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 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