Smokeless Duc
The S2R Outside of Lake Skinner
The sky is bleeding clouds on a dark, dank day as the engine disengages. One quick kick of the kickstand — and it dies completely.
Then all that’s left is the silence. And the ritual.
Letting the clutch out, I lean the bike over, twist the key and slide off and out of the saddle. Seconds later, I’m un-velcroing the gloves, loosening the helmet and unzipping my jacket.
It’s a combination of connected movements that I’ve now done thousands of times, on a whole mess of different machinery, all over the country and the world, without thinking about and yet today, I’m conscious of each and every step.
The order and the process. The A that gets to the B that takes you to C. And so on.
It’s a well-worn practice – a part of the riding experience that happens each and every ride, even on trackdays, and in a strange way there’s almost a comfort to the rhythm. To the execution.
And yet today there is something missing.
Mentally, I start checking and re-checking that internal to-do list that every rider has when they climb off of their bike during a ride.
Taking a breath, I stare out to the East; through the weeds in the fields, above the rolling hills that almost shimmer in the light breeze, and up and over the not-so-distant mountains, which look decidedly muted under such a dark, black, virtueless sky.
The menacing color palette feels haunting. It looks evil and nasty and so damn turbulent.
Yet the shitty weather on the horizon that’s quickly approaching doesn’t even faze me… Instead, my mind seems stuck on what’s been forgotten.
Swinging my head around, I glance westward, expecting to see something brighter, but it’s just a lighter shade of gloomy.
Looking back at the bike, my hands start to fidget just a bit as a thought crosses my mind and I shutter.
This coming Monday will start my 11th week without a smoke.
Unlike previous attempts to quit, this time around has been surprisingly easy with the exception of a few crazed days.
Expect for right now.
In my book, few things in life pair as well as smokes and sportbikes. They are remarkably complimentary if not opposed activities — The long, slow introspective drag of a smoke perfectly counter-balancing the heart-pounding core-human enthusiasm you feel after a jaunt down a decidedly curvy road that you just conquered. For practically the last decade, the combination of these two elements has been the means by which I’ve experienced life.
But not anymore.
Now, I find myself standing next to the bike, looking out at the foul weather that’s coming my way and thinking, it’s time to get back on the road.
Introspection will have to wait. It’s time to ride.
Rumbles on Rails
Ducati Monster S2R 1000 in Temecula Valley Wine Country
The air is vivid and the clarity stark as I gaze out at a classic reproduction of the quintessential California expanse. Wilted brown hillsides that amble up and down in a series of earthquake-riddled waves that feel like they’ll go on forever. There are no homes. Few roads. And not a single Mini-Mart in sight.
Of course, I’ve ridden enough miles in my life to know that at some point this rollercoaster of a journey will come to its inevitable conclusion and fade away. Die a slow death that hardly anyone but a true rider or driver will notice.
The road surface will once again straight-out and be consumed by track homes and manicured lawns and big, airy shopping centers with plenty of parking. Shopping Centers, which oddly enough seem replicate from one corner to the next in an eerie form of reproduction, where only the names on the outside of the buildings seem to change.
For a second I find myself detesting that magnificent sensibility we call urban sprawl – But then it occurs to me that I use it everyday. I exist in it. I pay for it. I live in it. And I use it far more than I’ve gotten out to ride — So who am I to put it down?
The reality is that the roads that make riding fun are not practical anymore. They’re not the heavy-lifting, heavy-duty infrastructure backbone that helps society advance.
Rather curvy roads are post-modern asphalt artifacts left over from a time when life was simple and secluded.
Today it is not.
Today Small Town America is a stone throw away from the big city thanks to a plethora of communication. We talk more. We email more. We surf the ‘net more. We connect more.
Information is our new currency and like the good ‘ol dollar bill, it binds us in a continual vortex of the ‘now’ and the ‘current’.
But right now, none of that really matters.
As the asphalt undulates, a wildly rumbling Ducati L-Twin time-machine is hustling me up and over yet another crest in the journey of life.
And it’s fracking awesome.
I feel so outside of myself and my life, that I find myself quickly wondering why I don’t do this more?
Why don’t I take that thirty or forty minute ride over lunch? Why don’t I escape for an hour or two, here or there? Why mentally do I always fall on the safety sword and tell myself I’m either to tired, or to unfocused, or to busy to get a quick ride in?
Why do I force myself to live a life of riding that’s blocked out on the mental calendar in permanent marker in dedicated riding chunks and not simple, short adventures, even if they’re just for a coffee or two?
Of course, if I did toss the gear on and take shorter, more frequently escapes, would I respect them as much? Would I get the same release? Would I feel as relaxed afterwards?
I don’t know… But I wonder…
Can riding be both less dedicated and as fulfilling?
The Inevitable Happened – My First ‘Get Off’
For the first time in ages I woke to sunny skies and a free day. With the flick of a switch, the coffee pot stirs. My eyes open up. I see so much more then just light. Quickly the pot percolates with fresh, dark, liquid freedom and a sip later it isn’t simply a cup of awakening but rather a cauldron of possibility that’s brewing. Twelve cups of warm virtue that smells and tastes of escapism.
Moments later I feel a twinge of freedom, a sense that after months of hard work, deadlines and stress, today I can finally unwind. Finally I can let go. Nothing looms over head. Nothing has to happen immediately. There is no sense of urgency nor dread. No obligation to attend to. No cloudy mental facility born from lots of late nights and far to early mornings. Instead there is simply nothing at all. The calendar is finally clean…
And ultimately perhaps that was the problem.
Forty-five minutes later I’m taking a mellow stroll down a quaint if not quiet canyon road while basking in that uniquely Ducati inspired sense of time and place and purpose. From the road, to the ride, to the sense of life that surrounds it, I feel certain that I’m destined to be here. To live life in this particular moment. When the world finally feels like it’s turning true once again.
Every vista seems fresh. Every corner is controllable. After months apart, the bike and I are back, and we’re at peace. Together. It is baptism by motor-oil.
A couple of corners later I’m overcome with the idea that this year, this riding season, life will finally return to normal. I can crawl out of the edit suite and slide into the riding gear with regularity.
Everything seems possible.
But then.. Then it all goes wrong – Because today is my day of reckoning — Today is the day that I finally had my first ‘get off’…
(more…)
The Puzzle Comes Together
The bike is running at a wicked pace through a pristine slice of California Wine Country, which sits on the edge of a desert that’s exploding with change, when all the pieces start to finally connect again. Suddenly. Effortlessly. Easily. It all makes sense, as if that much desired and somewhat foreign ‘see no evil, do no evil’ reality has once again been reborn.
What an incredible difference just a few days can make…
Gunning the engine, there’s a wail of interaction, an everlasting echo running through the canyon walls, and a touch of excitement as the bike downshifts and I begin a symbiotic dance through the turns. Bits of breaking meet a touch of front-end dive and a long, low, lasting tilt. It’s a much-needed change, especially after a few rides that bordered on the dysfunctional, or at least the emotionally downtrodden.
By the time the road begins to truly tighten and constrict the very civilization I’m escaping, everything feels ideal – and nothing it seems is going to be able to upset either the bike or myself today. Absolutely nothing… What a wondrous feeling… (more…)
Alternate Perspectives: De Luz Road, The 2nd Time
The last several weeks have been as strange a collection of days as I’ve had in quite some time. While they’ve been exciting and enjoyable, it certainly feels like I’ve been all over the place - and physically speaking I have. So it goes when you’re spending your time traveling. Yet as tripmeter for life has continued to roll on, I keep finding myself feeling greatly at odds with my new local riding roads.
At first I dismissed this as mere lethargy relating to the recent traveling, but as the days have passed, I keep finding myself feeling this nebulous sense of uncertainty when it comes to riding. Not in terms of the desire to ride, but rather where to ride.
I suppose I should have seen this coming and perhaps it’s just the natural order of uprooting yourself, but after years of living and breath the curvaceous bends of the Santa Monica Mountains it’s been harder then I had anticipated to get adjusted to riding around the Temecula region. I don’t say that to dismiss the local riding around here, but rather to admit that I have yet to find the roads I’m seeking.
Part of the problem no doubt is the fact that I simply haven’t ridden all that much as of late – and I certainly haven’t ridden all that much down here. Hell, I have yet to feel acclimated with area in general, especially when it comes to the simple things in life (‘Where was the Starbucks again?’).
Thankfully yesterday I finally had some time to get a ‘local’ ride in. As strange as it sounds the jaunt was perhaps only the fourth or fifth ride I’ve taken in the area since moving. That’s not a lot of time on the ground, so logically I can’t find fault in my sense of confusion when it comes to not knowing where to ride. You can’t instinctively know where great roads are – you have to discover them. And that takes time and ride after ride after ride of research.
With that in mind I’ve been spending a great deal of time on the ‘net searching for new local riding roads. It hasn’t been a completely futile search, but it’s been close. While most of the great motorcycle roads in California have been well detailed on the internet, the greater Temecula region and the upper end of Northern San Diego County don’t seem to be as well documented. At least I haven’t found a site that offers much in the way of a sportbike riders’ utopia. I was hoping the well known motorcycle road website, Pashnit.com, would shed some light on the subject, but the site seems to focus far more on the upper end of the state then the bottom end.
Yet as fate would have it, it appears that I have not been the only one scouring the net, looking for more local riding roads. A thread started on the DucatiMonster.Org website, titled,
What’s the opinion of De Luz Road?
As some of you might recall, the last ride I took in the area was on Sandia Creek & De Luz Road. Long time reader Ford had pointed it out and my initial reaction was that it was a pretty decent place to play around with the sportbike.
Yesterday I tried an alternate take on the same loop that was suggested in the DucatiMonster thread by a rider named troyslap.
De Luz is tight, no runoff room, and streams cross the road. Great ride is I-15 to Clinton Keith Rd, west. then on to Tenaja, then Via Volcano, then Los Gatos ( Los Gatos is about a 25% grade downhill, and kinda rough, beware, feels like you are going over the bars when you brake) left on Carancho, then onto DeLuz and to Fallbrook or Temecula, you choose. After Clinton Keith turns to Tenaja it is a nature area, sometimes horses. These are great roads for Monster, SBK ride is tough. All these are narrow, and blind corners with cars or trucks coming at ya sometimes, so ride to the right and within your ability, no room for error.
It was definitely an interesting experience trying a few of these roads out for the second time around – this time via a slightly different loop. I don’t quite understand it, but yesterday my reaction felt so very, very different then the first time out. Perhaps originally I was blindsided by the ‘need’ to find something, yet this time I felt so greatly at odds with what I remembered the road feeling like. Yesterday the road felt rougher, the water crossings more apparent, the gravel and sand on the surface more intense. There seemed to be so many more obstacles that presented danger that I for much of the ride it felt like I was battling the odds and not enjoying the journey. Who’s to say which reaction to the same road is correct. Maybe the first time out my senses weren’t sharp enough or perhaps this time around I was simply in a downer of mood. I really don’t know. But by the time I got home the residual feelings and emotions were a strange twist on post-riding depression. I felt so greatly disappointed and yet so curious about what the road really was like. It was as if these two diametrically opposed versions of the same reality were battling it out inside my mind. And the result was a complete inability to reconcile what I saw with what I felt on either journey.
This much I think is clear, without a doubt De Luz Road is the crown jewel of the Temecula wine region. The rest of the roads that connect to it hold so much promise and yet don’t quite live up to it. At least they didn’t yesterday. If there were no water crossings, better pavement and a tad more camber these could be some killer roads to traverse. But instead they never quite let you getup to speed – at least not Santa Monica Mountain speed. With so many obstacles it’s hard to push it much beyond a nice sport-touring pace and perhaps that nagging sensation I’m still feeling is the fear that sport-touring is this region’s calling card.
