That Critical First Ride
That critical first ride
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
TRUE STORY. WHEN MY BOYHOOD FRIEND Pat Donnelly was in his early teens, he was invited to a birthday party on the family farm of his classmate, Conrad Shaker. Conrad had a horse and saddled him up so all the kids at the party could take a ride. Pat, who had never been on a horse before, climbed into the saddle and gave the horse a gentle prod with his heels. The horse took exactly two steps forward, exhaled loudly, fell over on its side and died.
Pat, who was wearing a brand-new pair of extremely cool engineer boots just like James Dean’s in Rebel Without a Cause, had his leg and boot trapped under the horse, but both were eventually extricated with minimal damage. The party was over. Pat gave up on horses, and two years later bought his first motorcycle.
Usually it works the other way around.
A more typical first-ride story comes from my good friend Lyman Lyons, who grew up in Louisiana. A buddy of Lyman’s had saved up all his paper-route money for several years and bought himself a new scooter, a Cushman Eagle. The friend insisted Lyman “take a spin” and Lyman complied with a display that only the masterful Buster Keaton could have orchestrated. He whacked open the throttle, froze at the controls (forgetting which way to twist the grip), rocketed across several front lawns and finally blasted through a thick hedge, which probably saved his life by slowing him down before he hit the inevitable tree.
The brilliance of this physical comedy was lost on the Cushman owner, who quietly examined the crushed front fender and bent fork and simply said, “My scooter...” over and over again.
Lyman, needless to say, did not rush right down to the Cushman dealer and plunk money down on his own twowheeled fun machine. He was somewhat abashed and never really recovered his full measure of youthful enthusiasm for scooters-or motorcycles.
I have now lived long enough to have heard at least a hundred of these first-ride disaster stories, and I’m sorry to say that most of them involve motorcycles rather than horses.
Tell a group of people at a party you ride a motorcycle and at least one person in the crowd can produce a richly detailed, moment-by-moment account of catastrophe on a first bike ride. Usually the tale is quite similar to Lyman’s, and ends in a vow never to ride again, or to “stick to four wheels.”
As nearly as I can tell, a typical sequence of events in most of these mishaps seems to be: (1) surprise at the abruptness or speed of forward motion combined with a poor sense of twist-grip modulation; (2) growing panic in realizing that the technique for stopping safely has not been adequately rehearsed; and (3) a total loss of steering control as the unnatural instinct to countersteer is replaced, through terror, by an attempt to physically turn the handlebars in the direction you want to go (which is effective only at very low speed) causing the rider to hit the very object he or she had hoped to avoid.
When you think how many times this has happened to first-time motorcycle riders, and how many of them have gone away dazed and confused, the world-wide effect on motorcycle ownership has to be phenomenal. A few minutes of simple training might have eliminated many of these accidents, and a course from the Motorcycle Safety Foundation would prevent just about all of them.
Those first few rides are clearly the most dangerous-as are the first few months of riding-so I’m all in favor of as much training as possible.
And yet...when I listen to these stories, there is a side of me that says perhaps not everyone is cut out to be a motorcyclist. My own first ride, for instance, was not a lot better than Lyman’s, yet the effect was quite different.
I was trying to buy an old Harley 45 from a guy who ran a local gas station. I was 15 and could not legally ride on the street, so he let me take it for a short ride in the pasture behind the station. I chuffed around successfully for a while, mastering^?) the foot clutch and tank shift, and all was well until I returned to the station. I looked down at the clutch pedal as I came to a stop and ran into a bunch of trash barrels full of scrap metal and old oil filters. The bike and barrels tipped over with lots of noise, but no real damage. I quickly scrambled up and got the bike on its stand, just as the owner came around the corner, wearing a flippedup arc welder’s mask.
“No problem,” I said. “Just bumped into some cans.”
He scowled and went back to work, welding.
A week later, when 1 turned up with the money ($100) he told me he’d decided to keep the bike. So 1 made a down payment on a brand-new Bridgestone Sport 50.
Strangely, it never occurred to me to shy away from motorcycling because I’d dumped the Harley on its side. I would no more have given up the idea of owning a motorcycle than Lymanwho is a good baseball player-would have given up baseball because he struck out his first time at bat. The incident was a small setback, but not a trauma. All the defense mechanisms in my brain closed ranks, made their excuses and the event was quickly paved over, seamlessly, almost as if it had never happened.
The difference here, of course, is simply a matter of commitment. Lyman was merely curious, while I was absolutely fanatical. I had to have a bike, and nothing else would do. Most of us will accept a lot of hard knocks to fulfill some personal dream, but are turned away rather quickly if we take a bruising in pursuit of a merely marginal interest.
Maybe that first ride is just a filter, a means to separate those of us who have to ride motorcycles-or horsesfrom those who don’t.
