Columbia, Missouri

Riding a dirt bike at Finger Lakes State Park in March is about as predictable as the return of spring: There will be mud. Lots of it, in fact. But after a warm, sunny Saturday spent outside hand-digging what my neighbors would later describe as "a moat thingy" around the house, optimism filled my soul. Maybe this day would be an exception to the Finger Lakes rule of March. Maybe the trails had baked in the sun and shed their saturation. And maybe…just maybe…my neighbors wouldn’t think of me as the local nutcase.

One can always dream.

The Finger Lakes trails were muddy and my neighbors already knew something was wrong with me six months earlier when I rolled into Suffolk Avenue with two dirt bikes and not much else to fill my new home. I only confirmed what they already suspected with my “moat thingy”, which was actually a well-engineered underground drainage system for the gutter downspouts. But I digress.

All optimism failed on the drive to Columbia. Over the phone, Matt Sellers withdrew his support for the race, but I stopped by his place anyway for a delicious organic pop tart and a quick weather update. The internet meteorologist said wet and cold.

Predictable.

An hour later, nearing the north edge of Columbia, weather prophesies came true as a steady mist followed me into the state park and never left. Kurt “PizzaMan” Mirtsching, working his hometown race, greeted me in the staging area and mentioned an ATV rider had broken his leg in the morning race. With a casual smirk, he affirmed the trails had been “good until you got here” and then hopped on his muddy motorcycle to assist the sponsoring club.

I dared to confirm Kurt’s course intel by walking the trails in the midst of the ATV race, now in its final stages. Shockingly, evidence of actual dirt lay at my feet, semi-dry where sunlight had reached the surface. But the steady mist would wipe away the traction, dampening all surfaces within the next half-hour. The ATVs now felt the effects, although those machines handle mud entirely differently than the two-wheelers. Sure, their fat tires slide and skid and struggle for traction just like mine, but when this happens their riders rarely seem to make contact with the ground. While my motorcycle tends to slide out from under me, an ATV is more likely to slide into something solid, such as a tree.

One thing shared equally between ATVs and dirt bikes is the mechanics of making a machine move through narrow spaces at speeds the human body wasn’t designed for. Sometimes things break, as demonstrated by a rider crossing a nearby creek. His body language conveyed fatigue as his race neared an end, and this small stream was his final obstacle. He aimed his Honda 250R into the center of the creek and successfully crossed, but then felt the explosion of his entire silencer core exiting the muffler. The foot-long metal tube, wrapped in fiberglass insulation, landed in the mud, smoke rising above it while the rest of the ATV continued down the trail with a decidedly different exhaust note. The helpful person I am, I grabbed the core and carried it with cold fingers to the staging area, where by miraculous luck I happened upon the guy and handed him his lost equipment. If I were looking for positive karma, this was my opportunity to earn some, and I would need every bit of it during the race.

Back at my trusty and semi-reliable 1996 GMC Sonoma pickup truck, my also trusty and semi-reliable KTM 300EXC appeared ready for the challenge of a slippery race. I geared up and took in the course for a practice lap, where the Austrian machine performed flawlessly across a thin layer of slime. The real challenge would come during the race, with all the slipping and sliding and bottlenecks that would come of it. If I could find my way through those logjams, I liked my odds of a good finish.

None of that would matter, however, if I couldn’t keep my bike in good running order. After the practice lap, I noticed the left radiator had shed its mounting bolts and was attached only by the plastic shroud. I expected Matt would be here today, along with his collection of spare nuts and bolts and other hardware. I brought nothing of the sort, but I did have safety wire and duct tape. Five minutes later, those staples of improvised repair proved themselves invaluable once again. I was ready to race.

On the starting line, last week’s 3-kick performance repeated again while the rest of my class shot down the opening stretch of the motocross track without me. Those lost seconds mattered little on the track, where clusters of tightly bunched motorcycles tend to slow each other down while riders jockey for positions. Before exiting into the woods, I was already caught up to the pack. I made a few passes stick and set out to work my way up the ranks.

Inside the wooded areas of the former strip mine, the course wandered in and out of wide ATV trails and ran us up and down long ridges. Like most of these types of properties, Finger Lakes lacked the flow of a typical old-growth forest. Given enough time, nature has a way of setting up terrain in which all creatures can thrive, including humans on dirt bikes, but his land had been adulterated like a surgeon who forgot to sew up an incision. That kind of healing takes time, and Finger Lakes had a couple hundred years to go.

On a hare scramble course, this meant abrupt changes in direction, hills and mounds appearing in odd places, and always something or another throwing me off-kilter. As the gooey clay soil increased in gooeyness, I hoped to avoid the off-kilter throwing or any other type of chucking or pitching or heaving, especially that which might involve being thrown off-KTM. The odds of this seemed long, with evidence mounting for a difficult course. Already the first lap was filled with examples of riders in various states of distress. With luck on my side, I skated through to the scoring trailer, gaining more positions.

Just after the scoring crew scanned my helmet-mounted bar code sticker, I skated right into a snot-slick rut and slid to the ground. The right handlebar dragged in the slop just enough to jam a wad of mud between the end of the throttle tube and the handguard, eliminating the return-spring action. When I held open the throttle, it stayed open. I wiped away the obstruction and the throttle returned to normal. My riding, on the other hand, was anything but. Before returning to the motocross track I attempted a minor shortcut around two riders and found myself headed straight into a tree. The point of no return passed in a fraction of a second, and in another brief instant I realized there was no saving the bike and I should prepare for pain. My KTM smacked the tree head-on but I managed to bail out ever so gracefully, tucking and rolling and congratulating myself for the perfect dismount. While remounting, I lost a position to a man in my class whose helmet was painted with the word “Davey” on the back. This reminded me of my second cousin David Leamy, whose childhood nickname was also “Davey”, of which I always felt he took to reluctantly, like when your name is “John” and you are vertically challenged and the other kids refer to you as “Little John” so as not to be confused with the other “Jon” (Mowery) in the school who, ironically, was also a bit small in stature but was just “Jon” to everyone else.

I digress again.

Davey had committed what I considered to be one of the cardinal sins of racing: He identified himself from behind. I could see the back of his helmet and knew he was in my class, so I tried harder to catch and pass him. Were he just another rider with a blue and white helmet, I might have thought I wasn’t racing him directly and let him lead. For that reason, my noggin was protected with a solid black helmet with no identifying characteristics (the other reason, of course, was plain black helmets cost less than the colorful ones).

Back at the motocross track, I weaved my way through the turns and moderate jumps, Davey still in sight. Our run through the track ended with a short, steep uphill leading to a 30-foot-long plateau, and then an abrupt 40-foot drop-off. This is where I attempted to entertain the fans, who braved the cold wind, steady mist, and mud to watch idiots like me do what I was about to do. I flew up the hill in third gear, caught some air at the plateau, heard a "Whoa, boy!" from a spectator and left just enough time to scrub speed before sliding down the other side. At the bottom of the hill I kept the throttle pinned in third gear and attempted to bunny-hop a narrow gully in the middle of an open area. The front wheel cleared easily, but the rear wheel slammed the opposite side of the gully and the rebounding suspension catapulted my backside high into the air. So high, in fact, that I performed a half-handstand on the handlebars, my face within kissing distance of the front fender, all while traveling at about 30 mph. To the fans, this stunt may have resembled freestyle motocross star Carey Hart's Kiss of Death, except the bike was horizontal and wheels were firmly planted to the ground. Once again, I was fully prepared for pain, but somehow the bike remained under me and I continued into the woods.

Shortly after, I closed in on Davey, who surely took a more practical approach to the big hill, and then I passed him for good. Now on the third lap, I found most of the hill climbs and creek crossing had deteriorated into bottlenecks. The ATVs had already destroyed a well-greased, rocky hill which now required all the momentum I could muster at the bottom to propel me to the top. Alternate routes developed around many of the hills, and each one became more difficult as the race wore on. The worst of them was spaced between two small ponds, with only three lines to choose from. I stuck with the same line I’d used twice before and again scaled the hill successfully, but my fourth pass through here was a different story. A stalled rider blocked my hot line, forcing me to one of the two alternate routes. Neither looked good. Both were heavily rutted to the point where I suspected I’d find myself in the same predicament as the rider tugging and pulling his bike off the hill. So I took a risk, blazing a new line about a foot to the edge of a deeply rutted path, where the soft dirt gave just enough traction to claw my way up the hill.

On this fourth and final lap, fatigue had set in and I limped to the finish. I’d already been lapped by overall winner (and mud specialist) Aaron “Double-A Ron” Shaw near the end of the 3rd lap, who had put so much distance on the rest of the Pro class that I was nearly at the checkered flag before any others caught me. None of the Pro riders seemed to be at all affected by the mud, riding just about as fast as if the soil were dry and pristine.

Back at my truck, I quickly changed out of my wet gear, started the engine and warmed up for nearly an hour. When the results were posted, I was pleasantly surprised to see only Keith Kibort ahead of me in the Open B standings. Both of us had finished in the top 20 overall, which in the Missouri Hare Scrambles Championship is a feat for B class riders. Finishing among the 20 fastest riders gave me “Overall” points, which was a ticket to earning my way into the A class. An 18th place overall was a long way from advancement, but it was a proud achievement at a difficult venue.