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Chapter 1 - The Name of the Beast
That Damn Motoski
was aptly named. She was a hellish orange color; an orange so
intense to the eye that one always paused upon seeing her to reflect
on hell. As in, “How in the Hell did they come up with that damned
orange color?” Hence the Damn portion of the name.
Motoski is more
commonsense. She had a motor (actually an engine because as my dad
the engineer often corrected, “Motors are electric; engines run on
fuel.”) And, she had skis. Well, she had two banana-shaped lumps
of metal with handles welded at the tip. In retrospect, those
handles should have provided a clue.
That Damn Motoski
was an early effort at a snowmachine, but she had little resemblance
to the sleek shock-absorbed, electric starting, heated seat and
handgrip affairs we now see and hear buzzing around at 80 plus miles
per hour. The Motoski was anything but sleek. She was a
bulbous-nosed beast with an engine the size of the Titanic, but with
the power of a trolling motor. Her skis jutted out like toothpicks
stuffed in the mouth of Carl Maldin. The physics of the Motoski’s
design was such that you could not stop, or even slow down in deep
snow. Without significant forward motion, the skis would not support
the massive engine, and you would end up, “end up,” churning air
and breathing snow.
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Her seat had no
heat, and in fact had little padding. The high quality faux vinyl
covering the hundred-yard-long-or-so plywood bench seat lasted, oh,
say, three seconds in winter temperatures before cracking end-to-end
and loosing the stuff of the seat’s padding to the frigid air.
Duct tape could only do so much, and by the time we purchased the
Motoski all padding was gone and the once black vinyl seat was now a
patchwork of gray tape with shards of delaminating plywood poking
through.
Her key was a spark
plug wire with a metal hoop. One jammed the hoop over the plug to
allow ignition. Spit aided conductivity and assured a tight
connection once it froze. She had a recoiling starter cord with a
broken handle and an iffy recoiling mechanism. This meant that one
had to yank the cord with the half-handle threaded between one's
middle fingers for grip. Then, after the coughing engine rapidly
subsided to the non-start position of an object at rest wishing to
stay at rest, one had to take the rope, which now was draped over the
seat and into the snow in clumsy gloved fingers and thread it like a
reluctant window shade back into the recoil slot. Cussing helped,
but each starter pull took several minutes to complete. This was
just as well because it gave the dangerous gas fumes time to
dissipate.
Ah
yes, the fumes; the Motoski had no choke, but instead a rubber gas
bulb on the fuel line. This was a golf ball-sized unit one would
squeeze to push the gas/oil mixture toward the mass of metal alleged
to be an engine. On the well-respected theory that, if a little is
good a lot is better, we used to squeeze that bulb flat. Then we
would squeeze it flat again. We would squeeze until the fuel poured
out from the seal where the bulb connected to the fuel line; “Well,
that oughta about do it,” brother Rodney Lee would croak as he
became so overcome with fumes that he loosened his still pulsing
death grip on the gas bulb.
Once sufficiently
primed and pulled, the Motoski would roar into life with a huge cloud
of blue smoke. We never did figure out where the exhaust actually
was coming from because at that particular moment all of our
attention had to be focused on the throttle and the handlebars to
avoid stalling out or crashing. You see, the Motoski had no gears,
as in no neutral. Once started, it was "move it or lose it."
One had to pump the throttle, a thumb depressed lever on the right
handlebar, to keep the flooded (remember the gas bulb) engine running
and simultaneously steer toward open ground as the Motoski lurched
forward and up on step to plane across the snow as the engine
grabbed, and then slogged down and to one side or the other as the
engine faltered.
Starting out on the
Motoski must have looked like one of those old train engines in a
John Wayne movie lurching forward with great billows of blue smoke
only to falter as the iron wheels spun on the tracks. Like the train
though, after some initial lurching, the Motoski eventually would
steady out to a snow surfing beast of great elegance. Her capacious
seat was ample for four; so long as number four was willing to “buddy
up.” We tried for five by draping a neighbor kid over the hood
spread eagled, but Dad put a stop to that right quick, "Hey you
boys, you get that Lamont kid off the hood, he'll get run over.
Mark, you go on out there if you want to go for five… Oh, alright
Mom -- now you all stay the heck of that hood."
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