appetizer that’s a favorite, and any of the entrees are excellent. This place rivals the décor and feel of any restaurant in the US, but it hasn’t been discovered yet (and that means the prices are low).
The other restaurant, Don Eddie’s, is on the opposite side of the Old Mill Hotel. It’s not as fancy as the Molina Viejo, but I think the food is even better. If you call ahead, Don Eddie (he’s a real guy) will prepare a buffet-style meal for your group. We do that whenever I’m leading a group tour, and the breakfasts are particularly fabulous.
El Rosario
El Rosario is the last town on the Transpeninsular Highway before you enter the Valle de los Cirios. That’s an experience like no other; it’s the barren and beautiful wilderness that is Baja. But I digress; the focus here is the dining, and El Rosario (as any Bajaeno knows) means two things: Top off at the Pemex (it’s the last one for 200 miles if you’re headed south), and eat at Mama Espinosa’s.
Mama Espinosa’s is a Baja icon, a legend among many Baja legends, and perhaps their most legendary dish is the old gal’s lobster burritos. This little tiny spot is a “must see” on any Baja trip. It’s literally world famous. It’s a stop on the Baja 1000. There are zillions of decals from folks who race and travel Baja. It’s got a cool wall-sized Baja map so you can get a feel for where you are. But you really don’t need the map. Ride into Baja and you know…you’ve arrived. You’re in Heaven.
Mama Espinosa’s is known for their lobster burritos, but my favorite is Mama’s chicken burritos. I think they’re great. The bottom line is this: You won’t go wrong with anything on Mama Espinosa’s menu. It’s all good.
So there you have it. The next push south on our culinary cruise will take us all the way down to Guerrero Negro, and the best fish tacos on the planet. I’m not exaggerating. Trust me on this. But that’s a story for the next installment of our ExhaustNotes dining tour.
Stay tuned!
A Soldier Never Forgets North Platte. This is a good story that we saw in the Wall Street Journal last week. You need to read it. You’ll be a better person for doing so. You can thank me later.
Here’s an interesting story that popped up on my news feed earlier today. It seems an errant scooter rider, a young one at that, was stopped by the Maine State Police riding his scooter on the Maine Turnpike late last night, using only his cell phone for a headlight. There must be more to the story, because after stopping him, the police gave the guy a lift to his destination some 70 miles away. I can’t make stuff up this good, and if you doubt my word, you can read the original story here.
So that story naturally pulled my attention to a somewhat similar experience with my good buddy Baja John and his girlfriend Annie. This goes back to 2006 again, shortly after John bought a place right on the Sea of Cortez in Bahia de Los Angeles. Literally, right on the sea. Oceanside housing. It’s awesome.
I had just bought a new Triumph Tiger. John and Annie invited me to their new place. Who can say no to an offer like that?
Here’s where the story gets interesting. When John bought the Casa Baja Juan, it came with a VW bus. John worked on it for a week and got it running, and it became his get-around-town wheels. He never registered it, so it had no plates, but it was cool. I love old VWs, especially the buses.
That night, we took the VW and went to dinner at the best taqueria in town, just a short distance away…
John, Annie, and I had a great dinner, a few Tecates, and then it was time to head back to his place. There was a problem, though. The sun had set, and the VW had no headlights. The three of us pondered this situation a while, and then John remembered he had a flashlight.
John handed the flashlight to Annie and she hung out the passenger window, lighting the way as we rolled down a dirt road to John’s house. We couldn’t see squat (the flashlight was pitifully weak), but we were laughing so hard we didn’t care.
Then we drove past another restaurant on that dirt road. Imagine that: Another restaurant on that same dirt road. Then I saw who was sitting under the veranda as we went by. Uh oh, I thought.
There were three Mexican police officers having dinner, sitting out front, just a few feet away as we passed. The police officers saw us, we saw them, and Annie waved, using the flashlight, which I thought would only accentuate the obvious: We had no lights and the VW wasn’t registered.
The police? They waved back, holding up their cervezas in a salute to our ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome.
Ah, Baja….
Just over 45 years ago when I was getting out of the Army, I interviewed for a job with US Gypsum in Sweetwater, Texas. I was mustering out from Fort Bliss (near El Paso), and I wanted to stay in the Lone Star State. US Gypsum seemed like a nice outfit and the people who interviewed me were great, but I wasn’t too sure about living in Sweetwater (a town I had never heard of before my interview). I had a good interview, the US Gypsum folks took me to lunch and peppered me with more questions, and they offered me a job. I asked about what it was like living in Sweetwater, and what people did around there when they weren’t working.
It was the right question to ask. Up to this point it had been kind of a standard tell-me-your-strengths/tell-me-your-weaknesses interview. But when I asked that question, everyone started talking about the Rattlesnake Roundup, becoming more and more excited as they spoke. The Roundup, they explained, is kind of like a bass-fishing contest. “The boy who won the Roundup last year brought in nearly 3500 pounds of rattlers…” one of my hosts told me.
I was stunned. In four years of crashing around the Texas desert in armored personnel carriers and jeeps, I had seen exactly three rattlesnakes, and they weren’t very big ones. 3500 lbs? That’s a lot of snakes, I thought.
“How can you find 3500 pounds of snakes in a day?” I asked.
“We strip mine the gypsum,” one of the USG guys told me. “Our boys just bulldoze up the earth. Every once in a while, these old boys will turn up a snake den,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “They look around to make sure no one else has seen them, they mark the location, they cover it up, and then when the Roundup rolls around, they know exactly where to go…”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had no idea such things existed. Snake dens? For real?
Suddenly, all the rattlesnake kitsch I had seen (but not really noticed) at the airport, the hotel, the US Gypsum plant, and even at the restaurant’s cash register (belts, belt buckles, bolo ties, hats…all based on rattlesnake skins, rattlesnake heads, and rattlesnake fangs) started to make sense.
Snake dens? Seriously?
I experienced three revelations simultaneously: Sweetwater was not a town for a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey (that would be me), these people were seriously into rattlesnakes, and at some point in my life I had to get back to Sweetwater to see the Rattlesnake Roundup.
That interview with US Gypsum was in 1977. I told the above story three decades later when we had a couple of friends, Marty and Liesel, over for dinner. Marty listened intently. Marty is paid to be a good listener (and he is), but I could see my story was getting more than his usual intense focus. Marty was mesmerized.
After dinner my wife and I took Marty and his wife home. By the time we returned to our home, I had an email from Marty. He had found the Rattlesnake Roundup on the Internet, it was still going strong, and he thought it would make for a good motorcycle ride.
Hey, why not?
Sweetwater is about 200 miles west of Fort Worth, which means it’s about 1200 miles east of Los Angeles. That’s two days by motorcycle…two long, boring days of droning along I-10 for 1000 miles, and then I-20 for the last 200 miles. Like I said, why not?
Sweetwater originally started the Roundup because the town had a serious rattlesnake infestation. As one of the locals explained it, the snakes would slither right into town. The Sweetwaterians (is that a word?) were experiencing five or six snakebite cases a month. The idea was to thin the herd. Hence the Rattlesnake Roundup. When Marty and I went there in 2006, they had already been doing this for nearly 50 years. As the photo below shows, though, there are a lot of rattlesnakes still out there.
The Sweetwater Annual Rattlesnake Roundup was a big show. Those pens you see above? There were dozens of them inside Sweetwater’s Nolan Coliseum. There were all kinds of exhibits and zillions of snakes. Zillions, I tell you. Snake handling. Rattlesnake milking. You could touch a snake if you wanted to (while the handler held it, of course…I took a pass on that one). Grand fun.
One of the spectators asked a snake handler the inevitable question: “How many times have you been bit?”
“Never,” they said. I imagine they were telling the truth. I think in that profession, one mistake is all it takes to get into a new line of work.
Another spectator asked how long it took the snakes to replace their venom.
“About two weeks,” the handlers answered, “but these boys ain’t got two weeks…”
We would soon see what they meant.
David Sager put on quite a demonstration. He’s a good old boy, with a Texas twang, a flair for the dramatic, and a sense of humor.
Sager told a story about road runners and rattlesnakes. The former eats the latter. The roadrunner flaps its wings and entices the snake to strike at it futilely and repeatedly. The road runner is faster than the rattlesnake’s strike, and that’s saying something. We saw the handlers induce the snakes to strike several times. The snakes are faster than the eye can follow (more on that in a bit).
A road runner will tease the snake to strike repeatedly, and ultimately, the snake will tire and simply coil up. When it does this, the road runner then hops on top and pecks at the snake’s head until the snake puts its head under its coils. The snake becomes docile, and the roadrunner pecks at the snake’s head to kill it (and ultimately, to eat it). The snake keeps its head low in its coils, trying to hide from the roadrunner. Beep beep, Dude. Time’s up.
Mr. Sager played roadrunner for us. He put a rattler on a table and started lightly pecking at its head with a snake-handling rod. The rattler immediately coiled up, entered a trance-like state, and hid its head under its coiled body. If you think that’s something, read on…
Sager then swept the snake off the table with his right hand, and caught it in his left. Yep, he picked up a rather large, very much alive rattlesnake in his bare hand! That’s the snake’s head peeking out on the right side of this photo.
Mr. Sager explained that rattlesnakes sense heat, and he proved his point by irritating the snake with a long orange balloon. The snake dodged and weaved, trying to get away from the balloon.
Sager then pulled the balloon away from the snake, rubbed his hand on the balloon’s end to warm it up just a scosh, and started to move the balloon back toward the snake. The rattlesnake struck instantly. It happened in the blink of an eye. Less than the blink of an eye. Their strike is very fast, faster than you can see. The balloon exploded with an amplified bang. Grown men screamed. I was one of them. That, my friends, was a rattlesnake strike!
The Roundup even has a beauty pageant, and yep, there was a Miss Snake Charmer 2006. This was a major event in west Texas. I thought it was great.
Back in 2006, I was using a Nikon D70, one of Nikon’s first digital cameras. I was getting great shots and I was having a blast. Motorcycles. Rattlesnakes. Pretty girls. Texas. Life just doesn’t get any better.
The Roundup ran like a production line. The snakes came in, they were weighed, they were milked for their venom, they were slaughtered, they were butchered, and then the skins and the meat went their separate ways.
All of this was done right in front of us. It was definitely not a place for the squeamish, but we were in Texas. Ain’t no snowflakes in Texas.
The Roundup had a long line of people waiting to buy fried rattlesnake for lunch. I looked at Marty. He looked at me. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Marty tried one bite and spit it out. That was enough of a testimonial for me. I didn’t try it. Marty’s reaction and the rancid odor were enough.
The Roundup was fun, but a half day was plenty. The weather in Sweetwater was balmy…a sunny and humid 80 degrees. Marty and I decided to head back home. We had a 1200-mile freeway drone in front of us.
We hit I-20 and just kept going. We wanted to make New Mexico to get a jump on the ride for the next day. We cruised through El Paso at around 8:00 p.m., and stopped in Las Cruces for a quick dinner. Lordsburg, New Mexico, was our target that night. It was dusty, dark, very cold, and the wind was awful, with gusts in excess of 60 miles per hour. We were leaning our bikes at 30 degrees just to maintain a straight line.
We finally made Lordsburg, only to find that the Days Inn where we thought we would stay had no vacancies. You know the drill…you see the sign outside that says “No Vacancy,” but you have to go inside and ask anyway. “Everything is sold out,” the lady behind the counter said. “There isn’t an empty room in town, what with all this wind.” All the truckers were getting off the road due to the high winds.
We had passed an older motel on the east end of Lordsburg on the way in. Willcox, Arizona, was the next town up the road, but it was 80 miles west and I knew I couldn’t ride another 80 miles in this wind. We doubled back and tried the older hotel. We got lucky. We nailed the last room they had.
It snowed that night. We had a good breakfast the next morning and waited a couple of hours until the snow turned to sleet, and then we were off. We pushed through a combination of snow, sleet, and cold rain for the next 60 miles. We made Arizona (where the sun came out), and then rode another several hundred miles through sunny (but cold) weather.
The Roundup was a bit of a shocker. Lots of venomous snakes and the butchering was kind of brutal, but it was fun. And, no matter what anyone says, the myth that rattlesnake tastes like chicken just ain’t so. Sometimes I wonder…what if I had taken that job in Sweetwater? Would I be out there, rounding up rattlesnakes, instead of writing the blog?
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I’m a huge fan of the 1911, going all the way back to 1973. That’s when I graduated college and headed off to the Army. I went to college on an ROTC scholarship, and I had the same spot in the Corps of Cadets as Colin D. MacManus did when he graduated a few years before me in 1965. Captain MacManus was killed in action in Vietnam, and every year after that, his family awarded a Colt 1911 to the graduating senior who held his position. I was that guy in 1973, and that was my first .45 auto.
Back then, times were different. I had to get a permit to own the .45, but it was more a formality than anything else. We could shoot in our backyard, we often did, and my father and I couldn’t wait to put the .45 through its paces. Like I said, we couldn’t wait, but that was only one thing we couldn’t do. The other was hit the target. We set up a target 30 feet away (a soda can), and trying as best we could, the only thing we hit was the ground halfway between us and that soda can. A lot of dirt flew. There’s a lot of lead buried in what used to be our backyard. Don’t tell the EPA.
Fast forward a few weeks, and I got lucky. The Army sent me to graduate school, and the ROTC detachment got a new Sergeant Major, one Emory L. Hickman. Sergeant Major Hickman had spent most of his career in Vietnam and the Army Marksmanship Training Unit, where the finest pistoleros in the world live. He was the real deal: A warrior and an expert pistol shot. I told him of my plight (the evasive can of pop) and he laughed. The Sergeant Major schooled me on the fundamentals of handling the 1911, he coached me on the pistol range, and he taught me how to put those big old 230-grain FMJ bullets pretty much exactly where I wanted them to go. Thank you, Sergeant Major Hickman.
Fast forward several decades and dozens of 1911s later, and that brings us to this morning at the West End Gun Club, where I and my Rock Island Compact 1911 did, once again, what the old Sergeant Major taught me to do.
And about that Rock Island 1911…it’s a short little thing, and it’s a blast to shoot. Around here in the People’s Republic of Kalifornia, Rock Island 1911s go for $500 brand new (that’s a tremendous value). They are inexpensive, but they are not cheap. The Rock Island 1911 is a real handgun with its Parkerized finish, all steel construction, wood grips, and GI sights (none of that black plastic silliness here). It reminds me a lot of the 1911s I carried in the Army. I love shooting my Rock Island Compact, it hits well, and I can still put my shots where I want to. Sergeant Major Hickman would be 92 years old today if he was still around (I’m guessing he’s not); wherever he is, he’d be proud. He taught me well.
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