At Large

AT LARGE

Passing judgment

Steven L. Thompson

YOU'RE ON YOUR FAVORITE BIT OF two-lane, early in the morning. The road’s dry and deserted, the needle is deep into the top quarter of the tach, and the bike is doing its job sweetly, going where you want it to when you want it to. It's just you and the road and the bike. Until, suddenly, the glare of two 100-watt halogens in your mirrors breaks your kinesthetic reverie. Behind you, another Sunday rider on his sportbike is locking onto your taillight.

Now what?

Depends. If you're lucky, what happens next will just be another fast ride for you both. But if you're not, things can get ugly faster than you can say “exploding testosterone.”

You're not out there to race anybody, probably. You probably chose the time and place to explore the remarkable envelope of your incredible new-generation sportbike precisely because there was little likelihood you'd run into anyone or anything—literally and figuratively. But this is America in the late 20th century, and that means the roads are almost never really empty. So it’s inevitable that you'd encounter another rider with the hardware and mindset for road sport.

But road sport does not mean street racing. Road sport is usually benign, a matter of man and machine going road-dancing. Street racing is something else entirely. Something that can be very dangerous. Nobody talks about it much, but street racing’s been a feature of motorized life ever since wheels were bolted to engines. The same genes that turn scared young men into warriors ensure that it is so. To deny this is to deny human nature.

Those who wrote our traffic laws understood this, but deplored it. The roads are for transportation, not for racing, they decreed, at least unless the roads are closed to the public.

Few roads are, so on any given Sunday morning across the land, sport riders redefine their own limits with highly refined machinery and ages-old biochemistry, sometimes in defiance of the law'. Ánd sometimes, road sport turns to street racing.

Any honest man knows why. A headlight eroding the psychological comfort zone can all too swiftly become sand kicked in your face on Muscle Beach. Or an insolent hand laid on your wife’s shoulder. It can trigger the best physical and the worst social performance in any man. Performance which does not recognize effects, only causes.

The best sport riders have learned how to defuse such situations. Even when every ancient hormone calls out for ten-tenths riding to put the unwelcome interloper in his place, the wise rider does otherwise. Partly because a wise rider is one w ho knows that the dangers of going full-out in close company w'ith an unknown rider are clear, but mostly because a wise rider knows this simple truth: Nobody can really win an impromptu, “unofficial” street race.

The reason is simple. Any race that does not occur because the participants agree to exert maximum effort in a competition bounded by specific rules for a specified length of time or road is just a shoving contest, two egos eyeball-to-eyeball. Even in the highly illegal street racing that suffuses American legend, some form of organization matches men and machines; otherwise, the confrontation is formless and pointless, and any victories are meaningless. This is well understood by the shadowy brotherhoods of street racers around the country—drag racers, mostly—who stage their own unofficial-official events at night and far out on lonely country roads. In fact, that their competitions occur on public roads at all is largely irrelevant to their goals, w'hich are ironically remarkably similar to any “official” organization’s, in that they seek to minimize mismatches between vehicles and their operators.

But chance encounters on Sunday morning do not have these organizational underpinnings which give the contest form and meaning. So every time a cocky street racer challenges someone, he’s making assumptions that probably ought not to be made. Assumptions about himself, his would-be competitor, the venue and the contest itself.

All of this means that the best sport riders of my acquaintance all have in common one response to headlights in their mirrors: They allow' them to pass. They never dispute the ground with someone they don’t know'. In so doing, they point out, you lose nothing and gain everything. If the guy who goes around you is simply a better rider, you grant him the courtesy of a clear road. If he’s a hormonally charged street racer, you permit him to believe he’s vanquished you (when in fact nothing of the sort has occurred). If he’s just somebody a little too buzzed by the wonderfulness of the day and his bike, you cool him down by waving cheerfully as he goes past.

In the best case, though, if he’s someone of grace and style, by riding behind him you can study his moves, either to learn from or to use as evidence that the two of you can, in fact, fly in formation for a while. Not racing each other in a fruitless matching of primitive behavior, but savoring the exquisite sense of refined control and skill, as well as the growing sense that through it you may have found not only an unparalleled use of a priceless day, but also another person who understands, as few do, why you are out there.

Each rider has to make his own decision when the headlights materialize in the mirrors. Make the wrong one—the easy one, the hormonedriven one—and you might win an imagined race, or lose it in tragedy. Make the right one and you might win a friend for life.

It’s all, you might say, a matter of passing judgment. And in road sport, as in life, there’s no more important matter than judgment. Especially w here passing is concerned.