It's Hard To Beat A Motorcycle

It's hard to beat a motorcycle

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

I SUPPOSE BY NOW VIRTUALLY ALL HUmans-including the timid Forest People of the upper Wombezee-have heard the old nautical saying that the two best days of boat ownership are the day you buy it and the day you sell it.

This is a universally understood concept, and I’ve heard it used on airplanes, cars, marriages, Victorian houses, vacation cottages and certain brands of vintage motorcycles-whose Druidic country of origin I won’t mention here.

In fact, this “two best days” phrase came up just the other night at our monthly Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang meeting, which was held at my recently swept garage workshop.

Yes, I always go all-out when hosting these affairs. I knock all the cobwebs off the Steve McQueen Great Escape poster, vacuum most of the dead flies off the window sills, make a huge batch of corrosive Tex-Mex chili and put some blues music on our garage-band’s PA system. Then I turn on the “mood lighting.” This consists of colored light bulbs installed in my drillpress and bench-grinder sockets, which give the place a kind of opium-den-meetsbike-museum aura, with Mississippi Delta juke joint overtones.

Anyway, there we were, listening to Albert King, sipping a few beers and eating chili when someone said to me, “Hey, where are you storing your sailboat this winter?”

“We sold it last summer,” I said.

“Sold it! I thought you and Barb were having a great time sailing around Lake Michigan.”

“We were,” I said. “But it got to be too much. We had to drive for five hours to get to the boat, and then we’d spend part of the weekend cleaning and fixing it. Some weekends we’d get there and it would be too windy to sail, or too calm. Also, we had to rent a slip for the summer and have the boat hauled out in the fall and stored in the winter. Too much monkey business.”

Several Cruds nodded thoughtfully. At least four had owned-and sold-sailboats or inboard power boats. They knew.

“The two best days of boat ownership...” someone said, without finishing the sentence.

Truth be told, selling the boat was not one of our best days. Barb and I had great times sailing the thing, and parting with it felt like the end of an era. But there was also (I have to admit) an element of relief. One less thing to worry about in a complex world.

About 12 years ago, I’d felt almost exactly the same mixture of regret and relief in selling an old airplane-a 1945 Piper Cub that Barb and I had owned for many years.

A fine old aircraft, but, like the boat, it needed winter storage, professional maintenance, licensing, a time-consuming drive to the airport, careful pre-flight examination and good weather.

And it also required you to spend a perfectly good sunny summer weekend doing something other than riding your motorcycle. And there was the rub.

Many times I’d walk out of our house into a perfect summer morning on my way to the airport and think to myself, What a great day for a motorcycle ride.

Not that I didn’t want to go flying, but riding was more...accessible. Less hassle. More immediately inviting. Less regulated and more free.

Exactly the same thing happened when we owned the sailboat. We’d be loading the car with food and supplies for a weekend of boating and I’d glance at my bikes sitting there in the garage. I’d look up at the sun, feel the warm breeze through the trees and shake my head. What a great day for a motorcycle ride.

And, as we sat around in my workshop the other night, I leaned back in my festive plaid lawn chair, gazed fondly at my nearby DR650 and said, simply, “It’s hard to beat a motorcycle.”

Fellow Crud Toby Kirk reflectively jingled the ice cubes in his usual glass of Old Offenhauser and said, “It really is the perfect sport.”

Toby, incidentally, has an old sailboat that is becoming One with Nature in his backyard. It looks like a boat sculpture, done in moss, lichens and pine needles.

So, as we sat discussing these things, our little gang of vehicle addicts gradually came up with an informal list of advantages the motorcycle has over other equipment-intensive pastimes-such as flying or boating-which I’ll enumerate as follows:

•Motorcycles have no wingspan, draft or mast height, so you can keep them at your own house and you never have to rent a hangar, slip or warehouse.

•When the engine stops, you can pull over and put your foot down,

instead of doing a dead-stick landing in a cornfield. Or getting towed to port.

•When the weather turns really violent, you can retire to a place called “Al’s Nibble-Nook” and order a cheeseburger instead of sinking or crashing.

•There are no mandatory and costly annual inspections.

•You don’t need permission from a control tower or harbormaster to visit the men’s room, refuel or eat lunch.

•During a big storm, you don’t have to lie awake at night and picture your motorcycle bashing itself to pieces on some rocks.

•Your selection of motels, restaurants and acquaintances is not limited by shorelines or airports.

•You can leave right from your garage and return to it without filing a flight plan. No one needs to be notified of your intentions.

•Your “navigation system” fits in a back pocket or under the clear plastic of your tank bag. A compass is optional.

•Your passengers generally don’t require Dramamine.

And so on.

I don’t mean to be too dismissive of other sports here. I still love boats and airplanes-I’ve got them in my blood-but they will always be second-tier activities for me, for all the reasons listed above.

Motorcycling, as Toby says, really is the perfect sport. You have pistons and wind combined by alchemy into a compound of pure freedom. □