Canyon Cometh
Engines wail. Roads bend. Seasons change. But the dirt, the dirt in the middle of the asphalt, that never seems to go anywhere…
Extending the kickstand, I kill the engine and slide off the saddle. Peer out over the reasonably clear San Fernando Valley. And it slowly crosses my mind that this isn’t just a ride — It’s an anniversary.
Of my very first motorcycle accident.
And I chuckle to myself.
Not because I’m fearless. I’m not. Because I can’t believe its been only a year. And yet I can.
Amazing how fast time flies… And amazing how conflicted one can feel at the same time.
On one hand the low-side that happened that day remains remarkably vivid in my mind. I can see it. I can feel it. I remember the sensations, the dread that crossed me while standing above a downed bike. The sense of mourning when the tow-truck arrived. The relief when the adrenaline subsided and I felt alright.
But I was lucky and I know it.
Without a doubt both how I ride and why I ride changed that day. A touch of gravel redefined my life. As much as I might try to hide it, that collection of small pebbles altered the paradigm through with I view riding on the street. What didn’t seem like it could happen to me, suddenly did. And I think that was a good thing in the end.
Yet on the other hand, today I felt so totally in control of the bike, so able to do what I wished, that the thought of crashing seemed nebulous at best. Matter of fact I don’t even know if it crossed my mind while I was actually riding. I roared through the canyons with pep and perk and zippiness that felt fantastic and probably was illegal. There were no dark clouds hanging here, just bright skies and open roads ahead. The image of disaster was elusive and ineffectual and almost meaningless.
Until I stopped that is… What an odd round trip of a year…
Flashing back a couple of months, I remember perusing some leather jackets in a local cycle shop, when a sales gal popped in out of nowhere, saw my scuffed up jacket, and rather matter of factly said, “Looks like you were due”.
And maybe I was… Maybe that’s just the cost of doing business when you ride. I don’t know.
Pendulum of Confusion
F4 at the Rockstore
The engine is howling with anger as it sucks down air and explodes. Blows Up and instills its will. Rev by Rev, the road surface bears the brunt of this rage. For an instant it’s easy to imagine bits of tarmac being ripped right out of their cohesive molecular bonds and spit backwards, towards the remnants of the traffic behind me.
Asphalt Hell it seems is alive and well…
At five-grand I’m already doing seventy-five or more on the freeway and that’s not even a quarter of the way up the tach – I shutter to think what would happen if I really lit it up… Though the phrase ‘prison bitch’ comes to mind…
Slowly, or at least I think slowly, my hand instinctively rolls back the throttle anyway. Soaring speed like this is too much fun to ignore – to cathartic to miss – regardless of the consequences.
The sound of the engine goes up a notch. Becomes more intense. More sinful. More vicious. More maddening. Even with ear-plugs.
Quickly, I short-shift into the next gear in a sub-consciously ridiculous attempt to at least keep the speed limit in sight and the next thing I know, not only is the rest of the everyday world far, far behind me, but so too is the freeway itself.
It’s gone.
Vanished.
Behind four legendary MV Agusta exhaust pipes, which right now are bellowing out a purely wicked tune.
A moment later I come up to the first traffic light on the Pacific Coast Highway and am forced to stop. Cease dreaming and start seeing. Reality is back, in a big, big way.
It sucks.
More cars, more people, more dreams, more of the real-world once again. Lots of people on Bluetooth headsets chit-chatting away. I feel bored. My eyes search. Seek out something to focus on. Then they arrive at the clock in the dash.
It’s now an hour ahead.
Think to myself, ‘I ought to change that’, before stumbling through a series of vague Italian electronic solutions that make programming an ordinary VCR seem simple.
Its moments like this that make me question Italian Traction Control.
Seconds later the clock rolls back as the traffic rolls forward — It’s time to go again.
Finally.
Looking down the road, the light is harsh. The shadows starker and living more horizontal than I remember them before…
But then it’s been quite awhile since I was regularly riding.
Quite awhile indeed.
Can’t tell if I’m guilty about that or just plain angry with myself for letting it happen.
To many days have come and gone this riding season without a ride taking place. I’d say it wasn’t intentional, that it was a series of coincidences that in the end added up to form one horrific non-riding riding season, but then I’m not exactly sure that’s true either. I’m not really sure what is true right now. At least when it comes to riding and, well, more importantly work.
It seems once again, I’m living on the extreme edges, and perhaps for the first time in my life I find myself wondering if that’s a good thing or not anymore.
Somehow the journey seems harder right now than I think it should be. Harder to live with. Harder to justify. Harder to believe in. Harder to verbalize in a blog.
And yet it’s amazingly good right now too – On a personal front, it’s good in ways that it has never been before – Very, very good… The kind of goodness that makes you think you might actually be lucky enough to have finally found that missing piece to your life.
It is as if the pendulum of confusion has swung one-hundred and eighty degrees to the other side; Where there was once comfort from the profession and yet personal-side confusion, now there’s security in the joy the other parts of life and perplexity in the my working-world dream.
Why does that happen? How does that happen? What the hell is going on here? Is it impossible for life to be 100% good – does the journey we take always need some amount of uncertainty? Some amount of confusion?
I don’t know, but I’m starting to think so…
A beat later, the F4 roars back to life as the road opens up and I smirk with a diluted sort of self-confidence. The kind of confidence that I fear has been missing 9 to 5. There are lots of rocketships on the market right now and many I quite admire, but few that elicit this sort of emotional response. Something about the MV F4 is more evocative, more alive, and more vivid than any other machine I’ve ever known. Even when life seems to begin and end on the edges.
With a nearly full tank, a sunny, mellow temp’ed day and an open road, all that’s left is to decide where I want to go…
Retracing Your Roots A 1,100 Miles At A Time
Ducs on the Road at Alice's in NorCal
It’s flat and foggy. A collection of roadways, rattled by the everyday, intersect one on top of another. There are holes and grooves and unannounced visitors tucked behind the wheel of their ordinary machines coming up fast in the right lane. Folks cross the street without a care in the world. They never even look. Semi’s stroll along mass arteries of societal movement and never check their blind spots. It’s chaotic and mundane and unaware – And no matter what you do, you feel like you’ve already been here before… That you do it everyday…
And then the light changes. Goes Green. And the stop becomes the start of something special…
The road darts up the valley wall. Corners approach. Bend after bend they begin to build. One twist becomes one lean, which becomes one seamless arch – Then it all becomes two. Then three. Then four. The one-dimensional route becoming the two-dimensional, which begets the multi-dimensional. And you feel the bike bite down. The suspension settles. The tires grab the asphalt. The throttle advances. The gears engage. The L-Twin hums as the comfortable ceases and the challenge beckons. Your fingers beginning to bend just a bit before you hear the pop of the clutch, and the mechanical advances into the emotional. One gear up at a time.
A second, a minute, a moment, it all comes together — without even thinking about it – and then it’s just you and the road and the ride. Alone.
The ability to see ahead diminishes as the light goes dark, and the darkness then quickly becomes light again. To the side, tree after tree flies past and waves goodbye just as it says hello. The canopy above revealing little of what lies ahead and even less of where you’ve just been. You squint. You try to look ahead. But you can’t make it out. There are just pooled spots of light sitting on fragments of curved kinks that only a few hours ago you were idly tracing with your finger on a worn-out map while sipping your first coffee of the day.
Somehow, somewhere, it just doesn’t seem possible to be here. Right now. And yet you are. You are this very moment. This one, little bit of time, tucked away on the side of mountain.
As the road keeps climbing upwards, under your helmet, you struggle for your bearings. Initially grasping for the last remnants of a remotely general direction for where you’re headed. But slowly, as each corner wears you down, the need to know where you are dissipates. It evaporates. It disappears. Completely. You are lost and yet you are not – You’re just running from the preplanned part of your everyday life. Instead running towards the unarranged adventure. The thing that lies ahead and beyond what you can see. And for the first time in ages it feels good to not be worrying about where you’re going, just that you’re getting there.
After all, that’s why they make the maps in the first place.
Hitting the first uncovered straight in multiple miles, you catch a glimpse of the sun that’s sitting overhead as it settles into a groove. And through the break in the tree line you hear the exhaust resonate throughout the canyon walls. Booming and echoing from right below your helmet to the very valley floor sitting beneath you.
And you see. You see and see and see.
Acres of the uninhabited. Natures very own solitude. The last vestige of life before mankind ever arrived here. It is beautiful and it’s awe-inspiring and so counter to the half-dozen or so concrete or stuccoed boxes that you move between in your regular daily regiment that you find yourself wondering where did all this come from? And more importantly, how did I get here?
Then it’s gone. A flash frame in a scene of forward progress.
Hundreds of trunks of bark race right next to you, as bits of light flash in-between, and you just carve. Carve corner after curve after corner. The rhythm of the roadway repeating itself in the revs of the engine. Up and down and up and down. You shift. The bike. Your weight. Your mindset. It’s engaged. It’s complicated. It’s sequential events unfolding in microseconds of thoughtless processes; You see the road come at you, You catalogue it, You think back on the collection of roads you’ve ridden in the past, You process the event at hand, You come up with a game plan, You enact it. It just happens — almost instantly.
And a hundred corners later, you climb off the bike and breath. Big breaths. Deep down to the bottoms of your lugs. Because you’ve just experienced something that doesn’t happen everyday – something that doesn’t even happen every month.
You’ve just experience the beauty of a multi-day ride.
It’s been three days since I returned home from a 1,100-plus-mile voyage with the old man, and while my body is physically beat, my moto-spirit has never been better.
I feel more at peace with riding than I’ve felt in countless months. More confident. More connected. More passionate. More alive with what it means to actually ride.
It is as if I have returned myself to me. In a way that perhaps only I can understand.
And oddly, in a way I have.
Because for the last week MotorMilt and I have retraced our very own footsteps, rushing up and down the California coastline, one curvy road at a time, in an eerily reminiscent journey to an adventure we took almost five years to the very day from when we left town. Five long arduous years that have been full of change and circumstance and the evolution of life. 1,825 days where the only constant has been that there are few constants if any in life. With the obvious exception being a mechanical, dare I say near maniacal, advancement of time.
Honestly I don’t know what took so long to do this.
While we’ve done road trips or multi-day rides over these past five years, none of those journeys were like this journey. Because none of those trips featured this many miles in just five days of back to back riding, this far up and out of what I know.
It’s a kind of riding that is so righteous and profound that I’m not sure that I can fully comprehend it’s meaning in totality. It is as if the mile-markers are Brillo pads for everything that ails us in life and as you pass each one by a little bit more of the regular pressures or concerns of daily life get scrubbed away.
Each corner or sequence or hidden short-cut that turns out to be the long-way around holds the power to re-initialize your own hard drive and each gas station fill-up doesn’t just put fuel in the tank, but also installs a little bit more fresh code for your own personal operating system. Somewhere on day two or three or four, you wake up and suddenly it’s as if you’re a brand new machine all over again, fresh from the factory floor.
I’ve sorely missed that feeling.
Instead of bemoaning its absence, what I should have done in retrospect was tossed my leg over a bike and just go for it. Just ride. Till the flame in the sunset went out. But I didn’t. I let the real world and the deadlines and pitfalls of so many other things get in the way. Which begs the question, why do we wait to do the things that give us the most pleasure? Why do with rationalize the destruction of the very things that let us be us?
Sitting here tonight, I can’t escape the thought that there is something marvelous and magical and damn right special about just hitting the road with minimal pre-planning, a couple of saddlebags filled with two-days worth of clothes – max — and nothing more than a general direction of where you’re headed. It’s illogical, it’s unorthodox, it’s counter-intuitive on just about every level to how I run the rest of my life and yet it’s trips like this that lay the very foundation of my soul. For they are so much more than the sum of their parts. They are journeys built on a collection of routes and roads and off-the-beaten path highways that transcend the love affair with a machine or a weekend jaunt, and instead enter a realm of serenity where you exist in a nine or ten hour window of obsessive-compulsive movement.
They offer the kind of release that’s impossible to achieve on a regular ride. Impossible to feel when you’re wondering where you put the garage door clicker or if you locked the front door. When you’re on the road for multiple days none of that matters. Your head lets go of the grocery lists and the car payments. It’s as if you exist in a vacuum, where it’s just you and the road and the freedom to come and go as you please. It’s an almost primal reason to advance.
However the thing that truly stands out about the past week – and what I’ll always remember about this particular trip – were the things that finally had the time to be said. The words and the phrases and the sentences that somehow seem to get lost in the madness of the everyday. While the ride was great, it’s the bits in-between and afterwards that encompass the outstanding. Whether it was standing on the edge of North America and peering into the great blue beyond or shuffling up to the bar late at night and ordering a well deserved single malt, those are the true memories I’ll hold. The true moments. The things that matter the most.
It is perhaps that the best part of a long adventure – the time you have person to person to communicate when you’re unwired, untethered and unable to receive Outlook notifications.
A couple of other quick thoughts on the journey;
My New Favorite Camera: The Sony HXR-MC1 1080i High Defintion Lipstick System
There are a ton of fun toys in the motorcycle world - heck, some folks even call bikes themselves toys, though I’ve never quite liked that description for a purpose built machine myself - however over the weekend I got a chance to try out what quite possibly might be the coolest motorcycle toy ever created, a pre-production unit of the brand new Sony HXR-MC1 1080i High-Definition Bullet Camera System.
Granted, calling the HXR system a toy is totally not fair because it is a professional grade video production tool - however it is by far the best combination photography and record system I’ve seen in the POV camera market to-date.
I suppose a short backtrack is in order here — We’ve used a variety of POV Camera systems on a number of our projects over the years. None was ever perfect. System after system, one thing or another always left me wanting more. Either the cameras didn’t handle the vibrations on a motorcycle very well, or the record unit wasn’t exactly user-friendly, or the battery life just flat out stunk.
And ever since the Television world went High-Def, I’ve been actively searching for a stellar High-Definition POV camera system (sometimes referred to as a Bullet Camera or Lipstick Camera) that met Broadcast specifications in order to capture those great Point-of-View shots from various angles on a motorcycle that we as riders love to see. The shots that make you feel as if you’re part of the action.
Well, Sony it seems has answered my prayers…
The HXR-MC1 system shoots 1080i High-Def footage and records it seamlessly to a Sony Memory Duo HG Stick. The interface on the unit is superb thanks to the LCD-touch screen, easy to navigate menus and simple record features. The best proof I can offer is that because the unit was a pre-production model it didn’t come with a manual - because the manual apparently is still being written according to our Sony rep - but that didn’t matter at all. We were up and running in less then five-minutes. It’s really that easy. If you can run iTunes, I feel fairly certain you can operate this gizmo…
The embedded Vimeo video below is a quick and dirty camera test we shot up in Malibu, California, with the HXR unit set to auto-exposure in the highest quality setting. While it’s not nearly as crisp as a true 3-chip professional HD camera, it’s damn good looking stuff. Especially if you take in to consideration that a high-end professional HD Camera can run from 40k up to 100k. The HXR is anticipated to come in at just around three-thousand dollars. I’d say that’s some nifty bang-for-the-buck!
But, don’t take my word for it, take a look yourself 
Unfortunately we didn’t have to time to run the unit through a million paces, but as I understand it the lens is also capable of being set manually (most seem to suggest underexposing three stops). My primary concern was simply seeing if it a) worked and b) could handle the stress and strain of the specific vibrations from a motorcycle. (Historically that’s been the real undoing of a number of POV options we’ve tried in the past)…
So while this isn’t nearly as complete of a review as most folks will do, my gut tells me we’re going to be using this little’rig a lot on our next several upcoming sportbike projects 
Quick snap-shot of the record unit.
Another quick snap of the unit gaffe taped to the tank of a Ducati Monster.
Awkward Dance Partners - The Ducati ST3 & MV Agusta F4 up The California Coast
California Route 33 above Ojai
At first there’s one. A second later comes another… And then all hell breaks loose, as a cascade of perspiration rolls forward with vengeance. It’s the first real tangible clue that you’re getting close; close to the middle of nowhere and close to California’s Central Valley in the middle of summer.
Coming out of yet another series of contiguous sweeping corners, you feel the slight ache in your wrist - because it’s already been a long day - but instead of falling victim to your inner demons you press on. Ignore the pain. There’s just too much bounty to be had here. The sirens of an empty road are far to captivating as they call out.
So you roll the throttle back. A minuet movement in a landscape of grandeur. Once again feel the bike pick itself up and hustle forward as it shoots up the short straightaway that connects this twist with that twist and a moment later you remember to exhale before getting right back on the brakes, settling the suspension back down and diving into yet another arched asphalt form of serenity.
It’s a fast paced dance done with a mountain top. You throttle up, you throttle down. You duck, you dive, you pick it back up. You brake. Perhaps you even continue breathing.
And as the pace quickens so to does the transformation. Not of riding but rather life.
What had been a scenic route splitting bundled patches of pine tree derivatives quickly evolves. In minutes, or maybe just heartbeats, you rip through another banked corner and crest a 5,160-foot summit of dreams.
On the other side lies a stark and desolate arena. The average visitor might think it far to remote and well past dull to bother with, yet for an actively engaged motorist it is an untroubled paradise full of unique forms of individual adventure and challenge.
Welcome to the Southern edge of California’s Central Valley.
The landscape is harsh and dry, built on brush and cattle, tumbleweeds and water prudent oak trees. A place far removed from the concrete jungle and yet fairly dependant on it for survival. To live or work here is to languish in an alternate version of society, more Steinbeck then Grisham, where the quality of the water pump in your pick-up truck is far more important then the latest magazine cover girl.
It is also a place that time has forgotten and yet still hit hard nonetheless. Where every hundred miles empty retail spaces battle big-box stores for supremacy and conflict runs deep, which somehow encapsulates both the best and the worst of the Golden State all in one place. Everywhere you look the hopes, the dreams, the challenges, the exploration, and even dire hopelessness are blatantly apparent trends.
Yet life still goes on. Moves forward. Boiling upwards, inch by inch, in a thousand degree melting pot of that exists on the fringe of civilization.
A day later I swing the other extreme, subtly freezing as I watch seagulls dance just a short fragment off the coastline and the last drip of coffee tries its best to push past the lingering memories of a long last night. A quick wick the throttle and a different beast fires forward as a bucket of aspirin takes hold. The engine’s suggestive notes find instant traction. On the road and in my mind. Each millimeter of piston movement brings out a louder, deeper, more hideous wailing. A sound so strong it forcibly removes the thumping headache and matter of factly tosses it down on the road. For all to see and hear and trample. It’s the kind of evocative auditory experience that only comes from a bullish inline four cylinder that’s cracking its raw fists on the skull of an open road… And absolutely laughing about it afterwards.
Just like that I’m awake — But better yet, I’m alive.
Thanks in large part to the combination and contradiction of two completely distinctive types of riding – One which elicits sheer passion while the other remotely suggests it. Together they bend the rules of life and their associated meanings; forcing the yellow lines that divide us to vanish as the cool damp early morning fog evaporates in a mere moment.
This is a radical departure from my usual trips up the California Coastline — because I’ve never cruised up the coast on a true thoroughbred before…
Logically I’ve always held the belief that inside every machine is the perfect tool for a particular job and it’s foolish to ask a sportbike to do a touring task. Conceptually the idea of taking a full-blown sportbike up the coast has always seemed rather suicidal at best. The reasons and rationales range from the physical toll they take on a rider all the way to the unforeseen mechanical hiccups that could, and often times do, occur with trackday weapons are used on public roads.
Yet the older I get the less inclined I am to allow logic to infiltrate an arena of passion. If for no other reason then everything else in the day-to-day of the real world is completely and one hundred perfectly logical. And somewhere deep inside I keeping trolling over one basic core thought – If not now, when?
A half hour later while shooting up CA-46, which is an inland oasis of an open road, the traffic is surprisingly light for an upcoming MotoGP weekend that will take place in Monterey. Brilliantly crisp vineyards fly by on both sides as we burn through California’s Central Coast wine country on two rather awkward dancing partners; the old man’s brand new MV Agusta F4 and my trusty Ducati ST3. Neither is the perfect 1,000-mile adventurer yet they might just be the most fun for a joint trip covering a collection of remarkably empty and remote curving roads.
Coming around the next kink in California’s landscape of tarmac armor, I flash backwards eleven days and think how ridiculous this all must seem. A little less then two weeks ago the old man and I hit the track where one might have thought that we would have gotten our fill of getting our rocks off on the fast paced sportbike ethos. Yet we didn’t. Instead a strange thing happened on the way home.
We decided to let go of logic and instead starting formulating a plan entirely designed by passion.
The F4 was just too enjoyable – and to be honest, probably too new - to leave in the garage… So we left Buttonwillow openly talking about ratcheting up the stakes on our coming California coastal adventure. Could it make it Monterey? Could we survive it if it did?
We had no idea.
But it was a gamble that seemed worth taking. So we did something that even now strikes me as somewhat flawed. We left a perfectly good and capable sport-tourer in the garage, the BMW K1200RS, and instead flew the coop with one full-blown sportbike and one seriously sporty sport-tourer.
Our plan; A multiday escapade over and through some of California’s finest routes, starting with Central Valley staples CA-33 and CA-58, followed by the more coastal CA-41, CA-46, and inland avenues of chance G14 and G17, and then finally the mother of all great California roads, CA-1, which is better known as the Pacific Coast Highway. And that was before we started all over and did it again in reverse.
It’s a journey that over the past few years I’ve had the pleasure to attempt several different times – The old man however hasn’t been as fortunate for a variety of reasons, most of which center around time or the lack thereof. But motorcycles are about more then just tracks and canyons; they’re also about escapism as well. So once we committed to attending the GP races at Laguna this year we decided it was time to take a different kind of journey together – a more mellow, free-flowing amble North, which traversed both dreamlike scenery as well as our collective past.
Entering Lockwood, we stop at the aptly named Lockwood Store for a BSB break (butt-smoke-bathroom) and snap a few pictures. It’s a slightly surreal experience. Because we’re in effect retracing our previous steps. Our first great California road trip adventure rolled right through here and it’s surprisingly odd to stand in exactly the same spot you did eight or nine years ago in a seemingly remote part of the world and realize that while nothing has changed here, everything else in life has.
And then there are the bikes…
Eight or nine years ago we rolled through here on two BMW R1100S sport-tourers. At the time they seemed like the epitome of the perfect riding companions. Looking at the ST3 and the F4 that seems like a long, long time ago.
“This is a very different trip,” MotorMilt says, while running his hand over the tank of the F4, “and we’ve come a long way since then”.
All I can do is acknowledge the sentiment with a smirk as he smiles and says, “These are just a hell of a lot more fun”…
Both bikes offer a more fluid system of travel then the Beemers did; yet when compared to each other they are radically different animals. The ST presents a unique blend of both speed and semi-comfort while pushing the sport side of the sport-touring equation to the forefront of the category’s inherent compromise between the two extremes.
The F4 on the other hand is completely uncompromising to say the least. It’s a full-blown racing bike that just happens to have mirrors and lights. Everything about it is harsh. Hard. And uncomfortable. The footpegs feel like they’re stacked against the exhaust, the seat is the antichrist of plush, and the only seating position that feels remotely comfortable is a completely tuck.
Yet what this bike lacks in creature comforts it more then makes up for in wicked acceleration, awesome exhaust notes and remarkable handling. The bike just feels completely planted. All the time. It’s a freakishly secure feeling that’s night and day different then any of the Ducati Superbikes I’ve ridden, including the 1098S. On the F4 it feels as if you’ve got a holy ghost lingering above and watching your every move as you attack each successive corner. The chassis feels so solid that seems damn near impossible to upset it unless you’ve done something completely idiotic.
Of course the irony of idiocy on this bike is that it’s only a throttle advance away.
Twist your right wrist and you thrust the machine forward so fast that even a GPS enable iPhone accelerometer has trouble keeping up. The bike just hauls. Flat out and with idiocy in tow.
Just in case the warp speed disappearance of the landscape surrounding you confuses your visual sensory perception, there’s also a series of auditory battlefield explosions as well. The four organ-like pipes in the back bellow out such a nasty, evil, downright scary wail that both big and little critters alike flee in fear.
Stacked next to the 1098S it’s a very different riding experience. Far less fluid and far more point and shoot. Where the ’10’ feels torquey, the F4 feels defiant. Making such a loud and demonic noise that it makes mothers across the country to cringe in terror. The 1098S lets you delicately dance into and out of apexes where as the F4 cracks heads like sledgehammer, never losing sight of the fact that it’s got somewhere else to be.
An hour later I am somewhere else, as I take a slow drag from the smoke and suck down my eighth vitamin enriched energy drink of the day. Glancing at the digital clock in the dash it’s hard to fathom that it’s not even noon yet — Already my sense of time and space has been lost, much like contemporary society’s awareness of the true roots of California.
Looking out at a collection of wide-open fields surrounded by rolling hills and mammoth mountains in the distance, the old man smirks, “It always amazes me how empty most of California is,” he says before matching my puff of smoke with his own, “I think we tend to forget about that sometimes”…
He’s right; the enduring legacy of California isn’t the marvelous technological advancements, the Disneyland theme parks or the beacon like draw of the Hollywood scene that continually draws thousands of young dreams each year, rather the permanent fixture of the State is what’s missing in a pristine undisturbed landscapes. There are no hands-free gizmos sprouting out of anyone’s ear nor the rushed sensibility to trade your gas guzzler in for a hybrid so you can sleep better at night, instead just an honest panorama that’s not all that far removed from our pre-technology existence.
California’s Central Valley isn’t just physically at the state’s core but emotionally as well. This is the land of classic California virtue. Where dreams drift in the soft summer breeze and potential is allowed to amble undisturbed until it’s ready to come to fruitarian. What exists here today is completely indicative of what used to exist everywhere and the more you peer over the landscape, the clearer it becomes that something tragically got lost in our society’s evolution from the past to the present.
I’m not completely sure what that exactly is but each time I step foot in this Valley there is a sense of peacefulness and comfort that you could spend a lifetime searching for in the big cities and never find. A sensibility of hard work and determination scratched on people’s faces that echo’s the founding of this great nation not the current sense of elite entitlement broadcast nightly on E!
Six days after setting out I’m flush with fear when entering LA County again. While I’m still physically on the bike, I’m no longer not actually riding it. Instead I’ve already made the mental leap towards re-entering the ‘real world’. Something I feel inherently loath to do right now, but I know I must. Because that’s the way it works when you grow up. When you have bills to pay and tasks to do.
As the traffic thickens, I feel my lower back start to tighten up. The muscles squeezing the nerves for all there net worth. It’s not a comfortable sensation by any means, but then the last leg of a thousand mile adventure almost always ends in some sort of ailment.
Yet today the physical toll that the trip has taken is the least of my worries.
Rather it’s the never-ending game of mental catch up that I’m frantically playing that’s drawing my attention as I try to deduce what I’ve now got to get done while still expressively coming to grips with where I’ve just been. What I’ve just seen. Who I might be.
It’s an inherently unstable moment to say the least and one that leaves me wondering why the ride home always feels both completely premature in its arrival and yet long over due at the same time?
But then I suppose all great rides ultimately are comprised of a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, you never want to see them end and yet on the other hand there’s definitely a physical and mental ceiling that you hit. Especially when one of the bikes you’ve chosen for the particular task is the completely wrong tool for the job from a logical standpoint.
Of course common sense only gets you so far in this world and in the space of the past eleven days, from the trackday at Buttonwillow to this trip up the coast, the old man and I have gone from one extreme of the motorcycle persona to the other, battling and conquering the vast differences between logic and insanity.
Without a doubt my non-riding friends would say that taking a bike, any bike, to a track is an insane endeavor. Yet my guess is that they would completely understand the appeal of a good ol’fashion road trip – even if it is on a bike.
Yet as the road buckles down and the traffic comes to a halt, it occurs to me that these two divergent extremes of the motorcycle experience are exactly the opposite. The time we spent at Buttonwillow was all about the application of logic. Perfecting the art form of proficient riding. Taking two Italian motorcycles on a thousand mile journey up and down the coast on the other hand isn’t just an adventure – It’s also just plain nuts.
And it’s also a personal fantasy come to life.
For all the times I’ve ridden up and down the coastline, I never done it the way I’ve really wanted to – on a full blown sportbike that has a wicked engine, killer brakes and instinctive handling. Instead I’ve always bent to convention or at least logic and taken a sport-tourer of one kind or another. To finally make this sort of fantastical mental image come to life is something that’s worth any and all residual back pain and leaves me thinking that perhaps the axiom of the right tool for the right job is incorrect at its core. Maybe, just maybe, sometimes we need to choose the wrong tool for the right job in order to make dreams come true.
Morning Glory Meets Chaos
I woke up bright and early this morning fully determined to get up into the canyons and finally find a way to truly relax this weekend. Ultimately isn’t that what holiday weekends are for? I so badly wanted to have a killer ride and visions of riding to Ojai or Santa Barbara floated through my head as I made my way up the PCH. But it just wasn’t meant to be… To be perfectly honest the outbound leg of the ride was fantastic - early morning light, relatively light traffic conditions, the comfort factor of riding my 999… Yet by the time I hit The Rockstore for breakfast I felt extremely wound up. Usually I work myself into the ride - but not today. For some reason I was unable to capture the early morning magic and encapsulate it for the rest of the ride. Instead I found myself dodging traffic obstacles, cars crossing the yellow in front of me, small animals, the protective gaze of the local law enforcement and seemingly a hundred other impediments. All of which leaves me wondering if I’ve lost the ability to relax on a bike? Has my one sactuary from the real world finally been cracked? All told I ran up over a hundred miles and yet I was completely unable to disengage my mind. That’s not to say that I ride like a zombie - but usually I get lost in the focus of the ride.. But again, not today. Thoughts of work, to-do lists, appointments, and other regular world events floated through my head no matter how fantastic the corners were… It was simply not my day.. Or my weekend for that matter…
A Needed Unwinding…
While swinging around a rather decent sweeper on Encinal Canyon this morning about halfway through the ride I was struck by the thought that over the course of my life the word ‘relaxation’ has continued to evolve in its meaning. Almost to a point where sometimes I think it seems like an organic concept, not a definition in a book. Originally relaxing seemed like such a simple idea - have a day off, go do something you enjoy and feel refreshed afterwards. Yet these days, as more and more of ‘the real world’ creeps its way into my personal time, I find it harder and harder to just lose myself and feel mellow when I’m not at work. Perhaps thats just growing up, I don’t know. When MotorMilt and I were headed up the PCH this morning at the start of our ride I was having a bitch of a time finding a way to let go of all that other stuff… And of course its funny how a motorcycle picks up on your vibe, if you feel a little bit tense the bike suddenly feels that tension and begins to act out which in turn makes you feel even more tense then you were when you started. In many ways it becomes a stackable issue, one thing building on the last. Yet as we got further and further away from the city, the more I found a peaceful groove. By the time we hit the deli for breakfast even though the skies were still covered in a big gray mess of moody clouds, I felt pretty good… Thankfully that carried over to the ride home. I found the journey back an absolute blast. Had you asked me while MotorMilt and I were mounting up on the Ducs at the Agoura Deli in all honesty I probably wouldn’t have thought that a ride back on a cloudy day like today could be so rewarding. For that brief hour or so, everything just felt locked in. Not in a ‘zone’ sort of way, but rather in an at peace with life sort of way.
Today’s Ride Itinerary
The Medium Loop ( Approx. Time: 9:30 AM to 2:30 pm )
While we were out riding I happened to cross over 1,600 miles on the 9. Oddly enough watching a digital gauge cluster roll over is no where near as satisfying as the ‘ol analog white wheeled with black numbers odometer where you could progressively watch the final tenth of a mile click away. In the digital era it just happens. Odd thought I know. In other news, it was nice to finally see CalTrans out working on some parts of the canyons. At several locations earthmover’s were hard at work pushing mudslides off the asphalt. Perhaps the roads will finally be clear before the summer hits.
Absolute most random thought of the day: Ford must have a huge hit on their hands with the new Mustang. I don’t write about cars very often because frankly I dig cycles a lot more, but it was hard not to notice a new ’stang no matter where we were riding today. Granted Malibu, Ca. and the surrounding areas are probably statistically a very niche demo sampling, but man there were a lot of them out there today. Almost all of which were black, except for one that was painted in the oddest lime-green color…
Back in the Saddle
Yesterday MotorMilt & I were fortunate to finally get a ride in after what has felt like a month and half long drenching by mother-nature. Definitely not one of the best rides I’ve ever had nor the most enjoyable. I knew we were in trouble when we passed by the intersection at Topanga Canyon & The PCH, only to see it was still closed down. A friendly neighborhood policeman was making sure of that, his patrol car parked smack dab in the middle of the roadway. For as long as I can remember riding with MotorMilt, we have both preached to each other that ‘any ride is better than no ride’. Well, yesterday that axiom met it’s match. The roads were just filthy, dirty, distant relatives of the roads I know so well. I had fully expected that there’d be debris on the roads - after any decent rain in LA there’s always the seemingly prerequisite rock or two standing in your way - but the level to which the canyon roads have been destroyed it is quite extraordinary. Whole chunks of curb are gone in certain places, mini-mud slides are everywhere and in typical SoCal Caltrans fashion a good portion of two lane roads are now one lane. Stop signs are almost popping up at the mile mark. Yet to be honest, none of that really bothered me. What did was the thin layer of dirt that has coated the road surface. Perhaps it’s me, but the sportier I become in my riding the more time I spend worrying about my contact patch and yesterday given the reddish-brown clear coat that had been applied to the asphalt, I couldn’t help but wonder if the contact patch was in contact with anything other than a misty layer of mud.
Frozen Fingers…
Got up this morning determined not to make the same mistake as yesterday and go riding lacking the proper amount of layers. So out came the thermals for the first time in a long, long time. Funny thing is they didn’t matter that much. I still frozen my ass off. Amazingly the Duc’s temp guage was relatively high and the usually hot running seat didn’t feel very hot at all. As I sit here now recounting my desire for a hot seat, I find slightly ironic that now that it’s cold out I wish the bike generated more heat. How strange… The oddities of riding an Italian princess I guess…
Anyway, back to the ride. I probably should have known that we were in trouble when as we headed north up the pacific coast highway I took my hand off the left handlebar and at that exact same moment a gush of wind hit me and the bike thus sending me across the lane almost instantaneously. Actually if I had to testify at an FBI interrogation I’d tell you them it felt less like a normal wind gust and actually more like the bike simply was sliding across the roadway. Freaky.
Once that was over, I thought well we’re cool now. Of course we weren’t. Instead we headed up the canyons and hit more wind. Wind like I’ve never seen before. Honestly, this was different than any other in climate riding I’ve ever done. Perhaps because when you’re dealing with rain or rocks in the road or other more relatively normal obstacles there’s a certain amount of control. You can press down on the handlebars in the rain or slow down and swerve when something stands in the middle of the road. Here however it was a completely uncontrollable force of nature at work. At any moment this killer wind could and would kick up and I found myself continually reeling in its wake. I hate to say it, but it just wasn’t fun to deal with. I found myself thinking about how I enjoy riding because of the challange found in trying to master a skill and also because I find it relaxing. And today was anything but relaxing.
On thge way back I was also reminded of something that one of the instructors at Reg Pridmore’s CLASS course once said to me. There was this fellow named Fred who used the term, ‘moments of concern’ several times to describe the feeling of near accidents or disasters. Listening to him the first time, I was struck by how simple an expression and yet how dead-on it was. As I was thinking about my moments of concern MotorMilt & I were flying down Kanan Road towards the PCH at around seventy-five mile an hour when another wind gust hit. This pushing me to left of the lane. A BMW 5 series was coming head on in the opposite direction. And as the wind keep pounding away, no matter what I tried to do the bike kept heading towards the yellow line. Luckily it eased up and I was able to pop back to the right of the lane, thus avoiding the BMW. But it was unreal. Almost like I had no control over a usually very controllable motorcycle. And afterwards as we cruised down the rest of the mountain, I found myself thinking how when I first started riding a moment of concern would cause my heart rate to jump and my hands to shake. Now, a few miles away from a near disaster, I felt fine. As if it didn’t matter and I was on to the next thing. How amazing. Right now, I can’t tell if I think this is a good thing or not…
Regardless of all the wind and the stress of riding today, it was still a great day to get out. LA is a funny place when it rains or is windy. It’s one of those interesting cities that benefits from it all and once the storm passes the areas true beauty seems to come out. If you could have taken out the wind today, even though it was cold, it would have been an absolutely picture perfect day in the canyons. Here’s a few pict from ride:
Early Morning Skies and Way Back Memories
As MotorMilt & I were heading up the Pacific Coast Highway this morning, I found myself being struck by how familure the stretch of asphalt from Santa Monica to Malibu has gotten. It wasn’t that long ago that just riding up the PCH to the outskirts of Malibu and getting a coffee was what I considered a full ‘ride’. Now days I’ve almost memorized the whole trek. I’m far more focused on the little parts of riding such as my perferred lane placement or knowing where the bumps in the road sit then I am on trying to learn how to ride a motorcycle. These days getting up to Malibu is just a juant before we get the journey started.
Long before the waitresses at The Rock Store recognized us when we walked in the door, I was just learning how to ride on a used Blue ‘94 BMW R1100RS. It was a big bike with something like a 500 pound dry weight. The fairing was bulbous to say the least and the saddlebags always seemed to hold just a tad of dampness in them no matter what I tried to do to clean them. The bike’s previous owner had quite literaly ridden the thing around the world. It had something in the neighborhood of 80,000+ miles on the odometer when I picked it up for the first time. Yet while kids my age were riding 600cc Ninja’s, I willingly threw down for this bike because I was petrified with the idea of locking up the brakes. The ‘RS had ABS and that seemed like a better way to learn to ride. I can remember thinking to myself that it was one less thing to worry about.
While the ‘RS wasn’t a particularly pretty bike to look at - I always thought it was one of the odder German design statements - it did work extremely well for what it was. A sport tourer through and through. Plus I had been fortunately enough stumble on to the bike right after the previous owner had installed Ohlins suspension componets across the board and when you added that to the big, obnoxiously comfortable seat, it felt like you could ride that bike for days on end without feeling a thing. Only back then I didn’t know that a few years later I’d relish the idea that there are bikes out there that allow you to feel everything that is happening to your bike all the time.
It was only a few months after I bought the ‘RS’ that MotorMilt went out and trade up from his very clean ‘92 BMW K100RS to a new ‘99 BMW R1100S. I remember at the time him telling me that the ‘S’ was the first bike in quite awhile that he ‘lusted’ after. So now we were both riding boxers, abiet very different ones. Together we slowly started extending our morning rides. First we started heading further and further up the PCH. Then we slowly started hitting the more obvious canyons like Topanga to the 101 or Kanan Road. At the time he was afraid of twisty roads with cliffs and I was still trying to make sure that I didn’t fall off.
After kicking over around eight or nine thousand miles on the ‘RS’, I started to get this strange feeling everytime we took the bikes out. I was really enjoying the process of learning how to ride, but I wasn’t really enjoying my bike. It seemed like a very strange place to be and on our second or third trip up the coast on the bikes I decided it was time for a change. MotorMilt & I were staying at The Inn at Morro Bay and had stopped at the local diner for breakfast when I brought up the idea of a switch. I remember that Milt tilted his head and thought it over for a second or two and then shrugged his shoulders with one of those, ‘it make sense to me’ looks. Two days later I called Marty’s Foreign Motors in Torrance, California - a wonderful mom and pop beemer shop (aren’t they all?) that’s no longer in business - and told Joe, the sales guy, that I wanted to trade up to an ‘S’.
Up to that point I’d never bought a brand new motorized vehicle of any kind. So the whole process was an unknown as far as I was concerned. I had no idea how to negotiate or even what I was asking for. Luckily Milt & I had gotten to know Joe while we were in having our beemers serviced and he cut me some slack since we were regulars. I’m also pretty sure that Marty’s was more concerned with servicing bikes than selling them.
When it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to qualify for fiancing, Joe got on the phone with BMW Financial and got me qualified under the extrememly under publicized student rider finance deal. Only to prove that I was still in school, which I wasn’t, I had to provide BMW with a copy of my diploma. Now I don’t know how anyone else does it, but I day I got my diploma from USC I tossed it into a box and forgot about it. So for three days I remember tearing my entire life apart looking for that damn thing. Finally found it, promptly send a copy of it over to Joe and then went back and tossed it in yet another box. If you asked me today where it is, I still wouldn’t know…
Now somewhere around this time I realized that I no longer was all that excited by mellow trips up to Malibu and the few occassional canyons jaunts. I wanted to spend my entire day in the canyons, not surrounding them. I’ve written quite a bit about the ‘S’ in this blog but at the time it was the perfect bike for me. I finally felt like I was riding something that performed well and looked good while doing it. In many respects the ‘S’ was a step sideways, maybe even backwards, in terms of riding compared to the ‘RS’. The engine was quite similar, but the ergonomics were completely different. Instead of having the foot pegs right beneath you they were placed a bit further back. I spent awhile getting used to being more leaned over the handle bars and slowly my riding style began to change.
During the time I spent on the ‘RS’ I had grown very comfortable with a combination of counter steering and body steering. By the time I trade the ‘RS’ in, I was feeling very confident getting through corners by pushing down on the peg aimed at the inside of any given corner and then adding the necesssary counter steering pressure. On the ‘S’ body steering - at least as I had known it - didn’t do a whole heck of a lot. Instead I found myself counter steerings and growning more and more comfortable with leaning my entire body from one side to the other. As the miles passed I eventually found myself counter steering less and less and instead sliding my butt over in the seat and sticking my knee out in order to get around a corner faster and with more stability. Over time my speed began increasing both in and out of corners. Slowly I began pulling away from MotorMilt on treks through the canyons…
A few years later, on another journey up the coast from LA to Northern California, the idea was hatched that perhaps it was time for both MotorMilt & I to get something a bit more sporty. At first the idea was to pick up a used liter bike in decent shape. ProItalia had a low milage used Triumph Daytona for sale at the time and the thinking was that for limited out of pocket expsense we could both share the sportier bike over the course of the weekend. Of course that idea didn’t last long. By this time I had become a much more aggresive rider and I remember Milt telling me that I’d lose him in the canyons if I was on a bike like the Daytona and he was on a Beemer. I don’t know how true that is, but it pushed us in a more agreesive direction. Thus began the quest for the original set of Ducati’s.
Several years later I find it somewhat remarkable that as I’ve gone through bikes and grown up, I’ve learned so much along the way.
This morning when Milt and I hit The Rock Store for breakfast and it occured to me as we were strolling through the parking lot that we used to spend the time between riding going back and forth about what worked better for either one of us. He’d say counter steering was the way to go and I’d respond with body steering. We’d debate about how fast or hard either one of us should be going into a corner. I’d give him a hard time for not getting his feet up on the pegs and he’d complain about my lack braking (on the ‘RS’ and the ‘S’ I was a big engine braker). At some point he’d complain about the seat on the ‘S’ or the more leaned over ergos. I’d bitch about touching down the center stand.
Yet this morning as we sat there, I found it quite charming that our conversations were no longer about ‘how to ride’, but rather ‘how to get faster’. Over coffee we were talking about trail braking, sliding back in the seat when entering a down hill corner, where in the rpm range the 999’s like to be for certain things. It just struck me as such a different world and such a different conversation then it used to be. Instead of being the student and he being the teacher, we were both sitting at the table at the same place. And it’s now the little things that go along with that concept which I really admire.
Milt no longer complains about his seat - probably because on the Duc it’s a given that it’s going to be hot as hell and there’s not much you can do about it - and I no longer give him a hard time for not getting his feet back on the pegs. He doesn’t moan about what I’m doing wrong, but rather has grown comfortable with letting me go in the canyons and catching up a little bit later. We both have become faster, more confident in our riding, and I believe safer along the journey.
