At Large

AT LARGE

Washing machines

THE PURITANS WHO CAME ASHORE three-hundred-odd years ago thought that work itself was a virtue, but you’d never be able to sell that notion these days. At least not to the kind of guys who lease megabuck yupmobiles. A lot of them seem to figure that the object of work—any kind of work—is making money, period. Maybe that explains why the superb hardware that they herd around only gets cleaned by hired hands. Maybe washing their cars is just too much work for them.

Any motorcyclist can tell them what they’re missing. Bleeding knuckles. Soaked trousers and shoes. Gouged fingernails. Sore muscles. And hours, sometimes days, spent in the driveway. But no rider I know would have it any other way.

To be fair, a lot of hard-core car enthusiasts also spend their weekends in the driveway and soapy water; but my one-man survey tells me that these hard-core car guys are a dying breed, vastly outnumbered by the twerps whose deepest involvement with their cars is applying their American Express gold cards to buy yet another nose bra. Contrarily, that same survey tells me that the age-old ritual of a man (okay, a woman, too) cleaning his own bike is still in full force all around the country.

Maybe this car-bike split reflects the intense, personal nature of the motorcycle and its rider/owner. Our bikes are getting more sophisticated, sure, but the motorcycle remains in many ways more akin to a horse than to an appliance,whereas the opposite seems true with today’s cars.

And washing our bikes is a part of that intense relationship. There’s more behind this than just sentiment; because our lives ride on how well the things work, it behooves all of us to take care of our machines so they’ll take care of us. Hence, the bleeding knuckles and soaked clothes on Saturdays.

Washing a bike brings you face-toface with it. Specifically, it confronts you with the mechanical evidence of your own use of the thing. Bounce it off a rock last week, did you? There's the result, in that dinged rim onto which you’re now squirting SI00. Drag the left side a little too hard on Tuesday in your favorite hairpin? Check out the bent sidestand as you wipe down the header pipes. And what about that little oil leak around the exhaust flange? While you spray Gunk onto the cylinder in the hope (vain, of course) that you won't have to turn your knuckles to hamburger using the brush and lots of elbow grease to get out the real grease between the fins, contemplate just how long that little leak’s been there. And what it, like the one around the valve cover, might mean.

What a thorough, Saturday-long cleaning means is a detailed inspection tour of your motorcycle. If you’re like me, this tour winds up with you tidying up those niggling bits of mini-maintenance that always develop slowly enough to be put off until the right Saturday rolls around. Chain lubing, for instance. And a careful inspection of tires and brakes and cables, things that we take too often for granted.

Racers—the ones who succeed, at least —take nothing for granted, which is one reason they’re usually ardent cleaners of their bikes. But only “usually,” because there are exceptions; guys who make a point of showing up with greasy, scuffed-up apparent pieces of junk. One such gent was reputed to be Sixties’ and Seventies' English roadrace star John Cooper, who, the pit gossip held, was as proud of never having cleaned his bikes as of getting factory rides. Maybe. But whenever I saw Cooper, he was going fiendishly fast on a suspiciously tidy Triumph/BSA Triple. And those club racers who today might practice the never-cleaned routine are probably just trying yet another psych-out on the unwary.

All these mechanical reasons for the Saturday ritual only complement another aspect of taking bucket in hand. That one is less easy to define, but it has something to do with pride, with self-sufficiency, with knowledge as opposed to ignorance, with being something more in life than simply another “user,” another witless consumer of manufactured goods. The more Saturdays you spend with your hardware, the better you come to know it, and its makers. As you crouch there with scrubber in hand, trying to clean the twilight zone behind the cylinder and ahead of the rear wheel, you get so you can see the engine guys struggling to solve the problems of making the airbox fit in the absurdly tiny space the frame guys left them.

You come to understand, after awhile spent in soapy communion with the bike, how its builders thought, from front to rear wheel. You come to know all too painfully well where the financial guys stepped in and said, “Make it cheaper,” or when some stylist won the battle over an engineer, and left you with a stupid, swoopy sidecover and no tool space. The Saturday ritual then becomes something substantially more than soap and water; through the medium of the motorcycle, it becomes a matter of education.

If you look at your riding life as a succession of bikes to be ridden, made dirty and then cleaned, you can see there’s no end to this educational process. But there is a definite beginning. It comes the day you realize that, like everything else about machines, there is a rational reason why cleaning yours is so time-consuming, so knuckle-bloodying and so sometimes frustrating. It’s either that the guys who designed the thing never had to clean it themselves. Or that they actually do clean their own hardware, and just flat like skinned knuckles.

I've been engaged in the Saturday ritual for 25 years, and as far as I’m concerned, the question’s still undecided. But there's always next Saturday, and another weather-beaten motorcycle’s new lessons.

Steven L. Thompson