Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/1544109
April 2026 35 strange fascina on for old, filthy cast-off machin- ery, he knew I'd rather have a few fros es in that old barn than go to some goofy sports bar and kill some me catching up. What I really wanted to see was that old 'Ham and how me was trea ng it. Was it stuck? Did raccoons eat the seat? You know, stuff that we old bike dudes think about when we can't sleep. Well, we made our way into the dimly-lit barn, and way in the back, there it sat, in the same place it had been for the past two decades. It wasn't orange as I remembered it, but rather a dingy brown and covered in decades of barn dust. As I pushed my way past a bunch of other dead soldiers, I got my grubby paws on it. The first order of business was to see if it was stuck. As I grabbed the kicker, I could not believe it had swung free. As I a empted to swing it through the stroke, it did so, and freely, too! Wow, this thing might be an easy clean-up, I thought. "Dude, sell me the 'Ham, bud!" "Naw," was his answer. "I'm gonna wake it up someday."... Yeah, right, I thought again. As the years wore on, I'd oc- casionally ask about it, but was always shot down. More than several years had passed since we'd seen each other. We'd speak on the phone every now and then, with plans to get together, but you know how it goes: life gets in the way, and it just never happens. One rather late evening, I got a call from Howie. He was up north on vaca on, and it sounded like he'd had more than a few bowls of "Loudmouth Soup" in his belly. You know the calls, something like this: "I love you, man!" "When are we gonna get together?" "Come down and see me some me, we'll hang out and talk it over like the old days." His next slurred statement rang loud and clear: "If you come down to visit, I'll sell you that Can-Am!" Oh boy, really? Wow, this is gonna be good. This should be fun, Yikes. Although it took many months for us to find me to hang out and drag an old bike out of a filthy barn, we finally did it. In fact, we got a posse together. The process of ge ng this old bike from the back of a 60-foot-deep barn would be a challenge. There was zero room, old vehicles nose-to-nose, old equipment with flat res, certainly no room to ac- tually wheel the bike out into the daylight. What we decided was that the bike would have to be hoisted in the air, swung towards the front of the building, and then start over. We found a long rope, slung it