Why Do You Ride?

Why do you ride? There seems to be endless reasons why you shouldn’t and yet every year more and more people choose two wheels instead of four. What’s the reason?

When I purchase my first motorcycle, my wife told me I just paid for my death. Now, she is a seasoned passenger who has logged well over 20K miles, throughout the country.

I came across this today and I think it describes why I ride about as well as anything I’ve read.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets. On a motorcycle I know I’m alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunshine that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-vision and IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometime I even hear music. It’s like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind’s roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock ‘n roll, dark orchestras, women’s voices all hidden in the air and released by speed.