Yahoo Autos You'll Always Regret Giving Up a Motorcycle for a Car
The man on the Yamaha Super Tenere doesn't know it, but he's been pushing me, and shaming me, for two winters now. We park in the same reserved space outside my office, and he's there year-round. As long as there's not a serious amount of ice on the ground, I can count on seeing his blue-and-yellow beast, festooned with massive aluminum saddlebags and stickers from national parks all over the country, on its centerstand every morning. I've been trying to match his fortitude, riding to work in temperatures as low as 15 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter and braving the heavy rains in the spring. Last week there was fog so thick you couldn't see twenty feet ahead of you, but when I pulled up and got off the bike I saw he was already there.
I can't quite match him. He's willing to take more risks than I am. Some people are just born to be serious motorcyclists and he is clearly in that category of human being. So you can imagine my surprise when we were both loading up to leave work on Friday and he said to me, "I'm selling her, if you're interested."
"Really?" I replied. "What are you thinking? BMW GS? KTM Adventure? The new Honda Africa Twin?"
"Oh no," he said, a little abashed. "I'm buying a Jeep Wrangler."
You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. How could this stolid fellow, this absolutely stereotypical "adventure rider" in his armored Cordura and visored helmet, give up his monster Yamaha for a. . . car? Immediately I thought back to that fateful day in 2001 when I made that same mistake.
I was not quite thirty years old and the proud possessor of a 2000 Yamaha YZF600R in gloss black. I loved that bike. Rode it everywhere; ten thousand miles in six months. It was my third bike, but it was my first new bike. I didn't like to let it out of my sight. I'd have slept in the garage next to it if I could have done so without deep-sixing my marriage.
It was the first flush of the dot-com era and I had more money than I quite knew what to do with. I'd bought a motorcycle, a house, a new Bimmer, and a bunch of Armani suits. Looking back, I probably should have bought Apple stock with the money. Instead, I decided that my next purchase would be a Caterham Seven.
I should have bought a real Caterham. Instead, I bought a nightmare of a car that ended up haunting me even after I sold it. It was like a Lotus Seven, but it wasn't a real Lotus Seven. The worst part about that car was that I sold my YZF600R to buy it. Not because I needed the money, but because my wife of the time didn't think it was reasonable for me to have a sportbike and a Seven.
The fellow I sold it to was a six-foot-two Japanese fellow with massive square-set shoulders and a permanent frown on his face. We were road-cycling pals and co-workers. I wanted the bike to go to someone who would cherish it. Three weeks after buying it from me, he wrecked it. I was as upset as if I'd laid it down myself.
In the decade that followed, I owned nearly twenty different cars, from a string of Land Rovers to a lime-green Audi S5 to a Chevrolet Caprice "bubble wagon," but it never seemed like the right time to get another motorcycle. It took my divorce and quite a bit of soul-searching on my part to put me on two wheels. It will require my death, or crippling injury, to take me back off.
There's no substitute for a motorcycle. Not a sports car, not a minimalist special like a Lotus Seven, not an open-air plodding pig like a Wrangler. Those are all important, and they're all pretty wonderful in the right circumstances, but they won't fill the bike-shaped hole in your heart. There is a certain freedom in riding that can't be found anywhere else. At least not anywhere else that I've looked.
Here in Ohio, fall has finally fallen. The air is cool and the leaves are starting to drop. This is the best riding season, but it's also an unequivocal public service announcement that winter is on the way. I hope my friend doesn't sell that adventure bike of his. Come January, I don't want to park alone. It will feel like a betrayal, like an abandonment. Just one more case of me forging along where everybody else had the good sense to turn back.
My wife's flight instructor used to tell her, "The easiest maneuver to make is a one-eighty away from trouble." But that's the one maneuver that I've never been prepared to execute. So buy your Wranglers, turn on your heaters, slip into your crossovers and take the safest route. I will continue on without you. Somebody has to. Somebody has to be on two wheels, parked out next to my office in the worst of the winter, just in case there's another man driving by that space hoping there is harmony in the world for the rebellious music in his own graceless heart.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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