Today I managed to avoid my first "performance award" on the bike. For those not in the know, that's another term for "speeding ticket." Coming in to work this morning on I-5, right around the King County - Snohomish County border, I got lasered or radared by a police officer hanging out on a freeway overpass, with a pursuit car waiting on the other side. A classic setup, and one that I'd warned myself about literally minutes before - I see cars pulled over right around there every day. As soon as I got under the overpass, I saw a car merging onto the freeway, and suspected I was busted; the lights came on as soon as he got close to me.

At this point I wasn't angry, or sad, or anything - I knew I'd been speeding, and I figured I'd earned it. No real hurry; I got calmly to the shoulder, signaling each merge, and stopped the bike. Pulled off my gloves and helmet, and then tried to stow the earphones for my XM; I'm still not entirely certain whether it's legal to ride with them in. Then I waited.

The officer was younger than I am. He didn't come out swinging, just politely asked for license "and registration, if you've got it on you." Asked me how fast I was going, and I stammered something about how my speedo was indicating 72 but that probably equated to 68 in the real world. Yeah, I know, real smooth, especially since the speedo was actually indicating closer to 80 (74 true, give or take). He obviously wasn't buying it, and I don't blame him. He mentioned that he'd clocked me at 75, and I expressed some surprise.

He took my ID to his car, and did whatever it is cops do when they're deciding whether to write you a ticket or not - background checks of some sort, I'm sure. I spent a few sketchy minutes standing by the bike waiting, with freeway traffic hurtling past, before he came back, "suggested" that I keep it to 60 in the future, and reversed his way back up the shoulder into ambush position. I headed on to work a very shaky man.

First note to self: do not hop right back on the bike after getting stopped. My riding was, frankly, bad on the way to work - I was twitchy and anything but smooth on the bars, as well as distracted. I didn't even think to pull over and take a break, I was so distracted. I think that I was enough in the ride to handle whatever came at me, but I am glad that nothing tested that guess.

Second note: listen to instincts. I knew that there were cops waiting at that overpass, because there always are. I warned myself to keep my speed down, but the speed of traffic was at just over 70, and I feel very uncomfortable going at the same speed as everyone else and disappearing into their blind spots.

I'd earned a ticket today, and I'm just a lucky fellow that the officer let me off with a warning. I don't know what I did to get let off - was it the quick and safe pulling-over? the full armor and reflective gear? the non-race-lookin' bike? the fact that I'm a tax-paying middle-class property owner? I've got no idea. I'd hope not to test this question too much in the future, though.

Someone posted this on the ST-n forums, and it's beautiful. So I stole it. As usual.

edited: I've been informed by Doug of Forty Years on Two Wheels that this essay was originally written by Dave Karlotski, and can be found here. Also, it's actually called "Season of the Bike." So now you know.

Season of the Bike, by Dave Karlotski

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever.

The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and weight as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition. But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.

Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar.

But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony.

Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul.

It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.

Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy.

I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery.

Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air- conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

In between posts detailing the minutiae of mechanical adjustments on my bike and others railing against drivers who terrify me with their incompetance, I sometimes forget to express the feelings that occur to me when I'm out for a ride and everything goes right. When the rain's holding itself at bay for a while, and the traffic's light, and the road's just twisty enough to be exciting, and it's warm enough that I can feel my fingers and toes after the first 10 minutes, and I don't get pulled over, and I'm free to just run the tach up and experience the ride.

I really love this sport. I think I even love it when I'm not out on that kind of a ride, when I'm stuck in the gridlock and the drizzly, cold winter and the moments of terror, but when everything's going right, riding a motorcycle is an amazing experience.

I'm sometimes reminded of one sailing trip about six months ago, on a 40-something foot square-rigged ketch, when I climbed the foremast and planted myself at the crosstree where the big square sails are set. We were under power when I climbed up, heading back to Seattle through Agate Pass, and sheltered from the wind by the back of Bainbridge Island, but when we emerged from the pass the wind came in from the south, and the skipper unfurled her three big crimson and white foresails, white main, and red mizzen, and the boat heeled as the wind filled in and she found her pace. There I was, 50' from the deck, my feet on a swaying rope ladder with wooden rungs, and my arm crooked over the yardarm, all alone in the whole world. The motion of the deck is amplified by the length of the mast, and as the boat moved through the waves my perch swung through a wide arc, and there was no sound but the rushing of the wind and the metal-on-metal clanging of assorted rigging, the snap of the sails and the splashing as the bow moved through the water.

That same sense of danger held knowingly at bay, of exhilarating speed, of being solely responsible for your own safety, and of being seperate from everyone and everything else is a feeling that recurs time and again on my bike. I think it satisfies some deep-seated desire for adventure that we don't often see fulfilled in our sanitary, mostly safe, engineered world. I'm glad I've discovered this sport, and I hope to pursue it for a long time to come.

So in a hurry out the door yesterday, I set my helmet down in a plastic-covered bed in the hospital while I adjusted my jacket armor. The plastic was slippery, the bed was at a tiny bit of an angle, and off it went; THUNK! four feet down to the hard hospital floor. There's no apparent damage, but the conventional wisdom is that if you drop your helmet, you need to replace it, as the foam interior may have compressed under the impact.

I wish there was some way to tell for sure whether anything's happened; it wasn't a hard impact, but it may have been hard enough. I'm not looking forward to the expense of a new lid, but it's my melon we're talking about protecting, so I suppose I'll bite the bullet and replace it. By and large I've been happy with this helmet (an HJC) but I've heard really good things about some of the Scorpions. Maybe I'll see how they feel...

It's been some time since my last post - sorry, dear readers.

I replaced my helmet with a new Scorpion EXO-700 and I couldn't be happier. This helmet is, quite simply, better. The fit is better, it's quieter, it has a no-fog visor that actually works, the ventilation is awesome, and it feels a lot more sturdy. It is slightly heavier than the HJC, but not enough to make a difference. I'd highly recommend it. There was some news awhile back about an EXO-700 failing a randomly-administered impact and penetration test but apparently neither DOT nor Snell chose to withdraw their endorsement of the helmet or issue a recall; I'm therefore only very slightly concerned. Still, I kinda wish no-one had told me that piece of news, or that they'd told me before I bought the EXO...

There have recently been a couple of little "snapshots" of the things that make motorcycling a wonderful experience. Last Friday, riding home from a party hosted by a couple of riding friends, I found myself on I5 in a thick fog. Visibility was fine, but the lights of the cars ahead of me were blurred and haloed by the fog, and the freeway was mostly empty, and Pink Floyd's Echoes was playing on the XM. If you're not familiar with Floyd you may not understand the powerful sense of otherworldliness that this song can engender, but between that and the fog and the speed, I felt very alone, and very free.

...and yesterday, after merging from I5 to 525 on my way home, I found myself in the right lane with a newer Lexus sedan in the left. I glanced over and saw an adorable little blond girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old, with her face pressed up against the inside of the back-seat window, staring in rapt attention at me. I waved to her, and she returned it with a wide smile. I guess some of us fall in love with motorcycles earlier than others.

Down in the sprawling Seattle suburbs, about this time of year, we tend to forget that it's still winter: the rain hasn't gone away, but it's not crazy cold anymore, we get sunny days thrown into the mix every now and then, and there's certainly no more ice in the mornings. Folks, I'm here to tell you, winter's not gone quite yet.

Yesterday I took advantage of the seemingly bright day to get out of town on the bike again. Consulted my copy of Destination Highways, and wanting to just get on the road as soon as possible, I turned to the first entry in the Puget Sound section - DH46: Granite Falls to Barlow Pass. I knew that the pass would be closed, and that I'd only be able to go part of the way, but figured that was fine for a quick trip.

Basically, this route is straight east out of Granite Falls, into the Mount Baker - Snoqualmie National Forest, and following the Stillaguamish River for much of its run. I don't have much to say about it; the scenery was hidden behind layers of fog and rain, there was snow on the ground and slush on the roads, and no traffic to speak of. I had a few exciting moments with the slush and the less-than-perfect pavement, finally turning back when I realized I was getting a bit cold for comfort and the rain started to intensify. I was followed most of the way back to civilization by a State Trooper in an SUV, who no doubt thought me insane to be up on those roads on a cycle at this time of year, and figured if he waited just a bit longer I'd gun it up to 80 and earn a ticket. No such luck.

This looks like a really fun ride in the summer, and I guess turns into a nice long loop trail if you're willing to brave the 14mi section of gravel road in the middle. Maybe I'll give that part a pass, for now.

...and if I keep up with this sort of thing, I really need to invest in an electric vest. Damn, but it gets cold fast.