It seems a lot of bikers try to make heroes, or heroines, of themselves by telling the outside world how dangerous it is to ride their motorcycles, how tough they are for coping with all these homicidal cagers, how every ride is fraught...fraught with what?
How many times have I been at some watering hole and Bully Biker comes in and starts bragging about the near miss he just had with Joe Citizen, and how only his cool and competence got him through...could have been real messy except for his skillful handling of the situation. And this seems to happen every time Bully takes a ride. Makes me want to stuff a dirty bar-towel in his mouth to shut him up.
I’ve been riding since Ike was in the White House, got a helluva lot more than a million miles under my butt, and I find that so-called “risk” from hostile Citizens is 99.9 percent bull-malarky. Yes, riding a Harley, riding any motorcycle, is riskier than driving a big Yukon SUV or a Kenworth. Hit a manhole without a cover and you’re airborne. A patch of black ice and chances are you’ll be down and sliding. But this constant refrain that J. Citizen is out to get us freedom-loving riders and cause us injury is about as sensible as believing that Batman is going to destroy Gotham and the city is doomed if the Joker does not come to the rescue.
The other week I was reading a bit in a Harley magazine describing a biker in the city, slow street, sidewalk cafés, overtakes a car, driver opens his door...intentionally, says the witness telling the story. If it were intentional, for all I know this rider just snogged this guy’s wife and the cuckold is looking for a way to get even. Years back, my wife got involved in an open-door incident. She was riding along in traffic on a narrow street, a car in front stops for no good reason, leaving a gap between it and the parked cars, and she goes for the gap. The passenger door opens and a kid starts to get out; soccer mom had never bothered to look what might be behind her—just a dumb move. Wife missed the kid, hit the door, and keeps a piece of her windshield as a souvenir.
Smart move is to get a good horn. I ordered up a FIAMM Freeway Blaster Horn, which is rated at 132 decibels, bolts onto an Electra Glide in about 10 minutes flat. Soccer moms pay attention when they hear this. The “loud pipes save lives” crap is just that, crap that is not a nasty word but merely an acronym for Constricted Residual Anal Pollutant. The constancy of loud pipes does not do anything more than anger Joe Citizen and make him think about opening his car door when you go by. A loud horn makes him sit up and take notice and not do anything foolish. I find loud-pipe advocates are those insecure types who want the rest of the world to turn around and take notice of them.
There is risk to riding, I know, as I’ve crashed, more than once, way more than once, and I know why. I can give you an explanation for why I was at least partially responsible for every accident, but the usual reason is that I was going too fast...self-induced risk. You don’t know the road, you go into a right-hand corner too hot, you cross the double yellow, and if you are unlucky you meet a GMC box truck head on. You go into a left-hander, you’re leaning, leaning more, you’ve got hard bits scraping, you’re on the shoulder, in the ditch. Dang! That is going to be expensive.
After many years I have learned to slow down when I’m getting too jolly on the road. For me the thrill is in the lean angle, the Electra’s suspension pumped up to the max, the bike’s leaned to the max, sparks flying, adrenaline pumping. Never have tried meth, as adrenaline is my drug of choice. I’m coming into a blind curve marked 30, I’m doing 50, which is still pretty conservative considering the conservatism of those recommended corner speeds, but I get a vision of sand in the road, or a couple of bales of hay fallen off a truck, or a deer, and I ease off, decrease the risk factor. I know that falling down hurts, not only financially, but personally; I do not like pain, whether it is road rash or a broken bone.
There’s another aspect to risk the rider’s competence. A beginner finishes a Rider’s Edge course and that really qualifies him or her to ride around an empty parking lot at 15 miles an hour. Getting out in the hurly-burly of real traffic is something else, and we all keep our fingers crossed that our friends and relations will make it through the next 10,000 miles, which is a minimum of what it takes to become a minimally competent rider.
Even then there is no guarantee. I’ve met riders who have ridden 50,000 straight-up miles out on the flat lands, between Kansas City and Chicago, commuting across Texas from Beaumont to El Paso, and think they’re good. Then they ride to California and decide to take Ebbetts Pass over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and are flat-out freaked. A lot of riders do not know how to take corners, and that is not good.
If you look at the Rider’s Edge class as being first- or second-grade stuff, and a race-track school as being a high school program, there’s not much in the way of formal learning in between. The learner is out on the road, probably listening to bad advice from well-meaning doofuses, and hoping he does not do something stupid.
I still occasionally hear “experienced” riders counseling new riders on the danger of using the front brake...even though it provides 70 percent of the braking force. These are generally the same ones who talk about “having to lay ’er down” in order to avoid an errant truck. Stupidity is a worldwide problem, and we motorcyclists suffer our own share.
I should add that there is one school, Streetmasters Motorcycle Workshop (www.streetmasters.info), that runs courses on a closed circuit that is like a twisty mountain road for teaching touring and cruiser riders how to go around corners quickly and gracefully...it’s all in the lean.
I like the idea of riding for a lot more years, so I try to minimize my risks. And I like to talk to regular citizens and convince them that riding a motorcycle is a good thing, cutting down on gas consumption, traffic jams and parking woes. And having Bully Biker exaggerate the risks is not helpful.
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