ODE TO MOTORCYCLING
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 weight 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 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 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 that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and
around, wider than Pana-Vision and 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 per
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 half a 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 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 assurances 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.