Children's Games
I try all things; I achieve what I can.
A year ago, as I was going through a mound of keepsakes my Mom transferred to my custody (I have reached that age, yes), I came across a little book I made in kindergarten describing my first bicycle crash, which I attributed to rolling over a pine-cone. I have very little recollection of the crash itself - I only recall sitting, high up on the passenger seat of the minivan, with a towel pressed to my forehead and anxiously asking, "B-but can you see any BRAINS?" What I remembered best was the jewel-like redness of the bloody wound I drew on my forehead when recounting the crash:
Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who
will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket;
and come a stove boat and stove body (ed: brain) when they will, for stave my
soul, Jove himself cannot.
I was surprised as I flipped through to the end of my book and read the comments from my parents and grandparents. I did not remember at all what my Dad wrote - that the very next day I was back on the bike. As an adult, reading that, I felt a sense of pride - whether in the approval, or in my five-year-old tenacity, I couldn't say.
These recollections bring to mind a similar event that happened with my son when he was about six. Interestingly, my Dad was also present to bear witness in one of those inscrutable Jungian coincidences. It happened like this: my brother and his family were in town visiting, and my son and his cousin took their scooters to the top of the long hill outside my Dad's house in order to race down. My nephew's scooter had two wheels, but my son's had three (two in front spaced a half-foot apart, and one behind). By the second or third run, all fear had left them, and as they reached critical speed, my son's three-wheeled scooter began oscillating violently until it lurched and threw him off. He got a chipped tooth, a scraped back and a very bloody nose. My Dad came running out of the house with a towel again, and, seeing the profusion of blood, as quickly ran back. Blood is not our scene in my family. A day later my brother texted me to ask how Connor was doing and I sent him a picture of Connor riding his scooter, to which my brother replied something along the lines of "You still don't have a helmet on him?!"
That same day Connor found five dollars on the ground. In my household, anyways, I think we must also believe a great deal in luck.
This same brother and I rode our bikes all summer long, growing up in a quiet neighborhood near Brookside, in Kansas City. There were old sidewalks, long disjointed by the growth of tree-roots, which made excellent bumps to use to pop the front wheel in the air. I remember a feeling of triumph when I rode my bike, no hands, all the way around our block, switching from street to sidewalk from time-to-time. I felt a sense of confidence and mastery, freedom and joy, when I rode my bike, that is inseparable from that larger, better feeling of just being a child during the hot, lazy summer. It wasn't long before I was dreaming of a motorcycle.
So much has been written about motorcycles, but the one image that has stuck with me the most came from Pirsig when he described how a motorcycle puts you in the scene while in a car you are an observer of the scenery. For me, it gets to the truth that the spirit of riding a motorcycle is simply the experience - that indivisible moment when you are piloting the machine and nothing else. Being aware of the demands of the machine and the environment when riding is one thing, and to ride well is everything.
There is a 20-mile stretch of winding, two-lane country highway between my home and my former office. It skirts the old boundaries of farms as it winds between Topeka and Lawrence, and it became a ritual with me to ride it as aggressively as I could, pushing my corner speed higher and higher. Eventually I found my way onto the racetrack, though not racing competitively. I never pursued that, it seems I was always racing myself and my own expectations and demands. I wanted to be always right at the extreme edge of my limits, pushing to grow, to be a little bit faster, a little bit more precise. On the track I found the perfect place to abandon myself to this impulse. There were always faster guys to catch, though it was not from a desire to dominate - it was to learn to emulate what they were doing and apply it to improving my own riding. There was always that one corner I could've hit a little better, that one spot I could've kept the throttle open a little bit longer. Next lap I'll nail it.
Unfortunately, our track shut down a few years ago, and the widespread belief was that it would never reopen. It had been through similar drama in 2015 and it seemed that this was the end. Shortly after this I bought a street-legal dirtbike and decided that from here on I would be a dirt rider. I also really wanted to get good at wheelies, and the prospect of looping-out while learning on a 125hp supersport was just too daunting. The first time I ever saw someone do a sick wheelie I had been sitting stopped at a red-light, when coming through the other way I saw a guy on a clapped-out old bike - he glanced over at me and then in the middle of the intersection popped up a high wheelie and zoomed away. The nonchalance with which he did it, and the sense of awe I unconsciously felt filled me with a desire to learn.
I began practicing wheelies the winter after the track shut down. In February I looped-out twice in two weeks, both times because my confidence had exceeded my ability. After the second crash I sat up in bed and let it all out to my wife - my fear that I would never figure it out, that I was fooling myself that I could, the shame that I had crashed up my bike again, maybe I should give up. She looked at me and said, "I know you'll be able to figure it out. Who cares if you crashed your bike, remember this is what you got it for!" Now, I know that, if I asked her for her own opinion on whether learning to wheelie a motorcycle is an important life skill for one to acquire, she would not have any hesitation saying "no, absolutely not". But she knew how important it was to me, and the love and understanding she showed me then, made such an impression on me. It was exactly what I needed to hear, and le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. I mean, wheelies?! It is so arbitrary as to be ridiculous, and yet there it is, my truth.
I learned from necessity (and YouTube) to repair all the shit on my bike that I broke in these crashes because I was too embarrassed to take it to the mechanic (a friend of the family) and explain what had happened. I fixed my bike and got right back to it, this time really focusing on building the muscle memory to use the rear brake.
I'd like to make an Ishmael-ian interlude here to explain how a wheelie works. Controlling a wheelie involves three distinct operations:
- Popping it up - this is done by pulling in the clutch and giving the engine a hearty rev, winding up the motor, and then dropping the clutch and transferring all that power in a sudden burst. This is what lifts the wheel.
- Balance point - using the throttle to lift the front wheel higher and the rear brake to keep from looping all the way backwards. You are constantly making small adjustments while the wheel is in the air to keep the bike at balance point. Below balance point you will be gaining speed as the engine must continue supplying acceleration to keep the wheel up. Behind balance point, the rear brake will gently slow the bike.
- Side-to-side balance - because you're only on one wheel, you have more degrees of freedom, and maintaining side-to-side balance becomes more important the longer the wheel is up.
You know that feeling when you're sitting in a chair and kinda playing with tipping it backwards, and then you tip it a little too far and instinctively flail your legs and arms wildly. When that happens on a motorcycle in a wheelie, the only way to bring it back down is with light pressure on the rear brake. No brake or not enough brake you loop. Too much pressure and you mouse-trap.
After a week or two of practice, slowly building back my shattered confidence, the day came when I felt that sickening falling-backwards feeling and instead of looping out or jumping off, smacked the rear brake and brought it back down. This was the turning point. Later that year I was riding them for over a mile.
For all the Freudians in the house, check out my surrogate you-know-what.
What does it all mean? Nothing at all, objectively. In fact, the goal was so silly and arbitrary that I felt almost apologetic for devoting so much effort towards it. But somehow learning this skill has been incredibly rewarding personally. Before I learned how to wheelie well I would have these dreams where I hopped on a bike and rode them effortlessly - in my dream I would think, "Is this all there is to it? Why, then, did it seem so hard? This feels incredible, though!" And as soon as I could wheelie reasonably well, the dreams stopped, they had crossed-over into my reality.
I've been experiencing something similar with riding off-road. At first it felt impossible, coming from the track where managing traction is of such importance, to riding on terrain that shifts underneath you and is endlessly variable. I stuck with it, though, and then last Fall something clicked. I had the same feeling as when I hit the rear brake the first time - a whole new world had opened up before me.
I'm embarrassed to come right out and say that the motorcycle, then, is a vehicle for self-discovery, but what have I been talking about all this time? A measuring-stick? The source and destination of meaning, which ultimately boils down to the choice of the participant? Of course it must be these things, and more, or perhaps it's no different from the games of children.
And what does it say about me, but that I'm just like everyone else who loves these machines. The riches I have been given have been those moments of communion when everything flowed perfectly, connecting a corner exit to the next corner entry, floating the front wheel down a long stretch of road, flying through the woods as the bike slides and weaves snake-like along the winding trail.
