Most of my current vehicles came from out of state, and after every purchase, I swear I'll never buy another machine if it's more than 50 miles away. And then, like clockwork, I find myself playing hooky from work, shucking down the interstate with the mid-week truckers and trying to convince myself I don't have to buy the thing when I get there.

"I'm selling it because I got shot," is what the man said over the phone.

If that was an invitation to ask questions, I didn't take him up on it. I figure there are only a handful of ways you wind up digging lead out of your hide, and none of them start with, "There I was at the florist…"

Zach Bowman

The bike was a $1,800 Honda XR400R, nearly 20 years old and almost four hours away. Those are the kind of numbers that conspire to yield equal parts disappointment and crusty motorcycle. It was the rolling definition of a long shot. It was the third I'd taken in as many weeks.

The first was a KTM 525 an hour and a half north. I arrived to find a machine that had wound up on the wrong end of a spray can ten too many times. With a flat front tire and hacksawed levers, there was no way in this life or the next I was going to shell out $3,500 for the bike. Maybe the owner was trying to recoup his zip tie costs.

Zach Bowman

Then there was the slightly newer XR in Michigan. I spend a week or so a month in our home office in Ann Arbor, where Craigslist is already flooded with post-season motorcycles looking for new homes. The Honda looked like it had spent a year buried at the bottom of a quarry. The frame was largely composed of rust and weld splatter, and the two main selling points: the four-gallon oversized tank and the spare motor with electric start components, didn't offset the fact that I couldn't get the thing to start. Asking price? $2,200. It would have cost that much to get the stink of wet carpet off the bike.

I wanted a street legal dirt bike. Not a dual sport. A bike that was conceived and engineered and manufactured to survive bounding across the desert and skipping across rocks. Something that weighs nothing, requires next to zero attention, and is essentially valueless. I wanted simplicity.

So when the '97 showed up, I loaded up the truck, grabbed a buddy and hauled off south anyway. The odds of the bike being an absolute heap were astronomical, but when we arrived in a generic cul-de-sac 45 minutes north of Atlanta proper, we found a fairly clean machine with its original plastics and a full street-legal light kit. The owner was in his late '50s, partially deaf in both ears and a little skittish around strangers. He told us how he'd been the victim of a car-to-car shooting after badgering someone in south Atlanta traffic, and how his left arm was more metal than bone these days. He was terrified of falling off the bike and shattering his new skeleton all over again.

Zach Bowman

The XR kicked to life with a little prodding, and I ripped out of the subdivision under the grace of a deep blue fall sky. With the sun splashing through the trees, the Honda barked its way down the asphalt before stuttering to a stop. A little more thoughtful kicking and we were on our way again, only for the motor to die one more time, all in the span of a couple of miles.

Zach Bowman

A smart man would have walked away, but there was something in this machine's willingness. I didn't have to push it or curse it. Just poke a bit, turn on the reserve, and crank out the bad fuel lurking in the carb. I took it home for $1,600.

We are all gamblers. Every last one of us. If we weren't, we'd all stay huddled in bed with our books and our oatmeal, praying out the seconds of the day in an attempt to subtract ourselves from the brutal odds stacked against us. But we don't. We get up and brush it off, walk out the door in defiance of it all. Into the maelstrom of choking hazards and traffic fatalities, cancers and time. Maybe that's why I've found myself so fond of this old Honda – another perfect long shot.

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