Canter Bridge

Two or three years ago, my eldest son and longest arrow began to obsess on getting a motorcyle. It seemed to his mother and me a very bad idea.

Then, in a crystalline moment of letting go, of grace, of letting life happen, it occured to me that there was a better way than resisting the river’s flow. Why not join him and make it a male-bonding hobby?

Thus did I begin to obsess on getting a motorcyle.

‘Truth be told, I exaggerate. I did not obsess, at least not about motorcycles. Stated more accurately, signing up for rider’s instruction, getting a bike, riding with my son, riding off to fly fish for a few days on my own, these things became a pleasant, accompanying matrix of pleasurable ideas. Only seldom thought about, they seem so right when they spring to mind, sometimes leading me to pull off the road when passing a cycle shop to gaze upon these strange beasts, to sit upon them, to squeeze silent brakes as though easing to a stop on some very cool mile of life’s highway.

The mind engages that ancient, tribal complaint: does one go Harley (considered by many wise men and women to be the Real Way) or does one go Japanese (the Yamaha, you know, is a real sleeper)?

Then, more recently, this troubling thought: what about the Bimmer? Several of my friends own them. They are not my hippest friends—that much I concede—but they are some of the smartest. The more upright posture, the German cachét, the whole touring package with lots of room for, say, spare underwear and disassembled fly rods …

This weekend I was in Modesto for the first time and I met a guy—friend of a friend, that sort of thing—who is selling his 1999 BMW K1200 LTC. It is a fine machine.

Sadly, people who own BMW K1200s tend to also have a pair of Goldwings in the garage, a fact I locate somewhere between appalling and merely frightening. Yet the Bimmer stands there in all its Bavarian elegance and softly coos, ‘Own me, own me ….’

Can a man like me really contemplate owning a touring bike? Is this youth ends, is this what it feels like to cave, to age, to die?

The rabbis are capable of thanking the Master of the Universe that they have not been born women, a prayer I find it easy to echo as I contemplate the femine race’s angstful complexities.

Still, caught in the talons of that great Male Question, life’s simplicity suddenly vanishes, replaced by an Awful Choice: to cruise or to tour?