GAZETTE COLUMN: Easy, Rider! by John P. Flannery

John (on a borrowed bike)

Photo by Holly Flannery

There was a time when you hopped on a motorcycle, the wind in your hair, no helmet in the way, and you set out for a road ride, leaning into those turns, the pavement an elbow away, testing the edge, ducking bugs, dodging furry animals, on twisting roads through green valleys and arches of trees that made you feel as free as you could ever imagine.

I’m full of that feeling, and on the verge of buying a bike – but I have that urge each year about this time, and I fail to act on it, and don’t expect to do so this year either. 

I’ve satisfied myself by the occasional ride on a borrowed bike. 

A neighbor’s son came by once to ask how to get his small motor bike in gear.  My eyes widened like saucers, and I showed him – and took it for a short spin as well.  Well, it seemed short to me. 

Some recoil at the thought of riding any motor bike and I don’t pretend they are safe; in fact, I had my leg broken in two places many years ago by a careless young motorist in her Dad’s station wagon.

But the act of being on a bike changes your vantage point and prompts you to wander on an unfolding journey that just doesn’t happen the same way in a car.

If you’ve taken a trusted horse through open fields, you have a different experience, a quite rewarding one that’s not like anything else either.

When I was finished with undergraduate work, the summer before law school, I took the money I’d saved from being a stevedore on the docks on the grave yard shift, and teaching high school part-time during the day, and flew to Heathrow, bought a bike in London, and set out to “do the continent.”

I tied a duffel bag to the back of the bike and set out to catch the ferry across the channel from Dover to Calais. 

Waking in French fields surrounded by munching cattle, or swimming at sunrise near Cannes, riding through a chilly mile-long tunnel from Italy to Switzerland, driving up the Rhine past castles of old, and trying out the languages you learned in school, telling other nationals what you think and learning what they may think, is the best experience that you can ever have and it’s not like anything you’d ever get hitching a train ride or motoring by car or bus. 

Nor can you ever repeat such an Odyssey again in your whole long life.

Proust wrote an over long book about remembrance and how a scent or smell can provoke one to re-live an earlier sensation as if it’s presently happening.

Perhaps it’s the association of the warm breezes, of the summer impulse to renew, run free, and experience the novel and interesting that prompts my fond “remembrance.”

But it’s not painful.  It’s delicious.  I sincerely ache for those who’ve never had the experience – of a real long kidney shaking ride on a motorcycle that follows the road to that unexpected adventure that you’ll never forget.