Guided by the

Maybe more than any other motorcycle, owning and riding a Moto Guzzi makes you part of something special

The day I bought a Moto Guzzi I was naïve enough to believe it was just a machine, it turned out to be a map. What it offered as the ideal route through the landscape of all the coming years. It knew where I should go. It foretold who I should meet. It knew better than me.

August 21, 2017, was to mark the first total solar eclipse in a century visible throughout the United States. Who else to experience a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle with but motorcycle friends?

Mine are spread all over the globe, as motorcyclists are wont to be. They’re not family, although they are my family; they’re not local, although I make them so. We are aware of the distance between us, which we bemoan as well as crave; these are the miles that measure our closeness, born of space collapsing under the pressure of exploding gas and air.

I set the wheels in motion. Meet in North Carolina. Stay at a dedicated motorcycle campground, with cabins along the banks of a small brook and tent sites for those who travel with their compressed housing as pillion. From Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, New York, Virginia we converged over an instructively labelled bridge – MOTORCYCLES ONLY ACROSS BRIDGE and LIFE BEGINS AT 10,000rpm – and finally we were home, together. It’s a great happiness to learn you don’t need much; in fact, you need nothing more than what fits, to the centimetre, into the panniers. Yet another of the apparently infinite miracles lavished on us by our motorcycles. All we could want too, was within these precincts: our bikes in sight, patient and ready. Our bourbons to share and taste, our coffee made by a specialist in its exquisite preparation. Laughter and tall tales and the essential joy of simply looking on each other, delirious at the luck that brought us together in the first place, and that would allow us to part so that we could experience coming together once more.

On the way here, TVS at every stop beamed images of a nation starting to come apart at its loosely basted seams – the week before, a violent gathering of white supremacists took the life of a protester only a short ride from where we’d stayed the night. I felt like I was entering enemy territory. Still I waved at every passing motorcyclist, their politics unknown but not their fealty to something bigger. At a gas station, conversation turned only to ‘Moto Guzzis

I have known and loved’ (‘my uncle had an old one a them. H loved his Guzzy’). I was no longer in a place where we might finally be torn apart, but where we might be brought together.

In the evening we celebrated the best of life on the road. We shared

a campground dinner, then put ourselves to planning (triangulating among possible routes, checking forecasts, consulting the oracles inside our phones). In short, imagining the future. Another way to say ‘hope’. At last, we reluctantly bid each other good night in order to fall asleep anticipating a celestial event.

Turning and turning again under the stippled shadow of trees the next morning, we crossed a state line farther south. The moon was moving into place. We dismounted, arrayed ourselves in a small parking lot, set up tripods and donned cardboard eclipse glasses. The spectre of leaves overheard on the pavement started fracturing. And then the clouds that had been gathered at the periphery of the treeline rose to proceed across the sky. The final sliver of sun, just about to disappear, vanished behind them. The day darkened, but what we had ridden eight hundred miles to see went unseen. When the light gradually returned we geared up to remount. The next day we would all depart to our respective corners of the country again. How curious that we should have ended up in the one place where the eclipse was not visible, I waited for the crush of disappointment. But it never came. Not then, not on the way home. I remained suffused with a sort of elation. Finally it came to me. I could not be disappointed because I’d, in fact, had the transcendent experience I came for.

The web of friendships – one person leading to another and another, one cell of Guzzi aficionados leading to another – was the most unexpected and prized favour bestowed by my good luck one day so long ago. Guzzisti are a hardy breed. Also smart, generous, kind, and more than a little odd. These are the people I can, and have, called upon in hours of need, and hours of desire – for acceptance, pleasure, silliness, and that most essential of human needs, silent understanding. They are the only destination on the map of my heart.

Heading back north I did the only two things I do while riding, both blessings: think, and not think at all. In the latter state I’m a depository, receptive to a sensory simultaneity. When thoughts occur, they do so with stunning clarity. Because I chanced on a particular Moto Guzzi in a sales lot one afternoon thirty-five years ago on which I had determined I would become a motorcyclist, my route through life was mapped. Now I diagrammed what seemed happenstance but was actually an elaborate plan. I catalogued multitudinous gifts as I rode. That unprepossessing V50 was the progenitor of my life’s career. It brought those stellar friendships without which the days would be dull and tedious. It offered new horizons – Italy, Germany, India. It blessed me with a vertiginous view on ideas and knowledge to which I would otherwise have been blind. It even got me a flight in a private jet.

And do not forget love. That also came on two wheels, by the grace of a stoic V50 that has not stopped giving though it is long, long gone, three other Guzzis in succession taking its place. They said utopia can never exist. But they never tried getting there on a motorcycle.

Moto Guzzi 100 Anni

This essay is taken from the official Moto Guzzi 100th anniversary book, Moto Guzzi 100 Anni. It is a high gloss 224 page coming together of ten riders/writers in celebration of what these motorcycles have given to them. Writers include Bike’s Mat Oxley, writing about Guzzi’s racing history. At book sellers now.

‘The day I bought a Guzzi I was naïve enough to believe it was just a machine, it turned out to be a map’