motorcycles

The Waiting Game

There is no doubt about it, it is a strange mix of happiness and sadness. Seeing the motorcycle sitting silently in the garage, patiently awaiting me to flick the key and push the starter button. It has the patience of a motorized saint. It knows the day will come. It knows somehow. And I know as well. It sat, dirty, after the 6600 mile trip for a few days…for a few. But then I washed it and polished and put it back in its place, beside the wall in the garage to wait for the next time.

The adventure came to an end, a pause in between paradise. I see the handlebars just over the hood of my truck as I slowly make my way into the garage, squeezing the large truck in between the motorcycles and the other car. It is strangely silent when I turn the key off. I’ve found myself walking over and just staring at the bike, sometimes I start it just to hear the engine. One day the maps will come back out, just for fun, and routes will be considered and then I’ll know the time has come again. It might take months or days, or maybe hours.

Touring on a motorcycle is really simple. That is, if you want it to be. A few bags, a tent, a loose plan. Go alone for the most freedom. Riding a motorcycle alone is talking to yourself in your helmet as the hours whiz by with the wind and the road in your ears. There are many good conversations to be had inside a helmet. You are really never alone. Riding alone is stopping when you want and riding into the night.

Touring on a motorcycle, the complexity of life disappears. Simple things at home become more simple. Instant oatmeal and a pour-over mug of coffee is all it takes to jump start the day. Dinner is just as simple, cooked on a one-burner camping stove in a single pot. Two wheels, not four, no glass, just the wind and the rain and the cold and the heat. Go or don’t go. Sleep or don’t sleep. Either way your two-wheeled ticket to freedom will wait. Just as it does in the garage. It knows the waiting game well. Silently, knowing that the time will come when you will have to feel alive again. To feel human once more. To wonder and to laugh out loud inside the illusion of safety as you lean into turns and watch the world go by in a blur.

The Motorcycle

A motorcycle is most at home on back roads, leaning into turns and switchbacks. Not sitting in the garage or chomping miles on a highway. It will do these things but will taunt the rider at every chance. In the garage it will beckon, promising adventure and excitement. On the highway each exit represents a chance to feel alive and test your endurance and moxie.

These things, these motorcycles, are cumbersome when standing still. Like a seal on beach. But give them a road to go through their gears on and they come alive, like a seal in the water. Down gear and give it gas just as the curve comes up and gun it out of the end. Swing your body over to and from to follow the jaunts and snake-like line that the road takes. The motorcycle knows that you are smiling.

Motorcycles are often called death-machines but really they are a chance to live. They take one out of the mundane, out of comfort zones, out of life spent looking at a clock or the world through a windshield. There are roads that speak a language that only motorcyclists can come to understand, and that only motorcycles can decipher. On a motorcycle it is easy to realize that comfort is your enemy.

A motorcycle is a conglomeration of gears and steel and oil and gas. But it is more than a sum of its parts. It becomes a part of one’s body and psyche if enough time is spent on it, if enough patience is given to understanding the machine and its limitations. Experience will open up avenues to adventure and a motorcycle opens adventure up to life.

Speed Limits

 

For the last ten days I’ve been motorcycling around the Northeast and the Midwest.  Through the rolling mountains of New York, the Catskills and the Allegheny mountains touted small towns, luscious forests and hidden restaurant gems that serve farm-to-table foods together with local brews.

The Allegheny mountains through Pennsylvania seemed more rough and rowdy than the somewhat civilized backwoods of New York, but they too served up ready brews and food from local farmers.  The stars of the trip, no doubt, but the winding road through West Virginia and the amazing nature that goes along with such twisting scenery soothes the soul, even at 65 mph around 35 mph corners.

The Midwest’s flat lands were a welcomed respite from from the work of the winding roads that flattened out in Ohio, Indiana and Missouri.  The food changed too.  Now the long single-lane roads were dotted with small towns and more fast-food.  The roads were beautiful in themselves and offered thoughts that were often recited out loud in the helmet while the wind whistled constantly.

I love motorcycles because they allow the riders willing to search an experience that is lost on those that scale the highways in their air-conditioned automobiles.  The experience is sensory in all its forms: from the smells to the tastes of coming rains.  The motorcyclist recognizes the differences between the small back roads and the long reigning highways.

The small roads offer smells of pine and forest, of food and farms, of the dank and dusky smells of animal life to the warm and inviting smells of people cooking for others.  The highways offer time but at a price: the experiences are limited to oil in fryers to oil at the gas stations.  Everything is fast, from the food to the freeways.

I have lived on the highways for long enough, but the small back roads take getting used to.  Perhaps I will slow those corners to their posted speed limits one day.motorcycles