So I am sitting on a stool in my basement staring at the inanimate object in front of me and just hating it. I mean really hating it with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns and wondering what in the heck I was thinking getting involved in a sport that required me to be a mechanic. I have never in my life had my hands inside the engine of anything two-wheels or four, when I was in my early 20’s I was learning how to work a crowd fronting rock bands. If you want to know how to handle a lackluster biker bar crowd on a Wednesday night I am your guy, taking apart engine components and re-assembling them successfully is not my strong point. It is funny because the very word that was on my mind as I was sitting there was to be the subject of some controversy in a conversation I would have on the track.
“Your son is using four-letter words out there on the track.”
This came to me as I was standing in the fenced spectator area at Winchester Speedpark watching Jake slog through another of the endless early spring mud races for 2006. Our friend Barry Stacy was working the track and had come over to where I was standing to deliver this bombshell. I couldn’t believe it what could he have possibly said, I have never even heard him utter anything remotely close. As long as Jake has been alive I have been painstakingly careful about watching my language. Not that I don’t have my own share of colorful vocabulary words as do we all, reserved for those wonderful moments we all encounter throughout our lives. I am certainly no saint but I just always thought it was better not to use that kind of language in front of Jake indeed I have been pretty successful with just a couple exceptions. The mountain bike versus the Jeep incident immediately pops to mind but that is a long story and nobody needs to hear about me losing a battle of wits with a canvas top. So you can imagine what was running through my mind on hearing the news that Jake was spewing out four-letter words during a race. My mind was literally racing with possibilities if you will forgive the pun but I put on an admittedly weak smile and asked Barry a reluctant question. “What is up, did something happen out there…..what did he say?” I replied with more than a little dread. “He got stuck in the mud coming out of the turn up the hill and he told me “I can’t do it!” was the begrudgingly funny reply.
Can’t…..as in “I can’t” which although I will admit is better than what I thought he might have said and restored my faith in my decision to bite my own tongue frequently but it was still troubling.
Jake has always had a pretty good attitude towards what happened on the track and this year especially we have been to some races that have tested his patience with the ups and downs of racing. I on the other hand have been getting a crash course in the ups and downs of being an 85cc mechanic something which I am not sure that I have handled with the same optimism.
We decided this year to get out and ride a little earlier with Jake running on the bigger bike it seemed smart to not wait for the season to start before we hit the track. We did a trip down south to The Landing MX as well as running one of the venerable Jack Frost series races which had the distinction of being the first race we have ever gone to when it was snowing.
This year Jake also decided that he wanted to run the Loretta Lynn’s qualifier at Southwick to see what it was like to line up with the real big guns in New England. Except that while practicing following the race at Middleboro we noticed that the right-front fork had rivulets of greasy liquid stranding down to the bottom which I actually knew from previous experience meant that the fork seal had gone. OK that was no big deal we are sponsored by Factory Connection, they would certainly be at the Loretta’s qualifier weekend and since Jake wasn’t racing Saturday it should be no problem. Except that I had to take the fork tubes off so they could do it, which I found out at the track that Saturday. Suffice it to say that although the unnamed national hotel chain we stayed with probably doesn’t normally have a guest use their room as a garage it was that or nothing. After only a few missteps and one instance when the front brake pad fell out onto the carpet causing Jake and I to look at each other while he intoned a somber “that isn’t good” all was re-assembled and ready for race day. So the following morning in practice Jake was heading down the sweeping turn out of the woods as I watched from the mechanics area when he was suddenly bouncing and pitching over the bars the bike following him over and rag dolling him to the ground. As I sprinted down the side of the track towards where he was lying motionless on the ground with the medical workers knelt down next to him one thing kept running through my mind like a freight train “I screwed up the front brake and it locked up on him”.
Well all’s well that ends well as they say, Jake was fine albeit a little sore in the knee from getting tossed, the brakes did not lock up on him he just got a bad bounce down the hill and went on to run a pretty respectable couple motos, one of only 3 novice riders in a field of fast A&B riders.
Well things go along fine and then the bike starts to develop a bit of a late spring cold, acquiring a coughing pop and in general not running right. The general consensus was that I should take off the carburetor and clean it out to make sure that wasn’t the issue. “It’s easy” was the usual advice I would get as I laughed to myself, thinking that they obviously didn’t know who they were talking to.
Which brings us to where this story began as I am sitting there hating the carb and muttering to myself “I can’t do this.” That’s right the very same four letter word that Jake had finally been frustrated enough to let slip from his mouth after a month of mud racing had come all too easily out of mine. It was at this point I remembered a conversation we had when Jake was trying to work up to jumping some bigger obstacles and one double in particular, I told him there came a point where he just had to hook onto someone that was doing it and go for it.
“Dad I can’t jump that though”
“You mean you can’t jump it…yet.”
Well he laughed and we agreed that was the way to look at it and now he can jump that double, so I sort of laughed to myself and decided to get going on fixing the carburetor.
So from now on we have a deal there is no can’t do it, there is only can’t do it yet…
Oh and by the way it wasn’t even the carburetor after all but with “a little help from my friends” as the song goes at least I got a chance to take my own advice and stop using that four letter word.
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