Magic Chariot

The motorcycle has been many things during the century of its development: cheap transportation for the masses, military vehicle, sporting vehicle, image builder, and for some, like my wife and I, the motorcycle has been a pure life-enhancing machine.

When Red and I first got together in 1991, I had already gone through a mid-career divorce and had nothing but a job and an ‘87 Honda Magna to show for it. As a low-paid public school employee, I was not going to have much of anything else very soon, either.... I had two and a half months vacation every summer, but no money to spare – absolutely none.

As we sat facing each other on the only two living room chairs I owned (thrift shop, $5), in the tiny house ($37,500) that I had somehow managed to purchase with the help of a sympathetic -- maybe even pitying -- bank manager, I looked at Red and said, “Aw, the hell with it, wanna ride to Texas and get married? I got a brother down there.....”

She grinned and said. “Sure, why not?”

Several days later, I looked up at her grinning face from the pile of newly purchased camping gear scattered around me and said, “ I can’t strap enough of this crap on the Magna to make it work!”

“Maybe we need another kind of bike,” she speculated.

So we went down to Ellensburg Honda “just to look” and there found our first Goldwing, a battered and beaten ‘81 Interstate with many, many miles on its clock. The handwritten sticker read $2495. “This damn thing will barely get us out of town,” I said.

“This baby is barely broken in, “ gushed the hot-eyed salesman, his glance, incidentally, roving all over Red. “These babies run for ever.... change the oil, change the timing belts.... they just run forever.”

I looked at Red. “Let’s give it a go,” I said. “If we head for Texas and the bike coughs it up, we’ll part it out and take a bus home!”

The bike made it to Texas, and then to Alaska, and then back and forth across the states four or five times. We saw the California coast, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Canadian Maritimes, the whole spine of the Rocky Mountains...... we rode in awe-inspiring thunderstorms, in mountain snows, in desert heat so fierce it melted the adhesive holding on our boot soles. We were able to meet with Maine Lobsterman, Texas Ranchers, New Orleans Blues Musicians, Alaska Fisherman and Iowa Corn Farmers. We camped in nearly all the states, on the shores of both oceans, and on mountains so high and cold we would shiver in our precious sleeping bags, and often had to take our butane camping stove in to bed with us so it would operate in the morning. We saw bear, deer, elk, moose, buffalo, snakes, soaring hawks, and giant pelicans flying in formations of military-type precision from the saddle of our old and faithful bike. When my son was old enough, we bolted on an second-hand sidecar and took him with us. When we ran out of U.S. roads, we started looking overseas, and spent a wondrous summer touring the Swiss Alps on a rented scooter -- and then, eight years later when we could afford it again, spent another glorious summer touring the Dolomites of Northern Italy.

That battered old bike carried us more than 160,000 miles. And when I did have to part it out for real, we bought another one and kept on going, and we had nearly 80,000 miles on it before we wrecked it against the side of a deer. We promptly took the insurance money and bought another. And these low budget bikes have taught us an essential truth: the quality of one’s life depends not upon money, or net worth, or anything else other than the joy of simple existence, a loving partner, freedom, good friends, and the crisp, achingly lovely mornings on the road. The day we bought our old Wing is the day we were blessed, the day we were reborn.

We still live in that $37,500 house, but it’s now paid off and we have built a wing on to it, and we love every board, every nail, every stick of furniture in it..... That small house became our Palace of Joy, and the bike our Magic Chariot. The bike taught us how to live small, to use and love what we had, and not to pine for what we had not... We don’t live on a hill, and we don’t have a view, but we’ve seen things together most people never will. The bike, in a sense, salvaged the quality in our lives, and opened up a world of love and enchantment and adventure to us. Even after one serious accident, my wife still rides with me, whispering words to me over our intercom that only we can hear, and my son rides his own bike on his own roads. Outside of my wife and son, our family and our friends, my motorcycle has been the most quality-producing thing in my life. I will never stop riding a motorcycle, never...