Chapt. One: Part Three: I learn to ride...in traffic - on the Interstate!

Part Three: I learn to ride...in traffic - on the Interstate!

For years I wanted to become a motorcycle rider.  I had finally...finally gotten into a real state motorcycle "Learn to Ride" course.  The instructors were excellent.  Not at all snooty.  Not "I'm a cool motorcycle dude and your just a shmuck."  I was finally astride a big rumbling man-machine.  Most of the time these state-run courses have a waiting list months long.  They cost over a hundred bucks and if you back out too late you loose your money.  I had signed up twice before.  Life and job changes had gotten in the way.

I was so-o-o ready ready.  The third time I had to really talk myself, and my wife, into laying out the money again.  The first opening in the class was two months away...sigh..."Do you have a cancelation policy?  Will you call if somebody cancels?"

"We just had a cancellation, but it's this weekend.  Do you want it?".

"Yes!"  I didn't even look at my work schedule.  Five, six years of waiting.  Now or never.

The bike I had so righteously researched and found, was being prepped by the dealer.  A lot of excitement, an equal quantity of anxiety, was running through my head as I waited at the DMV to get a new driver's license with the little "M" classification stamped on it.  As soon as this chore was done I was to pick up my wife and she was going to deliver me to the dealers.  I would then take a cautious Virginia back country road home.

To scout my new carefully mapped route, we drove it to the dealer's.  Offramp Warning:  I have no sense of direction.  I cannot really stress this enough.  If I was standing directly on the little flag that denotes the absolute north pole, I could not find south.  This is beyond frustrating for me.  My life has been very nomadic.  Raised in a military family, we moved every few years when I was growing up.  Serendipity or fate or God's plan, I have continued this theme to this day.  So often by the time I finally get some landmarks memorized and a few routes locked down, I'm somewhere new and have to start all over again.  Which means, in short, I spend a lot of time lost.

This trait has developed a love, nearly a passion, for maps.  Most people have paintings or posters of kittens or kangaroos playing poker on their walls.  In my office, the only room that I am allowed to decorate, I have maps.  Mostly beat-up maps of the lakes, rivers and ocean coastal places where I have kayaked.  Mountain topos of areas I have mountain biked or road raced.  These are real deal maps - water damaged, sweat stained, folded and unfolded, jammed and removed from map pouches hundreds of times.  When I move from one region of the country to the next, I take the old maps frame them and put 'em on the walls of my new office.

These maps had saved my bacon over and over again.  I develop deep affections for them.  Whenever I have to go anywhere, I get a map and plan my route to the most minute detail.  I mark it with a high-liter.  Then I make a list of the road names, or other noteworthy locators.  I memorize the list and do my best to put a photo-like image of the actual geography into my thick skull.  Half the time even this doesn't work and I still get hopelessly lost.

To me the person who invented the cell phone should receive knighthood. The person who invented GPS should be made king or queen.  The person who figured out how to put GPS on a cell phone should receive Sainthood.  But my first ever-actual motorcycle ride on real streets and roads, predated all that stuff.

At that time I did have something almost as good for getting me out of various mazes I frequently found myself stuck in.  I had a wife.  I had a wife who was born and raised in Philadelphia.  Which you may, or may not, know is one of the oldest of the largest American urban sprawls.  Philly, Valley Forge, Norristown, Morristown, plus a half dozen other formerly separate and distinct burgs, have melded into one giant splat of paved cow paths.  Four lanes for a few blocks shrinking to two lanes.  Back to four lanes.  Three way intersections, four way intersections, five way, veer to the right, now left - if you don't know where you are going a minimum of eight traffic lights before you get there, you have two choices.  One, you are lost.  Two, you are going to be in a traffic accident.

 And even though she might get lost, somehow she'd figure it out and get unlost.  More on that ability later.  My wife however, does not believe in, does not carry, ever use, I am not sure she even knows how to read - maps!

Where this was a problem, or became a problem, is that I had my printed detailed route in my hand.  I was too anxious and excited to explain this to my wife...if I had remembered...which I did not.  We chatted about this and that, everything but the actual route.  She thought the country road was pretty, which is true of much of rural Virginia.  Such a pleasant change from Virginia Interstate 64, our usual route.  A little longer maybe, but worth it. 

Nice safe, two lane, lightly travelled, hardly any traffic.  Perfect for my first real motorcycle ride. 

Virginia Interstate 64.  Running mostly east and west across the entire state, damn near smack in the middle north and south, 64 is heavily travelled.  Two lanes each direction, sometimes widely separated, with woodsiness very tight to the road skirts.  In fact not much side skirt at all; i.e. no break-down lanes.  If you must pull over and stop,  like maybe you feel a heart attack coming on,  do not open the driver's side doors.  Some trucker will lop 'em off like a sushi chef.

The agreement was she would lead the way home. I was on a motorcycle and could not just lean over and read a map.  Or like most people, put the map on the steering wheel and glance at it while driving.  Not safe but who doesn't do that.  I would then be free to concentrate on not riding my new motorcycle into some hard object. 

Neither of us had ever been in this part of Richmond before, other than the time we had first looked at the bike...and I had gotten us lost doing that. 

As said, narrow one-ways, stop signs nearly every corner, blind corners.  Cars parallel parked crowding what narrow lanes there were.  The one-way street the bike shop was on runs the wrong way for the direction we needed to go.  The garage area where my bike was waiting opens directly onto the sidewalk  The door is maybe three feet from traffic.  Fairly frequent traffic.  Two car lengths at any given second to get out on to the street, make an immediate left and keep from ramming into the back of a parked car or one stopped at the first stop sign.

It was August in Virginia, thus ninety-five degrees with ninety-five per cent humidity.  I am wearing a full face black helmet, full length jeans, engineer boots and a heavy Levi jacket.  If I was going to crash on my first ride, I wanted to have some protection.  By the time I eeeased, tippy-toe, up to the rushing sound of traffic, I was sweating so hard my glasses were slipping down my nose and my face plate was fogging up.  The sidewalk was concrete cast at what seemed like a forty-five degree angle to the rain gutter.  From there the road seemed to heave up at another forty-five degrees.  From where I was straddling the bike it looked like I was going to have to ride into and out of a castle moat.

My wife pulls out at the first break in traffic and never looks back.  Three, then four, then five cars whoosh right in behind her before I can wobble, lurching in first gear, panicked popping of the shift lever, out in front of a bread truck which slams on the brake to let me in.  He was not happy and pulls up within the width of a child's hand behind me.  My wife stops at the corner stop sign.  She turns right.  I have to wait, still lurching in half clutch and half first gear behind each car as it does whatever it chooses to do at the same stop sign.  A duck trying to ride a huge log, boots pumping left and right on the baking pavement.

In this part of the city these are short blocks.  By the time I get to the intersection and rabbit glance to my right to find her, she is nowhere in sight.  My instinct says "go straight until you see her."  My instinct to never trust my instinct says, "Two one-way rights makes a U and puts us back in the direction we came."  I look to the right at the next corner and there she is.  I'm still gunning the engine, popping between gears -not on purpose, but because I am suddenly, very suddenly aware of how much I really don't know whatthafuck I am doing!

In the motorcycle course we just rode around a huge parking lot in a circle.  Then we did a cones course.  Then stop 'n go stuff.  Then figure eights in each direction.  We never got out of second gear.  Down one to first, grind up the tach till the engine sounds like it's going to explode, put your toe under the gear lever and pop it up past neutral to second gear.  Easy-peasy.  Never wound it up high enough to need third, or fourth, or ...lord-almighty...fifth. This was real life, real traffic.  The cars in front of me pay no attention to what is behind them...could not give a shit.  The cars and trucks behind me just want me to keep the fuck moving.

Short blocks.  Street not much more than alleys.  Bomb craters everywhere to dodge.  Every time I'd hit a dog sized pot hole or a huge crack in the road I'd shoot a foot off the seat.  The motorcycle course parking lot had been fairway smooth.  Now I was whack-a-moling up and down, lurching between first and third gears with that embarrassing neck-snap through second, trying not to stall out and fall over.  Weaving around avoiding as best I could not to drop a wheel in a crater or smack a continental drift abutment.  I should have had one of those stand-up placards that says "Learner" on it.  You know, the ones on Drivers Ed cars.

The throttle on all motorcycles, in a recent agreement between manufacturers, is on the right handle grip.  The right peddle is the rear brake.  Your right hand grip lever controls the front brake (the right hand generally being the strongest) and can stop a motorcycle in a matter of feet if it's jammed down too hard, sending the rider head over ass over the handlebars or down on the side in a micro-nano second.  The gear shift is the left peddle and the clutch is the left hand grip lever.  In the sedate motorcycle course parking lot, everybody in a line, the instructor yelling instructions and encouragement, all this seems like "Hey...this ain't no big deal.".

Compare this to the modern car.  Point it with the steering wheel.  Want to go fast, push down with the right foot.  Want to slow down, angle the right foot over just a tad to the left and push down again.  A chimpanzee could drive a modern car... go to a circus, they have chimpanzees driving little clown cars. 

After many, many years of car experience we must now retrain the driver in us to do a half dozen new actions.  With both hands and both feet.  In a precise sequence at very precise pressures in hummingbird movements while balancing a six to eight hundred pound machine.  In this instance things tend to take on a new, totally new, sense of fun. 

All of the above came down to a very abrupt epiphany.  Books, training, practice, theory - empirical experience cannot be substituted by, or with, anything else. I was in a "God, please look down upon your child and save my ass!" situation.  If you don't happen to believe in God, I don't know what advice to give.  Don't really care, but I would put even money on the fact, you'd be praying to something.  I am not a church going man, but I was praying like an unarmed man at the OK Corral.

My wife not being a map person and being a person whose toast always lands butter-side up is up in front.  She is just enough ahead that I can still see her in traffic.  Just barely.  Weaving, lurching, gear popping, riding the rear brake, wobbling I stay within four to five cars as Richmond falls behind and we make it to the strip-malls that seem to be on the periphery of every American city.  My heart rate is beginning to level off.  Traffic, stop signs and lights have kept out speed down.  I haven't dropped the bike or run into anything.  "It's all good."

So far I haven't had the courage to take my eyes from the immediate road in front of me.  I have been darting panicked glances at my rearview mirrors.  When I do manage a look at the one dial on this bike, something registers about the the trip odometer. 

This a very basic basic bike.  It does not have a fuel gauge!   I did not notice this before!  I naturally assumed all gasoline powered machines had fuel gauges.  However, thinking back I could not recall any of my old lawn mowers having fuel gauges.  You knew the tank was empty when the machine stopped.  That's just peachy when you're in your own yard on soft grass!  On asphalt in heavy traffic, this would not be peachy!  It would not be a good thing, it would be a fucking bad thing!

The dealer said the bike got about...sixty miles to the gallon.  It was a 2.3 gallon tank.  Quick math, not my best subject.  That would be about a hundred miles before the reserve valve would need to be switched on - where's the fucking reserve valve?  So-o-o many questions I should have asked.  So-o-o many questions I was apparently either too assuming, or naive, to ask.  Or just too stupid to even think of asking.

The trip odometer says twenty (something) miles, but did the dealer top off the tank?  I don't know.  No, I hadn't asked.   When you have been married, living in connubial bliss, comparatively, with another person for over thirty years (at that time) you do develop some  psychic connections.  Some.  My wife pulls over into a gas station.

"Do you know how much gas you've got?", she asks.

"Uh...." I respond, really struggling not to appear too shaken. 

"I think you'd better check it.  Maybe top off the tank.  What kind of milage does the bike get?"

"Uh..." I respond with puffed up equanimity, still trying to work the math out in my mushy brain.

Which is when I discovered I also did not know how to take the gas cap off this bike.  Pushing a little thingy on top of the gas cap over to one side revealed a keyhole.  Attempting to appear experienced, and to be an old hand at this, I took the ignition key, the bike only came with one key (very lucky for me at the time), I inserted it and twist.  Plunk! The cap comes off.

Hey! Everybody look at me, Easy Rider!  I put the gas pump nozzle in the tank and squeeze the lever.  About one tablespoon of gas goes in and thunk...pump stops.  Squeeze again...thunk.  Must be full.  I look in.  Obviously not full.  Squeeze...thunk.  This is a very small tank compared to a car.  It must be the pump's automatic pressure shut off.  So I pull the nozzle out to just above the tank opening, where the pressure valve won't kick in.  The tank fills in about ten seconds and I proceed to pump about half a gallon of premium gas all over the tank and down on to the super-hot engine and muffler. 

Hey! Everybody look at me!  An old boob who doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.  But I get it filled.  With a lot of fumbling and luck, I get the cap back on the tank.  At which point my wife, who fortunately for my sense of dignity, missed the whole debacle, has gotten her cup of coffee and is impatient to leave. 

She gets in the mini-van and zooms off.  I manage to get in right behind her.  Now we are approaching the intersection where the back-country road we had come in on passed under IS-64.  From this direction that overpass was not visible until after the 64 on-ramp. !!!  I'm totally transfixed on the rear of our minivan.  My mind says this doesn't seem right?  Didn't we come straight on through under the overpass?  She must know what she doing.  Where she's going?!  We went over this.  Don't go on 64.  I'm not ready to try and ride this thing on an Interstate yet.  Especially "not" on Interstate 64!

I barely got out of fucking Richmond alive!  Now I'm gonna be on the worst road in southern Virginia! 

"Oh Lord, look down carefully on this sinner and don't let me get fucking killed on this road.  I haven't even made the first goddamned payment on this fucking machine yet!"

In the back of my mind I hear him say, "I'll do what I can, but you really are a fucking idiot."

I've never had any trouble with the police in over fifty years of driving.  One speeding ticket back in the Nixon era and the cop was pretty nice about it.  In general I have a lot of respect for the men and women of the law.  Always been respectful to me.  And here in Virginia the Highway Patrol is everywhere.  By and large they keep Va's roads quite safe.  But even the Va HP stays off IS-64.  The posted speed limit of sixty-five is held to be a myth...a mere polite suggestion to be righteously ignored

Being as how 64 is the only major highway from the large coastal cities and the state capital, the traffic is heavy, fast and Big!  Back to front semi's with impatient commuters darting in between and experienced motorcyclists darting in between all of them.  Then all of a sudden on this sweltering summer day there was me.  Slightly over twenty miles of real motorcycle driving under my belt and not a very good job of that.  To say I did not belong there would be like dropping a mouse in the middle of an NBA play-off game.

In my entire motorcycle experience I had not gotten over thirty miles an hour yet.  Now I was being forced by a truck, which was boxed in behind me by a truck to his left, to do over seventy!  And the truck was closing in under the obvious misunderstanding that I actually knew what I was doing.  My right foot was naturally pressing harder and harder on the rear brake in order to make the bike go faster - not remembering at that moment that it was, in fact, the brake!  For fifty years the right foot made things go faster.  Now every time I dug down with my right foot the bike lurched what felt like was backwards! 

Having spent two years commuting on a scooter, my right hand was frantically twisting the hell out of the throttle too.  This combination was not working!   My wife was disappearing ahead, just keeping with the flow. I had somehow, with the God, that I rarely ever credited, clasped with iron claws to my shoulder, made the 360 degree on-ramp and fed into the right lane.  That was an experience that my memory has pretty much blacked out like scenes from a Saw movie.

I was on the giant "Death of Hercules" roller-coaster ride from hell, but this one wasn't going to be over in forty-five seconds.  It was going to go on and on until I got off the fucking freeway!  I had driven this stretch of 64 hundreds of times when I coached soccer.  I had particularly planned to avoid it today, but here I incontrovertibly was.

 I had driven soccer teams in mini-buses at all times of morning, day and night on this section and knew every turn and tree.  The familiarity of it began to calm my brain down bit by bit.  I finally realized that my right foot did not belong pushing down on anything at this point.  Focusing on the throttle to speed up and releasing it slightly to slow down seemed to be a better plan. 

I didn't have more than a few miles until the exit I had used all those soccer trips was coming up.  I knew the rest of the route home by heart.  "Just stay in the middle."  I kept reminding myself.  No idea where my wife was at this point.  She was a good driver, I wasn't worried about her.

Down shifting, this time feathering the clutch, on the off ramp.  Also this time feathering the rear brake, I was still alive!  I was on a sedate country road.  About twenty five miles from home.  Just me on my new motorcycle.  Cruisin'   What a rush!

When I did get home, un-wrecked and non-killed, my wife was there.

"How'd it go?  Sorry I made that turn onto 64.  Did you say you didn't want to go on 64?  I never saw you behind me, so I figured you took that other road."

"Uh....." I replied.  Which was when I forgot to put the kickstand down and dropped the bike for the first time.

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