Motorcycling
What I love about motorcycling is the way it's like flying. On a sport bike you lean forward, arms outstretched, feet tucked behind you on rearset footpegs. Almost diving through space, Superman style. And both the airborne superhero and the motorcyclist steer in about the same way: look left, lean left, go left. The bike, steel and aluminum and fiberglass and rubber, inexplicably feels like a natural extension of my body. It is my body's ability to project itself through space perfected, my body plus eighty horsepower. My body with the ability to go from a standstill to 100 miles per hour and back to a full stop almost instantly, blurring everything seen in the near and middle distance, like the ground blurs under the nose of an airplane flying low and fast. A motorcycle is really just a way to take a powerful engine and transform it's rotational fury into forward motion with the barest minimum of added stuff. Engine, two wheels, controls, rider. This minimalist design approach results in a rocket-like power-to-weight ratio, a pavement-bound flying machine, an experience as close to flight as one can get without leaving the tarmac.
At least it feels that way to me, and in the last couple of years I've been flying down a lot of that pavement on my sports-tourer. I explain my little addiction in terms of having been incessantly moved from place to place as the child of an airforce man who for twenty years believed, to no avail, in the possibility of a geographic cure for his problems. I grew up in the back seat of the deep blue Dodge station wagon, rolling up and down the eastern seaboard, pausing here for a year, there for five months. I am a child of the roadtrip. And now, full-grown, living the frenetically-paced life of an artist and self-employed New Yorker, I find it nearly impossible to be still, moving from the moment my eyes open till my head hits the pillow 18 hours later. But I've found a curious way to rest. On my bike I am nearly still; only very subtle movements are required, yet at the same time I'm in motion, constantly rolling through the landscape. Stillness and movement at once, and I can't get enough. Long weekend rides with friends in search of a perfect series of "twisties" winding through the upstate countryside, commuting around the city for my freelance work, and month-long cross country tours have been adding up to about fifteen-thousand two-wheeled miles a year. That is, until I discover flying. -From "Finding the Sky: Notes on Learning to Soar"