This is a quote from Samuel Coleridge that I recently ran across and I have been thinking about it these last few weeks. Up until last weekend I was still riding my BMW on a daily basis. Whenever I stop for whatever reason and remove my helmet and start to take of my many layers of clothing, people always ask me aren't you cold. I then explain that my heated Gerbings jacket is like wearing around an electric blanket, thermostat and all, and I go on to explain that I also have heated grips on the bike, heated gloves, that plug into my jacket and if it is gets even colder, I have heated socks as well. My Gerbings jacket liner warms up very quickly and I am, by the time I get going as snug as a bug in a rug. I have a balaclava under my helmet and with everything zipped tight I am ready for either a quick zip around town, to a six hundred + mile ride. There have been some years when I have gone as long as seven or eight months without driving a car, and while there is nothing wrong with cars, I know I have owned a lot of them, they are to paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson, a “Damn poor substitute for a bike.”
Many years ago, camping out with lots of friends, we somehow got on the subject of what it would have been like if Motorcycle's instead of being an alternative means of transportation, viewed essentially as a hobby, had instead become the dominant form of transportation. Everything from the camber of roads, to the shape of the typical nuclear family would have been different. While you could certainly put two small children in a side car, as they grew up, at some point, another motorcycle would have to be part of the picture. From that spark we went on for the rest of the evening imaging this society, were all 4 wheel deliveries would be relegated to the night-time hours, where parking lots could be half the size and roads would by their very nature, meander more than the wide and cumbersome network of roadways we have today. Even in Salt Lake City, with out usual distinct four seasons, if I lived downtown, I could get by without driving a car at all, and either walking or bicycling around for most of my errands, and then have a bike for what I couldn't or didn't want to do via either bicycle or walking or public transportation.
I have written before about riding to Death Valley for the Martin Luther King holiday weekend and also Death Valley in February and I have certainly ridden back to Zion in a snow storm and worried about getting over Scipio summit. Its not the snow, at least on an interstate that's the problem, its the slush and most of all ice that is not any fun at all. Motorcycle's don't handle very well on ice, unless they have spikes in their tires.
So for at least the next few weeks I am relegated to four-wheel transportation. In some years, I have gone from March till the following December on two wheels. Besides the fact that I love riding a motorcycle, over 500,000 miles and 6 BMW's, I feel a sense of grace on a motorcycle that I don't feel any where else. I am talking about physical grace, not grace in the religious sense.
While I tend to read books on a year round basis, I even have been known to read matchbook covers, and I don't smoke, I tend to read more between September and May, then I do during the summer. So far this fall-winter I have re-read Bleak House, The Golden Bowl, and just finished reading Chris Matthew's book about Kennedy. While there were some new antidotes in the book, what is brought out the most is how compartmentalized JFK kept his life. I have known a couple of people that are the same way and I have always wondered what prompted them to do this. Is it for psychic protection, or just because it makes life interesting and enables you to function in some sense, from a somewhat detached point of view. Viewing your own life as an involved but somewhat removed observer. As far as I go, I am not compartmentalized at all, I think I am pretty much the same with everyone, a pretty open book with at least, I hope, a modicum of interest to those observing and interacting with me.
There are several books that I read during my formative school years, that I have read again as an adult and although I certainly remember the plot and the major characters from the first reading, I notice all sorts of things that just living life, have given me an appreciation for. When Caitlin was growing up, from second grade through high school she read the book “The Giver” three times. That's quite an age span to read the same book. Either the curriculum in the second grade was advanced, or in middle school and high school it was parochial .
I inherited, probably by default, my maternal grandfather's complete set of Charles Dickens, and just like his library of Shakespeare, that I also have, I find notes written at the beginning of the book and in some chapters as well. I never met my grandfather Val, he died about three years before I was born, and although I heard a lot about him from my mother Louise, I have gained a glimpse, a mere one, of what he must have been like, by reading these notes. I don't know who will have these books, when I have departed this mortal coil, but I hope that they enjoy reading them, notes and all as much as I have. So I am now knee deep in reading for the second or maybe third time Great Expectations and I plan on reading over the next couple of years at least three Dickens books a year. Dickens was probably the first international celebrity, he packed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and paved the way for James, Twain, Wilde and Dylan Thomas among others to giving public lectures on both sides of the pond.
While I look forward to spring's first furtive glance, I will stay warm and dry and occupied for the rest of this winter, that really has just started in my beloved valley's of the great basin.
