Before my most recent motorcycle ramble, a 700-mile round trip to Des Moines, Ia. over Father's Day weekend, my friend Paul gave me a look that haunted me in the days before I left.
The look said, "You are a deranged fool or a selfish fucking asshole for riding a motorcycle when you have an eight-year-old kid. It is one of the things I have to overlook in order to like you. And I do overlook it. But you're still a selfish fucking deranged foolish asshole for doing this."
(Between good friends, a look can say a lot.)
And he's right, of course. Once my wife asked me whether, if I die on my motorcycle, she can tell people I died doing what I loved. I told her she could tell them whatever she wanted, but she should know that as I'm hurtling through the trees, if it comes to that and if I have time to think, I will be full of regret, will be counting up, until I hit the tree, all the other pleasures in life that this one pleasure will now snuff out.
And yet I do it anyway, and so do many other people with heavy responsibilities to other human beings, and a lot to lose.
I spent much of the Des Moines trip creating this answer to Paul's silent question, Why?
Here, with no expectation of convincing anyone of anything (least of all Paul), is "Why."
This looks like one great trip. If your purpose was to make people envious — me, especially — you succeeded. But did you know that they now make cars — four wheels, more comfortable and safer than motorcycles, and you can listen to music while you ride?
Well, there’s this, too (from my Murray Cycle Diaries):
From inside a car, you have time and detachment to see things and decide to remember them and imagine how you’ll describe them when you get back home.
Whipping through the air on a motorcycle, there’s altogether too much happening. All the senses are working at once. And working hard.
I see cows in the paddock but an argument ensues when my nose swears it’s a pig farm.
I feel the cool before I smell the fish before I see the lake.
It’s raining now, but the wind got heavier five minutes ago.
Buzz past a lawn, smell fresh grass clippings, ride through rode construction, smell fresh dirt, pass a logging truck, smell the wood, ride into town, smell for your lunch.
I couldn’t tell you what the Molson brewery in Montreal looks like but I remember how it smells.
Pine fumes are such a powerful intoxicant that I worried that if I was pulled over I would fail a sobriety test. (A Mountie spokesman reported that the American was riding at three times the legal limit of exultation.)
The instantaneous deep heartwarmth of an occasional sunburst on a cloudy day.
The quick whiff of wood smoke.
And the one you have to earn: the salty air of the Atlantic Ocean.
Riding down a tiny asphalt path of a road so close to the farms it seems we’re riding on them. The horse loam transforms the Triumph into Taffy, the leather-mouthed orange pony that I rode when I was eight. I’m riding her bareback, charging up hill and flying down dale and galloping, galloping, galloping, desperately, angrily, joyfully. She thinks she’s running away with me. No, I’m running away with her!
Because it is so overwhelming, riding a motorcycle is constantly frustrating. I’m aware I’m taking in too much too fast and I realize my billowing brain will leave me with few words, and only a useless emotion-memory, impossible express to anyone who doesn’t ride and unnecessary to explain to anyone who has.
“Couldn’t you just slow down a little and savor it?” a friend asks. Umm ….
The only way to alleviate the anxiety and pain is to lump all this infinite experience together and tell myself that I’ve seen it, smelled it, heard it, felt it all before.
But if I do, I will dismiss the smell that I can’t assign.
“What is that?” I ask myself in those words inside my helmet and I inhale deeply, twice and three times and fill my chest with it and let it seep into me.
By process of elimination I finally recognize it as the summer fragrance, encountered more frequently but less gratefully in my youth, of happiness itself.
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Writing Boots: Friday Happy Hour Video: Why I ride a motorcycle, Paul
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Writing Boots: Friday Happy Hour Video: Why I ride a motorcycle, Paul
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Writing Boots: Friday Happy Hour Video: Why I ride a motorcycle, Paul
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Writing Boots: Friday Happy Hour Video: Why I ride a motorcycle, Paul
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Writing Boots: Friday Happy Hour Video: Why I ride a motorcycle, Paul