In the Spring of 2020, my health was very bad, I was having more and more heart problems. When I was younger, for two years I had worked as a caregiver for terminally-ill people. I was familiar with diseases such as COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, it’s effects, and how it progresses. I was having heart pain, irregular heartbeat, heart palpitations, and occasionally difficulty breathing, and all of these things were getting worse.

I spoke to my father about this in the Fall of 2019, because I thought that I would probably die before too much longer, and that my father would have to deal with my home back in Idaho, and my other property. I didn’t know it, because my father denied to me that he had any health problems, but he had COPD, and unexpectedly to me, he died in April of 2020.

My father left half of what he had to me, and half to my sister. I was so sick of living in a low-rent apartment in a high-crime area of downtown Dickinson, that the first thing I did was buy a small house with a big yard, in order to not have to deal with crime, drug addicts, and theft like I had been, because it was all around me where I was living.

The second thing that I wanted to do, was buy a nice, new, reliable Enduro motorcycle, the kind that you can ride both on-road and off-road. I owned a 1976 Yamaha 125cc Enduro, and a 1975 Kawasaki 125cc Enduro, but they were always not starting, not running, and quitting when I was far from home.

Because of my bad health that had been getting steadily worse over the past year and a half, I wanted to buy a nice, new, reliable motorcycle while I could still ride one. I went to the Honda West motorcycle dealership in Dickinson in May/June of 2020. They sold both new Honda and new Kawasaki Enduros.

I liked Kawasakis, and I was interested in the Kawasaki KLX 230 in the Honda West showroom, it was about $4,800. I looked at this motorcycle, waited, looked at all of their other motorcycles, waited, and I could not get any salesperson to help me. So I left.

I went home and looked up the Kawasaki KLX 230 on the internet, and I saw that its top speed was only 77 mph, which means you would not be able to ride it safely on Hwy 22, Hwy 85, or the Interstate because you could not get out of the way of cars and trucks.

I looked up the Kawasaki KLX 250 on the internet, which they also had in the showroom of Honda West, and it had a top speed of 85 mph, which I thought was good enough. This motorcycle costs about $5,400. I went back to Honda West the following day to buy this Kawasaki KLX 250, I waited for a salesperson, I walked around and looked at all of the other motorcycles, waited some more, but I still could not get a salesperson in order to buy this motorcycle.

I went home, and I wasn’t really all that happy about this KLX 250 only being able to go 85 mph, it would be difficult to ride it very far on the Interstate. I was just wanting to ride on rural dirt roads in North Dakota, did I really need an Enduro, maybe I should get a street bike?

After some more thought and research, I decided that I wanted to buy both the Kawasaki KLX 250 Enduro, and the Kawasaki 400 Ninja Sport Bike that they had in the Honda West showroom in Dickinson, which would total about $11,000. I went back to Honda West for the third time that week, in order to buy these two motorcycles. It was the same thing, wait, wait, wait, and no salesperson to sell me these two motorcycles.

Finally I went looking for a store manager or store owner. There was a dark-haired man about 50-60 years of age in the parts department area, who said that he was one of the owners of this store. I told him that this was the third time that I had been to his dealership to buy a motorcycle, I now want to buy both the KLX 250 and the 400 Ninja, but I can’t get a salesperson in order to buy these two motorcycles. The dealership “owner” said, I can’t help you.

This was the most fucked-up dealership experience that I had ever had in my entire life. All I wanted to do was pay for these two Kawasakis and they couldn’t help me. I tried to understand why they wouldn’t help me, and didn’t care, and I thought that it was probably because of the oil boom.

From what I could tell, it wasn’t the oil field workers so much that were buying motorcycles, it was the land owners and farmers who were receiving oil revenue money that were buying four-wheelers and side-by-sides for $20,000 that was making them not care about selling me anything. I thought, just as well, I wonder what it would be like trying to get my two new motorcycles dealer-prepped and serviced here? It would probably take forever.

This winter, due to the Corona virus adversely affecting the economy, people not having money to buy things, and people needing to sell things, I began to see some very good deals for motorcycles on Facebook Marketplace and elsewhere on the internet. I was able to buy a very good-condition BMW R1100R street bike, and an almost new BMW G310GS Dual-Sport bike, both from very nice older people.