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.