The woods on the property of the Meriden Motorcycle Club are not safe for pedestrians. I came to this conclusion on a Sunday afternoon in late April, as I stood stranded in a grove of trees on the club’s property with dirt bikes coming at me from every direction.
One rider hit a root as he approached, and blew by in midair.
The bikers were in a hurry. It was the last half hour of the first event of the New England Trials Association’s 2006 Observed Trials season, and they needed to reach the next section so they could finish on time and avoid racking up penalty points.
Observed Trials is a species of motorcycle competition popular in Europe, but virtually unknown Stateside. There are only five clubs and a few hundred riders in the entire northeast. Riding specialized, seatless bikes, competitors slowly navigate through a sequence of short natural obstacle courses, maneuvering through streambeds, up 90-degree inclines, and around unthinkably sharp turns.
The Meriden Motorcycle Club hosts five Observed Trials events each season on and around their 16-acre property on the outskirts of Middletown. Founded in 1923, the club was established in order to “effect cooperation for the general welfare of those who like to skim over the highways astride peppy gas buggies,” according an article printed in the Meriden Record-Journal on the day after their first meeting. The clipping hangs on the wall of the club’s well-kept wooden lodge on Stantack Road on the outskirts of Middletown, among scores of racing trophies and pictures of members riding their motorcycles backwards.
Each Thursday night, about 30 of the club’s members travel to the lodge for their weekly meeting. With the membership capped at 100, a high percentage of members attend each week, traveling up to an hour to do so.
Pete, a retired manufacturing engineer who once served as the president of the club, said the members, who are exclusively male, look forward to the meetings.
“We’re just a bunch of old married guys who want to get away from our wives and our mortgages,” he said. At one point during a meeting in early February, the members purposefully ignored a call to the lodge phone that rang for a full two minutes before the caller gave up.
“We thought it was one of our wives,” one of them explained.
The meeting itself is a strange mix of the formal and informal. Robert’s Rules of Order are followed with surprising stringency. If someone wishes to speak, he must be recognized by the president, who sits at a long table at the front of the room. The secretary, a tattooed former state Observed Trials champion named Tex, reads the minutes and makes liberal use of his wooden gavel.
Still, the men have fun, ragging incessantly on one older member for having gone to see Brokeback Mountain with his wife.
George Eddy, a longtime member of the club, said that the meetings have changed since he joined in 1968.
“It’s a little less strict,” he said. “Used to be you couldn’t bring a beer into the meeting.” Today, nearly everyone has a can.
A stocky man with spiky white hair and an ankh earring in one ear, Eddy owns two motorcycles, a ’96 BMW road bike and a Trials bike.
“Trials gives us old farts a way to keep riding so we don’t get hurt so bad,” he said.
Out on the property on the day of the event, it was clear that Eddy’s logic is shared by many of the sport’s enthusiasts. The 107 riders from all over the northeast spanned a broad age range. The oldest competitor that day was Jack Hemingway, 74. The youngest was a six-year-old.
Atop a hillock near where I was stranded, Tex sat swilling Jägerbombs. Along with Herman, another club member, Tex had been serving as a judge at one of the most difficult sections on the course.
Traveling a circuit around the MMC’s property, competitors stop at eight of 22 obstacle sections, depending on their skill level. Each rider completes the course four times throughout the event. Herman, a semi-retired engineer with a trace of a German accent, explained that each rider earns a point each time his foot touches the ground while within a section. If a rider crashes, stalls, or slides backward, he earns five points. The best riders earn four or five points the entire day. Less skilled riders have scores that reach above a hundred.
Herman and Tex’s section consisted of a vertical climb with a sapling at the summit. The climb had two multiple routes, the hardest of which had only been attempted once the entire day, as it required the motorcyclist to approach the incline in mid-air.
Relaxing in a Meriden Motorcycle Club racing shirt, a huge hunting knife sticking vertically out of the wooden table behind him, Tex reminisced about his years as a biker. His father owned a motorcycle shop, Tex said, and taught him to ride a motorcycle before he learned to ride a bike.
Tex’s state title, which he won in Texas in 1999, as well as a NETA title he won in 2000, both came in the vintage, or twin-shock category. Vintage bikes are older, less expensive, and much tougher to handle within the obstacle sections.
“Real men ride vintage,” Tex said.
Ron Caracoglia, a 35-year veteran of the sport, is continually shocked by how quickly the youngest racers pick it up.
“They blow me into the peckerbrush,” he said.
In the early 1970s, when Caracoglia and many of the other riders took up Trials riding, motorcycle manufacturers briefly decided that Observed Trials would be the next big thing in motorsports. Since then, it has steadily faded from the national consciousness. Caracoglia isn’t convinced that that’s a bad thing.
“Sometimes I think the lack of exposure has isolated us from the bad press other motorsports have gotten,” he said.
Decked out in a bright blue full-body polyester uniform that matches his bike, Caracoglia ruminates on trials technique.
“The trick in this game is to have just enough speed. I never give it enough throttle,” he sighed. “I’m afraid of going too fast, but I end up sliding back down.”
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