Walking And Riding Motorcycles
Monday, March 16th, 2020
On a motorcycle you are truly outside.
I try to avoid driving a car as much as possible but I don’t always ride motorcycles. For instance, any time I can ride the light rail rather than drive I do. And I walk. I walk a lot. And you know what? Walking has a lot in common with riding motorcycles.
I was walking to the gym the other day and as I went down the other side of our block I had three encounters in quick order. There is a house over there where the entire front yard is landscaped, using a lot of rock and with plants wedged in here and there. And it was bursting with green! Spring had definitely arrived in that yard. Now, since then we’ve had a soaking rain and it is Spring everywhere, but this was the first.
Two houses later I saw a squirrel in a tree, going in and out of a hole in the trunk. I had to wonder, how does a tree come to have a perfectly round hole like that? My presumption is that a limb grew there but died long ago. As the rest of the tree grew around it the limb itself eventually rotted away and then the critters probably clawed away the soft, dead wood and created this hole. It was interesting.
And another three houses down I heard clucking. Like chickens. And sure enough, there was a chicken coop next to the garage in the back yard. That was never there before.
So what does all this have to do with motorcycles? What do you tell non-riders when they ask what it’s like to ride a motorcycle? Almost invariably you will mention at some point how being on a bike puts you out in nature, not enclosed in a box away from nature. You’ll mention the smells that people in cars never smell. You’ll mention the micro-climates you experience that people in cars are totally unaware of. I know those are two of the things I noticed right away when I first started riding behind my friend John, before I bought my own bike.
Well, same with walking. All three of those things I described are things I would not have been at all aware of if I had been driving. Judy and I both go to the gym but she drives while I walk. I’m always telling her what’s going on in the neighborhood, things that I see because I walk that she misses because she drives.
Plus I get the exercise of walking.
Biker Quote for Today
Why motorcycles are better than men: motorcycles don’t smell bad.
