A BIT ABOUT WHY WE RIDE
Psychobabble aside, book does a good job explaining joys of road, writes David Booth.
One of my pet peeves has long been the rather trite condescensions that pass for explanation for why we motorcyclists love to ride.
The whole “bugs in the teeth” is just plain idiotic; only the most dedicated entomophile wants to chew on mosquitoes. Ditto for the whole “wind in my hair” BS; there’s an entire industry built on the accessory windshields so that said wind doesn’t reach anywhere near our hair. Nope, I always assumed that my having chosen motorcycles as my preferred method of transportation, like so many things — a professed preference for the colour blue, always choosing cauliflower over broccoli, etc. — was just the random dispensation of flavours that makes us all unique. In other words, I didn’t expect to learn much from Mark Barnes’ new book Why We Ride: A Psychologist Explains the Motorcyclist’s Mind and the Love Affair between Rider, Bike and Road, essentially a compilation of the best columns he has written for Motorcycle Consumer News.
Well, you know what they say about assuming. Indeed, in Why We Ride’s very first story came the rather keen observation that any “deliberate movement through space defies the abstract mental walls that routinely hem us in; that’s why,” says Barnes.
“Even taking a walk can be such an effective means of attitude adjustment.” I may hate walking, but who among us has ever failed to have his, or her, attitude adjusted by a sunny Sunday ride?
And while his observation that “the process of surmounting provides a sense of satisfaction” is pretty much boiler-plate psychobabble, his discussion in the Call of the Open Road of “re-creating” our minds by stepping away from the ruts of day-to-day repetition because “the most diverse our experiences and the wider the range of the challenges we face … the better our set of tools for dealing with whatever comes up in the future” is spot on.
If that just seems like a fancy recreation of Eleanor Roosevelt’s famed imploration to “do one thing every day that scares you,” it’s still totally apropos for a book on motorcycling. That we sometimes mix up the extreme poles of adventure and security — for example participating in track days but ensuring we have the latest air-bagged safety gear — is just proof to Barnes that “there are many ways to slice the pie of human motivation.”
Even when Barnes steps out of his field of expertise — his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Tennessee — he still manages to speak with authority. His contention that, despite all the micro-segmentation — adventure bikes, power cruiser, hipster-classic styling exercises — now common in the motorcycle industry, “the machines within them are less unique.”
According to the author, the reason so many of we boomers might be caught up in motorcycling nostalgia, then, is that “while a fascinating engine design may not have been very efficient or effective, it might still have been extremely entertaining.” That’s as good an explanation for our continuing fascination with Honda’s CBX as I’ve heard.
On the other hand, his contention that we should all Get Lost seems a little self-indulgent. Like every motorcyclist, Barnes knows that getting there is more than half the fun, but to deliberately get lost is a lot different than taking the road less travelled; the latter is a new adventure, the former just a pain in the ass. And Brain Fade and the Perils of Fatigue is just a waste of a once fine tree. Anyone lame enough not to realize that mastering a high-speed motorcycle when you’re tired is dangerous will probably not be warned off no matter how convincing the admonishment.
Nonetheless, Barnes’ point that “mastery of challenges is not just enjoyable, it’s a necessary part of life,” is, of course, the reason many of us ride motorcycles when it would be just so much easier to drive a car. How fast you go, how far you jump and how deep you brake into a corner is just the sliding scale of risk you are willing to accept to challenge your personal status quo.
In the end, Barnes concludes by dividing motorcyclists’ motivations into seven distinct categories: Engagement (belonging to a like-minded group), Autonomy (the exact opposite, the desire to escape the confines of society), Mastery (achieving a skill set in a dangerous activity), Exhilaration (the sensual pleasure of speed), Transcendence (the altered state of consciousness resulting from merging with machine and surroundings), Relaxation (escaping the strictures of work and family) and, finally, Practicality (the economy of a bike compared with other transportation alternatives).
While that thematic analysis of motivations was my reason for reading Why We Ride, perhaps Barnes’ most insightful observation might have been on a scale far less grandiose, specifically track-day group dynamics. After convincing a few track-day virgins to join him for a day of cavorting at Talladega, one of the newbies pointed out that the vast majority of the tales told over dinner had to do with crashing. To Barnes, ever the professional psychologist, reflection determined that all theses stories were simply “attempts at inoculation,” the storytellers either trying to review all the lessons they had learned from previous crashes or, while in the manly art of teasing their friends of their mishaps, trying to convince themselves “that such disasters only happen in the lives of others.”
Even the semi-religious recitation of famous racers’ biggest crashes is meant to “invoke some celestial blessing on their own endeavours … (simply) human beings trying to manage collective anxiety.” For its concise explanation of the manly art of bench racing alone, Why We Ride is worth reading.
And, yes, you guessed it: one of the friends Barnes coaxed to Talladega crashed. No doubt they’re still hearing about it.