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 & whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. I expect to arrive with my cheeks & 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 height 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.

At 30 miles an 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 & 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.

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.
Dave Karlotski