Totally Rideable

After making the youthful transition from a bicycle to motorcycle, I often found myself daydreaming about motorcycle riding. Simply looking out over the countryside was enough to trigger a lapse from reality into moto-fantasizing. In reality, I was exploring my local world by simply wandering around looking for interesting trails to explore, obstacles to overcome, and hills to climb while in my imagination I was also in the natural world, silently projecting its ridable potential. Didn’t matter if the passing landscape was a smoothly mowed and manicured residential lawn, a golf course or park, an overgrown dense forest, or a steep rough, rocky slope.    I’d be sitting in the rear seat of my parent’s car going somewhere just looking out the side window and daydreaming by endlessly calculating what riding ‘there’, ‘there’, and ‘there’ would be like. There’d be a small gap in the passing scenery which suggested a route and think: “That is totally rideable.” Moments later I might see an area of mature forest with a relatively open understory and I’d look into the gaps and tell myself this forest was “totally rideable”.  Passing a golf course, marina, or even an unexplored alley in a residential neighborhood I’d automatically visualize riding there and think “that ______ (whatever) looks totally rideable.”

This phase of low-level autistic-y fantasy games lasted years. It all looked like fun. As my actual riding experiences accumulated, my skills and the motorcycles beneath me improved, so the range of totally rideable terrain expanded. Eventually, maybe 80% of all passing landscapes looked “totally rideable”. I remained lost in my own world like this for years, silently and nearly continuously evaluating an infinite geography that my motorcycle’s tires could be directed to encounter.

Now I’m an old man and though this isn’t the first thing I think about as I ride or drive along, this calculus remains deeply embedded and can be called up instantaneously. I’ll still look at any hillside or landscape and think “that ______(whatever) is totally rideable.” In a few years, I’ll be lying inside a coffin heading for interment somewhere, and as the solemn pallbearers, mourners and I enter the graveyard together, my spirit will poke its head up through the lid of the coffin and look across the peaceful surroundings, and I’ll be thinking “this place looks totally rideable.”