face to face

It was a cold afternoon, late Autumn. The sun was setting and a shadow grew over the pond. The phone rang. It was my neighbor, Lorri. She was worried she hadn’t seen her horses in days and wondered if I could run over to the back 440 to check. She was afraid a cat may have gone after them.

I decided to take my dirt bike and not the quad. A couple of years earlier, I bought two Yamaha WR 450s and set them up with Paris/Dakar-style tanks to extend their mileage range from forty to a few hundred miles. The impulse purchase was straight out of a manual you can find in any therapists office on middle-aged, male crises. Well, that and a survivalist hand book. My plans were vague, but two-fold: one was I wanted to ride from Mexicali to Cabo San Lucas, Baja California, with my friends Kirk Fox and Skeet Ulrich. A thousand mile trip over desert as unforgiving as the Sinai. The second was based on a conversation I had with Gilles Marini about how valuable the bikes would be in LA if a catastrophic earthquake occurred — we could get out of town while everyone was stuck in a fifty-mile traffic-jam.

I knew neither scenario would ever happen.

Because I’m an actor, I’m fortunate to meet the best of the best in whatever field they're in. When you have to ride a horse in a movie, they get the best experts to train you. If you ride a motorcycle, it’s the same. Sniper, cop, soldier, con man, whatever. That’s why I’ve heard so many amazing stories. If we don’t do a good job, it’s not because production didn’t provide the necessary resources.

My own history with motorcycles goes back to 1976 in the desert outside El Centro, California. Dale “Dutch” Gares taught me to ride on a Suzuki 60 in Pinto Wash outside Ocotillo. A group of adults sitting outside an RV on lawn chairs sucking down Olympia beers cheered me on after I finally got the hang of it. Proud of myself, I opened up the throttle and they screamed at me to change gears — I was smoking out the engine in first and it was about to seize.
All the kids who grew up in the Imperial Valley rode dirt bikes. I was with them on the dunes, but privately, just like in BMX motocross, I didn’t share their confidence going for big air or tricks. Privately, I was afraid, in awe of their fearlessness.
All of this is a long way of saying I had some history with motorcycles prior to being cast as the lead in a pilot for HBO about a motorcycle club (sadly, that never saw the light of day) called 1%.

The stunt coordinator was a guy named Joel Kramer, one of the best in the business, famous for doubling Schwarzenneger on “True Lies,” and “The Terminator.” Lane Levitt was in charge of getting us up to speed on riding bikes. Most of us had ridden motorcycles before (like W Earl Brown) and were eager to zip through a huge parking lot in Santa Clarita and show Lane we could ride. But for our first lesson, Lane had us WALK a Harley Davidson Sportster in a tight figure-eight around cones. He said he could tell a lot about our lean technique the way we walked a bike.

Ten-minutes with Lane confirmed a suspicion I held about myself— I didn’t know shit.

Lane was incredible. Besides having the job of making us look good riding, his primary job was to keep us safe while doing it (something stunt people don’t get enough credit for). His motorcycle knowledge was a family affair. Lane’s wife, Debbie Evans, is regarded as the greatest female motorcyclist of all time. She can also drive the hell out of a car. Debbie doubled Michelle Rodriguez in “The Fast and the Furious,” and did Carrie-Ann Moss’s motorcycle work in “The Matrix.”

Lane was the World Trial Champion for years riding for Bultaco. Trial riding is where riders traverse seemingly impossible courses, up steep terrain, over wet boulders, and fallen logs. Trial riders can look at a sixty-percent grade and figure out the spots they’d be at a full stop, balancing the bike with their feet on the pegs, and figure out which pebble to use for leverage to get to their next perch. It takes unbelievable skill. He also held the world record for the longest wheelie ever recorded. He told me they had to have a special motor installed in the hub to keep the front wheel spinning when it was off the ground.

For weeks, Lane had me and the rest of the cast riding tight figure-eights in formation, taking Harleys at low speed around cones in a square no bigger than a couple of parking stalls. He was a patient, incredible teacher, much like Bud Williams when I was learning to drive a big rig. Like most things, horses, motorcycles, Peterbilts, don’t respond to male frustration and anger. The more frustrated you get, the more foolish you look. I think that’s the ultimate fear most of us hold — not physical harm, but the possibility of looking foolish in front of your peers. That’s why some big, strong, guys struggle with horses, motorcycles, and big rigs. It’s about being zen. I don’t have zen.
The sun setting, horses missing, and knowing the quad (with its extra off-road lights) would be the smarter choice, I decided to take the WR 450.

The bike was like an F1 Ferrari. When I was doing 1%, Lane said he’d set my bikes for me. My neighbors in Oregon, Rick and Lorri Lowe, drove the motorcycles down to where we were filming in California and got to hang out on the set. It was a fun experience for all of us.

Lane gave my bikes to Kenny Zahrt, a champion dirt bike rider for Bultaco back in the 70s. Kenny was a gas and talked with me about motocross and the Glamis dunes near where I grew up, but in their company, I felt like a fraud — like they’d taken me into their confidence as someone who knew something about their world, when their world to me might as well have been Mars. I still feel that way. I watch the X-Games and can’t believe human beings are doing what they’re doing with the exact piece of machinery I own.

Kenny took my bikes into his shop, worked some magic, and gave me back a couple of rocket-fueled death machines.
After that, riding my bike in Oregon became a foolish personal challenge I’d set for myself. It had so much power, it was debatable who was riding who. There were times I’m sure I looked like Roy Moore on his horse leaving the polling booth and was glad no one was around to film it. I dumped it in mud, lost it jumping over a berm and smashed my helmet on a rock. I was lucky Rick and Lorri’s son, David, was riding with me that day or I would have been a snack knocked out on a trail in the middle of absolutely nowhere in a place we called “Bear Alley.”

My property is oddly laid out. The first part is closed in by a canyon. At the gate, the elevation is around 1400 feet, the house is at 2500 hundred, and the road cut out of the canyon to join the back 440 acres tops out at 3500 feet. There’s no one around or behind me except for millions of acres of government or timber company owned land. For the lower forty-eight, it’s about as rural as it gets. There are mountain lions, bears, bobcats, even a grey wolf (tagged by the government) that rolls through. Perverting Frost, the woods near my cabin are lovely, dark, and deep — creepy deep.

I got my speed up to get through a tight twist in the timber road, hit a rock and almost kicked out over the edge of a cliff. My adrenals were wide open. I was on my pegs and full alert. It was getting dark faster than I anticipated, so I flew through the logging trails to the pond on the other side of the mountain where I thought the horses might be. I liked the pond but was wary of it after I found a bear den and huge piles of bear scat around an apricot tree, full of pits and blackberry seeds. From the size of the pile of excrement and height of scratches on a nearby tree, I figured the beast must have been four hundred and fifty pounds.

I got to the pond and the horses were nowhere to be found. I’m the worst tracker in history, but near an old mining pit, I saw horse tracks. It looked liked they’d been backed into a corner. Then, to my shock, I saw unmistakable cougar tracks. Massive three-lobe rear pads and four, fat clawless toes.
Holy shit, I thought. Lorri was right.

I got on my bike and followed the hoofprints down the road to my far gate. From the distance between tracks, it was clear they were in full gallop. By the gate, the tracks veered into the woods. That's where the trail went cold.
I was worried about them. I witnessed a mountain lion attack the horses in the meadow in front of my house a few years back. A big cat was going after a foal on a moon-lit night. It was amazing to see how they ran around the baby in a highly choreographed defensive move while Harley, the donkey, took on the cat, rearing and striking at it with his hooves. My friend, Bob Mitas, was up from Burbank with his wife and we all (my kids included) watched the battle from the front porch ’til I squeezed off a shot from a .357 over the head of the cat. It ran into the woods and the horses galloped down the meadow towards Rick and Lorri’s.

It was getting really dark and I was worried about the ride back to my cabin. The roads aren’t roads, merely fire roads or logging trails. They have deep ruts and strewn with fallen trees. In full daylight, they’re difficult to navigate, in the dark, they’re impossible.

I made the long climb from the back pond, ripped by a spot with ancient slash piles (and a grave from the 1870’s— long story), and hit a section of road I knew was relatively wide and smooth. I twisted the throttle. Immediately the bike responded and the front end came off the ground, nearly dumping me off the back. I regained control and came around a corner to see a huge black bear standing in the middle of the road.

I squeezed the front brake as hard as I could and ended up balanced on the bike’s front tire, perched mid-air, face to face with the bear. I swear to God we both had the same “What the fu**?!” expressions. I screamed. The bear just stood there on its hind legs.

I landed back on my rear tire and the bear and I stared at each other. It might have only been for a couple of seconds, but it felt like a lifetime. I’d only seen bears on all fours. I’d seen pictures of them from game-cams on my property in full stretch, reaching for roadkill hung in trees, but nothing prepared me for how big the animal would look standing. I yelled at it to go and my voice cracked like a thirteen-year-old who just blew his audition for the Vienna’s Boys Choir. The bear grunted at me in return and took off running up the mountain behind us. To this day, outside of seeing greyhounds at Wonderland in Boston, I’d never seen an animal move so fast. It looked like a train. It made me rethink any and every fantasy I had about running from a bear, any movie I’d seen where someone ran from a bear. I don’t care if you’re Usain Bolt -- run from a bear and it will catch you in two strides.

The problem was it was headed back in the direction I had to go. I took off and prayed to God to make me Kenny Zahrt. It didn’t work. I got through “Bear Alley” as fast as I could, but every second I felt like I was hydroplaning. When I hit the logging road that wormed down the canyon, I was almost crying. I knew I had to gun it, but stay in control or fly over a cliff. I was convinced the bear was going to jump on me from my right at any second. When I made it to the meadow above my house and saw my roof peeking through the trees, I could have shouted for joy. I parked the bike on my porch and locked the door behind me.

I called Lorri and told her she was right, a cat had cornered the horses by the back pond and they had taken off into the woods near the Trail entrance to the 440. Then, I said I almost hit a bear.
“What?”
“I almost hit a bear on the trail. We were face to face.”
“Good Lord,” she said. “I’ll get Rick to grab a rifle and we’ll bring the Arctic Cat and the dogs.”
Years later, I befriended Kevin Frison when he helped me clear fallen oak trees near my house. We were kicking stories about the woods, bears, cats, and he said, "I almost hit a bear on a dirt bike once. We were face to face. No one believes me."
"I do."