Audio version (8:22), reader - Mr. Subjective

Long before internet commerce was mainstream, we enjoyed making and mailing print catalogs. Our idea was to present motorcycling, and Aerostich products, and related items, in ways that were not only accurate but also inspiring. We wanted to tell stories about riding which reflected a worldview I privately called ‘Andy’s Planet’. This was a small motorcycle-centric place that in my imagination resembled America fairly closely, except for one important difference; lots of motorcycle and scooter riders used their bikes in ways that went far beyond the narrow confines of recreation and sport. Those riders commuted, did everyday errands, and traveled to distant locations for both business and pleasure. Not by car but using their motorcycle. To help put this idea into the catalogs we divided them into sections like: ‘Off the Road’, ‘A to B’, and ‘Prevent and Repair’, and also included lots of non-commercial content: Short sidebar quotes I’d collected were at the bottom of many pages, and full-page guest essays and contributed stories were scattered here and there. I called this mixed presentation “the world writ whole” as if seen through a pair of motorcycling tinted rose-colored glasses.

Maybe the all-time best guest content we presented in one of those Aerostich catalogs was a poetic essay called ‘Season of the Bike’ by a guy named Dave Karlotski. I contacted him in 1998 or 1999 and received permission to put it in the catalog in return for an Aerostich jacket. This was more than twenty-five years ago so I have no idea where (or if) those records might be now. (Here is how it appeared in the 2002 Aerostich catalog.) 

Last year, the Progressive Insurance company started publishing Dave’s prose poem in pieces, single-line excerpts positioned at the top of full-page print ads selling motorcycle insurance. After seeing those ads for this past year, I thought you may also have seen a few, too, and might enjoy reading the entire work as originally written. Here’s a link to a video the Progressive people made about the ‘Season of the Bike’ ad campaign, and here is Dave’s timeless prose-poem:

Season of the Bike

By Dave Karlotski

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with coldhammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.

Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed.

At 30 miles an hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane. Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy.

I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over a half dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

Here's a little more about this poem, and Dave himself reading it.

And finally, here’s Dave’s website, with a large collection of his wonderful motorcycle writing. You will not find better writing about motorcycling (and moto-traveling) anywhere. Thanks, Dave.