A kid will pull on a pair of shorts, don a tank-top or T-shirt, slide his feet into a pair of flip-flops, hop on a motorcycle and tear out of his driveway, hitting third gear before he’s traveled fifty yards and probably has the front wheel off the ground before he hits the first stop sign. Let’s hope he’s got a pair of sunglasses on, at least. “Eight feet tall and bullet proof.” That’s a phrase my grandfather used to describe young men with a wealth of fearless bravado and a dearth of common sense. I’ve fit the bill a few times. I only wore flip-flops once, however. The shift lever wore through the skin on the top of my big toe.
Trying to recapture the inner squid?
It’s a question I asked myself when the thought of buying a motorcycle first crept into my head, and that was over two years ago. It certainly wasn’t a thought that plagued me. While my attire as a young man on a motorcycle was certainly that of a SQUirrely kID, my behavior fell rather short. While my greatest threat to public safety was my disregard for the speed limit, I was also never the type to blow by the elementary school at freeway speed. There were also a lot of kids in my neighborhood. There was an unwritten rule in my town that anyone’s dad was everybody’s dad if one’s own sire was not present to dole out justice. Any behavior perceived as dangerous– which was trebly enforced should a child be present– any parent (this right was not reserved for the paternal family member) was granted free rein to take any action they saw fit. This covered anything from getting a thorough tongue lashing to a smack upside the head. And it didn’t necessarily end there. As often as not, when you got home you may well find you’d earned a “two-fer.” The greatest danger was losing the privilege of use of my dad’s bike, as it would be two years before I became a real grown up and bought my own machine. I behaved myself in the neighborhood.
Back to my grandfather. I was told by my dad the scrambler needed an oil change. We did all of that sort of thing at my grandfather’s. I gave him a call and headed over. I saw him standing in his driveway, so I thought it was a great opportunity to exhibit my skill. Grandpa was standing at the garage door, ready to go. He had a gravel driveway. I turned in, cracked the throttle, started a corner and hit the brakes– no ABS in those days!– which left Gramps standing in a cloud of dust, shaking his head. “You do crap like that, and it gives me a reason to hate seeing you on that thing.”
I was nothing if not flippant. “You can only die once.”
His head kept shaking. “Yeah. Youngsters like to tell you they’re not afraid to die. If you’re lucky enough to get to my age, you’ll start understanding you have to die. It changes things a bit.”
The babes will think you’re twenty again…
Uh-huh… Didn’t happen when I was sixteen. Didn’t happen when I was twenty, either. And it sure as hell won’t happen now. In fact, I gave up the bike forty years ago to get married, and I know damn well I’m not the only guy who’s done that. C’mon…
It’s a means of escape.
Always was, always will be– but it means so much more now than it ever did when I was too stupid to know there were things that truly needed escaping from. The country’s a mess. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Political turmoil, cop shootings, mass shootings and, rather than fix it, all we do is name call and fight. We’ve abandoned reason for rage. The decision between watching the news and going for a ride became the choice of no choice. I’d rather risk a bird in the face than watch somebody denigrate their neighbor for the sake of politics.
It’s a reward!
Damn straight it is. Long overdue, as well. While I’ve lived a blessed life, I’ve still gone through my share of shit and made a lot of sacrifices. There’s getting my kids into stable adulthood, paying my bills, working a stressful job and enduring a lot of self-inflicted personal struggles and coming out clean, and… I’ve earned it. I’m not the only guy whose come to the same conclusion, either.
It’s all of that, it’s none of that.
Tell me something about the above picture. Is it a sunrise, or a sunset? Does it matter? You’re going to look at it and probably say, “It’s beautiful,” and not give a damn about whether you laid eyes on it getting out of bed, or after you ate dinner. It’s just there, and you appreciate the moment, and hope you may get to encounter such a thing again. When I walked away from motorcycling, I told myself it was the “mature thing to do,” but there was a voice in my head telling me I was wrong. That’s what “maturity” does to some people. And if this brand of “maturity” gets ahold of you, you find yourself with a lifetime of “doing the mature thing” for all the wrong reasons.
In forty years, I went from essentially getting out of the shower and hopping on the motorcycle, to a person who puts on a suit of armor before he starts it up. I say it’s part of a deal I made with the woman I’m married to now, but it’s also an act of “maturity” I didn’t possess as a twenty-something. Common sense, I suppose, and acknowledgement I’m no longer eight feet tall and bullet proof. It’s still a choice, mind you. I don’t care if you ride in full gear or feel totally secure in a bandana. To each his own. That said, I confess to having no small amount of anxiety when I turned the ignition on my new ride. There was a small audience of total strangers standing around on the sidewalk, all grinning, excited to see my departure. They all said words of a congratulatory nature, but I also knew a few of them were waiting to see if I’d kill the engine at my first clutch release. There was no shudder, no jolt, no humiliating lurch to a stop. I even managed a wave as I pulled away. A more palpable terror arose when I took my first turn. And while it rose and fell with every stoplight, intersection, lane change, it diminished by the time I had a mile behind me. The basics were all back and, while I knew there was still much, much more to get re-acquainted with, the fear had ebbed to a tiny tingle at the base of my spine, and the excitement I felt suffocated it pretty damn well. It was like riding a bike.
With over five hundred miles on the odometer now, I know the chances of embarrassing myself have pretty much been left in the hands of fate and not due to any awkward fumbling. I still have much to learn– when does it ever stop?– many skills to hone, but the guy now clutching the handlebars is very different from the brat pulling onto the freeway in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and a pair of cut-offs. Yet, a big piece of that kid woke up the instant that parallel twin fired up and the rumble graced my ears. That kid, who spent every minute with a smile on his face, feeling the wind, smelling the smells, hearing the roar, appreciating every ride was an adventure, finding new “twisties,” new hills to climb, more valleys to plunge through, throwing a wave at every bike he encountered, simply because he couldn’t keep it all inside him, and finding joy in meeting a total stranger who felt exactly as he did for that one fleeting second. That came back, too, and in spades. I am now as old as my grandad the day I sprayed him with dust. And, yes, it has changed a bit. Motorcycles can be death machines. To not acknowledge that is foolish. I still get that slight tingle of fear before I start every ride. But, what those who don’t appreciate, those who don’t take the risk, will never experience what it really represents. LIFE. Raw, pure, naked life. Unencumbered, yet all engaging, totally focused yet utterly liberating. It’s freedom. It’s hopping on and leaving everything that threatened to drive you mad in your day-to-day existence, and allows you to simply live, if only for as long as the ride takes you. Whatever rationale I employed that allowed me to surrender something that had meant so much is lost to me now. It doesn’t matter, and I can’t even bring myself to regret it any more. I know what I’ve got back, and I have no plans of letting it ever get away again. Not as long as I’m still upright and breathing.