Reasons To Romp
Reasons to romp
TDC
Kevin Cameron
WHY RIDE MOTORCYCLES OR CARE about them? The ad agencies think they know. We do it, the ads tell us, to be cool, to ensure reproductive success, to display something beyond the financial reach of others. Yet conversations with riders and confirmed motorheads reveal latent poetry that seldom makes it into print.
Sid Biberman, for decades a builder. and rider of Vincent Twins, opened the subject by saying, "I've always been big, and grace isn't often a part of. being big. But on a motorcycle-I don't know whether it's the leaning into cor ners, or the sense you get of the shape of the land curving under you-on a motorcycle, you can feel yourself be come a part of nature's laws, to move gracefully and effortlessly."
Freedom comes into the conversa tion. A woman I know said, "I grew up in a small town, and I spent a lot of time with the other kids hanging around downtown, talking. I wanted something that would go, I wanted to go. When my parents presented me with $1200 they'd saved for my col lege, I went straight out and bought a Yamaha RD with it." Like climbing a mountain, riding a motorcycle can push the horizon back, widen the view.
;~i~;; ;~;; and en hancers. With them, we are powerful or graceful, far-ranging, equal to the agile birds or beasts. There is motion, vibration, breathing, galloping, swoop ing, alighting.
Kinesthesia is important to my hyper active friends; in winter they're skiing and looking forward to getting out the sailboard as soon as the icicles get shorter in the spring. In childhood they zoomed through mall parking lots on skateboards, and drove their parents wild at the dinner table, drumming fin gers and fidgeting feet. The motorcycle is perfect for magnifying this perpetual motion, uphill and down, day and night.
Many a young man I knew regularly came home to dinner with a broken clutch lever in one hand, or the seat of his jeans ripped out, just back from trying to master the local traffic rotary. These were the backwards people; they wore the sides of their tires off, leaving plenty of unused tread in the middle.
Are some people born with a sense of style? I'll always remember the rider who pulled into the pits, brushed aside the stopwatch board, and said, "Never mind my lap times. How'd I look?" What greater pleasure than to have the first Sportster in town in 1955, and the first GSX-R750 in 1985? Grand to have the first European one-piece rid ing suit, too, when your buddies are still flashing their BVDs through the "pants gap." Looking good is feeling good, and the motorcycle is a veritable Gentlemen Quarterly of feel-good fashion goodies like paint, plate and moto-jewelry in stainless and titanium.
In another world are the intense, com petitive, athletic performance riders. The motorcycle is only an incidental item in their sharply focused drive to personal distinction, to win, arousing no more feeling than does a pair of trackshoes. For these people, the highest, the only, morality is to prevail-whether that means in races or in arguments. To fin ish second is to lose. Making your mark in two-wheeled life means leaving at least one black line through every cor ner, or being the first to combine a wingover with a double-jump. Anything and everything-money, friends, family, job-is subordinated to the goal of taking a clear shot at the top. As GP tuner Erv Kanemoto has said, "Whatever it is about finishing second scares these guys a lot worse than all the terrible things they have to do to finish first."
The motorcycle attracts craftsmen because, besides their other attractions, bikes are small enough to finish in a lifetime. These people bring forth something pure from imagination, and by so doing sharpen the contrast between the ideal and real worlds. Race tuners are craftsmen of performance, and they will say right out loud, as trackside veteran Vic Fasola has, "This is something I can at least come close to controlling and understanding." In the harsh world of downsizing and di vorce, politics and privilege, an island of control is a better neighborhood.
Who understands himself? My moth er tells me I insisted, as a tiny boy, that she read to me about cars and airplanes from the encyclopedia. "I don't think you understood much of it' she says, "but you wanted to hear it anyway." I wanted to know what was inside the smooth shapes, making the action. That hasn't changed.
For a time, it seemed every Sunday newspaper had another gee-whiz story about a captain of industry who had flabbergasted his buttoned-down friends by buying and learning to ride a motor cycle. Yes, Harleys are fashionable now, especially among those who can afford them, but look at it from their perspec tive. After a productive lifetime spent painstakingly coping with fairly dry stuff like convertible debentures and ir revocable letters of credit, mightn't it be time for Something Completely Differ ent? Money is supposed to confer free dom, but often it just presents the owner with a prescribed lifestyle not of his own choosing. If golf, lunch at Locke's and planned-conmiunity living get old, wouldn't it be nice to just pop open an escape hatch, yell Geronimo and roar out on a trusty steed of steel?
The late Phil Irving, Australian mo torcycle engineer, said that a motorcy cle encourages a romp. A romp is what results when a high-spirited young horse is let out to pasture-tearing madly up and down, kicking up its heels, twisting and leaping for the sheer pleasure of it. I think that's what I saw in 1967 when the late Bill Ivy wheelied the V-Four 250 Yamaha GP bike up Mosport's long hill, holding the machine way up high. In his open face helmet I could see him grinning, "Ican do this, so I'm doing it, see?"
It doesn't have to be fast and crazy. It doesn't have to involve incredible skill. Have a romp through a spring time landscape, or through a bright tunnel of autumn leaves, or just trickle along any pleasant road in whatever way pleases you. Live.
