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.