We’re all motorcyclists, right?

I’ve been riding the Cycle World long-term-test 2010 Can-Am Spyder RT-S for almost 18 months, and a couple of things about it have become clear. First, it’s still thought to be very cool by many people. And second, a lot of motorcyclists apparently think it’s some kind of affront to motorcycling—a slap in the face of “real” motorcyclists. One of those guys had his young daughter yell out the window of his Honda on a local Northern California road, “My daddy wants to know if those are your training wheels!” Ha-ha, yuk-yuk.

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In 1963, when I was learning to ride my new 80cc Yamaha YG-1, I discovered the value of metal bits that bent instead of broke whenever I managed to screw up and drop the bike again, usually in a rock-strewn streambed or sandy wash. I grew fond of that little rotary-valve two-stroke engine, which always restarted easily after I untangled the bike and myself from whatever mess I’d gotten us into. And I grew even more fond of the simple and rugged construction of the cycle parts as I bent back the brake pedal or the clutch lever after a low-side someplace.

You’d think, reasonably enough, that the take-away message would have been the most basic from Motorcycle 101—“Don’t crash.” But, in fact, the one I took most to heart was its corollary: “When—not if—you do crash, make sure you’ve got the tools to repair the bike and get going again.” Said tools being not just the onboard toolkit but the knowledge and skill to use it.

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Since July, 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has evidently made a point of being seen with Russian biker buddies. Nicknamed “Abaddon” (one meaning is “destroyer” in Hebrew) when he was inducted into a biker club by the “high council of Russian bikers movements,” Putin publicly rides a Harley-Davidson Lehman Trike with his fellow club members in the “Night Wolves.” He rides helmetless, at least for the photo-ops.

This year, at the opening of a motorcycle show in the Ukraine, according to the website RiaNovosti, Putin said of motorcycles that, “Bike is the most democratic transport vehicle. Bike is the most-daring, challenging as it gives its owner the tempting feeling of freedom, that is why one can say without any exaggeration, bike is a symbol of freedom.”

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Long before the Can-Am Spyder three-wheeler showed up in the United States, three-wheeled vehicles of all sorts had been a staple of automobility in Asia and India. So it’s not surprising that in 2011, Chinese-made three-wheeled scooters such as the 300cc Roadrunner, identified as made by “Dong Fang,” suddenly appeared online for sale outside China, specifically in North America.

Sold by distributors directly to retail customers, a whole lineup of trikes in various formats suggests that somebody in China sees a much bigger market for three-wheeled scooter-ish gizmos than do, presumably, the product planners of Japan’s Big Four. Of course, Honda was typically years ahead of everyone else with the Gyro three-wheeler, but it was the Piaggio MP3 scooters that seemed to raise consumer awareness of alternatives to two-wheeled motorcycles and scooters.

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Note to younger riders from an old rider: Sure, have as much fun in the sun as you can, but if you have Northern European ancestry, be aware that too much skin exposed to sun for too long can kill you. Not right away, but much later in life. Skin cancer is no fun at all. I speak from sad experience. 

When I was a kid (1940s and ’50s), I spent as much time in the sun as I could. My folks encouraged it, being outdoorsy types themselves, and motorcyclists, to boot. So, in the summer, depending on where we might be living (my dad was an Air Force pilot, so we moved a lot), I’d be outside as much as possible, usually getting sunburns instead of tans, thanks to my English and Scottish heritage. I had light blond hair, green eyes and skin blems aplenty. 

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It’s a literal pain in the butt, the wallet.  Necessary to modern life, because it hauls around who we are, how much we have and what the government has licensed us to do. When it’s all packed into a wallet, our cash and cards can add up to an inch or more of pure pain.  More importantly to motorcyclists, when parked in a back pocket of our pants, the damned thing can all too easily just slip out silently and disappear onto the road. Hence, that signature behavior common to all street riders of the male persuasion who persist in not parking their wallets in their jackets or shirts: checking the rear pocket to make sure the wallet is still on board.

So long as we have to haul our drivers’ licenses, cash and credit cards around with us, the challenge becomes finding ways to minimize the problems presented by the wallet. Some riders—cruiser types and especially H-D cruiser types—solve the theft-and-fallout problem of the wallet with the “biker’s wallet,” secured by a chain to the belt. Some people split up the cash and cards and put the money in one front pocket and the cards in another, secured by a rubber band, a box clip, a card case or some other means. Others move into specialty wallets designed for a particular garment—the inner breast pocket of a suit coat or sport coat, say, or a waist bag’s purpose-built cards-’n’-cash section.

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Photo by Gordon Keown

29 May 2011, 1700 hrs local, Mildenhall, Suffolk, England: Stationed as I was at RAF Mildenhall from May, 1969, to July, 1972, it came naturally to me to think in military terms as I gazed out over the crowd at the Mildenhall Speedway Stadium, even though the stadium has nothing to do with the base. Going to military bases does that to me, among other things. (Automatic, unstoppable thoughts: “Uniform squared away? Haircut okay? Going TDY today?”) But now, almost four decades after I left the Air Force base a few miles from this bustling speedway track, there is no sign of military anything, apart from a few spectators who look like Air Force types, even in mufti.

I’m here in England to do research for my next novel, and watching this speedway match between the Mildenhall Fen Tigers and the Isle of Wight Islanders has nothing to do with the research. But I can never resist the allure of a dirt-track motorcycle race anywhere I might be. And speedway tops my list of favorite dirt-track events when it involves team racing, as British speedway has almost since its advent in 1928 (or 1927, depending on whose version of the history you believe). The Aussies brought speedway to Britain that year, and everybody agrees that speedway as we know it was an Australian creation of the early 1920s.

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2012 Morgan 3 W Bespoke. Photo by Dennis Glavis

Morgan cars and three-wheelers used to be called Moggies by the blokes I knew in the car and motorcycle racing world of Britain in the late 1960s. They were generally considered to be vehicles of choice for people who wanted to be self-consciously different. Like motorcycles, though, three-wheelers had been used traditionally in Britain for transportation by those unable to afford a car.

The recently unveiled 2012 Morgan 3 W, currently slated to have a $44,000 price tag in Malvern Link, England, is obviously intended for those who can afford a car—as well as a vehicle which, in the U.S., will be considered by state motor-vehicle agencies as a special-category motorcycle, not a car. Meaning that in all but a few states (such as California), any new three-wheel driver will need to get a motorcycle-operator’s license with a three-wheeler restriction, and will also have to wear helmets in jurisdictions with mandatory helmet laws. So, we’ll soon be seeing that most curious of vehicles: a three-wheeled cyclecar steered by steering wheel but driven by someone wearing a helmet.

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About half past two in the afternoon on Saturday, April 23, I looked up at the grandstands behind where I sat and realized that, though the crowd was not pathetically small, it wasn’t standing-room-only, either. It should have been. Because that afternoon—sunny, not too hot, a bit breezy—the Salinas, California, rodeo grounds were home to some of the most dazzling displays of American-style TT racing you could ask for, and then some. From where I sat, near the start-finish line, I could see that the other grandstands around the dirt track were nearly empty, despite the skill and talent out there in the form of AMA Grand National Pro and Expert TT racers like CW’s own Mark Cernicky and Team Cycle World Attack Performance Kawasaki’s JD Beach.

Mark shares his experiences at Salinas elsewhere, but from where I sat, he and the others put on the best AMA TT show on two wheels I’d seen since the Johnson Administration, which was the era in which I’d last been to an American TT. (Though I did my own TT racing for Team Cycle World in the Isle of Man.)

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For World War I or II warbird enthusiasts, the annual release of Philip Makanna’s “GHOSTS” large-format calendars is itself a red-letter day because his stunning air-to-air photography is breathtaking in its art.

This year, Phil will receive the International Society for Aviation Photography Lifetime Achievement Award, and his 2011 “Ghosts of the Great War” has won the International Calendar Competition’s “Calendar of the Year” and “Best of Show” awards.

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Dr. Shreve Archer lapping Laguna Seca on his Honda VF1000R.

You never know how church can surprise you. Our church, for example, has a tradition of arranging small dinner groups for parishioners to meet informally and socialize. Usually, these are called “foyer groups,” and in them, we get to meet, chat and eat. When I’m involved, inevitably the talk rolls around to motorcycling, which isn’t usually all that popular with my tablemates. But last weekend, I was very surprised when the young man seated next to me—I’ll call him Martin—told me that, though he doesn’t ride himself, nor does his wife, he chooses his doctors based on whether or not they ride motorcycles.

Insert raised-eyebrow expression here.

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Say it’s the summer of 1964 and you’re 17 years old, living in a California suburb, and you’ve saved enough money from your job working at the local Mobilgas station to buy a Honda 305 Scrambler—the CL77 that every moto-minded teenager in America seemed to want and a whole lot got. Once you had the thing, you bought and installed the most vital components any self-respecting CL rider could buy: Snuff-or-Nots.

For the historically minded, the important questions regarding Snuff-or-Nots are: What were they, who invented them, where and when?

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You don’t get to choose your genotype, so I blame it for my instant desire to know by experience what it’s like to ride every motorcycle I see if it’s new to me. (Same goes for cars and airplanes, but that’s another story.) That’s one reason why I like to read first-hand accounts of riders who rode hardware in different times. Take the stories of guys who rode as dispatch (or if you’re British, “despatch”) riders in wartime. What was it like, especially back in, say, 1914, when all forms of motorized transportation were still new, and everyone from back-garden tinkerers to degreed engineers was pushing the boundaries of what could be done with their contemporary technology?

Such tales have been hard to find, but Project Gutenberg and other attempts to bring old books back to life using digital technology and the Internet are helping. And although, as I found out just now by searching for the origins of the expression, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” the truth of the expression used back in the saloon era of “free” lunches to lure people in who’d buy drinks hasn’t changed. So, when we read about Amazon.com having free e-books for its Kindle users or Kindle-reader users, we can be naturally suspicious: What does Amazon get out of the deal?

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Photo by Jeff Allen

Since 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closing of the American Frontier, the United States has been urbanizing and suburbanizing faster and faster. This has inevitably produced traffic jams of sometimes epic proportions, prompting my former Car and Driver colleague Brock Yates to conclude decades ago that whenever the roads are perceived as “too open,” the ever-watchful members of the Anti-Destination League mobilize and fill them up with slow-moving vehicles, usually in the supposedly fast lanes. American motorcyclists have responded to the ever-increasing congestion with the technique of filtering, or lane-sharing, just as their fellow riders in Europe and Asia have.

It’s not just motorcyclists who filter, either. Back in the late 1970s when I was an executive editor at Car and Driver, living and working in downtown Manhattan, I realized that everyone who used the roads or sidewalks there understood what I called “New York Rules.” These rules were triggered by any traffic jam at any time. For example, where I lived, at the intersection of East 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, I could see that every morning and afternoon, the lane-dividing stripes on 3rd Avenue would magically cease to mean anything. What might be four lanes turned into six, or however many cars, trucks, buses or other conveyances that could fit would fill every inch of space available between the sidewalks on the one-way street. It was entirely reasonable, and I never saw a cop bother to try to force people back into the official lanes.

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In 2008, when I rode a Can-Am Spyder GS in the Northern California Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation Ride for Kids, I was surprised at the diversity of riders. I’d expected the mom-and-pop Harley and Wing riders, but not the mix of sportbike knee-draggers, dual-sporters, cruisers and others, including several Spyder Ryders. We had a great time, a great ride and raised a lot of money for the kids. What’s not to like?

Nothing. Which is why I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the American Legion’s “Legion Riders” program has been the most successful recruiting and money-raising program the Legion has had in living memory. So far, the Legion Riders membership is more than 106,000 riders in more than 1000 chapters. Since 2006, the Riders’ annual Legacy Run has raised money to provide scholarships to children of U.S. military personnel killed since September 11, 2001.

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