Uberman

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness…to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature…I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking

. . .

Somewhere in the gap between a stolen motorcycle and a Bio-Diesel Mercedes Benz, there was a bike, and I, the biker. It wasn’t even my bike, it belonged to a man named ‘Dirty’ Steve, but I cared for it as my own. And just as no close relationship can be consummated as such until the moments after the first fight, my relationship to biking wasn’t established until our first crash.

I mention the crash because it was a shining (and painful) reminder that the version of me moments before the event was pissing on everything beautiful about the Art of Biking. I was in my head. I was proud. I was in my head and proud of the fact that I didn’t need a helmet to ride. That I could speed down busy LA streets and whistle Rolling Stones’ tunes and imagine how tasty sweet potato fries would be later for lunch. And then I met the curb.

There is an art to biking, either road or motor, and there are principles to be followed. The first should be: Get out of your head. Be here now.

You’ll never know the road—you’ll never know Nature—like you will gliding past it at upwards of 15 miles an hour. There’s an immediacy to taking it all in before it passes. There’s a healthy fear of being run down by some wayward, sunglassed, texting teenager in a Mini-Cooper, or being made airborne by a large branch and tumbling down a hill or rocky cliff. At least the most advanced of us have this awareness—the ones that value their lives or the symmetry of their pretty faces. This fear brings presence.

So there is some danger to the Art but it’s an art nonetheless. And what is art without danger?—which is to say, what is Life without danger? What is life without that healthy fear of being run down by comfort? It is nothing, I say. At least nothing one should classify as “life”.

Mere existenceness, that is all.

. . .

There are some cars they call roadsters, apparently designed for eating up the “road.” Yellow-lined, lane-partitioned wading pools for the tamed and timid—these are city roads. No, I’m not a roadster. I prefer the side streets, the back alleys, the dirt trails, the canyons and cliffs, the small strips of pavement lining ocean beaches. I am foe to the streets. I am a streetfighter. I’m a biker, and I LIVE.

A Song for Easy Riding:

Image originally found here.

Tagged: obi okorougo, Tagged: thoreau, Tagged: bike, Tagged: wild, Tagged: motorcycle, Tagged: nature