Once More, With (Loss of) Feeling: Michigan to California on a Suzuki SV650

A month after driving a rented moving truck to Los Angeles , I returned to my former home, Ann Arbor, Mich., for my motorcycle, a 2002 Suzuki SV650.

I expected my next road trip to last four days, equal to the initial haul, but it would be antithetical in every other way. My rig this time would be a 363-pound “naked” bike, with little bodywork and no windshield, powered by an efficient yet punchy 645cc V-twin.

So, why worry? Aside from the endurance challenge posed by sitting on the equivalent of a pommel horse for four days, I feared another Big Incident.

In 1974, while stopped at a roadside historical marker in Montana, the Triumph I was shepherding from Omaha to Seattle backfired on restart, igniting a leaky carburetor which sent a plume of flame skyward. The fire prevented me from reaching the manual fuel shutoff, and while I did salvage my sleep roll, the same could not be said for the Triumph.

Later that day, overcoming my grief, I stuck out my thumb and caught a ride to Seattle. The episode would go far to explain the 37-year interval between multistate rides.

But my yellow SV has always performed as dependably as the national debt . Retrieving it from a friend’s garage in Michigan, I started for California on June 16 through morning mist. Fifty miles along I-94, the left-side saddlebag’s rain cover ballooned in the wind and ripped away, bending the drive chain’s plastic guard into the wheel. Not an auspicious start.

Inside my helmet, my ears registered the bent guard as an oversize jack of spades flapping against bicycle spokes. Hoping this was my Big Incident for 2011, I stopped, bent the chain guard back into line, cut away the rain cover and started anew.

The SV surrenders its rider to wind, rain and bugs; a bumblebee striking my helmet’s visor at 75 m.p.h. sounded like a bullet hitting a washtub. At every fuel stop — 22 of them for 58.1 gallons in 2,387 miles, for roughly 41 m.p.g. overall observed economy — I scrubbed away the invertebrates. Unlike big Harleys and Honda Gold Wings, the SV does not have audio equipment or Bluetooth connectivity. No automatic transmission, no trailer, either; it’s a motorcycle.

Between Indianapolis and Terre Haute, Ind., my clothes dried out.

The only pain relief I sought, an ibuprofen pill, was taken on that first night, which I spent at the Congress Inn, along I-70, at Troy, Ill. Maheep Pannu, the desk clerk and a second-year medical student at St. Louis University, was listening to a recording of Sikh prayers in Punjabi when I checked in.

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