There is cold, and there is cold
on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with
coldhammers 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.
