We’ve just had our first hit of snow… a solid four inches, I’ll have you know. The panic buying has kicked in, there’s no milk left in our local shops, and town mayor has probably started project planning an air lift of cherry bakewells to keep us from rioting.
It’s at times like this that I reflect and laugh on my adventures in my youth. I have done my fair share of riding in the snow, not always for pleasure, but sometimes out of sheer necessity. That said, growing up on a farm, snow was often perceived as a point of access to a different kind of fun, often involving a trials bike, a makeshift sledge, and a dirty old tow rope that would shed the skin from your hands just by looking at it. We were always messing around. I’ll never forget my older brother coming home one night, drenched, stinking, and covered in snow; he’d been out on his crosser and managed to launch his bike into a big ditch, a few miles from home. We set about recovering it, going two-up on my Cagiva Mito on whited-over roads towards the crash site. We made it all of a mile before I washed the front and we went down, smashing my bike to pieces... but the recovery job went on. We eventually got to his bike, dragged it out the ditch, got it into a farmer’s straw barn, whipped the plug out, and began running his CR125 up and down to get the water out of the barrel. It was my turn to do so, thinking nothing of the fluid coming up and out of the cylinder… until it set on fire. I tripped over in a panic with the bike on top of me, setting my jeans on fire in the process. While I was breakdancing the flames away on the straw-laden floor, my brother got his bike, ran it outside, threw it in a snowy puddle, and filled it up with water to smother the flames. We were back to square one, albeit with a smashed-up Mito and a slightly charred, thoroughly flooded Honda. It wasn’t funny, but on reflection I wouldn’t change that kind of experience for the world.
