From the Library

[Biggles]

"A pleasure," he said, shaking my hand. "Have a good, safe trip."
"The pleasure is mine," I said, and it was. I was finding out that one of the best things about a motorcycle trip is that people you would never meet otherwise will come up and talk to you. "Won't you be lonely?" some of my non-biker friends had asked before I left.
"I doubt it," I had said, and on the ride down I never was.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p23

[Biggles]

Still, you wouldn't ride a bike if you didn't want to cultivate a bit of an outlaw status. I was working on my Entrance, one of the most important aspects of being a biker. You come into town and cruise slowly down Main Street- rump, rump, rump, cough-REVVvvv-rump- rump (obviously a high-powered machine, dangerous if not for your expert control)- and at the end of the street do a slow U-turn and come back to the cafe.
You back the bike up against the curb, taking long enough that you know all eyes are upon you, take off your helmet, put your sunglasses back on, and walk toward the door. You use the Strut: shoulders back, head high, just a hint of pelvic thrust You step inside the door and, chin still high, moving only your head, survey the room (even if it only has four tables). Then you take off your dark glasses and hook them in the left-breast pocket of your leather jacket the way fighter pilots do in the movies. Don't look. This is crucial. If you have to fumble for the pocket, you've blown it and you might as well get back on the bike and leave. Okay, by this point the men are cowed, the women trembling, and girls behind the counter moaning softly.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p26-7

[Biggles]

Near the end I found my guide, a local in a red Dodge pickup truck who led me at 65 through a bunch of bends marked slow, and slowed to 25 for some that were not marked at all. I was happy to follow. I had learned a long time ago that on the back roads the fastest car would never be an out-of-state Porsche; it would be a dusty Ford Tempo with a bumper sticker from the hometown radio station. Horsepower was no match for local knowledge.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p29

[Biggles]

Friends told me of their neighbour, a professional woman in her late forties who had started to ride. Short and soft spoken, she is not an immediately commanding presence. One Sunday during a ride she and her husband stopped at McDonald's. She was in full leathers and thought nothing of it until, with her burger and fries in hand, she had to get through the long food line-up to get to the ketchup station. She took a step forward and even before she could say "Excuse me," the line-up parted like the Red Sea. "It was wonderful," she said, "They thought I was a Biker!" Whether you're riding a cruiser or a dirt bike or a big touring rig, in the eyes of the world you're a bit of a hooligan or you wouldn't be out there. We reject it, we deny it, we explain at length that there is a difference between a Rider and a Biker, but we secretly relish it. We like the idea that we're mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p33

[Biggles]

Five minutes later none of it mattered. I found myself going a little faster, a little faster, a little faster.  My memory of the country is a blur- bright creek, slender pines- grabbed in laser-glimpses between corners. I tried to ride fast and stay off the brake, fast and smooth, using the Duke's linear power. I kept it in third- there it pulls hard all the way from 30 to 75 miles an hour, and when you back off it's like throwing out an anchor. This is why riders love big twins. Then I blew by a slow camper, snapped down my visor, and dived into a bend at 80- and found everythingoingintoslowmo. Instead of feeling fast it felt as if I could get up, do a tap dance on the tank, smoke a Havana cigar, get back down, and finish the corner with time for a snack. Glorious. Better than drugs.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p52-3

[Biggles]

"Pull off when it starts to rain," the instructor had said at Safety School. "The road is slipperiest in the first fifteen minutes because the oil on the pavement floats on the water. After it gets washed off, the motorcycle will be stable on the wet asphalt. Be careful, though. If too much water collects in the grooves of the lane you may hydroplane."
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p84

[Biggles]

The 300 miles to Roswell felt like 3,000. All day there was a 40-mile-an-hour wind coming out of Arizona and I felt as if I was wrestling with the lat pulldown bar of a weight machine. After lunch I rode for more than an hour without seeing another car. I didn't see a cow, though the land was fenced. I didn't even get bugs on my visor. Nothing, just the wind and the sage and the yellow-flowered cactus. I honked my horn every once in a while just to feel homey, and talked to myself inside my helmet. "Ain't nobody here," I told myself, "Nooooobuddy." The day was defined by wind and emptiness.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p89

[Biggles]

Non-riders would always ask me, "Don't you think motorcycling is dangerous?" in the tone of a foregone conclusion. It could be, I agreed, but I was a conservative rider. Besides, I said, motorcycling is only one of a million ways you can die. You can just as easily go in your La-Z-Boy recliner. In the spring, or when I haven't been riding in a long time, I have a moment of fear thinking about what I'm going to do, but as soon as I'm up and riding, I'm fine. I would give the answer my father gave when people asked him, "Isn't mountain climbing dangerous?" "Sure," he said, "but at least you go doing something you like." Then in The Stone Diaries I read about a Canadian journalist named Pinky Fulham who was crushed to death when a soft-drink vending machine fell on him. He had been rocking it back and forth, trying to dislodge a stuck quarter. Apparently eleven North Americans per year are killed by overturned vending machines. The next time I approached a vending machine I did so warily. And the next time someone asked me about bikes being dangerous, I told them about Pinky.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p93-4

[Biggles]

When I first put on a full-face helmet, I have a moment of claustrophobia. I can hear only my own breathing and I feel like one of those old-time deep-sea divers. 
The boots, jacket, and gloves feel cumbersome too- they're shaped all wrong for walking, but once you are on the bike, the gloves curl round the handgrips; the arms of the jacket flare out and forward, the wristbands are at your wrist instead of your fingertips; and the boots are snug onto the footpegs, reinforced toe under the gear lever. When you hit the starter, your breath merges with the sound of the bike, and once you're on the highway, the sound moves behind you, becoming a dull roar that merges with the wind noise, finally disappearing from consciousness altogether.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p124-5

[Biggles]

Even if you ride without a helmet, you ride in a cocoon of white noise. You get smells from the roadside, and you feel the coolness in the dips and the heat off a rock face, but you don't get sound. On a bike, you feel both exposed and insulated. Try putting in earplugs: the world changes, you feel like a spacewalker. What I like best about motorcycle touring is that even if you have companions you can't talk to them until the rest stop, when you'll compare highlights of the ride. You may be right beside them, but you're alone. It is an inward experience.
I like the fact that 'listen' is an anagram of 'silent.'
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p125

[Biggles]

They have begun using Ducati workers- "Ducati people"- rather than models in a sophisticated marketing campaign designed to hail you as a Ducati person.
We stopped first at the engine assembly. No robots in this factory: engines are made one at a time by one mechanic. She- and it is mostly women technicians in this section- moved with the engine and a tray or parts as it travelled down the line. The workers reminded me of typesetters, hands instinctively choosing the right piece from the case.
The bikes outside had led me to expect a bunch of lean, mean sport riders, but these looked like moms making money for their families. We moved on to the line where complete bikes were taking shape.
I wondered which person had assembled my engine. Maybe the blond woman with her hair pulled back. And who fit the engine into the frame? Maybe one of the older men tuning the finished bikes.  Each bike is made, in effect, by a family of workers.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p154

[Biggles]

"And all the bikes are still built here, on the same site as the original factory. We have produced only forty thousand bikes, where Honda has produced eight million. Ducati is like the pumpkin at Halloween or the Christmas tree at Christmas." I think what Livio meant is that you could not imagine the motorcycle world without Ducati, that Ducati crystallized the spirit of motorcycling. Certainly part of the mystique of Ducati is that everything they produce derives from a race-bred engine and a race-tested frame.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p159

[Biggles]

"One time coming back from the coast through the desert in Nevada- you know the Big Basin?- you come over a rise and you can see the road stretching away for miles and miles. No turns. Well, I'd always wanted to ride at 100 miles an hour for an hour. To cover 100 miles in one hour. And I did, I put my head down on the tank bag and just held it at 100. No one else out there. Straight across the desert." Will smiled, and for an instant I could see the young librarian speeding into the empty space, stretching the moment to an hour he would have all his life.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p174

[Biggles]

My reading on Lawrence and Ulysses had naturally led to a little research on Lawrence and motorcycles, and in one sense his death on a bike seemed inevitable. "Its my great game on a really pot-holed road to open up to 70 miles an hour or so and feel the machine gallop," he wrote to George Brough in a letter praising the firm's motorcycles. He told Charlotte Shaw how he rode down from Edinburgh averaging 65 miles an hour, hitting 90 miles an hour for 2 or 3 miles on end, "leaping" past Morris Oxfords doing a staid 30 miles an hour.
He called his motorcycles Boanerges- "sons of thunder"- and the thunderous riding was a compulsion: "When my mood gets too hot... I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it top-speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour." Like the pilots after the Second World War who formed the biker gangs in the United States, Lawrence felt his nerves" jaded and gone near dead, so that nothing less than hours of voluntary danger will prick them into life.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p176

[Biggles]

Once off the bike I knew I should stop. I got directions to the Energy Park Inn, and walked out to the bike already thinking of how cool the room would be and forgetting how top-heavy the bike becomes with a full tank. I swung it off the sidestand and-  aaurghh...  thump! tinkle-tinkle- I dropped it. The brake lever knob skittered across the tarmac. The saddlebags kept the bike from coming down on my leg, but gas was spilling out around me. I struggled but couldn't get the bike up (which way do you turn the bars? there's a trick to getting bikes up but I couldn't remember).
"Excuse me?" I called to the guy at the next pump. He had his back turned and I was muffled by my helmet. "Excuse me!..." I said louder (god how embarrassing- it's like those commercials: "Help, fallen and can't get up"- maybe they should have emergency beepers for elderly motorcyclists). "Help!!" I shouted.
"Oh ...oh ... sorry," he said, grabbed the handlebar, and together we got the bike up. I was really shaken. Not because of the bike falling over but because the fall made me realize how far gone I was. I had no business riding around the block, much less blasting into the desert sun at 80 miles an hour with my brain completely poached. I was lucky I had fallen over at a gas station.
Riding With Rilke  Ted Bishop  p190