Imnosaint
Adventurer
On my return from my last tour of the Eastern Sierras I got through Carson City’s morning traffic delivering me from 580 to I-80 in Reno where its left lanes expedited my way into Sparks and beyond. As I-80 hits the eastern side of that valley I noticed an incident tying up the westbound lanes. Traffic was stopped for over twenty miles and the frontage road was a parking lot as well. With temps approaching the century mark I was very grateful to be facing east and scooting along at speed.
Part of my prep before this trip was downloading Melville’s Moby ******** and creating a new playlist of music, deep cuts from favorite bands from the ‘70s, neither of which I was listening to on my retour, (nor did I believe I would really be able to since it’s the same on every trip), because wind noise over eighty miles-per-hour drowns out the best helmet audio systems with or without ear plugs, so I made the entire jaunt to the Wasatch with just the roar of the atmosphere and the whispers of my own thoughts, not the least of which was the begging question on every ride, why do I love this so much?
It’s loud. It lacks the accouterments of civilized automotive travel like a thermostat, lumbar support, safety systems, audio books and cup holders. It makes my right wrist doze off despite having cruise-control, and my coccyx burns like a five-pound bee sting after an hour or so. It requires expensive safety gear–jacket, pants, boots, gloves, helmet, mid-layers, skivvies and compression socks that not only adds another twenty pounds to mine and the bike’s GVW, it makes everybody think I ride a BMW.
But it’s nimble, quick with a downshift that propels me to that other century mark and beyond in less time than anyone has to react to me passing them. It saturates all my senses instead of anesthetizing them in a cage. It demands my attention, every second’s 117 feet, plus or minus. It has no frames to look through, just the pavement rushing past beneath my feet and the world pushing past in wonderful parallax and definition. It totes everything I need to sustain myself traveling and camping for a week, and even then, a laundromat and a market quickly reboot the journey. And it’s a Triumph with three cylinders churning out a rhythm unlike anything else internally combusting that soothes my body and soul. I’ve read as well that the seating position on a motorcycle is a yoga power position, open and accepting, brave and wind-breaking, which lends itself to lowering stress while elevating my heart rate to healthy levels. It’s been clinically compared to a light workout.
No, really.
More than these, though, is the balance of presence versus pain. My riding discipline forces a present-focus, an unwary concentration, at least for two hundred miles at a time (the Triumph’s fuel range at speed), and when my brain is in those moments, my body turns down the amplitude of its pain. The deep, abiding soreness of my larger, long bones, the grinding fire of my joints, the dull ache that envelopes my brain, the shooting pain from my lower back to my glutes, the constant heartburn, and the nodes that invade my larynx when I tip my helmeted head to the wind, all this abates to being propelled forward in the moment. And when I reach my destination, a campsite or home, and I make my bed for the night and lay in it with the day’s ride settling in like a good long stretch, I feel like I’ve won another day.
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