Bear with me: Is there a good luck charm on your motorcycle?

It was first embarrassing, then painful (I broke my thumb), and finally expensive. I could still get a factory mirror, and of course the shift lever was in stock. But it turns out Ducati no longer carries the factory hard bags, and finding a left-side replacement was nearly impossible.

At one point, I seriously considered buying an entire used bike just to get the bags that were attached to it. Finally, I found a guy in England who, years earlier, had received a defective right-hand sidecase. Under warranty, Ducati shipped him a new set of cases, and he sold me his leftover.

For much of the winter, the Multistrada just sulked down there in my basement, partly because it was hard for me to handle tools for a couple of months while my thumb set. The snow had almost completely melted off the streets here in Kansas City before I’d erased most of the outward signs of my crash and proven the bike was rideable. (Any time you break a shift lever, there’s a risk of other damage inside the gearbox, but it was shifting fine.)

I admit that my confidence remained a bit damaged as I contemplated a new riding season. I needed a sign from the universe that it was really OK to get back on the horse; a message that my stupid, unforced error had just been bad luck. An isolated incident.

Fate sends unexpected messengers

Back in my novice racing season, I rode a Yamaha RZ350 at Race City Speedway in Calgary. I towed it to the track behind a Honda Civic on a $300 utility trailer from Canadian Tire.

On race weekends, I parked up on the windswept gravel lot that passed for the paddock. Garages? I didn’t even have a stinkin’ E-Z Up. If it was snowing (yes, that happened) or raining or the sun was beating down, I just sat in my car in my leathers.

I raced in a suit that I bought used from my friend Ken Austin, who’d been a racer before he became a pretty notorious Superbike engine builder. Kenny initially set up my RZ for me. Part of the deal was, he came to my first race. But after that, if anything had to be done to the bike, there was only me to do it. At the time, it felt fucking glorious. But from the outside, I guess it looked like a pretty sad effort.

Not that anyone was looking. No actual fans ever attended our club-only races; the only people around were other racers and their friends and families. But one day, I was changing jets or something, and this little kid who I’d never seen walked up to me. A couple who looked to be his parents were hanging back a few yards. I didn’t know them, either.

The kid, who was five or six years old, tops, looked me straight in the eye for a couple of beats — seriously, totally deadpan — then held out a small, black teddy bear and said, “You need this more than I do.”

I took the bear, flabbergasted. What could he possibly have meant? How did I look, to him? I thought I was having a good day.

“Well thanks,” I said.

The kid turned on his heel, returned to his parents, and they continued perambulating about the paddock. He never looked back; I never saw them again.

I put the little bear on the dashboard of my Civic. It was the perfect size and shape to sit propped up in the corner, and even though I drove like a maniac back then, the bear always stayed put. It didn’t move until the next race weekend, when I tucked him safely up out of sight in the RZ’s seat hump.

Hundreds of thousands of miles later, I replaced the Civic-trailer combo with a race van, and the RZ with other bikes. The bear always came along and was always tucked away somewhere on every bike.

Eventually, all those years spent on sunny dashboards traipsing back and forth across the continent caused the velour fabric on the back of his head to break down, and his stuffing brains began to fall out. Out of respect for all we’d been through, I must have retired him, but I don’t specifically remember doing so.

“Hello, Fairies”

This truth is simple: It matters not why you ride motorcycles — as a cheap-and-cheerful means of transportation, or an avocation, or for sport — they’re all dangerous. That’s why almost all riders engage in some form of rationalization that allows us to think, “It won’t happen to me.” That goes doubly for most racers, triply for TT racers.

Psychologists call this "magical thinking." By the time I got to the Isle of Man, I’d lost track of my bear, but it was easy to replace one superstition with another.

One quirk of the Isle of Man is the Fairy Bridge, on the main road south from Douglas towards Ronaldsway, Castletown, and Port Erin, where the road crosses a tiny stream. That particular spot is where Manx people leave notes for the fairies, either jammed into cracks in the old stone bridge itself, or hanging off a tree that leans out over the stream. Most Manx residents and all TT racers always say, “Hello, Fairies” as they cross that bridge. Failing to do so is bad luck.

Racing in the TT was not like those early days at Race City Speedway. One of the nicest differences was that as the TT approached, my house on the IoM filled with friends who’d come to help and cheer me on. My home in Onchan was right near the paddock, so we worked on my Honda CBR600 in my garage, and when it was time to practice, I put my leathers on and rode the bike up to the paddock.

Just before one of those sessions, a friend who’d come over from Kansas City approached me as I was about to hop on the bike. He said, “I bought you something for good luck,” and handed me a small gold and cloisonné pin. It was a horseshoe, wrapped around a Manx triskelion. (That’s the three-legged symbol which inspires the motto, “No matter how you throw me, I stand.”) Although a horseshoe is a traditional shape for a good-luck charm, whoever made this one doubled down by casting the words "good luck" into it.

I pinned it into my Vanson race suit. Later on, Paul Smith — a fellow Canadian who served as my mechanic at the TT — safety-wired the clasp shut to ensure that it couldn’t come unpinned and stab me while I was racing. It’s still there.

Bear with me

Fast-forward 16 years and some, to last spring. The Multistrada is no longer virginal, but the crash damage is only visible at second glance. (There’s still a scar on the end of the front axle, but I have decided that can wait until I need to replace the front tire.)

I had a suspicion that one factor in the crash was that I’d dialed out too much ride height at the rear. In order to find the bike’s "wa" again, I returned all of the suspension settings to the original factory specs. That involved a lot of checking and adjusting, because my Multi, though it’s an old air-cooled duo-valvole model, has the fancy "S" suspension package.

I got all that done and looked at it. Something still didn’t feel right. I suppose at some level I realized that what wasn’t right was probably not between the axles, but rather between my ears. Perhaps because I was in search of a happier motorcycle memory, I was moved to open a random cardboard box labeled "2001 season" that had remained sealed through my last eight residential moves.

The first thing I saw in there was Bear #1. I remembered him as black, the way he was when I got him. But he’d faded to a pale grey-burgundy. He had a look on his face that made me think he’s used to disappointment — which makes the story of his acquisition even more poignant.

I honestly had no idea I’d been carrying him around all these years. I immediately knew what was missing from the Multistrada — a good-luck charm. The problem was, his brain stuffing was coming out worse than ever. I carefully studied his head to see if there was any way I could patch his brain hole, but the fabric was not just faded, it was completely broken down.

A day or two later, the funniest thing happened

I went out for coffee, and parked near a pile of gravel, road grit, and filthy snow, shoved aside by a plow and melting in weak early spring sunshine. I thought that it may have been the very last bit of winter snow remaining on the streets, and that spring was finally, really, upon us.

In my imagination, I spun out a little fantasy in which I was a fine-art photographer who specialized in photos of tragic old snow piles. So I really looked at it. And I noticed a tiny beige teddy bear that had melted out and was lying in a cold puddle.

I knew that the universe had just given me Bear #2. I brought it home, and washed it. (Actually I brought it home, lost it, searched fruitlessly for it, really worried about it, then found it and washed it, but there’s a limit to how many words anyone wants to read about my teddy fetish.)

I could have just jammed him under the seat, the way Bear #1 used to ride, but instead I made a little five-point harness of zip ties and attached him to an alloy forging that holds the Multistrada’s dashboard in place. I positioned him so he was sitting comfortably, and he could see out through the bottom of the windscreen.

It’s ridiculous, but all summer, every time I got on the bike I looked at that little bear and thought, “Motorcycles. Oh yeah, these things are great. This is gonna’ be fun.”

Sometimes all it takes to bring back the magic is a little magical thinking.