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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
I turned 70 this year. I always told myself I would stop when I turned 70 – but I can’t.
Every spring I get the fever when I hear that song. When Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild comes on the radio, or even more so, when it plays in the background as Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper rev their engines and rocket down the highway in the film Easy Rider, motorcycle fever attacks and I can’t resist. I have to ride.
The rush that fills me when I first crank over my Harley Sportster each spring is like nothing a non-rider can imagine or appreciate. While I miss the nostalgic satisfaction of hearing the motor roar to life after a successful kick-start, at 70, I am grateful for the ease and reliability of an electric start. It does not diminish the thrill of the rumble when the motor reverberates under me for the first time each spring.
I got my first motorcycle, a used Yamaha 100, at 16 when my parents were away on vacation leaving me alone at home. I had done an excellent job of forging my mother’s required signature on the application form for the “M” licence. When they arrived home, I took my father down to the parking garage to see it and demonstrate how safe it was. In my nervousness, I somehow popped my first and only wheelie.
My summer job and part-time jobs through the year covered the purchase and insurance. It was 25 cents for a fuel fill-up on that one. A year later I advanced to a Yamaha 350 to manage the highway travel to university and back. Alas, pretty soon I couldn’t afford a motorcycle and university, so the motorcycle had to go.
My novice teenage experiences yielded only two minor accidents, both collisions with cars signalling incorrectly. My right foot was crushed slightly under the weight of the upended bike in one accident, but it didn’t bother me much until arthritis set in recently.
After getting married at the end of university, I put away my motorcycle dreams for economic reasons, although they silently returned each spring. One year, two friends from earlier days stopped by with two dirt bikes in tow. They invited me to join them for an afternoon. What a return to two-wheel fun and dreams! Right then and there my wife made me promise, no motorcycles until all the kids were through university, to which I agreed.
Fast forward 25 years to my early 50s. As the opportunity to return to motorcycling lay within sight, clearly some preparation was called for. I signed up for a weekend refresher course at a local community college. What a blast! It all came flooding back, but I was still glad I had gotten some updated instruction and experience in a controlled environment before jumping out into traffic again. Next step: deciding what bike I wanted.
The regional Harley-Davidson dealer had what it called a “demo-day” where you could join in with a group of prospective customers and test drive a handful of models for free. While the feeling of driving these huge machines was alluring, in the end I cautiously decided upon a mid-range model more suited to the in-city driving I envisaged doing. With my wife’s approval, I ordered a Harley Sportster 883 – far bigger than the others I had owned before. It fit like a glove.
So now I ride – not a lot, not on long rides, not in a club, just me. My wife wants nothing to do with it. She won’t let me take any of our children, although one eventually got a smaller one of his own in another city. She is afraid, and so am I, to some extent. A certain amount of fear when riding a motorcycle is healthy, I think. While there are many more car accidents reported each day on the news than motorcycle accidents, the motorcycle accidents are the ones that catch our attention. I have a college chum who died not long ago while riding his motorcycle. It turns out he had a heart attack and crashed off into a ditch. People driving cars crash and die during heart attacks too, but it always seems more dramatic on a motorcycle. His wife said he died doing what he loved the best.
But this is a new spring and I am getting ready to ride again. Will this be my last year? I don’t know. I just know that the adrenalin rush that catches me when I roll on the throttle in my first big curve can’t be matched by anything else. Feeling that wind sweeping against your face, rushing into your nostrils to supercharge your lungs, it can’t be duplicated. When you lean over into the curve, skimming the road and accelerate back up straight, it is a sensation words can’t adequately describe. You are not in the bubble of a car or a plane, you are out there in the wind. Then, you finally swing your leg back off the saddle at the end of your ride and your heart and your head say you are alive.
John A. Lynch lives in London, Ont.