Passes & Canyons Blog

Stopping can be one of the nicest things about riding.

Reach back in your memory to those blissful times driving along on that hot summer day smelling the fresh cut hay, enjoying the dips into the ravines for the coolness they bring, and . . . Stop! You don’t remember those things? No, of course not, what was I thinking? You were in a car. You don’t have those experiences in a car; those are motorcycle experiences.

People who spend their lives riding in cars have no idea of how very “in the world” motorcyclists are, or how much “out of the world” they are in their metal, glass, and plastic cages. Especially now that nearly every car has air conditioning, motorists are closed up in their containers and inhabit their own controlled environments, largely oblivious to whatever is outside.

So what is outside? Oh, just the entire world.

There are smells outside the cage. Sure, sometimes those smells are diesel fumes and the like, but there are also smells of food coming from restaurants, newly mown grass, lilacs in bloom, sagebrush in the wide-open West, and the salt and seaweed smell of the ocean.

Temperatures change outside the cage. Of course the temperature will drop as you go up over a mountain pass, but it’s startling for first-time riders how, over just a tenth of a mile, even dropping into a wash to cross a creek, how much cooler it is in that dip.

There are sounds both inside and outside the cage, but some sounds are better than others. You’ll never hear the cry of a hawk with your windows rolled up and the CD player blaring. And you’ll never see a biker going down the road with screaming kids arguing in the back seat.

The whole world is outside the cage. If the sun is shining, it shines on you. If it’s raining, it rains on you. You feel the heat, you feel the cold, and you feel the delicious, balmy breath of Spring. You don’t have just a rectangle view of the world around you, your view in every direction is completely unobstructed.

And very few bikers ever fill the tank and ride until it needs filling again. Wide spots in the road are made for stretching the legs. View points are perfect for taking breaks. If you didn’t have time to make these sorts of stops you probably wouldn’t be on a bike in the first place. And at every stop you have time to really see, and smell, and hear, and feel the world around you just that much more.

The word is “sensuous.” The biker is in the environment and his senses are attuned to that environment. The motorist is in his cage, locked away from all but his unchanging pre-programmed environment. That’s why they’re called cagers.

Biker Quote for Today

Addicted? Possessed is a better word.

At least when you ride in a group they're a lot more likely to be aware of you.

The following post is sponsored by CentralContracts.com.

I rode my Concours to work on Wednesday, and figuring that on the day before the holiday the traffic was likely to be light, I went up I-25 to 6th Avenue (the northern route).

Normally when I ride I don’t like taking that route because of all the stop and go you can run into on the highway, and that’s just murder on your clutch wrist. I prefer to go across on Hampden, which turns into freeway past Santa Fe, and then north on Kipling and then some winding through the neighborhoods to my destination (the southern route). It’s actually a mile or so shorter on that route, too, but it’s a little slower than the northern route.

Of course the other reason I avoid I-25 most of the time is that it is simply inevitable that someone in that jammed traffic will decide to pull into my lane, never bothering to turn their head to check and see if perhaps I’m there. I know better than to hang in someone’s blind spot normally, but when you’re on a packed superhighway there’s just no way to avoid it again and again the whole time.

So it was no surprise when this woman started coming my way. I laid on the horn–fortunately the Connie has a loud one–and I had to laugh seeing her swing sharply back into her own lane. Hopefully feeling quite chastised.

That never seems to happen when I’m in my car, but on the bike it is inevitable. Bikes just get hidden too easily in the blind spot. And people trust their mirrors too much.

For the rest of the ride, though, and for the ride home there were no other incidents. As a motorcyclist you have to pay extremely careful attention all the time in heavy traffic like that and you learn to read people and what they’re probably going to do. At the very least, you hypothesize that they’re going to do something and while they don’t always do it, when they do you’re ready.

And one thing I noticed this day was that there were several drivers who I firmly believed were intending to come my way but just before they made their move they saw me. They did what every driver ought to do. They were good drivers. You can’t avoid noticing the bad ones–they’re flagrantly putting your life in danger. But it’s easy not to notice the good ones. On this day I noticed the good ones.

In other words, they’re not all idiots out there. It just seems like it some times.

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Biker Quote for Today

Life is a highway . . .