Everyone who sits in the saddle knows they’re taking a risk. I justify it by telling myself tomorrow is never guaranteed anyways. I mitigate the risks where I can, jacket, boots, helmet (never the pants, style over substance in that case). Still those are mostly just comforts, ones I wear for the sake of my friends and family.
In truth, I hate that when I ride, it’s assumed I have a death wish. Bikes are dangerous, but so is this volatile and violent world we’re living through today. It’s my belief motorcycles can be tools to make sense of and even help heal this damaged world. Bikes are not the vehicle of crisis, but as essential as a pen to a writer.
There’s something profoundly ironic about how safe I feel tearing up a mountain road, guardrail or not, with a sheer drop to one side and a cliff face on the other, or the peril of merging onto a busy interstate highway. On the twisties, my reaction times, riding skill and knowledge of my own limitations often put my fate in my own hands.
My most tense moments in my brief four years on two wheels are always at the stop lights. Whether it’s the dead of night waiting for that emerald permission, knowing it might never come since to the traffic system that considers us undetectable. It could be the middle of rush hour, sitting at the tail end of an eight-car queue, unable to split because the officer in the unmarked Explorer three cars up sits ready to pounce. Sitting in that queue, all I can do is flash my brake lights and pray that the high schooler in the Jeep Gladiator with the Carolina squat so high he bird watches on his way to school, stops in time.
We ride motorcycles, what greater sin is that? We’re the ire of the parking lot when they see us solo a whole space. We’re begging for a ticket if we park outside a space. Police often treat lane filtering like attempted murder or a suicide attempt. The memorial rides, hospital visits, organ donor jokes and dire warnings from justly concerned family and friends are a ubiquitous part of the culture. We know that we’ll never be as safe as a wage cage but must death and harm be the first thing people associate with this fulfilling, exciting, freeing and radical lifestyle?
The world in the past century has never been closer together. Yet within the American project, the land of opportunity, where disparate cultures come together to pursue a dream, homogeneity has appeared everywhere.
Whether you’re in North Carolina on I-40 or Wyoming on I-25 or California on I-5 or Indiana on I-74 it seems every exit you know exactly where you are. No matter what county state or time zone when you drive down the exit with a center turn lane you’ll find everything you need. Just as there’s no escaping the sprawling suburbs with bright green manicured lawns and driveways occupied by the latest SUV/Crossover that promises each owner the freedom that is safety.
So what’s my problem? This is safe, safe is good. The promised comfort of homogeneity is ephemeral. Bikers, we understand this intuitively. We stare down eternity at every intersection, everytime we turn the key, pull the clutch and press the ignition. We place ourselves at the fringes of society often turning invisible to the center because these fringes are where freedom lies.
I’m a black man, the fringe is my home — not by choice but by circumstance. I wouldn’t have it any other way. The fringe drives community and with community there is power. The idea that we are all mosaics made up of our unique experiences that together make us whole. To deny or reject a part of yourself is all too common in a homogenous world and everyone, in their own way, rebels.
When I’m laying in bed staring at my phone for an hour straight without so much as a thought entering my brain, I’m dissatisfied. A part of me feels cracked, wounded as though I’m missing life by ghosting my way through it.
That’s when I grab my keys, don my helmet and set off aimlessly into the hills. As a paint brush is to a painter the biker uses their instrument to create. I go down my well-trodden paths carving new lines into the familiar curves of a mountain and stop to observe a view in a crevice of the road that no car would dare to take in.
Bikes are tools to expand imagination. There will always be risks to riding. To accept those risks does not mean we belong as after-thoughts. There is a common ground and an understanding among motorcyclists that these are more than toys.
Motorcycles, as they’ve always been, are more fuel efficient and don’t require multi-acre parking lots to house. They’re human-scale machines that play an important role in meeting climate goals and reducing traffic. Most of all, they’re an expression of resistance to the center, a statement that we cannot be kept in a cage.
