to leave behind man-made structures, to surmount gnarly obstacles, and to traverse raging rivers (OK, maybe just angry streams), and you’ve got a tool that winds up the brain’s omnipotence center like few others. Little kids know how to tap into that, though they can’t articulate much about it. They certainly need experiences like that to offset the enormous limitations they face every day as the dependent, vulnerable, constrained creatures they really are. Teenagers might be able to put a little more into words, but they won’t admit to any pleasure they think you might take away or prohibit. But I don’t mind saying that I love to feel powerful, and, at the moment, it seems like a dirt bike could give me an effective antidote to the genuine helplessness I must routinely endure in other areas of my life.
There are gravitational fields in all of our lives that we cannot escape. Responsibilities and obligations, prohibitions and limitations can leave us feeling hemmed in, weighed down, mired in the mundane and familiar. It’s amazing what a few leaps into the air can do to provide much-needed relief.
Half the Fun
March 2003
The sequel to “Dirty Thoughts”—what goes up must come down.
I’m standing ankle-deep in black mud, doubled over, trying to catch my breath and waiting for the family jewels to descend from somewhere above the pit of my stomach. This is the unpleasant aftermath of the most dramatic moment on my maiden voyage aboard the first dirt bike I’ve owned in nearly two decades. Apparently, whatever I knew in my younger days about how to take a jump has been completely lost during the intervening years of street riding. Through the churning cloud of pain and disorientation that surrounds me, I can barely make out the frantic babbling of my friend, who may or may not have just immortalized this humiliation; he’s clutching his camera excitedly and yelling something about me popping up off the seat at least three full feet. Almost as clearly, I hear my newly acquired DR-Z400E chuckling derisively an arm’s length away.
This is not the scene I had in mind when I purchased this motorcycle. For many months prior, I’d been increasingly preoccupied with glorious fantasies—both visual and kinesthetic—constructed, collage-like, of both memories and media images, all involving freedom of movement in three dimensions and knobby tires. Somehow, I’d been able to superimpose the effortless grace of wide-angle supercross coverage onto dim recollections of my own slightly airborne ancient history. I’d imagined myself hopping blissfully, jackrabbit-style, over all sorts of obstacles, reveling in the miracle of flight made possible by lightweight horsepower and long-travel suspension.
Surely, there must have been some precedent for these expectations. I spent many a childhood day constructing dirt and plywood jumps for the neighborhood bicycle gang. Those had to have been good for several inches of “air.” And what about those adolescent years tearing across suburban boundaries on my Honda Trail 70? No doubt the two of us spent a few seconds free of the earth on occasion. The KDX175 and RM250 that followed had good flight credentials; they wouldn’t have failed as partners in crime, breaking gravity’s law.
While there must be some legitimate historical basis for my anticipation of aerial acrobatic success, all I can actually recall right now—and I remember it most vividly as I stand here, panting shallowly—is a single contraindicating incident: a catastrophic crescendo of whoops, released suddenly while riding way too fast in uncharted territory on my last off-roader from the pre-street-bike era, a powerful but ungainly (in my hands, at least) XL600. I remember that sick feeling of recognizing my certain doom well in advance, how the seconds stretched out surreally to provide lots of time for regret and self-reproach while awaiting my punishment. I experienced a sudden calm that accompanied my involuntary departure from the bike and the unnatural perspective of that mental snapshot taken postlaunch from waaaaaaay up there: tilted horizon, crossed-up machinery, and splayed extremities, all seemingly paused, observing a moment of silence before the awful thud. Miraculously, neither rider nor bike was seriously damaged in that fiasco. The entire payment for my foolhardiness was extracted in the form of wind; I think it was a half hour before I could inhale again.
Four-stroke dirt bikes are relatively friendly, with less abrupt power delivery over a broader rev range than two-strokes, but they’re usually heavier and cost more to maintain. Then again, they sound terrific! Decisions, decisions... The author recommends one of each.
So what happened here? After all that buildup, all those dreams of flight, was my excitement delusional, based on a collection of grandiose fictions (my face featured in magazine ads) that have now nosedived—quite literally—into the immovable, albeit soggy, ground of factual reality? Was I seduced by a too-selective memory that conveniently left out the rest of the story? Maybe buying the DR-Z was a stupid mistake…
An old sourpuss uncle of mine, whenever he detected some sort of excitement brewing among the children within his earshot, was fond of saying, “Remember, kids: the anticipation is always greater than the realization.” A lengthy lecture on the principle would follow. Those among us who took his advice to heart were promptly pre-disappointed and thereby inoculated against whatever letdown might occur during the execution of our adventurous plans. I’m sure this left my uncle feeling quite pleased with himself; he’d passed along the wisdom that had kept him safe from anything resembling disappointment—along with anything new and exciting—for his entire adult life.
What my uncle never noticed was how much the kids whose sails he had emptied missed out on. Without the fuel of excitement in their tanks, they often didn’t even try to reach for something not already within their grasp. By avoiding the possibility of disappointment, they never found out whether it was lying in wait for them or not. Those of us who were undaunted certainly tasted the bitter pill of disillusionment at times, but for that price we got to sample real success in the face of risk and the occasional surprise ending that was far better than we’d hoped. None of that good stuff would have happened if we hadn’t given ourselves over to excitement.
Not only does it set us up for potential disappointment, but excitement can be uncomfortable and distracting, too. Looking forward to something can make the tedious parts of routine life much harder to tolerate. Nobody likes feeling bored and impatient. And the more a person’s life in general lacks excitement, the more problematic it is for that person to allow the entrance of any excitement. The feeling is something like letting yourself out of prison briefly and then having to wrestle yourself back into your cage, with no clue when you’ll get your next chance to breathe free. It’s less disruptive and disturbing to eschew excitement altogether when it’s a rare event.
Excitement can also make us foolish. We can ignore important warnings, rush impulsively into disaster, and rationalize all sorts of poor decision-making. Obviously, excitement without any measure of reason and self-control is almost certain to come to a bad end. But reason and self-control without excitement are dead and have already come to a bad end. Ideally, the energy of excitement is harnessed in the organized pursuit of our goal and helps us plow through the necessary planning and hard work that stand between us and satisfaction. It provides us pleasure, via our imagination, during the wait, soothing our injuries and restoring our motivation along the often rocky road to achievement. And even if the end is less than we’d dreamed, it’s more than what we’d have garnered by sitting still, paralyzed by the false logic of purchasing security at the cost of vitality.
Motorcycles, by virtue of their copious visceral thrills, archetypal status, potential for enthusiastic camaraderie, and countless opportunities for skill mastery, offer infinite possibilities for excitement—as well as for calamity. I could abandon my fantasies of soaring through the air, casting them off as unrealistic and resigning myself to some more sedate use of the DR-Z. I could avoid further testicular displacement (not to mention broken bones) this way, be the subject of fewer funny photos, and preserve some sense of dignity as a middle-aged man who will episodically find himself amidst
