Passes & Canyons Blog

Scooters are harder to break than motorcycles.

At this point I’ve been riding motorcycles for so long it’s all become so second nature. I remember at first when it was new and I always was fully alert and focused just because I had to be. I thought back then that the idea that I would ever find myself struggling to stay awake while riding, as often happens in a car on a long drive, was totally absurd. Not true these days.

Thinking back even further, though, I go to a trip my lady friend and I made to Mazatlan. This was the only time I’ve ever ridden a bike in Mexico. It’s not a tale of glory, though; it’s a tale of ignominy.

Although I’d ridden motorcycles every chance I got since the time I was 15, I never had that many opportunities in those early years so the skills never had a chance to solidify and settle permanently in my brain. That only happened when, at 37, I finally bought my first bike and started riding a lot.

I was probably about 30 when Sue, my girlfriend at the time, and I took a week’s vacation to Mazatlan. Unlike me, Sue had owned motorcycles and ridden a great deal. One entire year in college her only transportation had been her motorcycle and she had even managed to ride it when there was snow on the streets, using her feet as outriggers.

It was only natural then, when we saw a place in Mazatlan renting motorcycles and scooters by the hour, that we decided to go for it. It turned out that the place only had one motorcycle available at that moment, plus some scooters. This being Mexico, of course the guy in charge set me up on the cycle and picked out a scooter for Sue. No self-respecting man would want to be seen on a scooter while his woman rode a cycle, would they? No way.

Never mind that Sue was the experienced one and ought to have been the one on the bike. We could swap once we had gotten away from the rental place.

Scooters, of course, have no gears; you just twist the throttle. Motorcycles have gears and you flip the toe lever down to get into first, and then flip it up for all other gears. Surely I must have understood this other times I had ridden but it was one of those bits of knowledge that had not stuck. Sue probably mentioned it to me before we took off but in the excitement of the moment that didn’t stick either.

We blasted away from the rental place and as the revs went up I pulled in the clutch and toed the lever down to get into second. Down. Letting out the clutch, the engine revved very high and I was clearly not in a higher gear. Again I clutched and toed the lever down. Again the engine raced and things were not right.

Maybe I was doing something wrong, I thought. Maybe I needed to be going faster before I shifted. I cranked the throttle harder, the engine really screaming now, and pulled in the clutch, flicked down on the shift lever. Releasing the clutch it was just like before.

It was about this time that the rental guy came racing up on a scooter waving us over. “Stop! Stop!” he yelled. “You break the bike!” Not allowing any protest he informed us he was taking the bike and giving me his scooter. And he kept muttering about “You break the bike.” Sue told me again after he left that second and higher gears are up, not down, not that it mattered any more.

So we scooted around Mazatlan for awhile and had a fun time anyway. Hey, scooters are fun. And they’re a lot harder for idiots to break.

Biker Quote for Today

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning difficult.