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I did not write this but I like it enough to post it.
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
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 Pana-Vision 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 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
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 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.
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