Looking for Zen in a Thumb-Driven World

I saw a motorcyclist on Main Street last week.  A hardy soul. My car’s thermometer read -2, but then, such is the lure of motorcycle riding.  I have been a motorcyclist for almost fifty years, seduced at the age of seventeen by a black BMW idling quietly outside a Boston coffee house. The allure of motorcycling has been misappropriated slightly by the North American concept of The Biker.  Most motorcyclists around the world don’t ride Harley Davidsons, wear black leather or even have tattoos, and the notion of freedom for most does not mean free to terrorize small towns or engage in organized criminal activity. Of course, most people who call themselves bikers these days don’t do those things either; they’re accountants and grocery clerks, but they like to dress the part.

The real freedom associated with motorcycling has to do with the combination of the physical and emotional responses generated by riding the machine.  Out of all the modes of transportation ever invented for land, sea or air only the motorcycle requires a real human being to operate it; all the others can be driven by computers or remote control. A motorcycle, however, without a human rider, just crashes. Riding a motorcycle requires focus and one’s full attention both at slow speeds in town so that you don’t get run over by a car driver who didn’t see you, and at high speed on a twisty country road so that you don’t fly off at a corner.  One uses both hands and both feet to operate the controls, and the inputs of sight, sound, touch and smell are always being monitored.  Almost every motorcyclist can tell you how the smell of rain made them fortunately slow down before a dry, blind corner that exited onto a section of wet, slippery road. Combine all that with the wind, engine sounds, vibration and the fact that the rider and the motorcycle both constantly lean into turns to balance the forces of traction and inertia and one has an experience that is exquisitely visceral.

Which brings us to an article in the December 8, 2011, Vancouver Sun by art critic Kevin Griffin. In commenting on an exhibition at the Or Gallery called Studies in Decay, he mentions the video exhibit by Jordy Hamilton of a burning motorcycle being riddled with bullets. Griffin comments: “Once portrayed in popular culture and in films such as Easy Rider as the ultimate freedom machines, motorcycles and their internal combustion engines can no longer be separated from oil colonialism and their role in global warming. Even if motorcycles were once marketed as embodying rebellion and freedom, they’ve become the exact opposite today. Freedom is no longer what it used to be.”

Alas, many things aren’t what they used to be. The physical and visceral have given way to the immaterial and virtual.  Children no longer use their imaginations to turn cardboard boxes into club houses and fairy castles, or sticks into swords and magic wands. Now they sit in front of screens and play in someone else’s imaginary kingdom, moving virtual figures with their thumbs.

Socialisation no longer involves being in the presence of anyone at all. Both conversation and confrontation are conducted in cyberspace where people hide behind avatars, and personality and character are figments of the latest YouTube upload.

Freedom, always an elusive abstraction, may not be what it used to be with cameras on every street corner, and human rights routinely discounted for the sake of political expediency, but I know that it exists still. And when I encourage my motorcycle to propel me down lonely roads at extravagant speeds, all those visceral inputs of wind and sound and vibration, of gravity and inertia, acceleration and deceleration convince me that the elusive abstraction can almost be made concrete.

I am sorry that global warming may be changing the world for the worse, but I am sorrier still that some people see humanity’s future in cyberspace.  And though legislators may eventually rid the planet of all internal combustion engines, the motorcycle will remain in the minds of the last surviving riders a creation that was always far more than some marketing consultant’s illusion of freedom.  It was the real thing.

And it took more than a pair of thumbs to ride.

Pency O’Doule, Enthusiast Extraordinaire: Pency Traumatizes a Troglodyte

            I had told Dave Owen that I would meet the guys on the 1999 Tour B.C. run at The Goldpanner Cafe on Highway 6 between 10:30 and 11:30 on Thursday.  It was 11:45 and I was wondering if I had misunderstood.  Still, I knew that eventually they would have to pass by because it was the only way to get to Nakusp and the other fine British Columbia towns on Dave’s itinerary and still take in the best of the twisty, Southern B.C. roads.  As I glanced up from a dog-eared copy of the Coldstream Advertiser, I caught a glimpse through the cafe’s fly-specked front window of a ’96 Connie slicing past.  I slapped a toonie on the table to pay for the coffee and pushed through the front door.  By the time I had picked up my chaps and wrapped them around my waist another Connie, a ’94 had zipped by, followed by an ’86.  I had put my jacket on and was just sliding into my helmet when an ’87, identical to mine flashed by, on the back the tell-tale red waterproof stuff sack of Pency O’Doule.

            I launched myself out of the parking lot just in front of a fully loaded logging truck that was jake-braking on the slight downhill past the cafe.  I didn’t want to get stuck behind that kind of a rig as I began the chase to run down Pency and the others.   With a minute or so edge on the relatively traffic free highway to the Needles-Fauquier ferry, they would be able to crank on the k’s.  Obviously, I would have to crank on more. 

The rear tire skipped a little to the right as took off.  The road immediately dipped into a short left hander and then a long right around an outcropping of rock.  The mountains extended up a thousand feet here on either side of the creek.  They were covered in second growth pine and fir.  For most of the sixty kilometres to the ferry at Needles, the creek would be down to the left and the uphill slope on the right.  I settled into the rhythm of the winding road, trying to be smooth, to minimise my braking, roll the throttle on and off with a bit more finesse, give the sidewall tread a little more work to do. 

Out of nowhere, the realisation popped into my head that my Concours buddies had almost ridden right by me!  Why hadn’t they stopped at the Goldpanner as arranged?  Had they not seen my bike?  It had been parked right in front.  Pency must have seen it; Pency never missed anything.

Hardly had those thoughts entered my mind, when I exited a corner to find, a hundred yards in front of me, the red-bagged backend of Pency’s motorcycle, which had slowed to about sixty k.  Pency was half turned around on his saddle in the hurry-and-catch-up position familiar to all motorcyclists.  I waved him on with my left hand and we were off.  He hadn’t missed me after all.

The ride to the ferry was fabulous: sixty kilometres of twisty, traffic free, smooth and silky asphalt; thirty minutes of pure pleasure: swooping through a gradual left and right, hammering up an inclined straight, braking over the top and down, around again, throttle on, left and right, then braking, braking, bending it hard and harder still as the radius tightened, out, blasting out and down toward some little bridge, over, up, a glance at Pency’s stuff sack, still there, damn getting smaller, throttle on...  For thirty minutes: eyes wide, heart going, wind, air, heat, noise, both hands and feet playing the two-wheeled calliope just as hard and fast as I knew how to play.  As I said: fabulous.

We passed the other Connies one by one on the way, and another guy and his girlfriend on a twenty year old Yamaha 1100 cruiser.  By the time they caught back up to us at the ferry terminal, Pency and I were sitting at a little picnic table eating some of my stash of beef jerky, still grinning. 

Ferry terminal is a little bit of an exaggeration.  The highway just sort of disappears straight into the water of Arrow Lake.  It re-emerges on the other side, about eight hundred yards away.   A set of three, three inch cables runs across the lake guiding a twenty car ferry back and forth.  We had about fifteen minutes to wait until the ferry came back.  Ken McNair, Dan Paulsen and Wayne Stirrett were the other three Concours riders.  We took a few pictures to pass the time.  Within about five minutes, the Yamaha pulled up and the two riders got off.  The guy introduced himself as Phillip and his wife as Irene.  They appeared to be in their late thirties.  Philip was pleasant enough, but Irene had hardly taken off her helmet before she launched into a tirade about excessive speed and passing on yellow lines and bad name to motorcycling not to mention endangering life and limb and besides how could anyone see the scenery, they might as well be on a race track.  Phillip seemed a little embarrassed which is probably why he started diligently searching in his saddlebags for something. 

“Do you suppose he’s looking for a gun?” Pency muttered to me.

“Why don’t you just slow down so you can see something,” Irene concluded, and though she was not directing her comments to him specifically, Pency glanced at me, rolled his eyes and responded.  I was pleased to note that he employed his best, clipped British accent.

“You err, madam, to assume that the acuity of one’s vision decreases with speed.  The joy one gets from riding briskly is infinitely enhanced by the very scenery you so quickly assume we cannot apprehend.”

I bit off another chunk of jerky to disguise my grin.  Phillip looked up, a slight smile on his face.  Irene frowned.

“What?  What has all that got to do with just slowing down instead of being an idiot?”

There was a slight pause.  I looked at Pency whose eyes, I noticed, were now locked onto Irene and no longer blinked.  He took a small step toward her.

“An idiot?” he said.  “I see.  Madam, at 80 kilometres per hour, the speed at which you choose to travel, one engages the senses in the usual fashion, one at a time, as did the troglodytes of old.  One sees, or hears, or smells as the case may be.  Occasionally, the tactile sense makes itself known as the droning vibration of the motorcycle slowly creeps through the foam and then the cellulite to the lower pelvis.”

Irene opened her mouth to speak; Pency kept going.

“At 110 kilometres per hour, all the senses blur together in a charming cacophony of sensation which, while enjoyable, eventually becomes tiresome: one hears and feels and smells and sees everything in a vibrant blend of fuzzy feeling.  At 140 kilometres an hour, the speed at which I choose to travel, each sense in that blur separates into a very distinct rainbow of sensation; the speed requires that I see everything, hear everything, feel everything, smell everything.  Not a colour, whiff, click or vibration escapes my notice.  In the last sixty kilometres we passed one eagle, a red-tailed hawk, two dead racoons, one dead king snake, you and three deer, one of which was a buck.  The eagle was flying back to its nest with a small kokanee, the buck had four points, the bum of your jeans is starting to split, and the Yamaha is burning a little oil in the third cylinder.”

Irene hesitated.

“Oh, right.  As if!” she finally said, and turned away.

Pency wasn’t through.

“Did you, for example, at your sedate speed happen to notice what the last road sign said?”

“Yeah, I did, as a matter of fact,” she said turning back.  “It said ‘Fauquier: 3 kilometres.’”

Pency smiled.

“Actually, it said ‘two kilometres.’  And by the way, the name of the town is French, and its not pronounced FOKE-ee-yer.”

Ah, Pency, I thought, you just can’t resist, can you.  I looked at a smiling Phillip and wondered how he would take this.

“And I suppose you are going to tell me the correct pronunciation,” Irene said with a slight sneer.

“If you insist,” Pency said, and then, in his most charming, phoney, Pink Panther French accent replied: “Een France wee say: Foke-ee-AY.  Een British Columbia, wee say: Foke-ee-YOO, eh?”

Pency O'Doule:Enthusiast Extraordinaire

Pency Makes New Friends

            We were late as usual.  Pency’s rear tire was starting to hop under braking and he was beginning to lean his shoulders into the corners, a sure sign that he was trying to make up a little time.  I knew I’d be able to keep up, though, as long as his left knee didn’t start poking out into the air stream in the left-handers. He couldn’t poke his right knee out because his right hip was a little stiff from an encounter with a bullet when he was serving Her Majesty in Borneo in 1959.  Once Pency started poking out that skinny left knee of his, I knew he’d slowly pull away.  He was comfortable with about four more degrees of lean than I was, and whenever I became uncomfortable, I began to visualise the grills of Kenworth’s appearing suddenly around blind corners as I drifted across the yellow line.   Pency never seemed to think about things like that.

            The road we were on followed a winding river through the Rossland Range of mountains in the interior of British Columbia.  There was little traffic and the weather was brilliantly clear and warm.  Just ahead was a series of short, wide radius turns, one of my favourite sections of Highway 3.  It was new pavement: black, pristine asphalt, and the short curves were all about the same size and distance from one another.  Pency was on his ZX 9 and I was on my GSX 750.  On a road like that, even ageing riders could still feel like Mick Doohan.

            We were late because Pency had had another encounter with a radar gun.  He was usually pretty observant, seeing not only down the road, but all around as well.  He had great peripheral vision and even managed to somehow pay attention to the sky.  If he was in front, he’d often shoot a black gloved forefinger into the air,  off to the left, or right.  I’d look and there, flashing by at great speed, would be a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, or a somnolent moose staring up from some marshy stream, or a grazing mountain goat perched on a rock above the road.  I don’t know how he managed to see all that and still ride faster than I did.  Today, however,  he had missed the ghost car coming toward us with the telltale red and blue lights down low on the grill.  I had fallen a little behind and so was out of sight at the moment of the bust, fortunately for me.  The RCMP enjoy whacking everyone with a ticket in a tight group of motorcyclists.  By the time I came around the bend, the car was already slowing for the U-turn.

            Pency was laconic as usual.  No doubt the young female constable was surprised when he removed his helmet.  In his leathers, Pency appears young.  He only weighs about one hundred and thirty pounds.  He has escaped the middle-aged spread of his peers through heredity and reasonable eating and drinking habits: small portions of food, generous amounts of red wine. 

            “Ahhh, out grappling with the forces of evil once again,” I heard him say to the policewoman as I pulled up in front of them and turned off my motor.

            He always sounded pleasant, though the irony of his remarks ensured that he would never get off with just a warning.

            “Mr. O’Doule,” she said, looking at his license, “I clocked you at 125 kilometres an hour in a 90 zone.”

            “Indeed,” he replied.  “Since yours was the only car we’ve seen in the last forty kilometres, I must have been lulled into assuming that the road was safe at that speed.”

            Three points and a hundred dollars later we were back on the road trying to catch up to Dave Owen and his Tour B.C. group as they headed toward Lillooet and lunch.  The rendez-vous was scheduled for 12:30.  I hoped that we wouldn’t overtake any Harley riders before we joined them; Pency couldn’t afford another ticket and yet he was incapable of pulling up behind anyone on a Harley and not blasting past them at least a ton. 

            “Nineteen thirties technology!” he loved to sneer.  “Archaic crap ridden by troglodytes!”

            Pency didn’t mince words and rarely backed down.  He attributed that behaviour to his Irish ancestry and Jesuit education. And having to live down his nickname.  Few people realised what “Pency” was short for. 

 “Pencil Neck,” Pency confided one afternoon.  “Richard Dungate named me that at university, the miserable bugger!  But I got even with him when I out drank him at a party, and he wet himself in front of all our friends.  Everybody who was there still refers to moments of ultimate embarrassment as ‘a dungate.’”  

The road straightened out into a long uphill stretch; Pency opened it up to 150 k.  We came over a rise and immediately swooped down into a long right hander.  The pavement was still good and I knew Pency was dying to carry as much speed through the sweeper as he could.  The skinny right knee creaked out about four inches, all the hip could take.

A yellow sign appeared just past the apex of the turn, announcing a left hander and a reduction in speed to 60 k.  Pency’s brake light came on briefly and his left foot twitched down through the gears.  In smooth cruising mode, Pency would have gone through the turn at 100 k. in fourth, but I knew he’d be working harder this morning so I dropped down into third and kept the revs up.  We came out of the left hander hard.  There was a dusting of sand on the far side of the turn.  I saw Pency’s rear wheel hop six inches and I backed off a hair.  As I refocused my eyes further down the road, I saw two black forms disappear around the next corner; the squat, pendulous rear ends were unmistakable: Harleys, with wide bars and wider highway pegs that stretched the riders out until they looked like they were either about to be drawn and quartered or had just suffered a violent explosion in the front of their pants.

Suddenly, Pency was pulling away from me.  He had seen them too.  In an instant we were diving into a 120 k right hander, and then into a decreasing radius left.  I muttered an expletive as I saw Pency’s left knee jut out into the air stream.  He cranked it over hard, and I held my breath and followed.  The pavement was clean through the corner, but I flinched and tapped the brakes anyway.  Pency was fifty feet further ahead of me now, and the Harleys were in plain view.  They were riding side by side at about three-quarters of our speed.  The bike on the left appeared to be a hard tail with fairly flat bars; the one on the right had leather saddlebags and medium height ape-hangers.  There was a short straight stretch up ahead, followed by another left turn.  I expected Pency to keep on accelerating and pass the Harleys at high speed before the turn.  Instead, he backed off and shifted down, and I had to apply a little brake to stay behind him.   While I was trying to anticipate what he was up to, I saw the Harley rider on the left glance into his rear view mirror.  Suddenly, there was a little puff of smoke and a blat from his exhaust as he, and then the other Harley, began to accelerate.  Ah, Pency, I thought, you crafty old bugger; they’ve taken the bait.  Here we go. 

I wasn’t sure what gear I was in, but I dropped down two and grabbed a fist full.  Even so, Pency was accelerating away.  I could imagine perfectly the severe little smirk on his face beneath his grey moustache.  They tried, of course, thinking perhaps that with their three thousand dollar Screaming Eagle Mark III add-on high performance kits and their Lightning cams and their chrome-moly doo-das they could out straight-line Pency into the corner and then maybe hang on until the next straight.  Who knows.  With me following, he pulled out to pass them, still accelerating, as their brake lights went on in preparation for the corner; prudently, they took their running boards into account before entering.  Fifty feet further on, Pency  tapped his brakes and downshifted; out went the knee as he started to bend the Kawasaki into the turn.  Then, in a little flourish, he took his left hand off the bar, bent it behind his back, and waved his fingers, a gesture to which he referred on occasion as “the inverted bye-bye.”  As I followed him around the Harleys I caught in my mirror a glimpse of another gesture, not inverted and not bye-bye.