AGV Backmarker: Toto, we’re back in Kansas.

Rural Kansas is, after all these years, still best known as the setting of The Wizard of Oz. As a landscape, it’s nearly flat and featureless—the perfect foil for Oz and the Emerald City. The road I followed to Dale Keesecker’s farm ran dead-straight to the horizon for hours at a time. And the farm itself—4,000 acres of grain and soybeans grown to feed 40,000 hogs—just about reaches the horizon, too.

I met Dale last year, in Kansas City, at Ralph Wayne’s Backyard National. He had brought a few of his bikes to display, including an Egli Vincent that had been part of the Guggenheim Museum’s “Art of the Motorcycle.” I asked him how many other bikes he had. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’d know if one was missing.” That piqued my curiosity.

When I finally saw his collection I was knocked out. There are a few notable concentrations of marques; maybe ten MV Agustas ranging from Tamburini’s modern classics to one of the first, butt-ugly, production 600-fours. He’s got several bevel-drive Ducatis and a Desmosedici. A good handful of Laverdas, including an SFC and Jota, are currently in restoration.

Seven of his dozen-or-so Vincents are stored in a vault in his basement. It’s not that he’s worried about theft; it’s also his family’s tornado shelter. It’s no accident that Dorothy was whipped out of Kansas to Oz by a twister. This is “Tornado Alley”; such storms are more common out here than anywhere else on earth.

Dale’s the third generation of his family to farm here. He was a handy kid, and when electricity reached the farm, he was able to build his first motorbike. No, it wasn’t electric, but when his mum got her first electric washing machine, Dale took the Briggs & Stratton motor out of her old gasoline-powered washer and mounted it on his Schwinn bicycle. On summer weekends, his dad took him to the nearby town of Belleville, where there was a steeply banked track billed as “the world’s fastest half-mile.” His dad rooted for the Harleys, so Dale rooted for the BSAs and Triumphs.

In Washington, Kansas, in the early ’50s, it wasn’t that easy to be a fan of British bikes. Although racers passed through Belleville, the nearest dealer was Hurlbutt Cycles in York, Nebraska—ninety miles away on gravel roads. When he’d ride up there for parts, half the time he’d need a whole different set of parts by the time he arrived. Sometimes, he broke down on the ride back from the garage. “My dad got awful tired,” he said laconically, “of coming to pick me up.”

Eventually, Dale got married and took over the farm. Around that time, the first Honda 750-Four came out. It didn’t break down, and was the only motorcycle he needed for almost twenty years. It sits as it was last parked, with a luggage rack, sissy bar, and huge Windjammer fairing that acknowledges Kansas’ scale; no matter where yer goin’, yer gonna sit fer several hours. If not days.

The first motorcycle he bought to restore and collect was a BMW R50. Keeping his farm equipment working necessitated a fully equipped shop, and to this day he and a couple of his twenty-five farm employees do all almost all restoration in-house (or more accurately, in-barn). Only painting and plating are sent out. Some of his bikes are hybrids—a NorVin, that Egli, and a couple of Terry Prince Vincents, for example. There’s no such thing as “correct” in the case of such bikes, but when he’s restoring a serial-production machine, he’s obsessive. To him, the whole farming/craftsman-restorer connection makes complete sense. “As a farmer,” he told me, “all I want to do is preserve my land and hand it on to the next generation in the best possible condition.”

That explains some of it. But stumbling across a collection of motorcycles like Dale’s, in a place like this, is only slightly less likely than Dorothy’s discovery of Oz. There’s not a Harley-Davidson to be found, and the two Indians are actually re-badged Velocettes. It’s skewed toward exotic marques and European machines that were never even common in their countries of origin, and utterly unseen in rural Kansas.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy takes her trip when she’s knocked out by the tornado, without ever leaving the farm. I guess that’s what Dale Keesecker does, too.