I like to think I’m something of a rarity in a few ways: I’m a short South Asian middle-aged man who has been infatuated with speed for most of my life. My parents didn’t get much right, but they did get one thing: growing up in rural Mississippi, a boy should have an ATV. That little 70cc machine was my first taste of speed…and freedom. Dangerous? Maybe, sure. But the rewards far outweighed the risks, then and now.
The first thing about it was that I could get distance. I was generally an unhappy child, and I wasn’t given much freedom…except when I got on that ATV and blasted down the trails my neighbor and I had carved through the woods around our houses. It was easy to get away from my parents' excessive demands by literally disappearing in a cloud of dust.
It also taught me about self-reliance. If the three-wheeler broke down far from home, there was only one thing to do: fix it. I learned about keeping the tank full, but also how to clean an air filter, a fuel filter, and I understood oil changes, although I never did one myself.
An air-cooled Honda single will run forever if you take care of it even remotely properly, and I tried my best.
When I was older, I graduated to bigger machines, and then to two-wheeled machines, and then to street bikes (my parents were horrified, but they opened this particular Pandora’s Box).
Some of the things you learn riding motorcycles you really only understand later. There are moments of epiphany, where a writer crystallizes your feelings into coherent thoughts that just click into place in your brain. Some of those individual moments involved calculating risk: “All The Gear, All The Time,” “your first year on a street bike is your most dangerous year,” “it’s not a race, you don’t win anything on the street,” etc.
All these things taken together helped me build a deeper understanding of the relationship between risk and reward. Some things that seem inherently risky to others are actually perfectly safe if you’re taking steps to mitigate risk. This served me in many ways in other domains of my life: rock-climbing, parkour, and especially flying planes.
All these things seem focused on doing risky things, and I suppose that’s one way to practice them, but it’s almost certainly a short road. Blindly taking risks usually leads to injury or worse, and it also seems to be a mostly young-male set of habits. I should know, that’s where I started out, too. It took me a while to understand risk, and most of my education was done on my own body. I was lucky in many ways to avoid serious injury when I was in my teens and twenties, but the illusion of immortality is both powerful and destructive to young people. Sometimes I wonder how I’d have turned out of I’d had just a few more cautious voices of reason around me.
The longer road is to use risk mitigation to change your practice, to develop strategies and habits that underlie your actions. It’s slower, but it’s safer…and it’s even more rewarding, because learning about risk teaches you about what you value and what you don’t, and instructs you about how much you actually care for yourself, which hopefully is a lot. And none of that changes much about the fundamental experience of the activity itself! It’s still just as fun, and understanding your limits and how to anticipate predictable outcomes and prepare for worst-case scenarios…and not-as-bad scenarios…allows you to do more, to be more confident, to expand your abilities.
I know it’s not for everyone, but I feel deep in my bones that riding in the dirt should be for more people. With the advent of lower-cost and drastically lower-maintenance electric vehicles, there’s a real opportunity here for more kids — and even more adults — to get out there and learn a thing or two about how a relationship with a machine can produce a sum that’s far greater than the parts.
I’m looking forward to the day when I can get on my motorcycle and ride…with my twins. Or my nephew and niece and brother-in-law…and maybe even my sister.
And who knows where that will take us? I hope they’ll get to experience riding the way I have in the past, and how I experience it now: a challenge that is its own reward, an opportunity to explore the world and yourself.