From the Library

[Biggles]

I am a motorcyclist, and though I recognize I am not the "usual" motorcyclist, I also don't anticipate ever meeting one of those in person. All I know is that over the years I have occasionally sat back and thought how strange it is that motorcycles can completely overtake your being and act as if they own it. Certainly nothing in my life before them- and certainly not my parents, whose own interests run to chamber music, books, gardening, art, and cocktail parties- had prepared me to fall in love with bikes. I had gone through prep school, college, graduate school without knowing they existed. Those years were filled with sequential or concurrent passions: horses, the Civil War, dogs, bicycling, photography, poetry, the dream of true socialism, literary theory, and a couple of dozen boys. I am still interested in all those things to some extent, except for the boyfriends, whose names I have largely forgotten, but the desire I came to feel for bikes eclipsed all of them, even though I still dream of having a horse.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p22-3

[Biggles]

I don't want to sell my bike, which is another friendly suggestion I receive. I love riding- and although I can't say I love trying to look this damnable fear in the face, I realize the possibilities for self improvement. The bike has merely become the concretisation of the free-floating terror that lives inside me, and if I didn't have a bike, it would attach itself to something else. I would be unable to go to the grocery store, or make phone calls, or show up for work. I don't want my world to shut down any farther; I need it to open up, and a motorcycle does nothing better than propel one outward. A few years ago I started going through the travel and adventure section of the library, looking for books by people who did dangerous things, preferably again and again. I always found what I was looking for. The autobiographies invariably carried a variation of the type of statement made by Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to climb Everest: "Fear is an important component of any challenge. If you feel fear, and then overcome it, you feel a special thrill." I was getting special thrills every time I went out for a spin.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p54

[Biggles]

ELVIS PRESLEY The King was a devoted motorcyclist, much to the dismay of those with a financial interest in his continued celebrity- and to the delight of the savvy PR organ of Harley-Davidson, the magazine "The Enthusiast", which often pictured him astride the Milwaukee product. In "Roustabout", a supremely forgettable movie, Presley is a baby-faced rebel who hits the road on a shiny red "Japanese sikkle" (which he rides while singing) and joins the carnival. This 1964 flick is wonderfully resurrected in 1986's "Eat the Peach", in which the bike-riding, down-on-their-luck Irish protagonists obsessively watch their favourite movie, "Roustabout", until they hit on a plan intended to change their fortunes: building a Wall of Death in the middle of the depressed Irish countryside.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p81

[Biggles]

ROBERT HUGHES Long the art critic for Time magazine and an unapologetically opinionated observer of culture at large, he is also an unapologetic lover of riding. In 1971 he published an essay in the newsweekly titled "Myth of the Motorcycle Hog." He tried to define the core of the experience:
Riding across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on his motorcycle, the biker is sensually receptive every yard of the way to the bridge drumming under the tires, to the immense Pacific wind, to the cliff of icy blue space below... There is nothing second-hand or vicarious about the sense of freedom, which means possessing one's own and unique experiences, that a big bike well ridden confers. Anti-social? Indeed, yes. And being so, a means to sanity. The motorcycle is a charm against the Group Man.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p82-3

[Biggles]

At the outset, with a solid mass of machinery trying to dive into turn one as if it were a single unit, relatively few risks are taken. Control and nerve. A bit more control and nerve than those other twenty-nine are showing. That's what begins the process that leads straight to the finish. Finally, since someone must take the lead, the rest of the field strings out behind, making it more possible to witness the concurrent intensification of the drive to win, to beat both the track and anyone else on it.
On and on they go. Twenty laps, thirty, shrieking by so fast in the front stretch that the spectators who stand at the fence are blown back, can't move their heads fast enough to watch them go by, so they pick one direction to look in and stay stuck to it. For their part, the racers are so precise about the line they choose that if it's raining you can see a five-inch-wide dry path forming, and no matter how many times they go around, a mile and a half later their tires will be exactly on that stripe each time.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p97-8

[Biggles]

One has to suspect nothing but such compelling cause when so many racers are blurring down the course wearing splints, bandages wrapped tight to keep the swelling out of the way, broken ribs and foot bones, and disregarding doctors' advice and, on occasion, threats. Getting back into the ring is the only thing that matters, and most people would hardly believe the sacrifices made to do so. Grand Prix racer Wayne Rainey fell in practice before the 1992 season, injuring a hand that might have healed but not in time for the first race; instead, he had a finger amputated so he could compete. The next year his colleague Kevin Magee, with a similar injury, made exactly the same choice. Just before participation in the Mille Miglia claimed his life, the Marquis of Portago, a celebrated automobile racer of the fifties, affirmed, "Racing is a vice and, as such, extremely hard to give up."
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p106

[Biggles]

My motorcycle was very happy to be home. Franz would pull her up onto the lift in the back room and instruct me on whatever minor dismantling needed to be done. It was not lost on me that one trouble I had had working on my bikes at home was not having the proper tools; in Philadelphia I first felt the silken weight of a Snap-on tool, a true joy to hold. Once Franz looked over as I was extracting the oil filter from the bottom of the sump during an oil change, saw my right hand under a river of black oil, and said, "You mean to tell me you haven't figured out how to pull a Guzzi's filter and keep your hands completely clean?" Damn, I thought; changing the oil is about the only thing I know how to do well, and now he tells me I don't. A few minutes later I came to my senses. I was such an easy mark. 
"There's no way to do it, you liar." He guffawed through his nose as he ran up front to avoid the dirty shop rag coming his way.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p110

[Biggles]

If the glue that binds is Italian-made, there is sure to be more than one person cruising the rally site wearing a sweatshirt that states vivere per montare, montare per vivere ("Live to Ride, Ride to Live"), and it is not to be taken as a joke. Nor is the related sentiment expressed by one Moto Guzzi owner who affixed large bas-relief dinner forks to the side covers of his bike over the legend MANGIERE PER MONTARE, MONTARE PER MANGIERE ("Eat to Ride, Ride to Eat"). 
The pleasures of long-distance riding are inextricable from those of eating, and one heightens the other. It is partly a trick the psychologists call "excitation transfer", which makes even the raggedest diner chow seem exquisite, and you can eat lots, too, so long as you get back on the bike and let the wind and cold and stress of constant watchfulness burn it up for you.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p113-4

[Biggles]

People continue to make epic journeys on two wheels because, like Fulton, they want a way to feel fully engaged with and even vulnerable to their surroundings. Many people feel free to come up and talk when you are on a bike; you have eschewed certain protections and shields in exchange for the fullest possible experience of a place. And there is the appealing athleticism of the endeavour- on a long trip across continents, you will get bruised, baked, and knocked about and be given plenty of opportunities to challenge your physical and technical wits. The resulting rugged experience has the effect of reordering one's priorities, making one look at the scope of a single life a little differently. It has much in common with camping (and indeed is often combined with camping) and with what camping can teach. 
Motorcycle journeyers would no doubt sense an echo of the familiar in what John Burroughs wrote early in this century in "A Summer Voyage": "The camper-out often finds himself in what seems a distressing predicament to people seated in their snug, well-ordered houses; but there is often a real satisfaction when things come to their worst, a satisfaction in seeing what a small matter is, after all; that one is really neither sugar nor salt, to be afraid of the wet; and that life is just as well worth living beneath a scow or a dug-out as beneath the highest and broadest roof in Christendom."
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p150

[Biggles]

You may have to take my word for the fact that travelling by bike is superior to travelling by car. All right- I will allow that it's very, very different. 
Especially in the dark: the road seems to tilt ever upward, and you start imagining things. There will be rivers rushing in the blackness near the roadside; there will be a cliff looming overhead. You can ride into imaginative space, which is real travelling, because you are not anchored by anything. Look around. There is nothing between you and the weather, the smells, the colour of the sky. All impress themselves on your consciousness as if the ride had turned it to wet cement. And there they will stay, apparently forever, so you can recall those sensations with an almost frightening precision years later.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p151

[Biggles]

For some reason, riding the interstates on a motorcycle confers automatic, if only temporary, membership in the brotherhood of truckers. Often in a car I've felt I was the sixteen-wheeler's enemy, annoyingly in the way of a proper eighty-five on a downgrade and chugging forty on the incline. But on a bike I've felt protected by trucks, given wide berth, leeway to pass, signals on the all-clear. Maybe it's because so many drivers are bikers too. Maybe it's because both vehicles become more like comrades than agglomerations of parts. Or maybe it's because everyone needs friends out there in the big bad world.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p151-2

[Biggles]

They had one book, and it was one I did not yet own.
One Man Caravan, 1937. With a dust jacket. First edition. The author's signature on the flyleaf.
I was feeling poor that day, and I decided the twenty-dollar asking price was too rich for my blood. I carried it around the barn for two hours, then told the friend I was with I was going to put it back. He looked at me like the feebleminded wretch I was and took it from my hands and wordlessly marched to the cashier.
On the way home I started doing math in my head. If Fulton was twenty-two in the early thirties, how old would he be now? Well, old. But it was just possible that he was living in the New York area.
I called the publisher of the book, Harcourt Brace. It had on file addresses for the author current to the fifties, the last of which was care of an airline at an airfield in Connecticut. I sent a letter off into space, fairly certain it would land in the modern equivalent of the lead-letter office, and forgot about it.
But I can never forget, a month later, the evening before New Year's Eve. It was powerfully cold outside, which meant you could feel the frigid air with your hand an inch away from my apartment's walls; in the winter I became like a heat-seeking cat, spending much of my time standing next to the special old gas stove in the kitchen that provided the apartment's only warmth. I was pressed up against its vents, staring absently toward the windows I had ringed with little white Christmas lights, when the phone rang. The voice on the other end was strong and clear, and it said, "This is Robert Fulton."
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p155-6

[Biggles]

I was encouraged to slow down only when I reached the Adirondack, whose trees and altitudes and gentle warmth made riding the perfect pleasure. I stopped for a root beer, from a brown bottle embossed with cowboys, and an ice cream cone, the kind of treats-from-the-past that are most appropriate to the area. I was growing about as relaxed as I ever got while travelling by myself, when I usually force myself to make a stop, even though my bladder had long been screeching for help or my stomach protesting its needs in minor sea squalls, and even then I would only pause long enough to get take-out sandwiches to eat in a few gulps outside on the kerb where I could be eye level with the Lario's carburettors.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p162

[Biggles]

If ever I wish to test the elasticity of my consciousness by posing fundamentally unsolvable conundrums along the lines of "Try to conceive of infinity" I have only to recall the night I stopped at a highway tollbooth and held out my money. The toll taker, a guy in his twenties, fairly started blubbering. Finally he squeezed it out with incredulity in his voice: "Did you ride that motorcycle here all by yourself?"
Every woman who rides in this country has been asked that perspicacious question at least once, and some so often they now amuse themselves with thinking up commensurately smart rejoinders: "No, I carried it on my head." "You've heard of the Immaculate Conception? Well, it's sorta like that."
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p167

[Biggles]

January 2nd only comes around once a year, thank goodness. This year, 1995, marks my 46th birthday, by itself no great feat, but it was also the day that I embarked on my 30th birthday ride! I began this tradition in Cleveland, Ohio, with a ride on my brother's Vespa. He was in Korea and graciously left it behind. I assumed it was mine to ride and simply told my folks that this was Jim's gift to me. I don't know why they believed me but they did. So I threw my leg over the ugly thing and rode until my fingers were nearly frost-bit. It was a personal celebration.
Over the years I rode BMWs, BSAs, Triumphs, Harleys, Suzukis, and Hondas of my own, plus friends' Yamahas, Harleys, and Kawasakis when mine weren't running or in those lean years when I didn't own a bike (never again). There were rides in the rain, snow, slush and sleet as well as beautifully sunny days. The temperatures ranged from very close to 0 all the way to the 60s. I've been healthy as a horse and ready to go and seen the other side of that coin, too. In 1987 I took my birthday ride on my R65 Beemer only a few short weeks after being released from the hospital for open heart surgery. That was definitely the most painful ride of the bunch but also the most inspiring. I knew I was alive and had never been so happy about it! My birthday rides have been as short as around the block (during a blizzard where you couldn't see ten feet in front of you) to several hundred miles in the northern snowy mountains of Iran where it was very cold, slippery, and scary.
As the sticker on the back of my helmet says, "Motorcycles saved my life." Again and again.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p208