Do you remember your first ride?

Common Tread wants to hear about your first ride, but to get started, I'll tell you about mine.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I rode solo for the first time on my dad's 1975 Benelli Dynamo Trail 65. Maybe seven? Mostly I remember the smell of two-stroke exhaust and the sweat-slick handgrips. Burnt premix went deep into my brain.

I knew what the throttle did (rrring-dinga-ding-ding!), but that lever on the left was an absolute mystery. It didn’t matter. If I wanted to ride, I had to learn, and I wanted to ride that Benelli on my own more than anything. The entire bike felt tippy like a canoe. Since when did the yard have so many trees? What should I do with my feet exactly? How did I just stall it again?

I never left first gear, and even then, I stalled constantly. I had trouble getting my head around different controls for both hands and feet. My best memory of that first ride is a burst of clarity when, for a second or two, I was balancing and gliding over the ground with real engine power. Brrrrrrtt! honked the little Benelli's pipe. My focus broke for whatever reason and the sensation disappeared as quickly as it came. Knowing me, I probably stalled it again. But that feeling? That electric fizz of realization as something important clicked? It blew Kid Greaser's mind. Operating the motorcycle was nothing like being a passenger.

Soon I learned not to leave the gas on, and how to use the oily premix can, and how to steal premix out of the weedwacker if I ran out. Sorry, Dad. I spent many summer days riding trails in the woods and trying to make the darn thing do a wheelie.

The bike's greatest flaw, especially for a first-time rider, was its upside-down "GP" shifting that was ingrained in me from the very first ride. (That's up into first, then down to neutral and the rest of the gears.) Dad said if I could shift the Benelli, I could shift anything, and he was right, I still haven't met a touchier transmission. It took forever to fully unlearn GP shift so I could ride other bikes.

When the Dynamo’s mechanical agita flared up, as it often did, I had two options: Figure it out, or stop riding. The exotic Benelli demanded careful operation, so it provided my first wrenching experience, as well as my first ride. Guess who flooded the carb? Thankfully, Dad grew up on the very same machine and knew all kinds of tricks to motivate the Benelli when it was in a mood. I hoped that someday I'd know what all these funny parts did.

Motorcycles still make me feel like Kid Greaser again, kicking the Benelli to life with all my strength, building ramps in the woods, and sneaking rides to my buddy’s house a few miles away. That very first ride was all it took to hook me on motorcycles for life. 

I felt like I won the lottery when Dad gave me the Benelli, along with its paperwork, spare parts, and a hundred stories of their years together. I’m sure the bike will remain as temperamental as it was under his care, and that’s fine. This mini bike and I, we understand each other. We go way back.

Tell us about your first ride

Common Tread has a little project in the works and we'd like to include a few of our readers' memories of their first rides. Tell us your story in the comments below or send it by e-mail to commontread@revzilla.com. Extra points for a photo. We'll choose a few favorites to be included.

Everybody starts somewhere. What was your first ride?