My first ride, six months after a crash

Five months, plus one week, to sit and think about what it will be like to ride again. Some of you might be thinking, “what’s the big deal, eh? I have to wait that long every year to get back on my zed-ex eleven!” I have plenty of respect for that, but it wasn’t snow and ice that kept me out of the saddle.

It’s been sunny and warm where I live, but I have been recovering from a crash in which I broke my ankle and my neck. It is a riding winter of my own making. Psychologically, it’s different to park a bike in a garage while Jack Frost howls for a season than it is to be carted away from your last ride in an ambulance and then steep in all of those emotions for nearly half a year. Now that I’ve done both, I think there might be more similarities than there are differences.

What we can learn from waiting

There are all sorts of phrases and idioms we can use to placate ourselves when our riding season is dormant, whatever the reason. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” if you’re the romantic type, or “out of sight, out of mind” if you prefer not to think about it. In the case of motorcycling, for me neither of those sayings has ever applied.

I grew up with long, cold winters and even though the motorbikes were often put away, they were not out of mind. For a few years, my dad put sheetmetal screws in the knobs of my Honda XR80’s tires and I rode down the snowy road to the bus stop. As I got older, I played motorcycle-racing video games to keep me in the mood. 

Even in the true doldrums, when I wasn’t watching racing, or playing games, or riding in the snow, riding was always in my mind. So much so that sometimes I felt like I learned things over a long stretch of not riding, like somehow my acuity had gone up for certain aspects of riding simply because I thought about it so much. 

My pops and I said the same thing about downhill skiing, another hobby we shared. The first run of the winter felt rusty, but not in all the ways we expected. I believe that the mind progresses even when it’s away from the activity. We digest experiences over time, and the latency between having done something and having learned from it can span a season, or two.

Then again, this whole “season” I’m in didn’t arrive poetically, with a wistful sigh and a gentle swing of a garage door. It started with a violent end to a ride, and a harsh closure on my ability to do all kinds of stuff — a fracture of both my ankle and my way of life. That made me wonder if the love I’ve always felt for this pastime of riding motorcycles would still outweigh the fear I have of it all going wrong. If you get a peek through the gates of hell, are you more or less afraid of it?

The first ride back

I pushed my little grey-market city runabout machine out of the garage and aimed for a coffee shop about 15 minutes away. A simple ride on a simple bike. Aside from the gentle breeze of worry that had been blowing in my face for the past five months and change, I didn’t have any fear before the ride. Or if I did, it was disguised as other emotions as I got ready. 

From a practical standpoint, putting on safety gear is an important part of a motorcycle ride. The first thing I noticed was the discomfort that non-riders probably often feel when they put on gear. The gloves feel tight, the shoes are stiff, and so on. I’ve said before that I like the emotional side of strapping on gear for every ride. It’s a ritual that offers time to reflect on why the gear exists. For safety.

This time the gear felt a little heavier, both literally and because my last ride ended in some amount of calamity. But it didn’t make me feel afraid or wary, it just felt something like a flavor from my childhood — something familiar that I hadn’t tasted in a while. If nothing else, I figured it was a necessary dissonance in my head, to feel a little bit awkward doing something that is supposed to be natural.

Ultimately, all of that melted away. I have been riding motorcycles for nearly 35 years and I was away for a little less than six months. The snugness of gloves, which can feel a little clumsy to people who don’t ride, soon felt appropriate. The gear didn’t feel uncomfortable, it made me feel like myself, and I realized that was a piece of what I had been missing.

I never believed that my confidence would be shattered by one crash, even the worst one of my life, but I did wonder how I would react once I was riding again. It was a few ounces of worry and 10 pounds of joy. I hit a few false neutrals, I left my blinkers on too long on a couple of occasions, and at least three times I noticed myself riding in a car’s blind spot or leaving myself open for a left-turn collision. I was rusty, in other words, and I’m not surprised. 

At the end of this riding winter, I am reminded of my favorite Steinbeck quote: "What good is the warmth of summer without the cold of winter to give it sweetness,” he wrote in "Travels with Charley." If memory serves, he was talking about retirees who escape to Florida in order to avoid northern winters. But, of course, it means much more than that. It could be applied to any number of experiences in one’s life. 

In this case, my riding winter. I've been lucky enough to climb on a motorcycle most days of most weeks for more than a decade. In other words, I've had a dozen or so years of summer. The only pause in the glow was a vacation here and there — a week or so of time away from the pastime and work that has brought so much light to my existence. After the better part of six months away from riding, in a particularly dark and cold state of mind, I can say that I appreciate the warmth that motorbikes bring to me.