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 January 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 weight
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 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 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 that fall through them. I
can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around,
wider than Pana-Vision and 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 per 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 half a 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 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.
