Why we ride

[Rob Hilding]

Don't know if this is a Derby - just saw this on the 851/888 board......

"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 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".

-Author  unknown.

[Goat_Herder]

  it's beautiful...

[corey]

this is how i try to explain it to everyone, but 90% of them just will never understand it.
you have to try it to know it, and even then, it's just not in the blood of some folks. they don't crave that type of exposure and freedom, they're too afraid of it.

[GLantern]

Awesome I need to share this.

[lawbreaker]

That's Fantastic...

and the very reason I DO NOT own a car

[thought]

awesome

[DoubleEagle]

Truer words were never spoken.

No wonder some of us become so enthralled.

We find ourselves in a world of unimaginable peace and power.

Under the Spell of another world.

Climb on and be whisked away to a world of thrills and adventure.

Soar like a Raptor, dart like a Fox chasing a Rabbit.

Gallop like a throughbred down the straights and dive in to the corners like a Cat after a Mouse.

Nothing like it !

Like other things that make you feel so good , it will probably someday be illegal.

Dolph     [moto]

[chixstrip]

We are all different in so many ways, yet all it takes is this one simple common interest that bring us all together. Amazing.

[chixstrip]

I think I'm gonna cry 

[DoubleEagle]

I think I'm gonna cry 

There's NO crying in Motorcycling .

Dolph

[WarrenJ]

I am disappointed it took till I was 45 to discover this, but maybe I appreciate it more now........

[speedknot]

Cool piece of literary work.  And yes, living in the North East and having the drive to get out there when its only 35* and sunny, I submit to being beaten with cold hammers only to come home to the warm ones I so desire.

[justinrhenry]

this forum is getting way too emotional for me.  next we'll be having group hugs and singing Kumbaya.

[El-Twin]

My eyes are still wet with tears of joy.

[datdude]

"Four wheels move the body, two wheels move the soul"  [moto]