The Wind: In Accordance with Two Wheels and Harley Davidson

There are any number of things that can lure me from passivity and a life of calm controlled existence. None does so like a Harley Davidson motorcycle. While I was growing up I rode about every form, make, and model of motorcycle there was, some of them mine and some of them simply loaned to me for varying periods of time ranging from a few minutes to a weekend. In that time, I never rode a Harley Davidson until I bought my own. It became clear to me why people don't loan them after I became a proud owner of one of the most treasured icons of the motoring world. A Harley Davidson is not a thing in the customary sense of the word. When I bought a Lincoln Mark VIII back when Ford Motors put one of those out for the first time I thought I had something and I loved it. What, with it's zippy techno advanced 289 CI old to me new to all the kids out there high output V-8 and the traction control go fast quick kind of not-so-old man's luxury car. It was very cool and it made a wee comment about who drove it too. Even with all those rosy words and expressions of cool acknowledgement for its attributes, it was still just a car, albeit a neat one with splashes of cool, it was only a car none-the-less. It was insured and if it became wrecked I would get a new one. No big deal, no deep emotional attachment and no real sense of personal hands on identity could be identified.

Now, in stark contrast, my Harley Davidson is anything but a semi-characterizing icon with which I identify with up to a point, after-which it is only a mode of transportation with which I experience no real commitment. With a harnessed and restrained zeal I report that nothing could be more distinctly important to me that doesn't live, breath, look back at me (which I swear it does) and sit to eat dinner with me. There is a pride of ownership in that Harley-Davidson motorcycle that I had only morsel size tidbits of with my Hondas, and Yamahas and Kawasakis. It was fun to clean them and customize them, play with the different techniques of riding and so forth, but admittedly the experience was limited to that which one can experience with a mere mass of configured metal.

It is here that the similarity to other inanimate "doesn't look you back in the eyes with its own eyes" objects stops. The Harley-Davidson is a piece of the American past that holds true to something that started when mud was common and sidewalks were wood. It came rolling out as a glorified bicycle that was intended to add a form of mobility to people who would otherwise be walking or maybe not be mobile beyond their own yard or property at all. It screams of a heritage that is not only nostalgic but actually lives and breathes, even if only in lore the iconic Harley is a remiscent figure of a time that we can all take pride in when our nation was an infant and had not even heralded its face into the international sphere of influence yet.

It was an innocent time when people who "knew" were far outnumbered by those who "do". An American in those days sought and applied himself/herself to the supportive structure of life and the American way of life in accordance with what was right and whole to them and not influenced so much by others as by their own conscience.

Once a few years ago I was riding across upstate New York in a hellacious storm and finally had to stop and dry and warm at a small mom and pop restaurant in a main street town and a man walked up to my bike who was near blind but saw and recognized my Harley from across highway five. He crossed the road and he bent over and passed his eyes from one end of my motorcycle to the other with his face about six inches from my bike. He looked at every inch of my bike! When he finished he wandered over to me and told me his story of back in the day at an Army base in Texas and his Harley.

Another little old lady on another trip stopped and came into a restaurant I was in looking for me. She sat next to me and had to tell me her tale of when she was young and her now passed away husband took her everywhere on an old Harley after he got home from WWII. She would not let me buy my lunch and coffee when she left. I could feel the love and affection pouring from that little old lady, and, funny, but she never told me her name and I never asked.

Once on a 2500 mile banshee ride I stopped in Maine, an island called Islesboro, and met a man there who had two ancient Harleys in his garage and I helped him re-wire a 1929 flat head. It was one of the greatest days I can remember. He had a 1954 Panhead that was so original it still had the original stock saddlebags...you never say you want to buy a Harley like that from it's owner... that does not mean you will not think of it... He had riding tales to tell from the days when Harley riding was just a thing some people did. It was not yet iconic. He showed me pictures of him and his lovely wife at Laconia New Hampshire when it was not a biker fad, it was a biker necessity.

When I start my Dyna Wide Glide Motorcycle and let it sit to warm with its two 3.6 inch pistons plomping out a rhythm that beats like music to the ears of many, I know I am listening to and appreciating the same sound from the same source as those who walked tall well before I was even a glint in a young man's eye. I ceremoniously pull on my gloves and if I am in a helmet state I sometimes wear that as well, and I know, I do not have to wonder, I know I am a member of a long history that embraces a similar experience and pride from farmer to Soldier and from laborer to wild explorer, and from an old man on a putt to a husband and wife on a national tour.

I know I have kin. I know the talk, I know the feeling, I know the song sung by the wind.

I am a member of a living and breathing entity that is composed of people living as well as long passed and encapsulates decades of love, respect, and adventure, as well as the sound of air being moved by man and the experience of man in synchronization with machine. I know the feeling of the expression "married to the road" and I know what it means to hear a brother or sister tell me that they actually heard "god" while the wind blew past their ears. I know the sensation of the phrase "road baptism". I know the look of love in a brother's eyes as he comes to rest finally with his soles on the ground and he can once again appreciate the earth beneath him in relative stillness. I am familiar with the internal as well as external experience as the sounds taper down to laughter of friends and the relief heard by people stretching and bending and pulling their bodies back into the vertical so as to assimilate once more with the other vertical two legged man-beasts seen everywhere.

I know well the sentiment of the saddle and the recognition of this is what it must have been like in the days of the wild-west and the freedom of open ways and nothing to see but the prairie or if it is to be the case the twist ahead in the road after which your eyes see nothing and faith alone compels you to make that turn as you lean hard into it only to reveal more of the same ahead. I know what the feeling of faith is when you reason to yourself that just because you cannot see the road beyond that twistee up there does not mean there is not anymore road beyond it. I know the feeling of leaning a whopping six hundred pounds down to the left and then throwing it back to the right in a split second at 60 miles an hour and realizing that sitting still I could not even do that and coming to the realization that out here, in motion, my speed is actually my friend as well as the awareness that if abused that same speed could my enemy.

There is nothing more satisfying to me in a recreational sense than a time when the road and my Harley Davidson Dyna Wide Glide and me all come together for a conference. It is in those conferences that I learn many of the skills that I use in all my other meetings with life as well as people. It is there that I find the communion with that one I call God and in those meetings where I resolve some of the more perplexing matters unique to being myself. Out there, in the wind married to the road man synched with machine, that is where I make peace with all that life does not allow, and find a way to allow all the peace that life offers.