This June, I rolled out to Colorado for a long weekend of riding in the mountains. Because of the tight timeline, I did something I find most distasteful: I put my bike on a trailer. Humming down the interstate in my truck with the bikes in tow, all was going well. Seventy-five miles per hour, tunes cranking, diesel motor chugging along without a care in the world. Then it happened. It was the briefest stutter, like tapping the brakes on cruise. Seconds later, total loss of power, followed by the tach dropping to zero, leaving twelve thousand pounds of American iron freewheeling down the road.
I wrestled the pig to the shoulder and managed to recover my senses. Turned the key, and she fired back up. A strange glitch, perhaps? I tentatively dropped it into drive and gingerly pressed the accelerator. It moved. This was a good sign. I started rolling on the throttle and off we went. Crisis averted.
Thirty miles, and the truck decides it’s time for round two. This time, it wouldn’t start back up. Shit. Shit, shit. Hooked up the programmer, pulled the codes, and started a frantic Google search. Called my go-to diesel guru, who had to call his uber-guru. I sat down on the side of the road and smoked a cigar, watching the warm summer sun shine on the soy bean field. After about thirty minutes, the truck started back up. The option of calling it a glitch was now off the table, so we decided to head straight for the nearest town that might have a diesel mechanic. And then, the matinee performance happened.
After much cursing, cranking, hoping, and waiting, the truck finally started again, but now running like shit. Missing, lack of power, rough idle…not good. We limped it to the next exit, somewhere in the farm fields of southern Illinois.
We pulled into “town”, which was devoid of even a traffic light. There was some sort of small factory, a church, and a gas station/convenience store called Marty-Mart. A local good ol’ boy was sitting up under the awning in his 
chair, and I watched as he took a swig of his beer. Mmm… beer. A cold barley pop sure sounded mighty good. I headed into the store with visions of a frosty twelve pack joining me for a strategy session on how I was going to proceed with the currently not-so-trusty Ford.
Much to my disappointment, the store did not have beer. Nor did they have advice as to how the hell I could get the truck fixed. They did, however, know where Detroit was, and they had a fine assortment of Slim Jims. So with my dinner selected, I headed back out to the parking lot to stew.
I learned a while ago to travel with my own booze. Lord knows when your journey will take you to a dry county, the airplane will run out of liquor, or shit just isn’t happening quite fast enough. So, in my bag, I keep an assortment of airline bottles. I’ll admit, never until that night did I consider using them for barter currency.
I asked the old boy on the porch if he’d be willing to swap a couple of his cold beers for some whiskey, a proposition to which he happily agreed. With beer firmly in hand, we started chatting and discussing some options.
As you might imagine, in a small town the convenience store / only gas station serves as a bit of a congregating point. When a weathered Vietnam-era biker pulled up, he immediately came over and sat down. A couple phone calls and a few minutes later, we were face to face with local wrench. After some questions and inspections, he determined it was beyond him. The boys gave us the name of a mechanic up in the next town, a mere six miles away, and assured us that he’d be able to help us out in the morning. We sat and shot the bull for a while, and believe it or not, they even invited us to stay with them if we didn’t find a place to crash for the night. Huh.
At 7:15 the next morning, a bit hazy from the copious amount of fire-water consumed the night before, (we did eventually sniff out a bar) I headed off to the mechanic. It was, amazingly, a very busy modern shop, fixing everything from family sedans to school buses. This looked promising.
I walked through the door and was greeted by a friendly service writer. I explained the situation, and he apologetically informed me that they’d be happy to look at it, but there was no way they were going to get to it until the afternoon at the earliest. My plan for making time by trailering was crumbling in my mind.
He agreed to send up the diesel mechanic to check it out, just to make sure it wasn’t something simple. This was the man I needed to see. I shook his hand and told him the old boy that sent me down there, and no kidding, the guy dropped everything he was doing and started trying to diagnose my truck. Fifteen minutes, he comes in with a wiring harness in his hand. He tells me it’s shot, and that’s what’s causing the problem. My heart sank. I was going to have to pull the bikes out of the trailer, haul ass to CO, and come back and pick up the truck. And it’s going to be a fortune. Shit!
Much to my surprise, he tells me that the harness in his hand was a spare that they’d pulled off another truck a couple weeks back. He’d put it on right now, if that’s what I wanted. Well, hell yeah! Give it a go!
45 minutes later, the truck’s running perfectly. Grand total: an hour of time, a few brain cells, two airline bottles of whiskey, and $107 for labor. The part, it seems, was their good deed for the day. Unbelievable. The biker network, once again, reigns supreme. A mere 14 hours later, we arrived at our buddy’s house in Colorado, greeted with cold beers and a bottle of Fireball to get the party started.
Had someone told me before I left on that trip that two strangers would offer me a place to stay, another would climb around in the engine bay of my truck in the dark, and a thriving business would put their regular customers on hold and donate parts to try to get a couple bikers from Detroit back on their way, I would have called them crazy. Well, as unbelievable as it is, every bit of that happened… and then some.
Very cool story Dave! Small Town USA at its best!