Tom Rickers, Editor of the The American Interest Magazine, has written a column about his fascination with motorcycles and his experience in riding, which he says was sparked by watching MotoGP races.
Excerpt: Milan Kundera used the motorcycle as the literary vehicle, so to speak, for relating modernity, speed and memory: “The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future . . . .”
In my case, I have never pondered why I ride a motorcycle; it'd be like pondering my hair or a scar on my arm, it's just always been there.
One of my earliest memories as a young child is being in our house in Appleton Wisconsin, (this may have been as my father's funeral was happening, I recall being there with some strange woman), and watching some band on a TV program--still in black and white then--sing "Up, Up and Away". This would have been 1968. The band members were seated on small Japanese motorcycles with balloons attached to the handlebars and somehow they lifted off the ground (special effects) as they sang. I found this fascinating and this incident touched something in me that has welded me to motorcycles for the rest of my life. Even after I found out later that you could not just tie balloons to a motorcycle and float away.
The above para noted by Rickers really forces the issue with bikes as a vehicle to travel on, "he is caught in a fragment of time" your head in the future and your ass in the past. I've never really felt that deeply about motorcycles being "literary vehicles"; maybe that comes when you glam onto bikes at a later age. The wind rushing past my body has always seemed so normal because ... it's pretty much always been there, although even today I like to take my left foot off the peg and drag it lightly on the ground just to get the sense of place.
I've never been without a motorcycle since I was 18 or so. At one time I owned almost 30 of them at the same time (I exported them to Europe for a while in the early 1990s). It's all seemed so very natural.