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 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.
Written by someone who understands...
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VTRgirl
- Posts: 2281
- Joined: Mon May 16, 2005 3:22 pm
- Location: Sunny Queensland, Great Southern Land
Written by someone who understands...
If you ate yourself would you become twice as big or simply disappear?
EXCELLENT VTRgirl 
A good read VTRGirl. I didnt know though its gets cold in Oz -
harryvdirtcheese
- Posts: 5
- Joined: Thu May 06, 2004 11:19 am
- Location: east of eden
Or you could try the musical version - Julie Andrews meeets Hunter S. Thompson
Get a flight to Las Vegas
book into motel on Tropicana
wander down the strip till you get to Pecos
Hire a Harley at ScreaminEagle (yeah I know - but it is essential)
Thud into the Seirra Nevada, at max (mechanical sympathy) speed about 50 mph - hum Hotel California - exit into Red Rock Canyon (sunday, bloody sunday, dirty deeds done dirt cheap) - roller coaster road - but slow for the awesome view) suddenly everything makes sense (but it doesn't last)
3am go for a ride down the strip - (bright light city, gonna set my soul on fire - Elvis version) - get filmed by movie crew - head back to blood spattered motel (drugs raid) meet some interesting ladies in town for the big fight, indulge in sunstance abuse till breakfast time - head to diner - 27 cups of black coffee half dozen eggs over easy, start again.
Get a flight to Las Vegas
book into motel on Tropicana
wander down the strip till you get to Pecos
Hire a Harley at ScreaminEagle (yeah I know - but it is essential)
Thud into the Seirra Nevada, at max (mechanical sympathy) speed about 50 mph - hum Hotel California - exit into Red Rock Canyon (sunday, bloody sunday, dirty deeds done dirt cheap) - roller coaster road - but slow for the awesome view) suddenly everything makes sense (but it doesn't last)
3am go for a ride down the strip - (bright light city, gonna set my soul on fire - Elvis version) - get filmed by movie crew - head back to blood spattered motel (drugs raid) meet some interesting ladies in town for the big fight, indulge in sunstance abuse till breakfast time - head to diner - 27 cups of black coffee half dozen eggs over easy, start again.