I was in a small traffic jam the other night caused by emergency equipment responding to a fire. A motorcycle on a highway just outside of Newark had caught fire and had partially melted. The front tire (and indeed everything below half-way down the front forks)
had melted into slag… and everything behind the handlebars had been burned and carbonized into one solid mass.
When I read this thread title, it was the first thing that I thought of.
At least we know when a motorcycle catches fire that the rider isn’t trapped inside.
Well, you might want to ask Nicholas Cage.
'Nuff said.
I know Slime et al market pre-filled tubes for bicycles, but I don’t know about motorcycle ones. You can use Slime preemptively on motorcycle tubes, but they don’t recommend it for highway speeds because it screws up the balance. There is however a competing product called Ride On that not only acts as a self-sealer but also supposedly helps balance the tire. I actually just so happen to have some on order after having to hone my tire spoon and profanity skills by the side of a very hot dirt road recently. We’ll see how it goes!
I love to ride at night on back country roads. Pulling out and slowly accelerating through each gear seamlessly. Virtually nobody else on the road for long stretches of time. No hurry to keep up with traffic. Taking in the smell of flowers or the dying embers of a fire or chasing a train from town to town and wondering if the engineer recognizes it’s the same bike.
But the day can be fun too. When you know it’s going to suck at work it’s great having the bike waiting for you. Instead of taking the highway home you take a back road that goes OVER the highway you usually drive on to work. And you smile because you’re literally on the road less traveled.
I like to go on theme rides. I’ll pick something like “old rail lines”. I map them out and look for the old rail beds as I travel and imagine what the towns were like when the trains ran through them.
And I don’t know if bikers do this around the world but in the midwest we signal each other as we pass. There’s a common bond in riding.
Better than that, on a corectly banked highway, at the correct speed, the bike steers itself.
You just look in the direction you want to go and it (the banked angle of the road surface) takes you there. And it’s not throwing you around: you just relax into the curves and the curves baby you around like you were being held by your mother.
It’s kind of like flying should be.
Machine Elf, that was absolutely beautiful. I could not have said it better!
For me, I love the long journeys that can create this “Thing, Flow, Zen like moments” or whatever it is called.
I have felt this with three bikes and one airplane, all of which I have owned & maintained for over two decades.
“Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” is one of my all time favorite books. His description of this “Thing” is also beautifully written.
Oh yeah. I forgot about those. I found them to be complete unadulterated crap. I didn’t ever stock them or recommend them.
On a similar note, my friends call me, “The World’s Fastest Flat-Tire Rider”. 
Good comments!
Yes. And I liked how he explained about how a motor takes energy and controls it, as well as that bit about people falling into different categories “classic” (“I don’t want to get too into repairing a motorcycle, …”), “traditional” and something else that I don’t recall.
Mountain bikes, Gato, Sorry. Although I do know some dudes who would put Slime in their YZs and Can-Ams’ tires when they were going through some gnarly terrain and since there wasn’t a lot of sections where you could go flat out balance issues weren’t a problem.
Magiver that is exactly why I commute by motorcycle as often as possible. I love the feeling of passing under the highway that is on my “car route” and see it full of stalled, rush hour traffic. While I am doing 40mph on a small farm road, smelling the cows and hay. That feeling more than makes up for any crappy day I’ve had at work.
Last year I was riding from Canada to Palm Springs. I had spent the night in Well, Nv. and the next morning headed out on a beautiful morning. A few miles south of Wells, the valley flattened out a bit, widened to maybe 3 or 4 miles and the road stretched out ahead of me until it simply disappeared. I had the cruise control set about 75 mph, and there wasn’t another vehicle in sight.
Coming up over a slight rise, I had this feeling that is hard to describe, almost a sense of euphoria. The air was warm, the valley ahead of me stretched out forever and the engine was purring quietly. I even shut off my mp3. It felt like I was floating. There were no thoughts in my head, no discomfort from the previous days ride, nothing to distract me mentally or physically.
I had never experienced anything like this before, and want to experience it again, even if it means going back to that same stretch of that highway. But I also fear disappointment if that feeling can’t be recreated. So it will remain with me as it should, a one-time experience.
I know if I drove that same stretch of road in my car, I would probably be bored silly.
Btw, you don’t lean to make a motorcycle turn. To make it turn to the right, you push the right hand grip forward, effectively pointing the front wheel to the left. That causes the bike to lean to the right and turn to the right. Pulling back on the left grip has the same effect. When the bike leans and turns, the rider just leans with it. This works on speeds over maybe 15 mph. At speeds below that, then you actually steer in the direction you want to go.
I never quite had the spiritual experience that many people describe here, but in my younger days, I rode almost every day and often had a sharing feeling with the machine I was on.
It isn’t a euphoric feeling, or being “one” with the machine, but there was always a pleasure in how the motorcycle became an extension of myself, and therefore, I was also running and touching the road.
The slightest shift in weight, an almost negligible nudge to the handlebars, and the bike followed the line my eyes had already scouted, my mind had already chosen.
A flick of the clutch lever, the smallest movement of my toe, and the bike shifted up or down, as suited my whim, and the airspeed around me rose or fell with the staccato tune of the exhaust trumpet.
A touch, a tender squeeze of the brake lever, the gentle pressure against the foot brake, and my machine would slow, the engine would sigh, a few hundred pounds of man and metal would arc gracefully through the corners, the tires tracking the asphalt ribbon beneath us, and the road would stretch out once again, the bike surging forward as my smile grew and the throttle yearned for just … a bit … more.
And occasionally, when the seduction of the power and agility beneath called to me with a wildings voice, I would rocket through the hill country with the goal of a hurry with no purpose.
The gears would change fitfully, back and forth, up and down, as best suited the moment. The gearbox would delightfully accompany the engine in its raging song, with or without the clutch’s forbearance.
The brakes would occasionally temper the bikes speed within sanity and tire adhesion, plunging the suspension through its travel as weight and mass shifted and rocked metal, flesh and fuel in a roller-coaster frenzy.
And the engine … oh, the engine … the engine would respond with a lovers eagerness to the rough touch of the throttle hand. As the twist-grip called for power and speed, the engines cry would go from a moan to a howl, from a muted grunt to a banshee scream.
As I rowed through the gears, braked and surged out of the corners, the engine would alternately sigh and shriek, gasp and shout, always begging for more, more, MORE.
And the song it sang was angry and anxious, sung with a ragged voice and a bursting heart, and it laughed at the stationary world around it as the road blurred beneath it and the fence posts grew closer together.
Ahem.
Perhaps there was something a bit, ah, spiritual in all that after all.
God, how I miss riding.
I don’t ride nearly as much as I used to, but I used to road race quite often, and there’s nothing like racing to get that man-machine connection. Knee dragging a corner at 80 mph is the ultimate sensation of the bike as an extention of self.
I don’t feel any love from my motorcycle, I’m fully conscious it’s a machine and whether it works right or not is up to me and my maintenance, and a bit of luck. But riding is a unique experience, you’re sitting on a motor and wheels going down the highway at 55MPH. A slight twist of your right hand makes you go faster, a slight tap of your right foot slows you down. A slight lean to the right or left changes your course. You have nothing but open road in front of you, different smells and sights abound, the world passes by in a 360 degree vista.
And if you have never driven passed a commercial bakery, you have missed out on something special. Cruising along and smelling fresh baked bread for a half mile or so.
I like fresh-mowed grass and honeysuckle as well.
I know the “one with machine” feeling/knowledge described above, but not with motorcycles.
I’ve owned two, the first a 500cc, the second a 750, and piled up the miles on both — city, country, cross-country and internationally, day and night in summer heat, cold rain and once in a snow storm when I had to leave the bike and hitchhike home.
No “oneness” ever occurred on either bike. But it certainly has with the cars I’ve owned, to more or less extent, depending on the car. But I enjoy driving anything and everything, from Renault Dauphines to buses and diesel-electric locomotives.
Many of the descriptions of the phenomena with bikes in the posts above match my own, whether in hum-drum daily drives to those that are extraordinary, where a light touch to the wheel, the gas, the clutch and the brakes (pedal and hand), sometimes in combination, or a single heavy, slam-dunk manoeuvre — and everything between — is as natural, correct and automatic as breathing. It’s almost telepathic. I want “X” to happen, and “X” happens. Or I know “X” is about to happen — Jesus Christ! — and it’s going to kill me, so I do “Y.” In at least a couple of circumstances, “X,” in a series and for miles, was better than sex.
If there is such a thing as a person being a natural in any occupation or pastime, it sure ain’t me on a bike. I could never get past the mechanics of riding, even after reading Zen and the Art. Perhaps I recognized that, and am still alive or at least uninjured, because I’m lucky enough to know what can (possibly should) transcend that stage, especially with motorcycles. I quit riding years ago, and I don’t miss it. Much.
But you’ll have to pry a steering wheel from my cold, dead hands.
Just outside of Green Bay, WI on fall morning the ground fog was waist deep. Getting on my motorcycle and riding was like parting the waves and it left a wake. My riding companion described it as flying three feet off the ground.
tbook
