Summer, or even spring, isn’t here yet but Tony Porrazzo is ready to ride. The Polson resident hasn’t been on a motorcycle since May 22, 2010 when he was injured in a wreck on Montana Highway 35, but he’s itching to get back on his iron horse.

“[The crash] won’t slow me down for a minute,” Porrazzo said. “As soon as I woke up, I was ready to ride.”

A southern California native, Porrazzo has had gasoline in his veins from a young age. His father, he said, was a gearhead, owning and tinkering with anything that had a motor. Tony quickly picked up on the hobby, riding what he estimates as an average of 10,000 miles each year.

“Sometimes I’ll haul my bike down to Vegas and start from there,” he said. “I make a lot of trips in the summer, wherever I feel like going. Find me a hot springs and I’ll go.”

It’s hard to nail down a favorite trip, Porrazzo admits, as any time on the bike is a good time, but a three week jaunt from Las Vegas to Key West was definitely a highlight.

“Each is as good as the next,” he said. “I ride with a great group of people, so anywhere we go we have a good time.”

When not riding, Porrazzo serves as the city of Polson’s water and sewer superintendent, a position he’s held for the last seven years. He’s worked for the city for the last 20 years after moving to the area in 1984.

“I came up to visit a friend, liked it, went home, packed up and moved,” Porrazzo said.

For a guy that enjoys working on bikes, supervising a city division seems like the perfect match.

“Working for the city is just one large ongoing project,” he said. “The project doesn’t end, it just keeps going; it’s a constant, building and continuing the growth of a city.”

His passion outside of work has also manifested itself into a small motorcycle shop he runs just south of Polson called the Iron Horse Livery (“Are you ready for LIFE behind bars?” the shop’s website inquires). From there he builds and tweaks bikes, including six of his own, some of which are antiques: a 1962 and 1965 Harley Davidson and his everyday bike, a 2009 Harley Davidson Electra Glide Ultra Classic. His lifelong love affair with the bike culture and the inherent risk is something he said he’d accepted long before the wreck.

“[Stuff] happens,” he said. “It’s just a part of it. You hear about them all the time. I was very fortunate that it happened here, just being in this community.”

This community helped make the process easier, Porrazzo said. The wreck happened while en route to Ferndale and his lower right leg sustained so much damage that it was amputated a few inches below his knee. Porrazzo occasionally uses a wheelchair and has a prosthetic leg, sometimes using crutches to get around in the winter weather. A new, improved prosthetic arrived earlier this week.

“I was out of the hospital in July,” he said. “Two days later, I was back at work.”

Porrazzo admits the support he had from the community made his recovery that much easier. From the immediate and professional response he got from emergency workers on scene to the doctors and nurses at the hospital, Porrazzo said it was a incredible feeling to have such an intimate connection with people he knew and others he met as he recovered.

“You don’t know how to thank people like that, other than to say thank you,” he said. “There was a benefit put on by my friends and the whole thing was spectacular, it helped pay for the huge expense that goes along with [medical care]. I felt pretty fortunate to be here in this place.”

Porrazzo contributes to the community himself in other ways, serving as captain of the Polson Fire Department and even earning the 2009 Fireman of the Year award, an honor that gives him great pride.

Yet in his free time, the joy of riding is like nothing else, Porrazzo said, and he won’t be stopping anytime soon.

“It’s just the connection with the weather, the scents, the smells and a sense of freedom,” he said. “You’re not encaged in a car. It’s an experience, it’s a passion. People ski or surf; I ride.”