Motorcycling
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In its simplest sense, motorcycling is the act of riding a motorcycle. But for many the act becomes about much more than simple transportation.
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[edit] Riding vs. driving
| You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness. |
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Automobiles and similar vehicles are frequently designed to separate their drivers and passengers from the environment of the road. Drivers travel sheltered from the weather in a quiet, temperature-controlled environment.
Riders are in the middle of it all. The weather, the smells, the sights and sounds.
Similarly, while an automobile surrounds its driver so that the vehicle seems the primary actor, while a rider, sitting astride a motorcycle, almost surrounds it, so that he or she is the actor, and the motorcycle merely the instrument by which they implement their decisions.
Driving and riding are surprisingly different activities. Presumably, this is why in western countries operating a motorcycle requires separate licensing, in addition to that required for operating an automobile.
[edit] Community
| So it begins. You learn the basics of how to ride, make mistakes, not too serious if you're lucky, learn some more, futz around. Buy a bike and learn to fix it, because the fixing and the accompanying flush of self sufficiency are part of bikes' allure in an increasingly monolithic, unfixable world. Go on lots of rides, alone, with good friends, and occasionally near strangers, and alone some more. Spend the week waiting for the weekend. Grow to love traveling so much you begin to feel that only by going to places can you be at rest. Build a world made of maps and of dreams of using all of them. Maybe start to hate humankind for procreating with such stupid abandon, thereby daily stealing vistas and giving them to strip malls and condo villages, and taking snaky two-lanes through the tress and straightening them out under a hot sun and crapping them up with stores selling ever more repetitive products to the excrescence of consumers who sit idling in their cars and blocking the way for you to get out of there, out of there.
You become a member of a community, linked first and foremost to anyone who rides; when another bike passes, you take your left hand off the bar and give the Wave, and perhaps a thumbs-up if it's a particularly splendid day or road. |
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While there are a multitude of sub-cultures in motorcycling, there is still an over-arching community. No matter how much a rider may disdain another's choice in motorcycle, riding gear or style, that other is still a fellow rider, and above the cagers in automobiles. (An autmobile is a "cage," thus its driver is a "cager.")
Whether a rider prefers riding alone or in a long parade, or something in between, there is still a large social aspect to motorcycling. People join motorcycle clubs, online forums and emailing lists. Even though two people have nothing in common but motorcycling, they can still talk for hours, ride hundreds of miles together, brake bread and share a roof and consider each other the best of friends.
[edit] Women in motorcycling
| There is this myth that if you're a woman traveling alone people will instantly want to kill you. This is an example of where you shouldn't listen to anybody. So much of the way we live and the decisions we make in this world are based on fear. It's amazing.
Sure bad things happen. They always have . . . . . . And check it out - I highly doubt you'd find a traveler pumping you full of psycho-killer fear. No. Only people who stay at home and watch too much TV will pump you full of that shit. How the fuck do they know? Look at their doors: they probably have fifteen deadbolts and an alarm system to protect their rhinestone horse sweatshirts. And one thing that won't work on the road is acting vague. Vagueness isn't cute on a woman away from home and it can get you involved in some cute misunderstandings. Basically, don't giggle when you say "I don't know." I talk to anybody. I forget I'm a girl, and I'll go out with some truckdriver I met on the side of the road and have a few beers. And when he smiles at me with that glassy-eyed look that says he wants to blow out his chakras, and invites me to the back of his cab, I go "Yeah, sure, right. That's real classy" and wave goodbye. The louder you laugh and the farther apart you plant your feet, the more respect you'll get. Take up space because it's not a school dance. |
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—Erika Lopez[3] |
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Women are very much in the minority in motorcycling. And, even in wetern countries, the majority of women in motorcycling participate as passengers, riding pillion.
This minority status of women is painfully apparent in the derth of riding gear tailored to women.
[edit] Escape
| The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. | ||
| The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time . . . in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. | ||
The process and experience of motorcycling forces the rider into the present. The environment of the road engulfs the senses, and the need for constant awareness fills the mind. The total involvement in motorcycling leaves little room for worrying about tomorrow, or second-guessing yesterday.
Many motorcyclists ride as a way to relieve stress, to "clear the mind." Despite the fact that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance speaks very little about motorcycle maintenance, or Zen, it was really inevitable that the two would be linked.
“Zen is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism which strongly emphasizes the practice of moment-by-moment awareness and of 'seeing deeply into the nature of things' by direct experience."”
Motorcycling demands moment-by-moment awareness and, unlike driving, rewards the rider with direct experience.
[edit] Speed
| But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right . . . and thats when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at one hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it . . . howling though a turn to your right, then to the left and down the long hill to the Pacifica . . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . . The Edge. . . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to chose between Now or Later. | ||
| Put in a good word for Boanerges, my Brough bike. I had five of them in four years, and rode 100,000 miles on them, making only two insurance claims (for superficial damage to machine after skids), and hurting nobody. The greatest pleasure of my recent life has been speed on the road. The bike would do 100 m.p.h. but I'm not a racing man. It was my satisfaction to purr along gently between 60 and 70 m.p.h. and drink in the air and the general view. I lose detail at even moderate speeds, but gain comprehension. When I used to cross Salisbury Plain at 50 or so, I'd feel the earth moulding herself under me. It was me piling up this hill, hollowing this valley, stretching out this level place: almost the earth came alive, heaving and tossing on each side like a sea. That's a thing the slow coach will never feel. It is the reward of Speed. I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving swiftly. | ||
| Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. | ||
Not all motocyclists have a "need for speed." But many do. Speed draws many people to motorcycling, because the power-to-weight ratios of even low-power motorcycles rivals that of an expensive sports car. The power-to-weight ratio of high power sport bikes is well beyond any mass-production automobile. All for a fraction of the price of those automobiles.
High speeds on a motorcycle can also be more exhilirating than high speeds in an automobile. Not only is the sensation of speed greater since the rider is not separated from the environment of the road, but motorcycles negotiate turns by leaning. And the greater the speed, the great the lean, sometimes to the point of scraping parts of the motorcycle on the road. Some riders will point proudly to the worn-away parts of their motorcycle, proof that they take turns so fast that they must lean the motorcycle over to the limits of its capabilities.
[edit] Wrenching
| The bike struggled,showing signs it was feeling the strain,especially in the bodywork which we constantly had to fix with Alberto's favourite spare part - wire. He picked up this quote from somewhere attributting it to Oscar Galvez: 'When a piece of wire can replace a screw, give me the wire, it's safer.' Our hands and our pants were unequivical proof that we were with Galvez, at least on the question of wire. | ||
Motorcyclists will refer to maintenance or repair of a motorcycle as wrenching, as in "turning a wrench." More riders wrench on their own vehicles than drivers. UK motorcyclists refer to a wrench as a "spanner", and the activity of working on the bike is similarly known as "spannering".
Historically, wrenching was a necessary skill for riders, since the materials and technology used in motorcycles often meant that repairs had to be done on the road-side miles from home. Modern motorcycles are as reliable as automobiles, but the feeling that many riders have that their motorcycle is more than just a means of transportation leads them to want to do any wrenching on the bike themselves.
This drive to wrench reaches its zenith with rat bikes. Riders of rats eschew paying anyone else to work on their motorcycles on principle, and therefore do all their own wrenching.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ a b Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York
- ^ Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Perfect Vehicle: What It is about Motorcycles, 1997, W.W. Norton & Company, New York
- ^ Erika Lopez, Flaming Iguanas, 1997, Simon & Schuster, New York
- ^ a b Milan Kundera, Slowness: A Novel,1995, HarperCollins, New York
- ^ Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels, 1967, Random House, New York
- ^ T. E. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence to his Biographers Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, (edited by Robert Graves and B. H. Liddell Hart), 1963, Casell, London
- ^ Ernesto "Che" Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, 2003, Ocean Press, Melbourne
[edit] External links
- Season of the Bike "The difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life."
- Mailing List Roundup Comprehensive listing of motorcycle-related email lists.
- Avid Motorcyclist A comprehensive motorcycling related website featuring motorcycling news, reviews, techniques, gear and roads
