I have been thinking a lot lately about why I have been bitten by the motorcycle bug. Particularly why a Ural.

For the uninitiated, a Ural is a sidecar motorcycle patterned after the WWII BMW used by the German Army. As the story goes Stalin knew that the non aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Russia would be broken and Russia would eventually be at war with Germany. Needing a way to move troops quickly around the battlefield he directed the army to find a vehicle that could perform this task. His advisers recommended the BMW R71, then in use by the German Army. Popular lore has it that the Russians secretly bought five of the BMW's, smuggled them into Russian and then reversed engineered them, building a factory near Moscow to produce them. The factory was eventually moved to the small town of Irbit in the Ural mountains out of reach of German bombers. Hence the name Ural for the motorcycle brand.

The Ural has been in production ever since. According to their website http://www.imz-ural.com , at the hight of production during the cold war the factory produced an astounding 1800 motorcycles a day!

Getting back to why I have been smitten by the Ural bug, ( I really have been bitten hard - I have spent the last two years or so lurking around on the Ural web boards learning all about them), I think it all began when I was a child.

As most young boys of my generation (baby boomer born in 1955) I spent a lot of time playing with army toys of one sort or another. Most young boys I think are enamored of military toys, and in particular vehicles. Toy tanks, jeeps, and trucks were great fun to play in the sandbox with. It helped that my Dad was in the military, in fact our whole family has a military background. Dad was training as an army recruit to go overseas at camp Iperwash in Ontario, but as luck would have it WWII ended before he was shipped overseas. I can still hear my Dad tell of the day he and all his fellow recruits were fell in on the parade ground in front of an officer and told that the war was over. The officer gave them the news stating that anyone wishing to resign from the army and go home should take on step forward. As Dad puts it "there was a resounding crash as the whole platoon opted to go home".

Dad's brother David served in the Air Force. After passing through the Commonwealth Air Training Plan he became a Lancaster Bomber pilot. Sadly he was shot down over Germany and didn't survive.

After knocking around for a while after the war Dad joined the peacetime Navy and got to see some of the world. Egypt, Japan and Korea. Dad fought in Korea on board a Destroyer . He used to tell us about how they used to  try and destroy supply trains that shuttled supplies down the coast of Korea. I also remember him telling us about stopping and searching fishing junks for weapons and illegal supplies being ferried to the North Korean army.

Dad spent thirty years in the Navy. We traveled all over Canada as Dad was posted to one base or another. Consequently we were always around military vehicles. One in particular really caught my fancy. My Dad was stationed in Inuvik NWT. At that time there was a Navy base there, primarily I think having to do with communications. This was in the late sixties during he hight of the cold war, and my impression at the time was the the base had something to do with the Distant Early Warning system or DEW LINE, that was set up by the American and Canadian government's to monitor the Soviet Union.

At any rate, one of the vehicles that Dad got to use from time to time was an old Willys Jeep, complete with fold down windshield and canvas seats, just like the jeeps I used to see on the war movies that I loved so much. It was great fun to cruise around town or head out to Airport Lake, where the base had built a cabin for the use of base personnel. As we rushed around steep corners on the dusty dirt road I used to picture myself behind the wheel of a jeep in the North African dessert, just like my favorite characters on the "Rat Patrol", another favorite TV show of mine.

Growing up my favorite movies were war movies of course. I can still picture Steve McQueen in the movie the Great Escape. That famous scene where he has captured a German motorcycle and takes a run at the barbed wire fence to try and escape. The motorcycles in particular would catch my eye. Whenever I would see a scene with a dispatch rider on a solo bike, or a sidecar motorcycle careening towards a trouble spot on the battlefield, I was glued to the tube. Motorcycles in these movies, to my mind, were always associated with life and death situations. Dispatch riders always proceeded at breakneck speed delivering messages of vital importance that could turn the tide of battle. Sidecar motorcycles always managed to arrive in the nick of time carrying just enough troops to quell an otherwise hopeless fire fight, or just in time to ferry the main character to safety. For that reason military motorcycles seemed, to my adolescent eyes to be a cut above the regular ho hum garden variety military vehicle. It seemed to me that if I was ever to own a military vehicle, (which I think a lot of young fellows secretly dream of), it would have to be a motorcycle.

Fast forward to 2003. I was browsing some army surplus sites online,   looking for Halloween costumes for the kids. ( I have 9 kids varying in age from 8-26, but that's another story) I picked up some US army helmets, battle dress jackets, camo face paint, and some utility belts from an outfit in California and had them ship it to me. Along with the order came one of their catalogs. Leafing through it I discovered they were selling a Ural motorcycle vintage mid eighties. I had never heard of a Ural, but immediately I knew I had to have one.

I think the catalog's posted price for a Ural was about two or three thousand American. I remember thinking at the time that after the exchange rate and the cost of shipping from California, where the store was, the price would be just too prohibitive for what essentially was an old motorcycle in questionable shape. I live in Cambridge Bay Nunavut which is on an island in the high arctic. It costs big time to ship anything here. 

The following days I kept thinking about that motorcycle! How could I justify buying one and spending all that money? Every couple of days I would leaf through the catalog, stopping at the Ural page to daydream. I wonder if there would be any difficulties getting it across the border? What about parts, something that old would require lots of maintenance, where could I source the parts I would require?

One day I wanted to browse thought the catalog again to have another look at the Ural. I couldn't find the catalog so I tried looking it up on the internet. Instead of going to the army surplus store I decided to google Ural instead and up popped the new Ural Website .  Unbelievable!  They still make these things!  I checked out all the models and stories of other owners and their adventures with sidecars.  I knew I had to have a military style Gear Up .

Not only does the Ural fulfill a young lads dreams of owning a military vehicle, to me it fulfills a much bigger role.  I think of the Ural as a time machine.  A connection if you will, to another time and generation.  A time of earth shaking events when the entire planet was engaged in a titanic struggle for freedom.  My own "Russian Time Machine" is sort of a rolling archaeological artifact that connects me to my father's generation. It evokes thoughts of my childhood, memories of my Dad, and our early family life moving around Canada with the Navy.  

Dave "Hanajuq" Crockatt