Status Miles
Status miles
AT LARGE
LIKE MOST BMW STORES, THIS ONE was well-appointed and populated with friendly people talking about their mutual passions. I strolled over to a dazzling red R 100GS. The store manager introduced himself and asked me the usual questions, establishing that I was not a buyer that day. We chatted for a while, and then he asked me a question I'd never been asked in 28 years of non-stop motorcycling.
"So." he said, "how main miles have you got?"
I blinked. How many miles?
"Um," I said, brilliant in repartee as always. A long pause ensued as he flicked his gaze more intently over my beat-up riding suit, scuffed' boots and motorcycle outside, a silver I 985 K I00RS. "Well." I added, still baffled bv his question, “uh, I dunno."
He recovered quickly and smiled back, saving. “Oh. well. sure. I see. I onlv started riding a few years back, so I guess you've got some miles on me!"
We parted amicably enough, but I knew Something Had Just Occurred.
I got on mv old K-bike and rode off. bemused, fragments of conversations began resurfacing from the louring People file and the Serious BMW People file. Sure enough, when I began reviewing them, there were references to this "mileage" matter. What clicked, suddenly, was that for a lot of today's riders, mileage must matter.
Nobody can be everywhere, sampling everv culture, even in a sport as small as motorcycling. So mv missing the development of this mileage trend didn't really surprise me. not as much as the trend itself, which doesn't surprise so much as sadden me. because it seems to be vet another part of the re-segregation of America, the continuing fractionali/ation and compartmentalization not just of Our sport, but of America at large.
I couldn't help connecting this mileage "credential" with the similar “thing hours as Pilot in Command" issue that has bedev iled av iation ev er since anyone can recall. When I was vice president for publications at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association m Marv land, w e fought continu-
ously to provide a counterbalancing v iew of av iation and av iators to our 265,000 members, whom we —as credentialled pilots ourselves—knew to be subject to the tyranny of w hat's known as "the ratings game" in aviation. In this game, he who flies with the most ratings—and by extension, the most hours—supposedly wins, and ev erybody else loses.
As Tom Wolfe groped his wav through the complex and labyrinthine taboos and rituals of living in The Right Stuff, he found the py ramid the most effective diagram of the aviation culture. At the top stood ( 'buck Yeager and his clones, fighter jocks all. and at the bottom, well, guvs w ho just flew airplanes. It made an interesting book, but real life in aviation is more complicated than that.
Except for the issue of fix ing time. Because the development of judgment is considered bv main aviationtraining experts to be dependent on experience as w ell as training, the fix -ing community's reliance on PIG time (as well as demonstrated proficiency) as a standard measure of relative status makes a crude kind of sense. But in the larger picture, it ignores the fraternity of all pilots, young and old. high-time and lowtime. Which was w hat we stressed at AOPA: a human who makes the commitment to tlx and earns a license has earned the right to be considered "credentialled." Everything else is just the old tribal pecking order.
So for a man like me. to see this emerge in motorcycles, via the mileage matter, is to see the stifling
Steven L. Thompson
strands of similar stratification w rapping themselves around our collective throats. Perhaps those w ho imagine “ridden" miles to be a rider's equivalent to a pilot's living time also imagine the process tv) be equally valuable in developing a rider's judgment; perhaps they therefore feel more status ought somehow to be accorded riders who've thus racked upa lot of miles. Mavbe this is the touring world's response to mankind's competitiveness. a means of sorting out winners and losers. Maybe it began innocently enough as a means of Gold Wingers comparing notes about their transcontinental rides on machines which did not—as prev ious motorcycles certainly did —break down on such rides, turning them into adventures in ingenuity and problem-solv ing as opposed to exercises in buttock and bladder endurance. Maybe all of that is w hat happened. or none of it.
Whatever happened, it's too bad. Encountering a fellow motorcyclist who seeks, however politely, to establish relative riding time as a means of assigning status is too much like encountering the tiresome old ratings game in aviation, a game that nobody actually wins.
Just as the real object of av iation is to fly. the real object of motorcycling is to enjov motorcycles, however one can best do that. If' it's restoration, racing or just riding to the store, it's your call, not your odometer's, because so far at least, there's no Eederal Motorcycling Administration trying to regulate our ev ery riding activity the wav the f ederal Aviation Administration has come to regulate Hying.
Beyond the regulatory procedures controlling pilots and motorcyclists lies this simple truth; I here are good pilots and riders, bad ones, and ones in between. At one time in our lives, most of us will have been in every category, just as most of us who ride for life will have racked up more miles than w e can ev er count.
More to the point, most of us who ride for life—for living—don't count the miles. Because after our apprenticeships, it's not the miles that count, it's what we do with them. In the air or on the ground. 0
