Mesa man, 1929 motorcycle take a cross-country ride

Oct. 30—Picture riding across the country on backroads for 3,782 miles in 17 days on a two-wheeled vehicle powered by a weed-whacker engine.

No surprise if you can't.

You'd have to be like TJ Jackson, 68, of Mesa.

He actually did that last month.

On a 94-year-old motorcycle.

Jackson was one of the 77 antique motorcycle riders who completed the Motorcycle Cannonball 2023, riding mostly on two-lane country roads winding between Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Oceanside, California.

They had one day off in the unusual road rally between Sept. 7 and Sept. 24 but otherwise spent 250 to 300 miles riding between motels, hoping their hogs wouldn't break down so they could keep earning points that would earn them little more than bragging rights at the finish line.

And that meant the world to Jackson, who earned a perfect score.

"When I went across the finish line, I had tears rolling out of my eyes," he recalled — and not because his posterior finally found relief from riding a bike with no shock absorbers.

"It was very emotional — as it was for a lot of the other riders," he said. "I had worked on this bike for about three years, taking it down to the last nut and bolt and massaging it, making this work, changing that and then not liking it, then changing something else. A lot of time, a lot of money invested."

And he can't wait to do it again when the biannual road rally comes around in 2025.

Hopefully, he said, with an even older motorcycle.

No doubt about that

To read the stories and profiles at motorcyclecannonball.com is to become immersed in a passion that only men and women like Jackson really feel.

The website sets out in meticulous detail the Motorcycle Cannonball's history, the people who fuel participants' hearts and the enormous sense of accomplishment that washes over the riders who roll through the finish line.

The organizers call it "the most difficult antique endurance run in the world."

And no one likely challenge what they call "an undisputed fact."

The run's founding father, Lonnie Isam, Jr., first started daydreaming about cruising America's back roads with his antique biker buddies in 2009, the website states.

"There was no way he could have possibly imagined what his musings would eventually become," it continues. "All Lonnie wanted to do was to see the scenic Americana landscape one mile at a time from the saddle of ancient iron with his riding buddies."

Isam admired Erwin "Cannonball" Baker "and other historical figures that literally paved the way across the country in the early 1900s.

"His logic was that if the motorcycle greats could make those miles on the early machines, many with no roads whatsoever, certainly modern riders could do the same."

And so the Motorcycle Cannonball emerged in 2011, born out of Isam's desire "to break the stigma of sequestering collectible old relics to museums and the life of oversized dust catchers and to let the old machines spend their geriatric years living as they were intended: on the road."

That desire grabbed Jackson by the throat and didn't let go.

A semi-retired — what else? — "career motorcycle tech and motorcycle shop owner," the Tempe native once owned a shop for 35 years before becoming a "personal mechanic" to select bikers.

He was destined as a kid to a life-long love affair with motorcycles.

He's been riding them for 50 years and still remembers putting playing cards in the spokes of his Schwinn Sting Ray bicycle so it made motorcycle noises.

He had to age a bit before he could get one because "my parents wouldn't let me have a motorcycle," he explained.

Jackson, who moved to Mesa in 1991, also collects antique motorcycles and counts 25 in his personal museum.

The "youngest" in that collection is 38 years old. The oldest was made in 1908.

"They are all operable," he boasts. "I mean theoretically, anyway."

One with his machine

A long-ride enthusiast, Jackson doesn't fancy himself as just a collector.

He shares the same kind of reverence for history that created the first Motorcycle Cannonball in 2011.

"I always sort of made it a point to make all my stuff run rather than be garage queens," he explained.

"So as a career motorcycle mechanic and someone who spent a great deal of time doing high-end work, I felt that the Motorcycle Cannonball was sort of the ultimate challenge of man and machine."

Perhaps it's better framed as "machine versus man." Jackson talked of one Cannonball rider who had to actually peddle a few miles up a steep grade because his bikes had a little engine that couldn't.

Indeed, because he had never participated in a run as long as Cannonball, Jackson confessed, "I was really nervous as to the performance of my machine."

"I had put some 2,500 test miles on it before I ever showed up at the starting line. But half the battle is getting to the starting line — preparing the machine, however many hundred hours I spent preparing.

"But once I got going, and figured out the navigation system, it was quite enjoyable. I started to relax and started to become one with the motorcycle."

Becoming one with the motorcycle, however, includes manning up — or as Jackson put it, "Part of the Motorcycle Cannonball is overcoming adversity."

The machine

Jackson's mechanical partner for the journey was a 1929 Scott Flying Squirrel Deluxe that he bought 20 years ago from a guy in New Zealand.

"It was purported to be restored, but it wasn't," Jackson said. "I mean, it looked pretty but it had all kinds of mechanical problems. But I got it running.

"I took it around the block and I just put it in my collection. It was garage-clean for 20 years until I got the nod for the Cannonball."

He picked the Scott "because it is different, because of the two-stroke. Nobody had ever succeeded in the Cannonball on a two-stroke and I love a challenge."

Asked to elaborate, Jackson replied, "You know when you hear your landscape guys out there blowing off your driveway or you hear that weed whacker? That's a two-stroke engine."

"I was a professional motorcycle racer for 20-plus years and when somebody says 'you can't do it,' I say, 'Watch me.'"

When he arrived in Virginia Beach, variations of that dare rang in his ears.

"I heard a lot of people muttering under their breath — 'two-stroke, it will never make it.'"

Those mutterings just fired him up.

"Every other motorcycle in the event was a four-stroke motorcycle," he said, adding that his riding the Scott "is riding the motorcycling equivalent of a Model T."

"Not only is this bike fairly unique because it's two-stroke. It's also water-cooled. Nobody thought I would complete the event on a two-stroke because two strokes typically are not long-life engines."

"But because of my longtime career and doing performance work, I was able to make it live."

Then there was the issue of his seat — an equally concerning matter because the Scott has no shock absorbers.

"When I'm sitting on any motorcycle for an extended period of time, I start getting pretty saddle-sore. I knew this was going to be a problem.

"I spent quite a bit of time in Mesa trying to get my seat to be comfortable and they sculpted it and reshaped it but the long and short of it was that I never did end up with a comfortable seat."

While he modified the seat as much as the Cannonball rules allowed, Jackson figured he'd be able to periodically stop on each day's route for rest.

And with the deadlines built into every day, he was grateful for having a motorcycle with a little more speed than most of the other 76 riders, some of whom were on bikes older than his.

"That did allow me to have a few more stops," he said.

"But you don't want to push that envelope because if you have a mechanical problem on the side of the road, you've got to get it fixed. If you don't get in on time, you're going to lose your points for the day."

Rules of the road

Jackson said, "I was very fortunate to have not a lot of mechanical problems along the way."

But then he added, "I won't say that I didn't have some and some of them could have been event-ending."

That's because the rules of the Cannonball are stringent, starting with the fact that riders don't get the day's route until a half hour before takeoff.

GPS is forbidden under pain of disqualification.

Instead, riders had old-school maps that Jackson put in a little box on his bike.

The route map is "like this long piece of toilet paper with instructions like 'turn at the third oak tree, make a right at the fourth stop sign.'

"And all of our riding was done on secondary roads, no major highways with only a few exceptions. You had to follow those directions in order to get your checkpoints — points for every mile, points for hitting checkpoints on time, points for hitting the lunch stops on time, points for reaching the next motel."

Those points determined winners in categories that are based on the age of participants, the age of their cycles and a couple other factors. For example, Jackson had a perfect score, but came in second in his category to a rider whose bike was three years older than his.

But the most worrisome rule is the one barring "outside assistance" in the event of a breakdown.

"You have to make do with whatever you carry on your bike."

A support crew member is allowed to help only at certain times along the entire ride. Jackson's was his wife, Pam, who drove their van.

But Pam couldn't help the one time he ultimately needed it most.

'My gosh,' a hole

On the third day of the ride, Jackson's dream seemed perilously close to becoming a nightmare.

"I stopped to take a little break on the side of the road and I could smell coolant and I looked down and 'oh my gosh, my radiator is dripping water out.'

"At first I thought it was a hose and I tried fixing it on the side of the road and realized I actually had a small hole in the radiator. I thought, 'how am I going to fix this?'"

He could have hopped a ride on a trailer the Cannonball kept for bikers in true distress.

But the trailer was two hours behind Jackson and besides, if he had used it, he would have lost all the day's points.

Initially he was buoyed by the fact that all this happened "on a rare time when we could interact with our support crew.

"My wife was there and I said, 'Honey, dig out the extra radiator because I had an old one in the van. She's digging the thing out, and I kept thinking 'Man, I gotta be out of this stop in an hour and 10 minutes. I will not have enough time to change this radiator.'"

Instead, Jackson grabbed six bottles of water.

And whenever an overheated engine threatened, he stopped for a few minutes to quench its thirst and kept riding.

"I made it to the end of the day. And that evening, we took the radiator off and soldered up the bottom of the radiator. And it's working today."

Cheers, tears and nerves

Jackson was surprised by the crowds that greeted the riders along the way in the towns where they stopped for the night.

"The number of people that showed up and that were supporting us was incredible," he said.

He recalled his eighth-day overnight in Garden City, Kansas.

"We pulled into the old part of town and they had a huge big arch set up that said, 'Welcome Cannonball riders.' I pulled onto the street and there's a freakin' marching band, like we won the second world war."

"Just dozens and dozens of people were coming up and pounding me on the back and saying 'Wow, I'd never seen a Scott motorcycle before.'"

By then he had also won the admiration of the other riders.

"By the third day, some of them came over and said, 'Man, you passed me like I was standing still.'"

They also admired how he and Pam treated the bike in their ritual of daily evening maintenance.

"People were coming over and saying 'This bike is incredible. It's beautiful.'

"My bike honestly was much prettier than most of the others and by the seventh day, we had really had commanded a lot of respect. People were saying 'This is the coolest thing in the event.'

"So finishing on the bike was a great big feather in my cap.'"

The crowd that had gathered in Oceanside thought that too.

But 10 miles out from the finish line, Jackson almost never got to see it.

He ran out of gas.

"I had to switch to the reserve tank, which I knew was very small," he recalled. "And I though traffic in Oceanside can get very congested and if I run out of gas, I'm screwed. I do carry extra gas with me so I stopped one more time to get some gas."

But then he needed a prayer.

A couple days earlier, Jackson had been working on his engine but got the timing wrong, ultimately causing his Kickstarter to crack.

He kept his stops to a minimum the last two days, hoping to spare his Kickstarter a devastating break.

Wary of his reserve tank running out of gas before he reached the finish line, "I put in a gallon and I said a little prayer: 'God give this Kickstarter one more kick.'"

It worked and he rolled past a checker flag and into an hours-long celebration.

When he and Pam decided to leave, their van was a few blocks away.

"I told my wife I'll just ride there, so I jumped on my bike, gave it a mighty kick — and the Kickstarter broke off."

As he worked on repairing that Kickstarter when he got back to Mesa, Jackson reflected on his glorious ride and the calamity he miraculously dodged.

"I laughed and I said I'm the luckiest guy in the world. Somebody up there was smiling down on me."