Infatuations

I go to sleep thinking about motorcycles, whereupon I dream of motorcycles. I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t have this obsession.

Originally published in BMW Owners News.

One morning a few years ago, when I was still an office slave, my boss and I pulled into the company parking garage at the same time. She was in her aging Subaru wagon. I was astride my 2007 BMW R1200 RT.

“Traffic was terrible today!” she opined as she opened the car door. It was true: a couple of accidents had caused a major snarl. Still, I was nonplussed.  “As long as I’m on my motorcycle, I’m happy,” I said spontaneously. “Even if I’m standing still.”

This produced a puzzled look. “It’s amazing that something gives you so much pleasure,” she said, then added: “What is it about riding a motorcycle that you like so much?”

The truth is, I don’t know. I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t have this obsession. It emanates from somewhere deep in the subconscious, like the desire to procreate, eat ice cream, or avoid house chores.

I go to sleep thinking about motorcycles, whereupon I dream of motorcycles. I read motorcycle magazines. I watch motorcycle movies. Friends give me motorcycle-related presents at Christmas. I have five motorcycles battling for space in my garage and am constantly perusing the interclouds for more. After a day of riding, I go out to the garage in the gloaming and stare at motorcycles, drink in hand. I can do this endlessly. Or until my wife calls the sheriff to perform a safety check on the seemingly hypnotized man in the garage. 

If I could observe myself from outside my body, I would be really worried. I think I’m a multi-dimensional guy with a wholesome and balanced perspective on life. But it seems like every one of those dimensions involves two wheels. Go figure.

Here, in no particular order, are just a few of the things that fuel the infatuation: 

• Putting your BMW GS up on the hydraulic lift and taking three days to do a one-hour valve adjustment because, well, you’re retired, there’s good music on the box, and you enjoy the process.

• Pressing the button on your freshly rebuilt Honda SOHC engine, after six months of work, and hearing it snap immediately to life. 

• Sitting up high in the cab of your friend’s pickup, music on the box, filthy dirt bikes in the back, and discussing how fast we could be if only we weren’t so slow (which is kind of like saying if we weren’t so ugly, we’d be handsome).

• Reading the text message thread from your buddies after a great day of riding, confirming that everyone got home safely, had a fantastic day—and that we’ll be doing it again next week.

• Celebrating a great, all-day ride with one or more of the following activities: 1) Watching motorcycle racing on TV; 2) Reading a book about motorcycles; or 3) Shopping for more motorcycles on the internet.

• Enjoying the smell of an air-cooled engine tinkling gently as it cools in the garage.

• Completing your first track day in the rain, after being completely petrified, and realizing that smoothness is everything, and rain riding can actually be fun.

• Rolling on the throttle when riding your dirt bike, and feeling the back end step out in a controllable fashion, sending roost in the general direction of your best riding buddy.

• Having to pirouette carefully through the garage because there are so many motorcycles.

• Discovering that you forgot to close the fuel tappet on your ancient carbureted bike, which lives near the furnace pilot light in the garage. And realizing, through some miraculous intervention, that you are still alive.

• Watching Moto GP, Supercross, and the Dakar Rally on TV, after a day of riding. Even better, realizing that your wife is sitting on the couch with you, knows most of the riders on the grid, and has taken to rooting for Chase Sexton and Malcolm Stewart.

• Being an hour from home at the end of a long ride and realizing that it would be much more fun to take the small roads instead of the superslab, even though it will add an extra half hour to a six-hour day. 

• Listening to the unending chatter about various mechanical gremlins at a vintage club meetup, all of which solves nothing but is endlessly amusing. 

• Finding a group of riders with whom you are completely compatible: not too slow, not too fast, not too close, and capable of compelling conversation over a range of topics—including, but not limited to, motorcycles. And no politics!

• The enjoyment of riding your trials bike in your tiny cul de sac, doing progressively smaller circles and controlled wheelies. And the look of puzzlement on your neighbors’ faces as they watch you do these things.

• Parking your motorcycle among hundreds of others at Laguna Seca Raceway, and watching riders strafe the Corkscrew at exactly three times the speeds you went through there on your last track day. 

• The satisfaction of fixing your motorcycle by the roadside after its fuel pump controller dies, by creating a bypass using cut-up sections of your heated vest cord. 

• Realizing that your wife has recently been asking to go for rides, instead of you having to cajole her into going.

• Enjoying the parking lot conversations that inevitably take place with car drivers who used to ride—and realizing how lucky you are to still be on two wheels and supplying them with this vicarious experience. 

• Realizing how good you are at the age-old game of guessing the year and model of a motorcycle by its sound alone, and having that guess confirmed as it passes by moments later. Even better, realizing that your wife has somehow become accomplished at the same game.

• Enjoying the thrumming pleasure of riding your 50-year-old Honda CB400F on a quick afternoon jaunt, rather than your giant, modern bike, and realizing that bigger isn’t always better. 

• Having the good sense to step off your giant, 500-pound motorcycle when it starts to tip over in an off-camber parking lot. And appreciating those crash guards you installed a few months earlier, which you promptly sand and touch up with a rattle can. 

• Listening to the soft, rhythmic idle on the 1969 Honda Z50 minibike you just restored, and realizing that, in that moment, you have been transported to your 12-year-old self, puttering around the neighborhood unmolested by neighbors, police, or troublesome things like registrations or insurance.

• Setting the timing on a vintage motorcycle with your 50-year old strobe light and being mesmerized, yet again, by the hypnotic illumination of timing marks as they rotate past.   

• Adjusting the screw-type valve adjusters on your old airhead BMW and realizing that you’re manipulating the two wrenches in a reflexive way, without the intervention of actual thinking.

• Thumbing through issues of Cycle Word from the ‘70s and being transfixed by all the ads hawking expansion chambers, oversize piston and cylinder kits, lace-up leather boots, and open-face helmets. And realizing that you once bought that stuff, and dressed like that.

• Listening to the crackle of the ancient radio on your workbench, its exterior scarred and chipped by a thousand encounters with the garage floor, as it blares the best motorcycle song ever written, Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”

• Riding past Joan Baez’s old house in Carmel, California, and having Joan Baez come on the Bluetooth speakers in your helmet at that exact moment. 

• Seeing the overarching joy of one of your motorcycle safety students when they realize they have just passed the written and riding exams and are about to embark on the same infatuation that you have been enjoying for the last 50 years.