A Lifetime of Experience - Turning the Corner

[UberGoober]

I hated to admit it, but the CBR was starting to piss me off. I had owned it for almost a week and it just wasn’t running right. It was weird. Around town, below 5,000 rpm, the bike was smooth and, despite the fact that it wasn’t the peppiest thing I had ever ridden, ran well. At exactly 5001 rpm, however, the bike totally changed. It started chugging like it was misfiring and its ability to accelerate went almost entirely away. I had never seen anything like it and I was beginning to think that maybe I had been had.

Fortunately I didn’t need the bike as daily transportation. The company I was working for, GEOS Language Systems, had kept their promise to send me to a school in the countryside – which in Japan means a city of around 200,000 people – and I ended up in a place called Uji, a town just south of the much larger city of Kyoto. My apartment, it turns out, was located at the top of a tall hill just about a mile from my school and if I left for work early enough, I could make it there before the full heat of summer made it too oppressive to be outside. Coming back at 9:00 PM in the cool of the evening was just as pleasant and with plenty to see and experience along the way, I enjoyed the walk.

Learning to do my job was tough at first too, and it took a lot of time an energy to master it. But with extra effort I soon found the groove and was cranking out good lessons that were a lot of fun. GEOS, it turned out, was not what most Americans would think of as a school in the traditional sense, instead it was more like a mental gym or health club. Like people who want to improve their physical fitness, GEOS’ students were interested in self improvement and, since Japan doesn’t have anything like a community college or adult education centers, people who want to learn new skills, or brush up on old ones, have to turn to private schools.

The private schools, of course, take advantage of people’s desire to change their lives and sign them up to expensive long term, no refund contracts knowing full well that most people lack the drive to stick with it and will eventually quit. Of course, also like health clubs, there really is a hard core membership who come to every lesson and try their hardest. Naturally, when they feel like they aren’t getting what they pay for, they bitch and complain like you wouldn’t believe.

My first few weeks on the job, being totally honest, I made the mistake of telling many of these people that I was not a professional English teacher and that I would be learning how to teach as we went along. These people reacted with dismay, they were paying what I later found out was big money for professional lessons and expected their teacher to know everything. Of course, unlike a lot of the other teachers at GEOS, I had at one point actually intended to be a teacher, had studied education and even spent a lot of time in schools working with experienced teachers learning how to teach, so despite my claims to the contrary I really was up to the task. Still, these people didn’t know all that and within a few weeks many of them had actually quit or transferred to other schools to continue with “more experienced “ teachers.

Bad as it sounds, the effect was good. With one honest, clueless statement, I got rid of most of the complainers, none of whom got a refund, and left the door wide open for new students. Then, because I soon figured out what to do and was soon teaching great lessons, I quickly refilled the classes with fresh motivated learners, none of whom had been around long enough to have anything to bitch about. In no time at all, my weekdays were a cheerful routine.

Weekends however, were a different matter. Still fairly new to the country and without many friends, I longed to get out and see the real countryside that seemed so close when I looked out the window of my hilltop apartment. The fact that my bike seemed just barely able to run above 30 miles an hour, however, made me nervous about getting too far away from home and I felt trapped.

With only the barest set of tools, nowhere clean to work and with no service manual of any kind, my ability to do any kind of repair on my little CBR was almost nil. Still, I tried all the usual things like putting in new plugs and changing the air filter, but got nowhere. It was beginning to look like I was going to have to actually pay a professional to sort the bike out and, frankly, having only just emerged from an extended period of real poverty and with a crushing pile of debts at home that required monthly feeding in the way of money orders, the thought of doing that just pissed me off. Screw it, I decided, I was going to just ride the damn thing and let the chips fall where they may.

(Photo Caption - A behind the bars view of the CBR250R)

[UberGoober]

So, one lovely Saturday morning, I emerged from my tiny apartment, put on my helmet and fired up the bike. With my map securely in my tank bag I had one mission, to go out into the hills, get as lost as I could and then find my way back. I eased the little bike out through the narrow alleys that comprised my neigborhood to a busy, broad, tree lined boulevard that seemed to be headed the direction I wanted to go and tipped the bike through the sharp left hander required to get me out into the flow of traffic. I stood the bike back up and cracked the throttle wide open in an attempt get up to speed before some idiot in a car tried to run me down. The little bike that had been so troublesome on my earlier, gentler rides responded with a banshee-like roar that remained steady and unbroken all the way to its 18, 000 rpm redline. I hit second, then third, fourth and finally fifth keeping it at the high end of the tachometer and experienced not a hint of the usual chugging.

That was odd, I thought. I slowed the bike down and brought the rpms down to the more normal sub 10K range and the chugging started immediately. I dropped two gears and cracked the throttle again, pushing back up above 10K heading toward the high end of the band and the bike responded like a racer. OK, it made power but surely you couldn’t ride through town at 17K rpm wailing like a GP race machine… and then it hit me. No you couldn’t, but you could cruise around at less and 30 mph and then run up quick through the lower gears to get into the power band when you wanted to play. It wasn’t the bike at all, it was the rider.

I had always owned mid to large sized bikes, never a featherweight 250 that needed to be revved to make its power. Hell, even with a “small” 550 you could blow a shift and the torque would pull you out of the hole quick enough that you didn’t need to correct your mistake. This bike was different, it was razor sharp and if I was going to have any fun and get any real use out of it, I was going to have to get razor sharp myself.

And so I did. Soon my little bike and I were a regular sight around town and out in the surrounding hills. As pleasant as my walks had been, getting to work in three minutes on a sharp little racer was even better and I soon started to ride to work every day as well. I also hit the late night riding circuit and even went up to Kyoto in the wee hours to run around on the nearly empty city streets a few times, often pitting my skills against the tough bosozoku riders who ran the streets around the same time. I had, for the first time in a long time, found my place and I made the most of it.

In the weeks and months after I purchased the small Honda, my life turned a corner and things were finally coming my way again. To be sure, I still thought Japan would turn out to be a dead end road, but with the amazing little CBR carrying me at least I was going somewhere again and that felt good.

[GreyWolf]

Good read, Uber. Causes me to try to pick up the pen again..........

[RiverRoadWarrior]

Amazing what a good ride can do, ain't it.

[UberGoober]

Originally Posted by GreyWolf

Good read, Uber. Causes me to try to pick up the pen again..........

Actually, I thought your article was awesome. You write very well.