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.





Season of the Bike
by Dave Karlotski

 

I couldn't have said it better... ok I couldn't come close to saying it half that good
So true.

 

I like this bit

 

The letters MC are right there next to my blood group

THE OLD LADY

SHE SITS QUIETLY, DIGNIFIED IN SILENCE, WAITING…
A PICTURE IN HER NEW COLOURS, PRETTY AS WHATEVER YOU CAN IMAGINE…
IF WE COULD KNOW THE STORIES ONLY SHE COULD TELL
THE DAYS OF YOUTH AND SPEED, LONG RUNS FLYING THROUGH THE MORNING COLD, OR INTO THE LAZY HEAT OF SUNSET, ADVENTURES LOST NOW TO ALL SAVE THOSE WHO KNEW AND LOVED HER THROUGH THE YEARS.
SHE IS OLDER NOW, YET STILL HAS THE POWER TO DRAW YOUNG MEN WHICH WOMEN WOULD PAY A KING’S RANSOM TO POSSESS…..!
SHE WAITS FOR YOU. OR ME, TO WHISPER TO HER GENTLY, BRING HER TO LIFE IN AN INSTANT, AND SUDDENLY IN HER AWAKENING ALL IS NOT AS IT WAS…..
THERE IS A MENACE IN HER STANCE WHICH WARNS AS MANY WOMEN DO,
“MISTREAT OR ABUSE ME AT YOUR PERIL ! “ AND SHE’S THE ONE WHO CAN MAKE IT ALL RIGHT OR WRONG IN A HEARTBEAT, AND YOU WILL PAY DEARLY FOR ANY DISRESPECT.
SHE GROWLS A GENTLE WARNING LIKE A PREDATOR TO HER CUBS, BUT WILL BARK AND RUN AT THE LEAST ENCOURAGEMENT, TO PLACES WHERE LINES ARE BLURRED AND THE WORLD BECOMES A TUNNEL, BATTERED BY SOUND. WHERE AN INSECT HAS THE POWER OF A BULLET,
AND YET WITHIN ALL THE NOISE THERE IS A SILENCE SO PROFOUND THAT ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN THERE CAN DESCRIBE IT.
WE RETURN HER TO HER HOME, TO BE PAMPERED AS ANY WOMAN SHOULD BE, AND CARED FOR AS SHE COOLS WITH MUSICAL TINKLING SOUNDS.
AND ONCE AGAIN, PATIENTLY, SHE WAITS

It's an attitude we have, and our "old Ladies" are an integral part of our lives - no matter whether new, old, ratbike, they are all beautiful.............even in the cold of winter.........................

 

Well put, Juliet.

Speaking of smells.... ride by the cookie factory in Michigan City, IN.... AGHLARGHLHARLHGLHA! Kinda smells like vanilla-y sweetness. Pretty much the best ever. I dunno if they don't always make cookies or what but I always seem to smell it on the bike. Cause you can ride by in the car or stand across the street at King Gyros and not smell it.. weird.

 

Nice read Jules.

 

Great post Jules, says it all.