And what thoughts raced through the mind of famed, second-generation professional motorcycle daredevil Robbie Knievel, 49, as he raced up and down the parking lot of Spotlight 29 Casino on a Honda CR 500 bike, a string of prayerfully-placed eagle feathers flying from the back of his helmet as he prepared to make a 200 foot motorcycle jump across 10 parked vehicles from a 10 foot high wooden ramp lined with American flags in front of a crowd of 5,000?
“I was talking to God, talking to my dad, praying the whole time. I could also feel the prayers coming from the crowd, and that’s what got me ready to go.”
Finally, just before 5 pm, as the sun touched the tip of the valley’s famed mountain backdrop, Knievel appeared in front of the crowd, decked in an all-white leather suit accented with blue and red trim. After his daughter, Krysten, sang the national anthem, Knievel thanked the audience for coming, and also gave a nod of thanks to the American troops.
After doing a series of wheelies back and forth in front of crowd at 85 mph, to the pounding tunes of Lynyrd Skynrd’s famous rock anthem, “Free Bird,” Knievel “felt the time was right to go,” and successfully made the jump, albeit with an unusually rough landing, to a widely-felt collective sigh of relief that was punctuated by ear-splitting cheers.
Knievel has been doing motorcycle daredevil stunts, including successful jumps across the Grand Canyon and headlong across the top of a moving train, since he was eight years old, when he performed with famous father Evel Knievl, the legendary daredevil icon of the 1960’s and 70’s motorcycle world, at Madison Square. He decided, while performing to a crowd of 25,000 in Canada at age 11, that “this is what I do for a living.” He’s been jumping ever since, and although his father retired at age 37, Robbie isn’t ready to stop.
Among those who gathered to watch the spectacle were a unique blend of newly-arrived winter visitors, die-hard motorcycle riders, retirees, families with children, and other curiosity-seekers, many of who took time to leave slot machines in the casino behind in time to catch the show.
Brian and Samantha Magnusson, of Sky Valley, brought their three young children, who were visibly bored and fidgety in the hour before the jump, expressing their desire to go home to play video games. “The kids are going to love it,” said Brian. “They’re going to love it, because I’m going to love it!”
Gary Baston, 50, a dedicated Evel and Robbie Knievel memorabilia collector since childhood, took the time to drive from Los Angeles along with his 8-year-old son to watch the jump.
Another attendee, a winter resident of Rancho Mirage who came with his wife and a group of friends and declined to give his name, said, “It’s something to do – the football game on TV was over.”
Knievel’s jump was a dreamy and perfectly-performed nod to an era gone by, an era of open desert highways marked by off-roaders in the California 60’s and 70’s when thousands of motocross enthusiasts could gather for a 100-mile-long, open desert ride known as the Barstow-Vegas run every Thanksgiving weekend – before the BLM, concerned for the desert environment, shut it down for good and ushered in an increasingly reduced-riding space era for off-roaders, who have seen their access to desert riding shrink exponentially since then.
Applying for permits, paying registration fees, and competing for space in the relatively small areas now available to motocross and other desert vehicular riders is a whole new world, one that is far from the innocent, dreamy era when heading out into the open desert on a rusty, illegally-fitted dirtbike straight from the backyard was as exciting to teens as - and doubtless much more dangerous than - the search for enemies to kill now is for the excitement my 13-year-old nephew feels when he enters the high-tech, graphically-inebriating world of his favorite virtual-reality video game. But then again, maybe there's more danger now for kids who rarely even venture outside, some kind of loss of being able to actually feel the flames coming out of the bike's exhaust manifold, instead of just seeing a slew of dead bodies littered like broken crayons across a cartoon-world....
Knievel accomplished something at Spotlight 29 Casino that highlights a faded memory of the American psyche, that is, the stirring ‘vroom-vroom-vroom’ of the subconscious of the collective American dream: dream wild, dream big, and ‘keep on truckin’, as famed 70’s cartoon icon Mr. Natural once said. Most of us remember a time when we felt nothing was impossible, that the earth and sky had no limit.
In the blink of a jump, we remembered that it was once possible for Hunter S. Thompson to light out on Interstate 15 for Vegas, where “we were 30 miles from Barstow when the drugs began to take hold” to cover the Mint 400 off-road motocross race, another icon of desert off-roading that has long since been sacrificed for the higher environmental good.
What’s next for Knievel, who lives fulltime in a luxury RV that he uses to travel across the country? He plans to reprise his father’s jump across 13 London buses at Wembly stadium, using the same model of bike, a XR750 Harley, but attempting to jump across 16 busses. He will also repeat his father’s unsuccessful Snake River Canyon jump, in honor of his late father, in the hopes of succeeding this time.
“But first,” he notes with a wide smile as he relaxes in his RV shortly after the jump. “I plan to relax and play golf here in the desert. I think I’ve earned it.”
As far as I'm concerned, Robbie can take his time. He's earned it.
by Ruth Nolan copyright (c) 2011 by Ruth Nolan
published 11.3.11 in the Desert Star Weekly Alternative Weekly newspaper based in Desert Hot Springs, CA
http://desertstarweekly.com/
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