Misty watercolour memories.

Somehow, I imagine that if anyone is reading this at all, they're probably new to motorcycling or maybe even just thinking about it. In that spirit, I thought maybe a novice rider's review of the Scrambler might be a nice contribution to the canon. I've put about 4,000 km on this thing since getting it in June. I'd read a lot about how to get a first bike (which this wasn't, technically, but I did get it during my first season), and was duly warned against getting something so big and so powerful. Indeed, this redheaded stepchild of the Bonneville family is intimidating to sit on if you're new to this. It's tall, it's got a biggish motor at 865cc, and it's heavy at 500lbs wet.

The big lesson, for me, turned out to be that these measures don't mean much on the road. The truth about Scrammy was deeper into the numbers. Specifically, I'm talking about torque. How much, and where it is on the tach. In Scrammy's case, there's plenty of it at 50 ft/lbs, and the majority of it is available below 3,000 rpm, after which the curve flattens out nicely. What this means is that there is absolutely no incentive to rev the crap out of it only to hit an arm-stretching peak in the power band. You can choose to be mellow, and it will cheerfully do whatever you ask without surprising you or making you feel like you're abusing it. Between that and the fact that it turns out motorcycles don't want to fall down, I was confident as soon as I was rolling. I wouldn't want to have to pick the thing up off the ground, mind you, but this bike isn't going to unduly challenge a new rider, that's for sure, as long as he/she is tall enough to keep it upright at a stop.

You'll find some carping about the shocks by professional reviewers of this bike, and they're right, in my opinion. The bike is oversprung and underdamped at both ends, which can make potholes and pavement irregularities a bit too exciting. Hagon makes some well regarded and surprisingly affordable shocks and springs for this bike, so I upgraded both in the fall. I can't honestly say they changed the ride quality much, but they absolutely improved the damping. The bike is much less unsettling on sudden bumps and through corners. Speaking of which, and from no basis of expertise, I'd say it's a decent handler over all. Less responsive than my little CBR, but much more so than the ponderous S40. On the twisty roads around here, I'd say mellow is the word again... it just does what you ask, and always leaves you feeling there's some margin of error if you need it.

I've caught the farkling disease, for sure, but in surprising moderation compared to what I've done with some of the cars in my past. You can see in the photo that it has the Arrow 2-into-1 exhaust, which sounds glorious and old-school badass (once the fuel map was properly revised). The leather saddle was an e-Bay find, a casualty of an abandoned custom project. It gets a lot of complimentary attention. I added the headlight screen and skid plate for that desert sled look, and the Hagons, of course. I'm thinking dresser bars might be in my future, too, but past that the bike doesn't seem to want for much.

The real risk to my credit card seems to be stuff to wear. Can you have too many jackets? I don't think so. Because if you ride one of these, you'd better expect to be social. Not looking like a testosterone-addled kid on a sport bike or a gangster on a cruiser definitely lowers some barriers. And Scrammy's retro looks seem to invite misty reminiscing by strangers of all kinds about the Triumphs in their lives that got away. You owe it to them to look like you belong on one. If you're going to trade on the history of a brand like that, consider it your karmic duty.

The road home.

How often in life does something potentially great turn out to be just as great as you'd hoped? If you're honest, probably not that often. Love, if you're lucky. The occasional recipe. That time in New York. The exceptions are memorable, and we frame them in our minds to hang in a prominent spot at the edge of our worldview so we're constantly reminded that it can happen.

That's what this last six months has been like for me and Scrammy. Granted, being of a certain age and of modest sportiness, I didn't go into this new adventure expecting the moon. But still, every mile has been a grin-inducing party. Every mile, including the freezing cold trip to the dealer this morning, a crystalline late fall dawn with frost on the ground and a view that went forever. And now it's over. The Triumph got its annual service today, which included preparing it for storage. At least at the farm, we're done for the season.

I wasn't prepared to be so sentimental about it, but it's ended up feeling almost like some kind of rehearsal for mortality. The lady at the gas station actually offered condolences, without a trace of irony, when I explained why I was topping off the tank. The months ahead seem to stretch indefinitely, a little like the road I turned off this morning to get home, instead of rolling on the throttle like every fiber of my being wanted me to do. As with everything in life, intensity has a price, if you want to survive it.

I still have to clean Scrammy up and install a battery tender before the cover goes on for the last time. My magazine subscriptions are updated, and I'm going to start thinking about projects and goals for next year right now, just like I did last fall. We'll make next year even better, if fate will allow me to be a little greedy this time around. In the meantime, just in case those nondualists are right, I thanked him before closing the garage door. You never know.

Valar morghulis.

A hawk? This is how I die? An effing bird of prey?!

I didn't, of course. Heading west out of town on County Road 9 - a delicious 15km stretch of twisty, fresh pavement - I rounded a curve to see the raptor dive bombing something by the roadside. He, being better at his job than I am at mine, pulled up as I was 20 feet away and closing. Disaster averted, I swallowed hard and rode on.

This kind of thing happens a lot. There are times when riding a motorcycle is like living in Australia: everything wants to kill you. Deer, off-leash dogs, wind-blown trash, texting drivers, gusty crosswinds, mid-curve sand on the road, on and on. But they warned me about this. They - the people who teach the motorcycle safety course - warned me about a lot of things, in fact. And every single one of those warnings was true. Every. Single. One.

That thing about motorists turning left in front of you, said to cause more than 40% of multi-vehicle motorcycle accidents? True. That thing about not sitting in a car's blind spot? True. Always being in the right gear as you approach a stop, and watching your six? True. About not riding when you're not feeling your best? True. That thing about assuming another vehicle near you will always do the worst possible thing, so be ready for that thing? Mostly true. True, true, true. In fact, I have to say that not one moment of that weekend last year standing in the pouring rain while those perky people rabbited on about what can happen on a motorcycle was wasted. It has all happened, something on almost every ride.

What's funny is, stuff that would make me apoplectic if someone did it to me while I was driving a car, I brush off on the bike. It's like when you're suited up to ride, you inhabit an alternate version of yourself, someone unflappable and, well, superior. The most people get from me is a shake of the head, which tends to seem doubly reproachful when you're wearing a helmet. Though I don't bother with wildlife, of course.

But I think the main thing I want to say here is this: if you're thinking of taking this up, take the course and pay attention. It will turn out that not a single word they say to you is frivolous.

Somewhere west of Laramie.

So this happened.

Stopped for fuel, I returned to my bike to find a woman of uncertain age (old enough to know better, which bears on this tale) in a summer frock inspecting the Triumph at close quarters.

Me: "Careful. That pipe is hot." On account of the aforementioned frock.

Her, brightly: "Oh, thanks... I guess it would be. So, where are you headed?"

Because a guy on a bike, bug splattered and riding alone must surely be "headed" somewhere. Fleeing the law, perhaps. Or a jealous lover. Or maybe just because of his vagabond soul. Anyway, the point is, this is not the kind of question a strange woman asks someone driving a Yaris.

Me: "I've been where I'm headed, I guess. Going home now."

Her, faintly crestfallen: "Oh... too bad. Well, ride safe."

I realize now I should have made up a more mysterious answer. Because you're never really riding alone, right? It turns out the escape fantasies of countless fellow humans are riding pillion. You can't step out of character for a second.

Every ride a lesson. 

What you pay for.

Pretty much everything they tell you - or warn you - about motorcycling turns out to be true (more on this, and why the safety course is a brilliant investment, in a future post). But some things, you don't find out until you've read between the lines of a hundred magazine articles, or discovered them for yourself. One such topic: helmets.

Most of what you read about helmets focuses obsessively on fit, and on making sure you have the right certification. These things matter, and they mostly determined my first helmet purchase, a Zoan. Not the prettiest lid, but it fit my oddly shaped head more or less (just one little pressure point),  had the all important ECE 22.05 blessing, and was a pretty good deal. It never occurred to me for a second there would be any more to it than that.

A second bike necessitated a second helmet (the bikes, you'll recall, are in separate places), and by pure chance I found myself in the middle of a seasonal clearance sale wherein I scored the helmet above, an Arai Signet Q, for less than half of its stratospheric regular price. It fit like mother's love, as if it had been made for me (Arai's oval headform is kind of a thing among North American riders in the know, this being the market Arai created it for). I figured I'd scored a bit of extra comfort, and the status illusion that I was a guy who spent $700 on a helmet.

Then I rode with it, and here was the revelation: it's quiet. Noise, it turns out, is a big deal in helmet selection. I hadn't realized it, but the racket inside that Zoan was amping my anxiety at speed, which made me more tense and the bike therefore more squirrelly. The Arai allows barely a whisper of wind, even with the vents open. All I can really hear is the drivetrain and exhaust of the machine under me. I have mixed feelings about the Snell certification, but otherwise I can say, hand on heart, that this lid improved my riding.

Who knew.

Do you hear a truck?

It has not been entirely surprising that motorcycling is a regressive behavior, although they don't prepare you for the fact that you will actually feel like a kid when you're riding. More than this, they also don't prepare you for how comprehensive the regression will be. You will sneak looks at your bike as you're walking away from it. You'll find excuses to skulk out to the garage to see if it's really there. You'll read motorcycle magazines with an ardor not seen since you bought Playboy as a teenager (along with a get well card for your 'sick friend'...). And you will order things from the internet and wait breathlessly by the front door for the sound of the UPS truck crunching up the driveway. You will be 16.

I have done this a lot. Kevlar jeans. A brake lock alarm for the Honda. Armor. Boots. But nothing - nothing - comes close to the anticipation I'm feeling for the imminent arrival of my new jacket.

I found it online, at a place called Union Garage, in Brooklyn, NY. It's kind of a spiritual home for the urban hipster retro bike scene, and everything they sell is awesome. Awesome. I visited them this past spring (the store is the size of a walk-in closet), and they were as friendly and knowledgeable and passionate and and cool as you would hope. I like the world better knowing that Union Garage is in it. We will do a lot of business.

But first, this jacket. Check it out, and tell me you wouldn't buy a motorcycle just so you could have one too. Seriously.

Mr. McQueen, your bike is ready.

Much to tell.

First of all, let's deal with the long silence: I've been out riding. I mean, that's pretty much the explanation. It's been busy at work, yes, and I've been trying to avoid screens in my down time, but basically - in my head, at least - I'm riding. Doing it, reading about it, buying stuff for it. Riding. It all started with an ultimatum.

One fine day in May, I decided that the gravel hill that was haunting my nightmares like some white whale wasn't going to change its position on the matter, so I had to, or this experiment was over. And down I went (the hill, I mean, without incident). Things moved pretty quickly after that. I rode every chance I got, flogging the little Suzuki hither, thither and yon, and knocking off every nervous-making road within 50 km one by one. Not elegantly, or quickly, but convincingly enough that it was only a matter of weeks before I knew I was going to outgrow the little thumper sooner than later. Then my 'dude economics' gene kicked in. If I'm going to sell it, better I should do it in the spring than in the fall, I intoned to my long-suffering wife.

The rest is a bit of a blur. Somehow, the week of my birthday, the beast in the picture above landed in my driveway. 500 lbs and 865 cc of Brit-bike hipster cred, not at all the Bonnie I thought I wanted, but infinitely more suited to its bucolic new home. In my defense, it was a great deal, a 2013 demo (the year I would have preferred anyway, because of the chrome wheels), well below list and with an $1100 rumbly exhaust system bolted on to ice the cake. I've put 1000 km on it already. More on that later.

In short order, the S40 found a new home. A nurse at a local hospital, probably about my age, rolled up the driveway in her minivan, took one look, and said, "I think I want this." She was tired of being a passenger in life, she told me, had had about enough of mom duty and of waiting for her husband to make good on his intention to buy a bike so they could get their second puppyhood started. So she was taking matters into her own hands. Cash deal. With the ink barely dry on her M2, she rode the little Zook home on a pretty busy road, grinning like a fool. She was pretty cool.

Now, Scrammy has the barn all to himself. A custom vintage leather seat is on the way, after which I think I'll leave it alone for a while. Mind you, if you've been reading this blog, you already know my promises are about as reliable as a house cat's.

Happy trails.

If you happen to also be a novice at this magnificent game, you should read this post. It's a point of view that I would have found pretty helpful when I was fretting about my choice of first bikes. To wit:

Let's start with the picture above. That's William, or rather was. He died last spring, part of my annus horribilis. This blog is secretly dedicated to him. I loved that horse. He was my second, but he should have been my first. Where his predecessor was flighty and nervous and tended to amplify my own anxiety, old Bill was always calm and circumspect. He never freaked out or overreacted to an input, yet it took very little to get him to do what you wanted. He could run like the wind, but he needed to be sure that's what you had in mind before he put the hammer down. And when he did, his canter unfolded in easy, joyful waves that made you feel like a real cowboy. Had I been even a little talented as an equestrian, I might have eventually looked for a more challenging mount. But I wasn't. William just made me feel that way, and that kept me riding.

And that is the Suzuki S40.

You may recall that I recently bought a Honda CBR250R to toot around the city. Every review of this bike characterizes it as willing and capable, but easygoing and difficult to get into trouble with. The state of the art for starter bikes. Which is fair enough; it kind of is those things. But compared to the larger displacement S40, it has an almost twitchy throttle (at least at first), tends to lurch when you roll off, and it lets you know if your downshifts are less than perfect. That's great for learning (I do really like the CBR), but you don't get quite as many 'hey, look at me!' moments out of the gate as the old Zook gives you. The latter's lazy throttle and broad, flat torque curve mean that you just have to have a grasp of the general principles and you can get down the road in dignity almost from the first try. I can see wanting more, soon, but it's hard to imagine a bike more encouraging to start on. The fact that it's a 650cc only makes it all the more so. As with William (who stood well north of 16 hands), the bigger engine may make for bragging rights, but it doesn't make the ride one bit more challenging.

Just my .02, but if you see a nice one in the classifieds, I wouldn't dismiss it. The right first horse can make all the difference.

Sprung.

You can interpret the title of this post as a reference to spring (as in having sprung), or to the immortal Springsteen lyric (as from cages out on highway 9). The season is probably the safer bet; I'm still a few tanks of gas away from being worthy of the Jersey bard's poetry.

In any case, winter is gone at last, and there is news to share.

My standoff with the steep dirt road from our house to the nearest pavement continues. Currently, the problem is actually mud, not loose gravel. I've been bombing around the dirt roads around our house a little, just to get back into the groove. The Suzuki is proving easygoing and companionable, and I even seem to be mastering the clutchless shift on the old bird, but discretion remains the better part of valor where steep grade + greasy mud + a sharp curve are concerned. In other words, I still haven't made it to pavement. Conditions seem to be pointing to an opportunity to try tomorrow morning, so we'll see how that goes. But this getting silly. I'm going to need another place to park this thing, or the nerve to cast common sense aside and go for it, praying I don't end up tangled up in barbed wire in the ditch at the bottom.

In the meantime, staggering around in a fog of wounded male pride, I did the only sensible thing. I bought another bike.

A bit of explanation: We spend part of our time in the city for work, and we have an apartment there. When I first got it in my head to get a motorcycle, I swore I'd never ride in the city. Too many jerks, I thought, and too little situational awareness. It would be dangerous. But a couple of weeks ago, out for a walk, I started to notice the sheer number of motorized two-wheeled vehicles on the road. Hipsters on Vespas. Grim looking heavy people on e-bikes. Newly licensed kids on Ninjas. Grey-bearded hedge fund managers on Harleys. I can't possibly, I thought, be the stupidest person ever to survive riding a motorcycle in the big city. And besides, I was a cyclist there for years and years. A motorbike can't be more dangerous than that, right? There's more noise, more protective clothing, less speed differential, lights, a horn... hell, it ought to be safer than falling off a bar stool.

Right about then, I saw an ad for discounts on non-current CBR250Rs. I know, I know, I'm not a sport bike guy, and the CBR at least looks like a sport bike. But $3700 plus the dealer's vig for a brand new, fuel injected bike with ABS? At a certain point, even with motorcycles, vanity has to take the pillion. It's exactly like the one at the top of this post. I pick it up on Tuesday. My trial by fire will be the 15km ride back to the apartment on choppy suburban four-lane.

All that remained was to get a parking spot. The super at our building said, yes, there were underground spots available for rent. But I did know that these things get stolen down there all the time, right? Right. Sigh...

Back in Black.

So, there’s a motorcycle show. 

That’s not surprising once you say it, but the discovery was, for me, like finding out a circus was coming to town. And in one of those rare moments when I think maybe God really does want me to be happy, my darling wife just happened to be busy taking a course that very weekend. When Saturday morning finally came, I kissed her goodbye, gulped down the last of the coffee, jumped in the car and was among the first people in line when the doors opened.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about motorcycle shows, and you need to know this: you can sit on everything. You can’t even do that in dealer showrooms. But here, on this one golden weekend in February, you can plop yourself down on any motorcycle that tickles your fancy, and likely not even have to deal with a salesperson. And you should. Mind you, it took an hour before this truth really dawned on me – I’d been raised to not touch things that weren’t yours, given the certainty that something embarrassing and expensive would happen. But once I had the epiphany, I was straddling everything that didn’t move. And learning more than all the motorcycle magazines in the world could possibly teach me.

I learned, for example, that I’m not comfortable on cruisers. Look at them, and you’d think they would be the easiest bikes to ride, what with your feet in front of you where you can see them. But, sitting there, at least, this position seemed like it would feel strange to me on the road (Harley's Iron 883 reminded me of riding a Big Wheel). I was less surprised to learn that a lot of sport bikes would be equally uncomfortable, besides the “not that guy” problem, and yet more so that the Kawasaki Ninja 300 was the second most natural feeling bike I sat on all day. All of the adventure bikes were immediately off the table simply because they are so tall; that thing about beginners needing to put both feet on the ground is real. 

All of which was fine. Because I wanted a standard. I wanted to be Steve McQueen way more than I wanted to be Jax Teller. As it turned out, what I wanted was a Triumph Bonneville.

I flirted with other bikes in the class at the show, of course; you don’t pass up a chance like that. Besides being less pretty, the BMW R Nine T is just a lot of money. I loved the Eurotrash quirkiness of the Moto Guzzi V7, but it wasn’t as comfortable for me as its measurements would suggest. But when I got to the Triumph booth, it felt like a homecoming. I’d found a crack in the time space continuum and landed in an alternate 1970s in which I was cool and insouciant rather than a chubby dork. The Scrambler made my heart beat a little faster, but it felt ungainly, more than I was ready for. But when I settled into the saddle of the base Bonneville, my feet and hands landed in exactly the right four spots without even thinking about it. Clouds parted, angels sang, and a column of pure, divine light shone down to the very spot I was sitting. My bike. 

Except that the T100 Black is effing gorgeous. Just a smidge less comfortable for me than the regular Bonnie, and I’d probably die trying to catch glimpses of myself in store windows as I rode it. But, man. 

Men plan, God laughs.

In motorcycling, as in life, it can sometimes be hard to tell whether your god is protecting you, or simply reminding you that joy is a mirage. 

That hill would be my white whale. Praying for a long dry fall, I realized nothing awesome was going to happen until I mastered the art of gravel road surfaces. It was an odd and joyless place to start motorcycling, but the options were ridiculous (I never seriously considered a trailer. Not for long, anyway).  “All idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary,” wrote Nietzsche. So, never getting out of second gear, I burbled up and down our laneway and ventured out on to the road, an hour here, an hour there, every chance I got, praying the neighbours weren’t paying attention. I played with rear wheel braking on the gravel hill, letting the engine help and feathering the clutch to keep the wheels turning. But mostly, I spent those first few hours trying to erase anxiety.  Three kilometers away, there is a small town with quiet, leafy streets where I can practice in earnest, but first I have to get there. Finally, by early November, I was growing confident enough to make a run for town and finally feel pavement under my wheels. “Next weekend,” I said to the little Suzuki as its warm engine ticked itself to sleep.

And then it snowed.

Easy rider.

There is no shortage of finger wagging on the internet about how novice riders should consider small-displacement bikes, ideally 250s. Believing that while fortune favours the bold, caution favours the old, I accepted this guidance and shopped diligently for such a bike. Like most advice on the internet, though, it turned out to be a little on the glib side. 250cc cruisers like the Yamaha V Star 250 and the Honda Rebel look great in pictures, but I felt like a circus bear on them (I’m 5’11”, 200-ish lbs). When I took the MSF course, I had been issued a Kawasaki Eliminator, which managed the trick of being both Ken doll-tiny and stubbornly reluctant to turn. It was awful, and dampened my enthusiasm for going the cruiser route. I liked the idea of a standard and thought the Suzuki TU250 might make a respectable place to start, but there were simply none to be had at the end of the season. Honda’s CBR250R was a very tempting package, especially with ABS – everybody loves this bike – but the sport bike aesthetic just doesn’t fit me. I’m not that guy, and motorcycling, it turns out, demands that you know exactly what guy you are.

A little stumped and running out of good weather days, I pled my case to the local Yamaha dealer, thinking I might end up on a Virago. Instead, he led me to the back of the building where they kept their used inventory. Buy your first bike used, he said, because you’ll probably drop it. And yes, don’t buy something too heavy or powerful. But for pete’s sake don’t by something so small and pokey that you’re sick of it in a month and end up doing something stupid. And with that, he pointed to a tidy little silver 2006 Suzuki S40. “The best kept secret in beginner bikes,” he said. Almost as light and just as narrow as a 250, but a touch roomier and, at 650cc, more powerful. And, I have to admit, it appealed to me that the S40 wasn’t dripping in pseudo-Harley cruiser drag. There could hardly be a plainer, more honest bike, in fact. But for the relaxed rake of the front fork, you could call it a standard. It makes no statement at all. That’s the guy I am.

The bike was a consignment, so it took a few days to settle the deal. Rather than ride it home, I’d have it delivered to our house the next Friday afternoon. The nearest pavement to our place, you see, is 3km distant, at the bottom of a steep, twisty gravel hill. I wasn’t ready for that to be my first open road experience. I had not, if I’m honest, even thought about that hill until the shop called to say the S40 was mine. But I looked at it this way: the little thumper had passed through six owners on its way to my driveway, probably all novices, and not one of them appeared to have dropped it. So maybe it’s a lucky motorcycle. Amor fati.

Amor fati.

This story doesn’t start where you might think it would. It doesn’t start when I was 8 years old and my dad happened by on his Honda while I was being harassed by some other kids on the walk home from school and rescued me. That didn’t make me want a motorcycle. It doesn’t even start when I was 13, when I swung a leg over my very own second-hand Broncco minibike and headed off to a nearby gravel pit to be humbled by my rich friends on their Honda 70s. With the muscle car era at its apogee, there were bigger fish to fry in the fire of my puberty. The Broncco was just a bit of distraction until I could get my driver’s license. Cars would take up residence in my soul soon after and would not release me for decades. The story didn’t begin with a motorcycle at all, actually. It began with a bad year.

We all have bad years, so I won’t dwell on the details. Suffice to say it has been a cocktail of sudden, unfair family deaths, various crises for the living, a health scare for my wife. Life. A bit concentrated, time wise, but life. A funny thing happens when you hit your 50s: You realize that you can – you must – decide how you’re going to let this stuff define you for the time you have left. When you’re younger, you think in shorter horizons. Bad things set you back, even change your course, but they don’t leave such distinct marks on you. Once you’re in the middle of life, though, you are more of a fixed thing. The cement isn’t wet anymore, and the cracks and chips are permanent. So you have to decide.

I decided on a muggy August morning, while I was waiting to get the oil changed in my truck. The bad year was in full swing, and I guess I was having one of those ‘is this as good as it gets?’ moments, sulking a little. Killing time, I wandered into a Yamaha dealer nearby, a place I’d done some business in the past, just to say hello. And then I sat on a bike. And then I picked up an MSF brochure. And then I said, “fuck it,” called the number and signed up for a course in September on the spot. Just like that. No meditation, no biblical epiphany, no heroic moment of clarity. I just decided.

I took the course during a weekend of cold, unrelenting rain, passing without distinction. The dates had fallen just a week after cancer took my brother in law, as it happened. Going anyway was probably stupid, but it felt like some kind of gesture. Amor fati. I had my M2, and a fresh reminder of my mortality. Now I needed a bike.