That Damn Motoski was an early effort at a snowmachine, but she had little resemblance to the sleek shock-absorbed, electric starting, heated seat and handgrip affairs we now see and hear buzzing around at 80 plus miles per hour. The Motoski was anything but sleek. She was a bulbous-nosed beast with an engine the size of the Titanic, but with the power of a trolling motor. Her skis jutted out like toothpicks stuffed in the mouth of Carl Maldin. The physics of the Motoski’s design was such that you could not stop, or even slow down in deep snow. Without significant forward motion, the skis would not support the massive engine, and you would end up, “end up,” churning air and breathing snow.
{mos_ri}Her seat had no heat, and in fact had little padding. The high quality faux vinyl covering the hundred-yard-long-or-so plywood bench seat lasted, oh, say, three seconds in winter temperatures before cracking end-to-end and loosing the stuff of the seat’s padding to the frigid air. Duct tape could only do so much, and by the time we purchased the Motoski all padding was gone and the once black vinyl seat was now a patchwork of gray tape with shards of delaminating plywood poking through.
Her key was a spark plug wire with a metal hoop. One jammed the hoop over the plug to allow ignition. Spit aided conductivity and assured a tight connection once it froze. She had a recoiling starter cord with a broken handle and an iffy recoiling mechanism. This meant that one had to yank the cord with the half-handle threaded between one's middle fingers for grip. Then, after the coughing engine rapidly subsided to the non-start position of an object at rest wishing to stay at rest, one had to take the rope, which now was draped over the seat and into the snow in clumsy gloved fingers and thread it like a reluctant window shade back into the recoil slot. Cussing helped, but each starter pull took several minutes to complete. This was just as well because it gave the dangerous gas fumes time to dissipate.
Ah yes, the fumes; the Motoski had no choke, but instead a rubber gas bulb on the fuel line. This was a golf ball-sized unit one would squeeze to push the gas/oil mixture toward the mass of metal alleged to be an engine. On the well-respected theory that, if a little is good a lot is better, we used to squeeze that bulb flat. Then we would squeeze it flat again. We would squeeze until the fuel poured out from the seal where the bulb connected to the fuel line; “Well, that oughta about do it,” brother Rodney Lee would croak as he became so overcome with fumes that he loosened his still pulsing death grip on the gas bulb.
Once sufficiently primed and pulled, the Motoski would roar into life with a huge cloud of blue smoke. We never did figure out where the exhaust actually was coming from because at that particular moment all of our attention had to be focused on the throttle and the handlebars to avoid stalling out or crashing. You see, the Motoski had no gears, as in no neutral. Once started, it was "move it or lose it." One had to pump the throttle, a thumb depressed lever on the right handlebar, to keep the flooded (remember the gas bulb) engine running and simultaneously steer toward open ground as the Motoski lurched forward and up on step to plane across the snow as the engine grabbed, and then slogged down and to one side or the other as the engine faltered.
Starting out on the Motoski must have looked like one of those old train engines in a John Wayne movie lurching forward with great billows of blue smoke only to falter as the iron wheels spun on the tracks. Like the train though, after some initial lurching, the Motoski eventually would steady out to a snow surfing beast of great elegance. Her capacious seat was ample for four; so long as number four was willing to “buddy up.” We tried for five by draping a neighbor kid over the hood spread eagled, but Dad put a stop to that right quick, "Hey you boys, you get that Lamont kid off the hood, he'll get run over. Mark, you go on out there if you want to go for five… Oh, alright Mom -- now you all stay the heck of that hood."
