When I was a baby, my mother used to take me down the driveway to the side of Pacific Coast Highway almost every night. Watching the occasional car blur by with that unmistakable whoosh of air consistently put me to sleep with a smile on my face. While I don't usually fall asleep on the sides of highways anymore, machines of all shapes and sizes still captivate me. Whether it’s whipping around the yard with the weed whacker, sitting in the passenger seat on the way to school or even brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush, my childhood was replete with indirect appreciation of human ingenuity. This is why it was a terrible idea for my parents to give me that little $300 100 cc dirt bike on my 13th birthday. I was hooked the first time I swung my leg over the saddle.
I waited seven and a half years from that moment to own a real street motorcycle, and I was not disappointed. I did my research, saved up for months and ended up with a beautiful naked sport bike called a Suzuki SV 650. Please don't think that I didn't love my little dirt bike — I kept it for years — but the comparison between the two would be apples to oranges. I'm not exactly sure why that dirt bike failed to captivate me so, but carefully positioning my 180-pound frame atop a motorcycle I almost outweighed made me feel like bear riding a tricycle. It’s hard to explain how it feels atop the SV, but I’ll try to explain it anyway.
As cheesy as I know I'm about to sound, here goes nothing: I slowly stop feeling like a human being as I ride. After ten miles or so, I feel as if my body is nothing more than the fleshy connection between the throttle, clutch, shifter and brakes. When I want to accelerate, I don't think about twisting back with my right hand, simultaneously releasing the clutch lever with my left, pulling it in again, tapping the shifter up with my left foot and releasing the clutch again. I just go. It feels natural; it feels fluid; it feels awesome. It feels like the motorcycle has become an extension of my body — which just so happens to be a spectacularly cool machine that excites my inner child to no end. Riding honestly feels like a superpower to me. When I’m not surrounded by cars that are trying to kill me, it feels like I'm perpetually floating atop a standing tidal wave in that liminal place where I'm one twitch of the wrist from being on top of the world and being dashed to pieces against a rocky beach. It's a supremely terrifying, yet peaceful place to be once you've been there awhile.
Ironically, I once sat next to a former fighter pilot on a plane. I swear that he actually introduced himself as "Chunk" Phillips, and Chunk loved motorcycles even more than I do. After he spent ten minutes comparing riding to flying and sounding as stupid as I just did in the preceding paragraph, he told me that he'd been riding almost every day since he was 17 and had only crashed once. He was 18 when the crash happened and 55 when I met him. This conversation comes to mind every time one of my friends or loved ones berates me for owning a motorcycle despite the fact that I met Chunk years before I got my bike. He was and still is living proof to me that the risks of riding can be mitigated.
Amidst media sensationalization that cites skewed statistics, I believe that the real danger of riding is overblown in the first place. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety releases their statistics for motorcycle fatalities every year, and if one parses through the data, one can see some interesting trends. On average over the past 10 years, 59 percent of people killed on motorcycles were not wearing a helmet. Wearing a helmet is both the simplest and most effective thing one can do to minimize risk while riding. The fact that anyone would ride without one is astonishing to me. Moreover, in 2012, 34 percent of motorcyclists involved in fatal crashes were speeding, compared with 24 percent of passenger car fatalities. Finally, 24 percent of people involved in fatal crashes over the past ten years did not have a valid motorcycle license, compared with 13 percent of passenger car fatalities. I don't know about you, but these statistics indicate to me that the average rider is a little bit more of a risk-taker than the average driver. There are many more statistics out there to show that the average rider simply does not take the steps necessary to minimize the dangers of riding both before and after getting on their bikes.
Even though I do everything in my power to minimize my risk, I fully accept that riding is the most dangerous thing that I do in my daily life by a titanic margin. I also accept that I could die by no fault of my own. What I do not accept is complacency. The more proactive about safety I am, the more I minimize the chances of suffering tragedy. I never swing a leg over the saddle without a full face helmet, spine protector, armored cowhide jacket, armored cowhide gloves, armored overpants and armored racing boots. I am meticulous about my bike maintenance, and I've taken the highest-level safety courses and regularly practice emergency stops and swerves at speed in empty parking lots — and willingly look like a massive idiot while I do it.
When I actually travel through traffic, I ride like I am invisible and pretend that every car is trying to kill me — all with the aim of never having to actually use the skills I practice. I keep my eyes on my mirrors at every red light to check for speeding cars on their way to kill me. When one oncoming car takes a safe left turn in front of me, I am always expecting the cars behind him waiting to take the same turn to follow the first car without looking and kill me. There isn’t an intersection I pass without looking left and right first for red light-running assailants on their way to kill me. I treat every ride through traffic like a life-or-death situation. It is a strange and terrible feeling to be both invisible and hunted simultaneously, and consequently, I am absolutely terrified every time I get on the road with other cars. So why even bother doing it? For the times when I'm not.
I only ride through traffic to get away from it. You try taking a sunrise ride through the crisp 60-degree air in the Sonora desert at 6 a.m. and tell me it doesn't feel like raw, unadulterated bliss. Try riding the empty, undulating curves of the country roads outside of Galveston at twilight and seeing the setting sun scintillating over the tranquil tides of the Gulf of Mexico in the corner of your eye as you flow through the turns. It is pure serenity. These are the moments worth all the risk that I took to get there. This is why I will never commute on a motorcycle. I will never ride to the pharmacy or post office. I will never even ride to a friend’s house. I ride to find those roads where it is safe to be alone with my thoughts. I ride to get lost, because ultimately I believe that is the easiest way to find yourself.
