We do it,the ads tell us, to be cool, to ensure reproductive success, to display something beyond the financial reach of others. Yet conversations with riders and confirmed motorheads reveal latent poetry that seldom makes it into print. Freedom comes into the conversation. I wanted something that would go, I wanted to go. Like climbing a mountain, riding a motorcycle can push the horizon back, widen the view.
Motorcycles are multipliers and enhancers.
With them, we are powerful or graceful, far-ranging, equal to the agile birds or beasts. There is motion, vibration, breathing, galloping, swooping, alighting. In childhood they zoomed through mall parking lots on skateboards, and drive their parents wild at the dinner table, drumming fingers and fidgeting feet. The motorcycle is perfect for magnifying this perpetual motion, uphill and down, day and night. Many a young man I knew regularly came home to dinner with a broken clutch lever in one hand, or the seat of his jeans ripped out, just back from trying to master the local traffic rotary.