Let me stop you right there, mmmm-kay? I can tell by that little intake of breath what’s coming next. Thank you in advance, but I already know that motorcycles are “dangerous.” After nearly twenty years of riding on the streets, I am aware; telling me now will not be a revelation. It is not an insight into my lifestyle that has remained hidden from me until this, the moment of epiphany when you shine the light of outsider wisdom on my foolhardy choices.
Photo: Grant Ray
There are ways I can minimize the risk — by riding defensively, riding sober, knowing my own and my machine’s capabilities, etc. — but I also know there are some risks that are simply beyond my control. But you know what? There a lots of risks that are within my control. We’ve become so pathologically risk-averse that for most people it is inconceivable to assume any additional risk no matter how much joy you might get back in return.
You want to know what’s truly dangerous? Not taking any risks. Hanging out with like-minded middle-of-the-roaders. Absorbing the same brain-ossifying shit from media factories every day. Jogging. Putting helmets, flotation devices, and auto-deploy epi-pens on your kids every time they leave the house. Passivity. Not paying attention to where your car, or your life, or you country is going.
If you don’t get that, that’s OK. I’m not trying to convert anybody, but here are a few tips to save us both a little aggravation:
You don’t need to tell me the horror story about your uncle’s buddy who wiped out his chopper while drag racing at some hooligan rally. That just makes me wish I were talking to your uncle’s buddy instead of you. He sounds pretty cool.
Do not — do NOT — tell me about the time you almost Sausage Creatured a biker because you “couldn’t see him” or he “came out of nowhere.” I have never known a bike to come out of nowhere, but I have seen plenty of cars pull a Crazy Ivan and turn into a lane occupied by a biker or make an impromptu unsignalled left turn in front of an oncoming me. If you’re expecting me to share your outrage at the temerity of bikers to be in the lane you want, you’re more deluded than a goldfish with a passport. I can’t make you see bikes. I can’t make you hang up your phone. They won’t let me mount a .50-caliber machine gun to my bike. So really, there’s not much I can do to change the outcome of your anecdote, so save it for your coreligionists who also have stick-figure families and giant softball stickers with the name “Tailyr” or “Flynn” or “Shyly” on their rear windows.
I do wear a helmet, as a matter of fact, along with other protective gear. But, the fact that you “certainly hope” I wear a helmet is so condescending it makes me want to ride a tricycle completely naked doing doughnuts in your front yard screaming Beastie Boys lyrics at midnight. Trust me, you do not want that. My buttocks are extremely pale and unsightly, especially in moonlight.
Please, do not complain about bikes parking in car parking spaces. Where are we supposed to park? If they let us park up on the curb like in Europe, we would totally do that, and precious few parking lots have motorcycle parking areas. Most cops already have a hard-on for bikes, so parking anywhere but in a designated spot is asking to be impounded.
Yes, I know, some bikes have very loud exhaust. Maybe it’s obnoxious, but at least you knew they were there, didn’t you? They say loud pipes save lives. I don’t know if that’s true, because there hasn’t been a serious comprehensive study of motorcycle safety since 1981, the poetically named Hurt Report. And yes, I know, at one point you probably saw some kid riding his 600cc sport bike at 100mph doing a wheelie down the freeway. He’s a squid, and he’ll either grow up or just take care of himself. Some bikers do crazy things. Anti-social things. Unsanctioned things. I don’t represent him and he doesn’t represent me — that’s the great part of being a biker. I could be a Lowbrow Weirdo or Antoine Predock or Lyle Lovett or just whatever I want to be.
If you’re really so all-fire concerned about my safety, don’t preach at me. Just do me this one favor: pay attention when you’re driving. Keep your greasy fingers off your touch-screen, put down your phone, use your turn signals and lay off the booze before you get on the road with me. You take care of your part and I’ll take care of mine.
But hang-gliding, man, that shit is crazy.
Carter Edman is an architect, writer, and rider in Cleveland, Ohio. He teaches “Motorcycles and American Culture” and other courses at Case Western Reserve University.
- “I will fucking kill you without a shred of remorse if my sticky-faced kid drops his juice box and I take my eyes off the road for five seconds to pick it up.”
- Male stick figure, Motorcycle, Beer Stein, Video game controller, Dog, Dollar signs.
- Actually, the only thing more terrifying than all of the above is having a teeny tiny little blonde girl applying makeup and gabbing on the cellphone appear in your rearview while she is driving a lifted Longbed Crewcab F-350 King Ranch edition dually(complete with diamond plate sewer pipe bumpers, headache rack, and farm tags) inexpertly thru College Station traffic on a Saturday afternoon before a Texas A&M game. Doubt she would’ve even noticed if she’d run me over, what with Texas Avenue being like it was at the time.
- “Not, nearly as dangerous as being an over 50, obese, smoker.
- I can’t guestimate how many times I’ve been down on my bike. My last BIG one 2 1/2 yrs ago ended with a broken back, all my right side ribs, and shoulder.
- I’ve had an ER nurse tell me that she hated motorcycles because of all the bright, young people she’d seen killed or turned into vegetables in a motorcycle crash. But no one has ever told me that I shouldn’t ride or that I should do anything differently. Just the regular, “be careful out there.”
- “and a bunch of people were killed sitting in their offices in New York”
- “much more worried about my cholesterol.”
- We just point to the garish skull logos on our jackets and laugh maniacally.
- And the #1 reason why hang-gliding is safer than motorcycling? In the air, there are no SUV-driving, cell-phone-gabbing, emailing, texting, BBM’ing, dancing-in-their-seat-to-bad-music dumbshits blindly taking left-handers or changing lanes.
- I work in a hospital in Virginia horse country. We have about the same amount of ICU admittions from horse accidents as we do motorcycle accidents. Horible, maiming, debilitating, nasty accidents. It’s the chance one takes on getting on something so wild with so much power.
- Most people think we ride as they drive, if the feds removed airbags from steering wheels and replaced them with steel spikes, then people would drive more carefully.
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