My eldest son has wanted an RZ500—bad—since he first laid eyes on one twenty years ago. He is of the R6 generation so he was pretty underwhelmed after riding one, they are not fast, but like most gearheads he wanted one for the two-stroke exhaust sound and for the engineering.

A few years ago an RZ500 popped up on an on-line classifieds site. It checked all of the boxes but was deep in the heart of rural Wisconsin. I jumped in the truck and long-hauled it to take a look at the bike. I found it at the end of a gravel road and after looking it over I purchased it on behalf of my son. The previous owner and I put the RZ500 in the box of my truck. I started the journey home with the Yamaha RZ500 cocked sideways in the short box of my pick-up.

I burned through small towns and villages coming back, some so small they had stop signs on carts, so that the sign could be brought inside at night because there was next to no traffic after dark. These are pragmatic people, these small-town Wisconsin-ites. There were thick, tall pine trees for miles and miles in every direction. It seemed like every home had a sawmill on the side yard, and at the end of it, stacks of rough sewn pine boards drying. Every home was heated by wood. Windmills stood spinning over every farm.

I stopped for gas on the entrance to one small town and then noticed a cautionary sign suggesting all vehicles slow as this was Amish country. Two blocks into town the entire makeup of the little village clicked back 150 years—it was all Amish. Black wagons dotted the road and men in dark, wide hats were working outside.

A mile outside of that little Amish village I began to encounter a steady stream of Amish children walking towards me on the side of the hi-way. School had obviously let out and they were walking home. They came in clusters—first the older kids, then gaggles of younger ones. The boys were dressed as they would be for the rest of their lives: wide-rim black hats, dark wool coats, pants held up with suspenders. The girls dressed in long blue dresses that almost touched their feet. These girls all had some sort of scarf covering their hair. Every one of them walked on the side of the hi-way intensely looking down at the ground. Most clutched slates to their chest or under their arms so they could do their homework later.

I rolled slow by them; who knows what could happen? Dean Adams? Superbikeplanet? Didn't he run over some Amish kids?


As I approached each group of Amish kids I gave a short honk of my truck's horn to let them know I was there. I have no idea why, because none of them, no matter the age or the gender, ever looked up. They were walking quickly through the dirty modern world from their school to their homes, dodging all sorts of motorized vehicles, driven by outsiders and "Worldly people" like me, listening to a Beastie Boys CD and drinking watery Diet Coke left over from a drive-thru lunch. Any and all of these entities were in no way permitted in Amish culture.

There must have been a hundred Amish kids walking in a long strip of people who looked straight outta 1798.

I continued to honk every time I slowly approached each group, and once past them I would look in the truck's side-window and rear view mirror mostly out of boredom to see if there was any reaction. Nothing. Not one turned their head to look at the truck with the motorcycle jammed in the back.

The line of kids started to peter out; these kids were the last to leave school. I continued to honk and looked to see if there was any reaction.

Imagine my surprise when I honked and one boy, maybe 13-14 years old, actually looked up, and then his neck instinctively snapped right so hard his hat almost didn't stay on his head when he saw the motorcycle in the back of the truck. I watched in the rear view mirror as he quickly stopped and then spun fully around. He raised his arm at me, his face with a mad grin, smiling at me and the bike. I like to think he gave the outsider's truck with the motorcycle in the back a thumbs up, but it was probably just a wave. I can see his smiling face today in my mind; I think of him often.

In my mind he was one of the last to leave because he misbehaved and was given some kind of "stay after school and wash the floors" punishment. In my mind it wasn't the first time he had been punished for being the square peg in the round hole. He didn't fit in with the Amish life very well, I imagined. He'd seen a motorcycle and was tantalized by their simple existence. I imagined that when he was alone on the farm he found a branch shaped like handlebars and he pretended to be riding a motorbike, making all kinds of revving engine noises. That kid wasn’t supposed to want what I had in the back of the truck. But he clearly did.

I brought that RZ500 home for my son John, but somewhere out there on a pine-lined road in Wisconsin, it lit a spark in someone else's soul. In a world where everything told him no, his eyes said yes. That Amish kid was a rider. He was one of us.