--- id: reader_ask_20260802_142537_3c10a7 title: 'Ask from Daniel Lenovo: You used to ride motorcycles?' category: Wisdom predicted_narrative_arc: Adventure to Reflection sentiment: Nostalgic emotions: - joy - freedom - adventure - fear - respect keypoints: - Borrowed stepfather's Honda and mountain bike in 1969-70 for orchard runs and forest jumps - Lived at 3444 Newtown Rd across from Canapa's apple orchard in Placerville foothills - Earned $2.35/hr washing dishes at Bluebell Cafe while babysitting and tending animals - Traded Celica for Kawasaki 1000 ride to Tahoe and nearly lost control at 80-90 mph - Prefers not to ride now due to modern distracted drivers versus past awareness summary: Daniel recounts riding motorcycles as a teen in Placerville, CA, borrowing his stepfather's bikes to carve trails through a snowy apple orchard and jump dirt mounds in the national forest behind his home. He contrasts the freedom and adventure of those rides with his chores and low-paying dishwashing job, later sharing a near-disastrous high-speed incident on a Kawasaki during nuclear power school. He concludes he would not ride today due to distracted drivers. tags: - reader-ask - family - wisdom - motorcycle-riding - placerville-ca - youth-adventures - stepfather - national-forest - bluebell-cafe - nuclear-power-school - freedom-vs-responsibility sycophancy: 1 truth_score: 9 entropy: 4 sample: false consent: own_laptop agent: witness source_session: '' created: '2026-08-02T19:25:37Z' updated: '2026-08-05T00:19:25Z' vault_stage: 07_CODEX headwaters: READER prefix: READER enrich_status: answered_enriched enrich_blockers: [] enrich_method: llm pipeline_filename: READER_2026-08-02_daniel-lenovo-you-used-to-ride-motorcycl.md source_kind: reader_ask proposed_topic: Wisdom lane: Wisdom reader_ask_id: 20260802_142537_3c10a7 reader_id: f1615d922a203623 display_name: Daniel Lenovo routing_source: carbon corpus_topic: Wisdom dual_write_from: witness dual_write_at: '2026-08-05T00:19:25Z' witness_codex_shelf: Wisdom --- # Question from Daniel Lenovo You used to ride motorcycles? ## Your answer So here's my story. I lived on. Kind of a home out of town while I was in high school on Newtown Rd. 3444. I think it was Newtown Rd. in Placerville, CA. Across the street from our little home was a small apple orchard privately owned by Mr. Canapa. And. In the winter, occasionally it would snow between a foot and a couple of feet in the Sierra Nevada foothills where we were. And in which case my? Father. I should say he's a. Stepfather that adopted me he was fond of motorcycles and he had a Little black Honda. That didn't have a metal frame. It had a unibody kind of thing on it. Then we add one other. Umm mountain motorcycle, cross country motorcycle, but I would umm. Borrow those, so to speak, from my dad, not necessarily knowing that he knew I had it. Out. But I guess once in a while when I crashed it and bent something, he knew that didn't happen in the garage, so somehow we never had that conversation. My point being that in one winter I took the nice bull Taco out and rode it from the top of the hill in Mr. Canipa's orchard all the way down to the bottom. Swallowing course, where I could just lay the machine down almost 45° left and right, big Serpentine trails all the way down through the orchard and then Zing all the way around to the top of the hill again and do it again and again. So I was doing what kids do today, looping at ski areas, through the halfpipe and terrain parks. But I was doing it old school. 1969 and 70 maybe so. During the summers I would. Occasionally take the bikes up into the. Mountains, or should I say my backyard, which was, uh, National Forest and I'd Zing around, uh, Weber Creek on all the little foot paths. And at the very top there was kind of a large area that ultimately became a home development. But at the time it had one mound in the middle of it that was kind of curious because it was just the size that today you would call it. Right. A large jump and I could spend a little time going around and around and around getting airborne and experiencing that thing that most of us today take for granted, which is being able to do big jumps and air time. Did I love what I was doing? Yeah. Because otherwise I was babysitting or I was just beginning work. At the downtown. Placerville. Bluebell Cafe, where I did wash dishes on Saturdays for probably $2.35 an hour. Yeah, and I bet you that was only $1.65 at that time because I was a a miner. And they expected me to get tips left on the plates for being a good kid in the back. But you know what? I actually found some good pieces of something to eat occasionally, so that was kind of my tip. But back to the motorcycles I appreciated. The adventure and the freedom and maintaining the motorcycles was a lot of easier than taking care of the one cow or the one horse or the bunch of chickens that I also kept. Oh, yeah. And a bunch about 3:00 to 5:00, German shepherd drug dogs that my dad raised in the kennel and I got to scrape the poop out of. So I used to ride motorcycles. Yeah. My favorite story is when I was in nuclear power school down in Mare Island. I got a chance to. Trade my Celica GT for a weekend. In exchange for a chance to ride a Kawasaki 1000 up to Lake Tahoe. From my roommate and at one time I thought, well let's see what this thing does on a long stretch of Rd. just before the foothills leaving Sacramento and I cranked it open and I was probably hit about. 80 to 90 and for some reason I thought I might sit up a little more and almost got drug off the back of the motorcycle on that freeway because I was not expecting how much wind resistance there was. So that was another one of those moments of terror where just gripping the bars and shutting it down did nothing more than scare the Dickens out of me. Respect of the built environment. The question being when I ride today. Probably not, because although motorcycling has become safety safer, it's more dangerous. Because of the number of distracted drivers that aren't paying attention to what's around them, in the old day you had to really look around. Your blind spots were bigger and you didn't have devices distracting you and hardly even had radio so. You looked around and knew your. Vehicles around you far more than you do today. So today I would probably not ride motorcycles. Especially after having cycled so many times. All right, that's the audio transcript for you used to ride motorcycles?