The Righteous and the Unrighteous Alike

The day was hot, hotter than I'd expected, and I'd made the wrong call.

I-66 is often the wrong call.  It's a chaos-monster of a road, utterly unpredictable.  Oh, it'll always be jammed solid at rush hour, but one little twitch in the flow pattern of the universe, and it'll lock up completely.  Or, if there's another quantum-level twitch, it'll flow smooth and swift.  You just don't know.

I'd had that moment of decision, as I rolled back from seminary on my bike, the top-box filled with books from the library, research materials to fuel the next two weeks of my doctoral writing.  I could go left, onto Route 50, with its lights and stop and go.  Or I could risk Sixty Six.

I rolled the dice, gambled, and lost.

I knew I'd lost as I pulled down the exit ramp.  Exit ramps are fun, usually, an opportunity to let my bright little bike breathe deep into its willing cylinders, hooting out a rebel yell as I hit sixty in less than four seconds.  But this ramp had me slowing, and then notching into a stop and go line that stretched out as far as the eye could see.

It wasn't even bicycle pace.  A particularly motivated four year old could probably have kept up on their Big Wheel.  And the road was hot.  The sun had been bright all day, though clouds were coming in, and the ambient temps were in the mid-eighties.  Right there standing on the dark baked asphalt slab, surrounded by thousands of idling cars, it was much hotter.

I, of course, was in my trusty riding suit.  It's great protection, and in summer, it's perfectly cool.  So long as you're moving.  I'd unzipped the front zipper, and the vent zippers under my pits and across my back.  But we weren't moving.  I was becalmed.  I felt the sweat beading inside the helmet.  I felt the heat rising from the little motor idling between my legs.

This is no fun at all, I thought, among other unpastorly imprecations at myself for foolishly having risked such a random road.

A shadow fell across the road, and moments later, there was a sound of impact against my helmet.  "Spock," it went. "Spock," it went again, and there was cool moisture on my face.   Rain.  Raindrops make a percussive Nimoy onomatopoeia when they hit a helmet visor.  I looked up.  Huh.  The clouds didn't seem particularly like rain.

They were, though because then suddenly it was raining, tropically, heavy drops widely dispersed.

I could, I suppose, have received the rain as yet another annoyance.  Now it's rackafrackin' raining!  And I'm standing in the middle of an interstate.  On my bike.  Going nowhere. In the rain.

I chose to feel it differently.  Lord, it felt like a blessing.  I leaned back, and let the water strike my face and chest, tiny blows of grace on after another.  I felt the heat dissipate from the road, and from the air.

Rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, I recalled.  How we receive that rain, though? That's up to us.

Of Bikes and Book Learnin'

It was a spring Sunday afternoon, and it shouldn't have snowed.  It really shouldn't have.

It wasn't in the forecast.  And it wasn't winter, dagflabbit.  But the gloomy rain that was pelting the windows of the sanctuary in the morning was by noon a sloppy mix of sleet, hail and flakes as a little group of stalwarts stuck around for our post-fellowship-hour discussion and study.

By the time I was finished up with my last bit of pastoring of the afternoon, the snow was coming down hard.  Though the ground was warm from the balmy day that had come before, the huge wind-blown flakes were hitting the ground so fast that they were piling up, one on the other, faster than they could melt.

The snow gathered on the grass quickly, but as I looked out at the road, it was gathering there, too.  It was also piling up on my motorcycle--which was, as it always is on days when there's no frozen precip in the forecast--how I'd ridden the thirty seven point five miles to my church.

Hmm, thought I.  This could be a little dicey.

I wandered out to the snow covered two-lane, and performed a traction test.  It wasn't ice underfoot, but the Slurpee falling from the heavens didn't exactly provide an adequate surface for two-wheeled riding.

For the time being, it was a no-go.  And so I waited, and contemplated my options.

During that contemplation, other offers came in.  Congregants offering cars to borrow, or places to lay my head.  Neighbors offering dinner.  I added those kindnesses to the options hopper, and watched the skies and the temperature.  I know winter riding, and the way to do it safely.  Part of that is experience, and part of it comes from having sat at the knee of masters and studied their teachings.

The best of the books I've read on the art of motorcycling is David Hough's Proficient Motorcycling.  It's the book for riders who love to ride, year 'round, no matter what.  We are the ones who couldn't care less about wheelies or stoppies or blowing by you at 135.  We don't care about chrome and shine and leather chaps.  We want to ride, and to ride safely and well, so that we can ride longer.  It is the Wisdom Literature of motorized two-wheeled transit.

Hough deals at length with how to approach inclement conditions.  Wind and intense desert heat,  rain and subfreezing temperatures?  You name it, he teaches it.   I've had a chance, over my 25 years of riding, to put many of his recommendations to use, and they've been remarkably effective.

I have appropriate all-weather gear, and a well-maintained bike.  Those are steps one and two.  A compromised bike or rider sets you at a disadvantage from the git go.

But for snow?  Well, first, you gotta know when to fold 'em.  Icy surfaces mean you stay where you are.  Period.  You have to have some way to maintain a trustworthy contact patch, either on dry powder or by pushing through slop to road surface.  But ice?  Ice means you're going down.

There are other rules, assuming a road surface that is suboptimal but viable.  You have to keep the speed down.  You have to stay loose, and be ready to respond appropriately and rationally to traction loss.  You have to use microconditions to your advantage...like riding in the tracks of the vehicle ahead of you.

You have to know your abilities and road conditions in a bluntly objective way, devoid of ego or machismo.  That's hard.  If you can realistically sense a probability of Bad Things Happening, it doesn't matter how much you'd like to prove yourself as a rider.

So I patiently watched it snow, for an hour, and then for two.  I watched as the snow turned to mostly rain, and the road cover became grey and permeable slush.  I checked road surface conditions out front of the church.  The change came.  The road surface was viable.  The precip was different.  I could tell that I was a go.

So go I did, after sweeping the snow off of the seat and the controls.  And yes, it was a bit more technical than my typical ride, and required more focus.  It was cold, and sloppy, and surprisingly enough, I was the only motorcyclist out there.

But at no point did I ever feel out over the edge of my limitations.  A person's gotta know their limitations, as it is written in the Book of Clint.  Gender neutral New Revised Standard Version, of course.

In motorcycling as in faith, it's equally important to know how to blend experience and the teachings of wise elders to get something done.

Riding Like a Libertarian

I heard him coming, as did everyone for two hundred yards in every direction.  He came up fast on the right, slicing at speed between two cars and leaping over three lanes of traffic to lock himself into the crawling fast lane.

It was a Harley, a Street Glide, modded with a large single exhaust that amplified the already sufficient ruckus of Milwaukee Iron into a din that drowned out everything around it.

The rider was wearing the uniform that identified him as A Loner and a Rebel (tm).  The leather jacket.  The black leather stomper boots.  The little beanie helmet and the aviator sunglasses.  His face, as I caught it for a moment, was red...to be expected in forty degree weather.  

It's why I wear gear designed for function, not to help me pretend I'm an extra on Sons of Anarchy.

He leaped to and fro in traffic ahead of me, roaring in front of cars, tossing himself from lane to lane in a futile attempt to get ahead of the pack. 

I signaled and moved my Suzuki to the far right.  Traffic is best understood in terms of fluid dynamics, like you're dealing with a thick semi-sentient particulate sludge, shoving itself through a pipe on tiny cilia and flagellum.  I knew, ahead, that there was an outlet, and that being in that place relative to the flow would gain me time.

I passed him on the right, moving easily with the new flow created by the exit.  His machine bellowed and snarled as he pointlessly bullied his way into each momentary advantage, and he fell behind me.

I wondered if the rider knew that he wasn't making the impression he thought he was making.  Loud pipes don't save lives.  They just make people dislike motorcyclists.  I'm sensitive to that, as a rider.  No one looks at the roaring, aggressive biker or the testosterone-addled crotch rocket pilot and sees freedom.  "Freedom" isn't the word people mumble under their breath as you tear past them, kids.

Which is a pity, because riding is freedom.

It brings out the libertarian in me, riding does.  I don't ride to be part of a herd or a group.  I have never understood the desire to be trapped in a column with a hundred other identically-dressed loners and rebels.  It looks less like freedom, and more like commuting, or marching in a military drill.

I ride because it's pleasurable, and because it feels freeing to be able to move through traffic like it's nothing.  And I do that, whenever I need to.  When traffic has locked down completely, when the grid has seized up in a vast steel stroke, I move out of it, and into the spaces in between.  Yeah, I know.  I'm a lane-splitter.  It's legal, sort of, meaning it's legal in Europe and in some states.

But I do so quietly and respectfully.  My bike is bright, tall, narrow, and quiet.  When I "filter," which I do in locked down urban traffic, I do so slowly and systematically, and in such a way that I'm not going to startle or upset anyone.

Why should I sit in traffic, if my vehicle allows me to move through traffic without harming others?  Why should I add to the problem, when I can flow through it like light through water, like a subatomic particle through matter?

Use your freedom, while respecting the liberty and integrity of others.  It's the only way you can really claim to be a libertarian.

Centerstands

Yesterday, as my family chilled our way through a Monday off, I found that it was time for a bit of routine motorcycle maintenance.   The shiny yellow 'Strom was slightly less shiny following a few sustained jaunts through driving forty-degree rain, and while spatter and road grit add character to a bike, they really don't do much for your drive chain.

So out onto the driveway I went, and for about 45 minutes, I performed the necessary ablutions and applications of solvents and lubricant.  For the first time in almost twenty years, I found myself hiking a bike up onto a centerstand.  Not since my first ride, a '72 Honda CB750 purchased way back in my late teen years, have I had a centerstand.

I've missed it.  My last two rides were a bitty little cruiserlet and a sportbike, and both cruisers and sportbikes don't have centerstands.   The reason varies, depending on the type of bike.  A centerstand is a great big dangly thing, a mass of steel that snugs up under the chassis.  It ain't purty.

And cruisers are purty bikes.  Purty is their raison d'etre.   They're all rumble and chrome and glossy shine, with elemental lines that catch the eye as you style on by in your do-rag and chaps.  Centerstands work for that aesthetic about as well as a life vest on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.  

Sportbikes are bellisima bikes too, but they're also shrouded in many thousands of dollars worth of plastic for the purposes of aerodynamics and attitude, and that leaves no room for a stand.  A centerstand cuts deep into lean angles on a low bike, so that's strike two.  Sportbike designers are also as obsessed with weight as a high-school wrestler, which is strike three, and means that big hunk of steel has to go.

But on the 'Strom, tall and lean and rangey as a Masai warrior, it works perfectly.  It means that I don't have to stash a paddock stand somewhere in my cluttered home.  It means I can maintain my chain and work on the bike anywhere I can find a bit of flat ground.   It's just so deliciously practical.

Almost no bikes in the United States have them any more, of course.  Bikes aren't meant to be practical things here.  America has become a binary land of sportbikes and cruisers, and gas is still cheap, and our bikes aren't transportation.  They're lifestyle statements that spend most of their lives pampered and polished and gleaming.

Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But for four season, rain or shine, day in day out riding, you just can't beat a bike with a centerstand.

I'm glad to have it back.