Season of the Bike...

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Toyuzu · #1 Unread post by **Toyuzu** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 7:05 pm

I posted this before the hack attack, and I think it's worth a re-post. Here ya go:

Season of the Bike
By Dave Karlotski

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.

poppygene · #2 Unread post by **poppygene** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 7:47 pm

Yes! Glad you did the re-post! I'm not embarrased to tell you I had saved it to my hard drive the first time around. My favorite line is, "... a motorcycle summer is worth any price." That nails it for me.

Toyuzu · #3 Unread post by **Toyuzu** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 7:55 pm

It's my theme, Poppy. If my printer worked, I'd be carrying a copy at all times.

#4 Unread post by **Sev** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 9:04 pm

You can't see it, but I'm shaking right now. We've hit a cold snap, after 2 weeks of riding weather, it's now -12 and there's ice on the road, we're expecting to hit a whopping high of -2 tomorrow. I'm going into withdrawl, give it back, please give it back. My forecast goes up to friday, and it still says warmest day is a -1. Please give back riding weather, or at least no ice....

Toyuzu · #5 Unread post by **Toyuzu** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 9:28 pm

Jeff,

May your days from here on be perfect weather, and may you always have a Honda 599 to ride. (Even if that means riding a Suzuki Savage on roads devoid of ice in spite of weather below freezing.)

Enjoy the music of the ride!

Keyoke · #6 Unread post by **Keyoke** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 7:12 am

Absolutely beautiful!

Should carry a copy of that around with me to show to anybody who asks "why do you ride?"

Mag7C · #7 Unread post by **Mag7C** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 2:21 pm

Love it. It's so hard to explain to people why I ride, and all the ups and downs.

Especially felt the part about the cold, and then the peace of the trees on a perfect day. And the ending sums it up perfectly.

Did you write it? I'd like to print off a copy to keep under my seat.

Toyuzu · #8 Unread post by **Toyuzu** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 2:53 pm

No it was written by a guy named Dave Karlotski. It is readily available on the net at several sites, so I don't think there would be any problem with printing a copy for yourself. Just be sure to give Dave the credit.

#9 Unread post by **Skier** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 8:18 pm

I mirrored a copy on my website. Link's been in my sig for a bit.