Here are more thoughts on motorcycling that came to me in waves recently as I futzed around with my Harley’s balky electrical system. Please excuse their disorganization and untidiness of grammar.
– Marlow
Details of an early Harley Davidson motorcycle
Scratch a motorcyclist and inside you will find a pilgrim.
No enthusiast washes his motorbike after a long ride in a rainstorm. The same goes for rental cars rain or shine but for different reasons.
Motorcycling should be the original good time had by all but sadly is experienced by a very few souls.
Motorcycling blue highways like repeatedly visiting Paris leads one to a more intimate knowledge of life’s fragility and elegance.
Motorcycling’s pleasures are not momentary and the situations its devotees sometimes get themselves into are scary, yet its expense and personal toll are quite acceptable.
When a good ride is had, all the riders dig it, yet a clear and silent yearning soon arises inside them to immediately go out and motor along another road.
Smartphones are utterly useless. They allow their owners to nibble on the edges of the world. How easy and comforting. They can only give you answers and false senses of connection, completion and knowledge. Motorcycling gives you questions, opportunities for creation, discovery, and a taste of life’s unlimited unfinishedness.
When it is raining, snowing, sleeting or blowing outdoors and riding is not possible that day:
• Close your eyes and think of your last ride.
• Shut your eyes tight and think of that road.
• Lie still and think of the pavement
• Lie back and think of the landscape.
• Lie still and think of a new way to take that corner.
Motorcycling isn’t about sitting, thinking, or sitting and thinking. It’s an active thing at the edge of our personal and the universe’s existence. There are no illusions when riding — just doing, being and belonging — almost a communion at times with truth
Motorcycling does not give one ulcers. It cures them.
Ride only when your mind is clear. Anticipate and plan for what is coming on the asphalt. Ride gracefully without bumping into things. And don’t run into the curb.
Motorcyclists don’t require fashionable riding gear. They don’t owe it to anyone. Not to their spouse, not to their fellow riders, and especially not to random folks along on the road. Fashionable is not some rent payment for occupying a space marked “rider” to those who have watched TV programs or movies about motorcyclists. Safe gear is good enough.
Group riding
When you screw up during a group ride — apologize and analyse. Apologies and lessons learned are the Gorilla Glue of group riding and a longer riding life.
Motorcycling is a silent movie — the rider provides the piano music.
Dare to excel when on two wheels. Mediocrity is life shortening in my riding experience. Getting the most out of a ride, even the short ones, means always striving for mindful, technical excellence. No excuses, please.
There are no excuses for poor riding technique — just hospital bills.
Don’t make or give excuses. The road doesn’t.
One’s motorcycling skills do not progress funeral by funeral, but stumbling by stumbling.
Stumbling is not falling, but crashing is. Stumblings, while sphincter clenching, are ground gaining, learning opportunities. Stumblings help prevent future crashings.
I have been run off the road into ditches several times by car drivers. One of my darker reactions was to consider proposing that driver’s training should include all prospective car licensees be pushed off a bicycle that is going 15 MPH onto the pavement, so they know what it’s like.
When a road’s cliff edge approaches, a rider’s quiet faith in his skill has to take over.
Where a motorcyclist’s skill and faith therein must meet
Keep a riding diary — it will keep you someday.
Bikers do not worry much about the future as a central thing. When we do worry, we know that heavy worrying is as effective as trying to solve calculus problems by skipping rope. The road has taught us that real troubles in life don’t come into a worried mind, heart or soul, but blindside us on dry, backcountry, two lane roads at 4 o’clock on some idle Wednesday afternoon. Write about that, fellow biker diarists.
Riders do not write because we have answers. We write because we have stories and lots of questions.
Part of rider’s job as storyteller is to show people pockets of the world that they don’t know. The more we share, the more man won’t judge.
Ride sober. Write drunk. Revise when hungover.
Compared to writing, riding is easy.
An old biker once told me that the stories we motorcyclists tell about the road are divided into those which did not happen exactly as we recall them and those which will not matter unless we recall them.
Riders universally find interstate roads revolting. Why do so many others love them?
Interstates are the most unpleasant and the most expensive of all roads.
I say “No thank you” when I pass by an interstate on ramp. I will waste none of my two-wheel time riding them.
Riders look at cars on the interstate like railroad cattle cars — mere pens which if not delivering their occupants up to occasional roadside slaughter waste countless billions of hours of their cattle’s time in traffic jams in soulless manscapes of endless concrete denatured desolation.
You can easily see a person’s character by how he rides and treats those — especially those who can do nothing in response to his acts — whom he meets or rides with along the way.
I shouldn’t have to write this, but . . . . motorcyclists are nonconformists and exceptions to the rule. We riders know that the world values and celebrates living conformists and dead rebels. We avoid those two states like the plague.
While social media is eating the world alive given its complex and unforeseen consequences, motorcycling is simplicity distilled.
Motorcycling is art. It does not hang in museums, but it still is art.
Motorcycling is art (photograph courtesy of Neil A. Miller)
Approach the road like a sculptor approaches a block of stone. Somewhere along the road is a close-to-perfect form with the features of a beatific goddess. A rider’s ability to chip off all extraneous matter will let the road’s divine excellence stand forth for itself.
When riding, no one cares a fig whether fiscal year budgets are balanced, the national treasury is refilled, or public debt is reduced. Life on two wheels is balanced, full and debt free.
Motorcycling requires two of life’s main ingredients: forward motion and balance.
Remember, dear riders, that despite being 70% water, we can’t go through it when it deepens or its velocity and intensity strengthen. Go around it or wait it out.
Sort of like Lennon and McCartney said, the joy you get while on the road is equal to or more than that you give to the road.
The road is a library without shelves. Riders are its readers, and every curve is a novel. If you read to learn from a book, riders are bound to learn from the road. A good road properly read puts its riders ahead.
Driving a car is like modern communications, while motorcycling is a conversation. Most communication and car driving in today’s day and age are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses. Two wheeling is a constant back and forth between the road and the rider.
Only the rider can keep a kickstandless motorcycle upright.
When encountering a curve in life, do as motorcyclists do — lean into it, pick your line and keep your weight on the outside peg.
Motorcyclists must become intimate with and apply while riding the underlying wisdom of Margaret Thatcher — “Cocks may crow, but it’s the hen that lays the egg.” There are two kinds of riders — talkers and doers. Choose wisely.
Riders daily encounter and overcome the difficult. So, every now and then, they should choose the impossible.
All great roads are ridden. The challenge is to find them.
Riders are like hunters. They wear clothing that alternately camouflages and announces their presence to the whirling worlds of endless yellow strips on the pavement on cool moonless nights and wheat covered rolling hills under blast furnace hot, blue skies. Riders chew up the faded grey road quickly across these still landscapes. They grip the handlebars, lean and look forward like hunters peering through their rifle long scopes at their quarry. Smart ones are helmeted. Pure and perfect black when new, these lids are nicked, scratched, stained, and filthy, like their wearers. Riding like hunting dirties things plenty fast. Neither laughs, and both are vigilant, since they respect their quarry. Both suck up the air for the wind’s secrets. Both know that being careless won’t get them anywhere faster. They were not born to pass their time by texting on the phone in a coffee shop. They know not to pursue their passion under black stormy clouds which hide vengeful spirits. From a distance, both are invisible as if they were the earth stood up and moving forward.
Like horse riders, motorcyclists nudge and ask, not pushing or telling, to make the road and bike theirs.
When a ride is cold, damp, snowy or sleety, hug the tank and engine below like it’s your prom date.
Do not ride with nothing on — except for the radio. Turn it off.
Behind every great ride lies a minor traffic violation or two.
Never argue with the road, it’s harder and will resist you to your detriment. The road like a retail customer is always right.
Swearing out loud on the road is a natural outcome of meeng an unexpected road challenge. In fact certain roads encourage cursing.
Beartooth Pass Highway in Montana: a long, demanding and
mostly guardrailless ride that evoked cursing of surprise and delight
Riders dedicate themselves to the road they deserve and desire. The road gives them peace of mind. Deserve your delight.
Stealing an afternoon for a ride is not stealing. It’s an investment that grows forever in your heart and soul.
Painting by the numbers between the lines works with oils but is not always feasible or desirable with motorcycles.
Don’t wait for the perfect day and conditions. Ride.
We motorcyclists truly own the country. Ours is not a government of the people, for the people, by the people, but a government of riders, for riders, by riders. The rest of our countrymen are slaves, and social media and apps like Uber are their masters. Convenience rules. All the more reason to ride.
We enthusiasts should learn from the exceptional people of the diverse roadside cultures across our country. I am speaking of the men and women who live and love in a world that is not gifted with the privilege of location, birth or fortune, but one that is built on their hard work and dependent on the mortgages they place on their children’s lives by their birthing and raising them there. We must cherish them and do them no damage. We are thus duty bound by our travel and acquaintance.
The recipe for motorcycling, all motorcycling, is the art of applying the seat of one’s jeans to the saddle of the bike.
During any truly joyous ride, I believe the rider cannot be omniscient in advance about what he will face. This suspense of a ride intrigues the rider like a mystery novel does its reader. What’s gonna happen keeps readers and riders turning the page and rounding each twist, turn and unknown curve.
Be extra careful when riding two up that your motorcycle triangle does not become a wrecktangle.
Ride long enough and far enough and you will see and hear the ghosts of long gone riders. They are there on empty roads, at dusty intersections, in small town cafes, and old decrepit gas stations whispering to you to turn this way or that, slow down or speed up, eat here, or smile when a stranger smiles at you. Look for them. Listen to them.
If motorcycles disappeared off the surface of the earth, human life would be severely diminished. No more riders, very few OMG moments, no secret worlds uncovered, no pilgrims, nor pilgrimages made.
Better to ride and be thought foolish or disreputable than to stay at home and be thought respectable.
Long road trips lead riders past a lot of water. We also pass a lot of water along these roads as well.
Only on the road are there free lunches for the mind and soul. They’re just around the next curve.
What you spend years riding to see may be destroyed overnight. Ride anyway.
On the road, riders face impossible situations, simply since we are not those who find it easier to live in the world we are given than to explore it. Remember the impossible is temporary not permanent, an opinion not a fact, and at rock bottom just a dare.
Most times riders are called to follow where well laid paths lead. But it is special when they travel where there is no path. Please leave a trail for the rest of us.
Easy riding requires hard planning.
Riding is not for the famous but for the anonymous.
The internet can provide you thousands of answers. A motorcycle ride can bring you the right one.
Motorcycling is a form of escape. What classes of men should we expect to be most hostile to this idea of escape? Three of them off the top of my head include jailers, fascists and commies.
The road not ridden is the most potent toxin generated in a motorcyclist’s body. It causes physical and spiritual wreckage if allowed to well up within.
Make friends not enemies on the road.
Most wonder what just happened. Some watch what happens. Riders make things happen.
A lifetime of riding puts us at extreme risk of meeting chance, coincidence, miracles, and, if we’re real fortunate, the divine.
Riding makes even the most hardened two wheeled enthusiasts converts to a religion of the road. It is why the sharp eyed will spot certain talismans dangling on their rides.
Motorcycle guardian bell talisman
Riders rarely die from desire but often from over indulgence.
Luck doesn’t live out on the road. Luck lives in casinos and cities. Riders know in the big city whether they get hit by a bus or run over by a driver who’s on their damn cellphone when they roar up behind them, that’s luck. Out on the road motorcyclists can thrive, survive or surrender. It’s determined by their skills, strength of purpose and bare spirit. Riders cannot blink, not once, not ever. Period.
Being astonished on a ride is good, being surprised not so much.
If you want to survive the hazards along the road, make habit your friend. Habit will sustain you. Habit is persistence in practice
All riders choose the wrong option sometimes. When they do, the good ones don’t give up or feel bad. Rather, they keep their head and make things right.
If you still are seeing billboards, you haven’t ridden far enough out of town yet.
I shall never see a billboard as lovely as a tree.
While not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious, enthusiasts know that motorbike riding is.
Backroad country is the land of you’re on your own.
Riders over their lifetimes pass through periods of barbarism, then decadence and finally into being well mannered. Whether this is due to the road or divine intervention I am agnostic.
I am more and more unsure about the truth of the old saw “Loud pipes save lives.” My audiologist loves it.
My audiologist believes “Loud pipes mean hearing aids.”
For us older riders, progress might have gone on too long. But the road never does.
For motorcyclists to meet the challenges of the road, they must first calm what lies within themselves.
Patently obvious #1: motorcycle riding is a treasure hunt.
Riding helps us understand how Shakespeare wrote all those one liners.
For example . . . . no leave take I; for I will ride, as far as land will let me, by your side. Richard II Act I, scene 3
Easy Riding Will
A motorcycle rider must know his limitations.
Before starting your morning ride, brush your teeth and then sharpen your mind. The road will then hone your senses.
Patently obvious #2: the road has no tinsel, real or fake.
Some say that motorcycling is the upright expression of horizontal desire. Sleep on that for a while.
Riding either makes you laugh or kills you.
Patently obvious #3: Riders must have their wits about them. Half measures here are deadly.
The two most common reactions of riders on the road can be expressed as punctuation marks
! ?
The road enlivens, encourages, sensitizes and finally educates us.
Motorcycling blue highways sometimes requires putting off till the day after tomorrow, what you had planned to do today and tomorrow.
Two motorcycling rules of the road:
• Simple and best are bedfellows.
• Don’t go with the crowd, since you likely won’t go any further than the crowd.
On your first cross country trip on a motorcycle, you see such perfect things — bucket list things. On your second such trip, you see things that are not so perfect but neglected, withering or decaying. With your third long journey, you seek out more examples from your second trip rather than from your first.
Riding back roads has made me reconsider my life’s “woulds” and “shoulds” and “wills” and “shalls” as being for the most part wrong.
After spending many years on backcountry roads and towns, I remain taken by just how few young people I saw anywhere out there.
As a storytelling rider, be aware that many of your readers already believe you have a fairly thin grip on reality to begin with.
Take all riders’ denials as admissions.
Riding old turnpikes and county roads is like travelling back in time.
I recall dreaming about motorcycling when I was seven. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just goofed off, I suppose.
Inside every child is a motorcycle rider. The problem is how to remain a rider once he grows up.
There’s a lot riders don’t know. It’s just a fact of life. Seek wise counsel.
When you stop improving your two wheeled skills, it’s time to stop riding. This takes a different kind of courage, since when we began to ride, we were courageously doing what we couldn’t do yet to learn how to do it.
The purpose of riding is to discover your roads. Your life’s work is to develop your riding skills. The totality of one’s riding comes into focus when you give up the road.
Motorcycling washes the dust of daily life off our souls.
Seeing something captivating along a deserted highway sometimes felt like I was stealing. More than a few times I would turn the bike around to go back, look at it and steal it again.
Without great solitude at times no serious riding is possible.
Riding taught me more and more about less is more.
Computers and the internet have helped me screw up many a thing since the 1970s. Motorcycling did not offer me such excuses.
My time in the military during the Cold War and various small hot wars taught me the world’s physical geography. 55 years of motorcycling has taught me human geography.
Personal motorcycle journey anecdotes are so much more and better than an internet search’s results.
Nostalgia is unhelpful when riding a motorcycle at highway speeds.
A muddle in the middle of a day’s riding is quite often a good thing.
Riding reveals a rider’s strong weaknesses.
Despite what Hollywood says, motorcycle culture back in the day wasn’t cultured. They all died young, foolishly so and for nothing.
Motorcycle club
I love paper maps. Digital mapping systems on motorcycles provide well-known solutions to every trip leg, point by waypoint — neat, plausible, precise, and just plain wrong. Paper maps, especially old ones, have annotations that lead riders off beaten tracks to unknown lands of discovery and wild things.
Obsolete and abandoned roads are the best. They are required riding.
Riding through different worlds changes indifferent people. If it doesn’t, true human progress is all but impossible.
What can go wrong will go wrong, especially when riding out in the boonies. Come prepared to fix things on your ride.
If your riding becomes a libido, then, dear rider, you are chained to a madman.
Motorcycling does not fill riders’ heads, hearts and souls; it ignites them.
Your riding days aren’t over until the road’s singing is done. Or when you can’t remember where your bike’s keys are.
How well a rider knows where he is is directly proportional to how well he knows himself.
Get the road. Otherwise the road will get you.
Just give young riders a map and destination and let them figure it out.
There are no boring roads, just boring riders.
The ultimate purpose of a ride is to produce some good in the rider.
Two things riders should not care about:
• riding faster than anyone who can ride better, and
• riding better than anyone who can ride faster
The universal absence of the word science in any sentence that mentions motorcycling was ordained by the gods.
Despite all the languages I spoke, I rarely if ever said NO in any of them to someone’s offer of a motorcycle ride.
There was a certain amount of my good judgement on two wheels that came from experiences where I displayed and survived my poor judgment.
Riders do most of their best work sitting down.
All my years of two wheeled travels can probably be summed up in three words about the road. It goes on. In all of today’s cultural noise . . . with politicians and the media slinging bull around, many if not most of us are discouraged and tempted to say this is the end. But the road — it goes on. It always has and always will. Don’t forget that.
My first born said brightly forty years ago that electricity was her best friend. I did not understand how wise that was until I faced a dead motorcycle battery in the middle of nowhere west of the Rockies twenty-five years later.
It’s not the tall mountains, wide rivers or big storms that pose the greatest dangers to motorcyclists. It’s the small, hardly visible things like wild animals, livestock, gravel patches and wet leaves on the blacktop around blind corners.
Focus on the signs that matter and not the shiny objects.
While riding do not just look for clues of what’s coming but for signs of what is there.
If you have a motorcycle, you already have a good friend.
A rider without observation skills is like a bird without wings.
All roads lead us back to home in the end.
I soon realized how much I wanted to go on my first long distance motorcycle trip. I was so excited that when I turned the ignition, I was already at the first waypoint before the engine turned over.
Never give an autograph while on a road trip — it can be used as evidence.
Motorcyclists do not suffer from low self-esteem.
A cigar may be just a cigar, but a motorcycle is never just a motorcycle.
There are damn few cars as well shaped as a well-designed motorcycle.
To a motorcycle enthusiast, high test gasoline is like fine French perfume.
Some regret decades later losing their first girlfriend or boyfriend. All riders regret selling their first motorcycle.
On all my long rides in America’s distant rural lands over the decades, I have never heard anyone utter the phrase, “The trouble with this country is . . . .”
Motorcycling is good for you — it is not illegal, immoral, or fattening. It also prevents smoking. Why you ask. Try smoking a stogie with a 70 MPH wind in your face.
Computer technology and the internet now make possible whole simulated worlds for man’s senses. If this is the future, count me out. Motorcycling may be the only way man has to ensure the integrity of his senses and imagination.
No one owns life, but a fool on a motorcycle owns death.
Revisiting treasured roads is so déjà vu all over again.
I prefer brevity in wit and lingerie. Not so for motorcycling road trips.
Motorcycling is life on fast forward with the dull stuff cut out.
I admire modern analogue print and digital communications media as much as any man, and I am as thankful as anyone can be for what they do for us. But, they will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his heart and soul in it, encountering something new along the road at 65 MPH. The essence of motorcycling, I’d contend, is simply a rider’s refusal to believe or accept what people say, write, draw and photograph of the world solely on the basis of faith.
If you have a motorcycling road trip story or three, please sit next to me.
Road tales are a rider’s prayer-bead string. They arise from a fullness of the soul.
Riding farm country byways just before harvest is like holding fragrant bouquet of thornless rose stem blossoms up to one’s eyes and nose.
The pulsing thrum of the engine and the whir of the tires on the pavement as you wind your bike back and forth through endless S curves are some of the most pleasant and least expensive things in life.
Rain atop a gas station’s tin roofed canopy is more pleasant than it sounds.
Don’t ride when angry. It’ll be the worst ride you’ll ever regret.
Don’t ride without purpose. It is crucial for success and avoiding a rider’s unplanned intersection with the pavement.
Ride long enough without a windscreen or face shield, you will become intimate with the millions of species of insects the world now supports.
The road is a biker’s opium pipe. Our drug, vice and indulgence which lead us to improvisation and contemplation.
Philosophers say the color of truth is grey. Motorcyclists know better.
Never follow a rider who can’t find more than one way to go somewhere.
A road well journeyed is not useful for supporting our preconceived notions. It illuminates the previously unknown, unseen and unconsidered.
It is easier riding an unknown road in the dark with a trusted fellow rider than it is to ride the same road alone in the light.
I saw my first honeyed moon atop my bike on a deserted road. I saw its glint on the speckled pavement below. That was the moment I said “I do” to the road.
Life isn’t fair; but the road is to its riders, if we treat it right.
Young riders are like savages before their one true god almighty, the road. But they don’t worship the facts and dogma of the road at first. And in return for this perfidy, the road smacks them with awe and fury — hailstones, gravel, ice, dust storms, clouds of locusts, rumpled pavement, off cambered curves, and assorted obstacles. Once they wise up, they turn to collecting these facts to lay them all out to make to-do and not-to-do lists. If they remain wary, this endless series of learned stepping-stones will lead them safely past unseen roadside bogs as they motor on down the road.
The road smiles at riders when they love it, since it knows how they feel.
Of two roads, choose the lonelier.
Road forks: which one to choose?
Roads don’t lie, but hazards lie in wait.
All riders seek to be in the zone. It’s that unconscious, other worldly, twilight state where we are just riding away as if our motorcycles were uncrashable slot cars. The zone is sublime, narcotic and habit forming.
Motorcycling from time to time involves going up alleys to see if they’re blind.
Blind alley?
Avoid dead ends at high speeds.
The motorcyclist’s riding experiences start with gambling, proceed to speculating and end, if one is persistent, with banking.
Somewhere along the way I and my motorcycle switched places on the leash. Now it walks me.
I almost forgot these. Here are two more “never” rules for motorcycle enthusiasts:
• Never ride more than one motorcycle at a time.
• Never trailer a bike to a road.
Before you die, read your riding diary out loud, making sure to include the facts and the fables, to a child or two. Perhaps it will teach them to long for the vast and endless road.
A well ridden motorcycle
P.S. All enthusiasts aspire to be one of the Abernathy boys.
In 1913 the Abernathy boys rode from Oklahoma to New York City
at the ages of nine and thirteen on the Indian Motorcycle seen in the above photo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Abernathy_and_Temple_Abernathy
https://books.google.com/books?id=IFRAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA110&dq=Abernathy+kids&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KbT-UIqnDe_q0QGLo4DYDA#v=onepage&q=Abernathy%20kids&f=false
Copyright © 2018 From My Isle Seat