WHY WE RIDE

[toolinalong]

I suspect that most of you have run across this little story before, but as we begin a most welcome New Year I hope you will find it a comforting reminder. Enjoy.

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition. But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles an hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.
Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over a half dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty ssurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

Author Unknown

[Sunbeemer]

Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed

Beautifully true on the sea as well.

[snowprick]

Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed

Beautifully true on the sea as well.

Ever had a problem 10,000 feet up in a small plane?

[bmwdave52]

Well said.

[boxermania]

All so true indeed.

However, I don't think it can surpass the exhilaration of skydiving in the nude in the winter....

[wncbmw]

Nice little essay and the first part is somewhat current for me as I set here on New Years Day and think about a chilly ride before the predicted snow arrives!

I don't think it can surpass the exhilaration of skydiving in the nude in the winter....

Oh, the mental image!

[Beemeridian]

99

[allanj255]

Also true indeed. However, I don't think it can surpass the exhilaration of skydiving in the nude in the winter....

As an ex Para I think skydiving in the nude in the tropics beats the cold every time. (for Snowprick.. I skydived on to Fields Ave naked in June 1982 to celebrate my return from the Falklands.... There was some pictures in The Birds of Paradise Bar on Fields, but this is now closed. Just as well it was not pretty.)

Thats a good riding sentiment - first time I've seen it.

[TonyT607]

Great article. I re-read it every so often. It's "Season of the Bike" by Dave Karlotski.

[towerworker]

"Skydiving in the nude in winter"

When I had my accident two months ago I don't think I hit my head that hard.

[chris]

All so true indeed.

However, I don't think it can surpass the exhilaration of skydiving in the nude in the winter....

Please...no photos....

[duckdave]

Tony,
Thanks for identifying the work. I googled Dave Karlotski and found this, among other postings.

http://the751.tri-pixel.com/

Great reading. I'm still in the middle of it, but it tells the story of him finding a roll of cash ($751). After turning it into the authorities, it was not claimed, so returned to him. He decided to use the cash to see how much of North America he could see. Here's an excerpt of a part called Time Dilation:

Although it was a two-week trip, we were only actually in Newfoundland and Labrador for five days. That boggles my mind- those five days seem somehow bigger than the whole previous year. When I try to remember 1998 there are whole months missing- not amnesia, it's just that when every day is the same there's nothing to remember. I had a couple jobs but I really only remember a day or two from each- and that day repeated X times, over and over. Even when I look at the calendar to jog my memory all I see are empty spaces, a blank grid signifying idleness and distraction, a wasteland of lost time. I lost almost an entire year and it makes me want to weep.

Of those five days in Newfoundland, though, I remember every minute, from strapping the motorcycles down on the ferry to eating french fries soaked in gravy and cheese. Because everything was constantly changing- the land, the people, the price of gas- every moment was stamped and marked in my memory. It's got something to do with the way brains work, the way they compress data; if you have a routine, if one day is just like the day before, then the brain says, "Hey, I've already got this memory- I don't need another copy." That's how weeks of my life seem to disappear.

Anything different, though, gets remembered. It can be painful to live without a routine, exhausting to make countless small decisions when you don't have a template to follow, and frightening to not have the reassurance that what you're doing must be O.K. because it worked yesterday- but times of flux get remembered, so that when you look back in your mind there's at least something there. This is one of the secret magics of travelling, a kind of time dilation that stretches minutes and hours out until you have to find another way to measure time; with miles, maybe.

So that's what I'm going to do: I'm going to buy memories. I'm going to get back on my motorcycle and ride until that money is gone and I've ridden across 751 dollars' worth of North America. Instead of watching time erase behind me on a mnemonic whim, I'm going to build a linked chain of places visited and people met and then polish each one in my mind like a jewel.

One of my New Year's resolutions was to stop time. This'll be a good start.

[Just-Beeming]

I really like that part about being ' beaten with cold hammers.'

been there

[TonyT607]

While we're on the subject of readingl this is one of my favorites:

"The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles"

By Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Read a preview here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=gX-yd9 ... il#PPA7,M1

[Sunbeemer]

Duckdave - thanks for turning us on to Karlotski's 751 blog. I've been enjoying it immensely! Perceptive and eloquent.

[iowabeakster]

Even when I look at the calendar to jog my memory all I see are empty spaces, a blank grid signifying idleness and distraction, a wasteland of lost time. I lost almost an entire year and it makes me want to weep.

Man does this describe the last three years of my life. But the motorcycle is paid in full, as well as our cars, and our business. We are self employed. We have some cash that is not owed to anyone but ourselves. Nice weather cannot come soon enough.