How we spent Thanksgiving around Mom and Dad's house:

A Ride With the Girls, a Ride With the Boys


In all fairness I should probably have helped Mom and my sister-in-law with the Thanksgiving meal preparations. But I had other things to do that morning. Dad, having no grandsons, had decided to try encouraging his three granddaughters (aged seven to seventeen) to ride motorbikes. I helped Dad and my brother load Dad’s pickup with an assortment of bikes—a blue Chinese commuter scooter, an orange Honda Express, and a red Baja Doodlebug mini bike.

Dad startled us by firing up the little Honda and riding it up the two-by-eight plank we used for a loading ramp. He was one day short of his sixty-fifth birthday. I hoped he would make it.

Dad drove the load of bikes and two of the girls the several miles into town to the deserted middle school parking lot. I followed on my motorcycle. My brother and one of the girls rode in on a large red scooter of Dad’s. When we reached the parking lot they took a bit of a tumble on a slick, wet section of pavement. Nobody was hurt, but the mishap knocked off the windshield of Dad’s red bike. Dad was not too upset. He had planned to replace the inadequate windscreen anyway.

Most of the long parking lot was not at all slick. It made a fine place for novice riders to practice with no danger from traffic. The youngest girl eagerly pounced on the mini bike. This was a modern reproduction of the crude, classic (if that’s quite the word for it) minis that I had looked at so longingly when I was about her age in the 1970s. It had been de-tuned at the factory so that it could barely carry a medium-sized adult like me at a walk. With a seven-year-old aboard it could run a bit faster than she could pedal on a bicycle. This was about the level of power we needed. At first her daddy ran along beside her, telling her what to do. Soon she showed herself able to run up and down the parking lot on her own. She did not have a single accident, although she did come very close to running into her oldest sister on one occasion.

The older girls took turns riding the Honda Express. This was a thirty-year-old motorized bicycle, essentially a moped without the pedal start. Dad acquired it and fixed it up a while back. On a good day it can still carry a grown man at about thirty miles per hour. The girls did not get a chance to go that fast on the parking lot. The middle niece in particular loved it. She even briefly tried her hand on the larger blue scooter.

Most of the time I rode the blue scooter, carrying one or another of the three girls. This gave me some practice with hauling passengers. We rode up and down the parking lot, passing through occasional clouds of oily blue smoke from the Honda and keeping a careful eye out for the little wild card on the mini bike. Along toward lunch time we reloaded the bikes. This time Dad rode the blue scooter up the plank into the pickup. I asked him in all seriousness to please not scare me like that again.

We had a nice Thanksgiving meal. All of us kids and grandkids were there. We were all well. The overcast day had turned fair. We knew that we had much to be thankful for, and we were.

Toward evening (I had at least helped with the dishes in the meantime) we returned to the middle school for another round of riding. This time Mom and my sister-in-law came along. The latter rode one of the scooters some. Mom just stood and watched. Back home afterward I showed the older girls a catalog picture of a Honda Metropolitan scooter, a cute little machine that I thought looked just right for them. I wouldn’t have minded riding one myself, actually, but I wanted more performance.

The next day we had rain and could do no riding. The day after that Dad, my brother, and I got out late in the morning for a more serious ride. With temperatures of about fifty and overcast skies we had to bundle up thoroughly for the trip. I wore long underwear, two jackets, a “gator neck” around my throat, long motorcycle gloves, and a stocking cap under my helmet. Dad loaned my brother some items and the red scooter. With no windscreen, he certainly needed to be ready for the cold.

We rode downtown to gas up our bikes and then headed out of town on Sticky Road. Along the sparsely inhabited road we saw nobody stirring outside except a few deer hunters. Here and there the trees still held a splash of fall color. Leaves drifted down on us as we rode by.

From Sticky we turned onto South Fork Road. A little way down this road Dad abruptly stopped and pulled over. His sharp eyes had spotted a ruined brick building nearly hidden in the brush off to the side. I had ridden by several times on my own without ever noticing it.

The ruin was a church that one of Dad’s uncles had built in 1950. This was the first church Uncle Van built. He went on to spend nearly four decades building them. This one had unfortunately been abandoned for many years. My brother and I could barely approach it through the dense growth. Inside there was little vegetation and I was able to take several pictures. As we scrambled over the wreckage of the fallen roof and ceiling Dad asked whether we could find the remains of an old piano. When the family moved many years ago his father had given the family piano to the congregation (over his daughter’s objections) rather than move it. We could find no trace of it. Uncle Van must have done a good job on the brick walls, since most of them still stood and not much else did.

Further down the road we came to the highway. We ate lunch at the local truck stop. Dad warned the waitress when we came in that we were a dangerous biker bunch. She did not believe him. It didn’t help that she referred to our bikes as “cute.” As we ate Dad pointed out the University of Arkansas football mascot (a rampant razorback hog) disguised as a cloud in the mural painted on the restaurant’s wall. I had not known that college art students had painted the mural.

After lunch we rode down the highway a bit to Stevens Road and headed for the lovely hills and open fields of Moon Valley. Where Moon Valley Road joined the other main highway Dad halted. He had just remembered that he had to go to the church, about eight miles or so up the road, to turn on the heat so the building would be warm for services tomorrow. Were we game for the trip? We were.

Dad led on the blue scooter. It was not really built for extended runs at highway speed, so we cruised a good bit slower than that. Dad signaled to cars that overtook us whether it was safe to pass. When they had trouble passing us on the hilly road, he has us run in single file on the broad, level shoulder until they could get by.

At the church we poked around the storage shed behind the parsonage. When I was a teenager we spent our weekends in the parsonage to be closer to the church. Later my brother and his new family lived there for a time. Dad had also now and then used the parsonage as a refuge for families he had found broken down along the highway until he could get their vehicles repaired. In the storage shed we found several old items we recognized. In particular it still held a large Yamaha motorcycle that my brother had bought used way back then and had never gotten running. He learned that certain parts of it had migrated to Mom and Dad’s house.

We rode from the church back up the highway. To save a bit of highway riding we came into town the back way along Smithton Road. Smithton was also curvy and bumpy enough to be more fun to ride.

Back home my brother started looking for the missing bits of his Yamaha. I went inside to get warm. My legs had been exposed to the slipstream (my motorcycle lacked the protective fairings the scooters had) and took about half an hour to warm back up. I didn’t mind. I wouldn’t have missed the ride for the world.