Drawing The Line

Pete gave me a fountain pen at Sea Otter. It’s a Pilot Metropolitan, which I am told is sort of the reliable gateway drug in the fountain pen world. It’s fine enough to write fancy, but not so expensive as to make you question life choices. Pete and I had been talking about how our brains work and the difference in memory between writing something down with a pen on paper and typing the same thing onto a keyboard or phone screen. This had come up in the aftermath of the dead laptop induced handwritten column from a month or so ago, and I have been thinking ever since about how we learn, how we remember, and how we move through life.

I cracked the pen open this morning, with the lucid intention that I would use it to align my thoughts for writing this column. My thoughts needed some alignment, since my mind was still pinballing all over the place trying to come to some coherent point of view regarding the Avinoxalpyse. As I scribbled, tapped, scribbled some more, and no ink flowed onto the page, I realized I had forgotten a whole lot about not just penmanship, but pens themselves, in the 45 or so years since I last blurched ink all over my school uniform.

This, I thought ruefully, is probably how someone from the 1970s feels when handed a modern mountain bike with electronic shifting and no instructions about how any of it works. Or, it’s kind of like handing a gen-Z kid a rotary phone and telling them to call home.

As it turns out, filling the Pilot Metropolitan with ink and expecting to immediately get your Dickens (or Brontë) on is about on par with taking that new AXS equipped sled out for a rip before charging the battery. It will not work. Upon filling the Pilot Metropolitan with ink, it is advised to let it sit in an upright posture, nib down, for about an hour. This lets the ink flow down from the cartridge (I know, lame. REAL writers aspirate the ink up into the pen, and then are primed and ready to go from the gun) into the pen.

I found this to be enchanting. Made a cup of coffee, took the dog for a walk, thought about what I was going to write. Hand writing, after all, is not the sort of thing that lends itself to rushed effort. And, per my last effort, the word-per-hour productivity index takes a beating when ditching the keyboard for the pen. Now, ditch the convenience of a ballpoint for a flowing ink pen, and the care required to let the ink dry and not smear a fist inadvertently across freshly written lines, and everything slows down even more.

Slowing down is something that we are not socially wired for these days. Slowing down – mentally, physically, in any sense – is best avoided. Sounds unproductive. And we, societally speaking, are all about productivity. We are all trained to want More. To expect More. To measure our worth – our successes, our appetites, our wants and needs, in the context of More.

This is probably where the Avinoxalypse clears its throat and enters the conversation, but I want to talk about my dad for a bit first.

My father was a lifelong motorcyclist. Almost. He discovered motorcycles in his late teens, emphatically disobeyed his parents edict to stay away from the things, and spent the rest of his life riding them, crashing them, fixing them, and manufacturing motorcycle helmets so that others could ride and crash them too. My first recollections of understanding the printed word are swaddled in the pages of 1970-ish issues of Cycle World magazine. Motorcycles were a constant presence in his life, and therefore mine as well. Our conversations would invariably revolve around what we were riding, what was in the garage that day/month/year, what was being worked on, what the next project was. I would try to romanticize this, but my dad was not the sentimental type. He was a pragmatist about most things, but if he had any sentimental blind spots, they could be revealed in the bikes that he rode. Motorcycles were a huge part of the tapestry of his life, and he knew his way around them as if they were innate extensions of himself.

So it must have been an absolute kick in the balls when his Suzuki Bandit 1200 fell over on him and pinned him to the floor in the garage of the new house he and his partner Colleen had just built. He was 72, still in good shape, but unbeknownst to him, things were changing inside his body. And his big old bike had trapped him there, giving him some time to think about things while Colleen came home from playing golf, found him, then had to rush off to find a neighbor to help lift the Bandit back upright, because 500 or so pound motorcycles are really awkward to pick up.

What my dad thought, laying there on the floor, was that if he couldn’t get out from under his own bike, or couldn’t pick it up, then he shouldn’t be riding it anymore. He told me this with a matter of factness that I couldn’t help but admire, since he had employed the exact same logic on me as a kid whenever I wanted a bigger bike. “If you can pick it up, you can ride it. If you can’t, then you can’t.” Gotta give him credit for his consistency on that one.

He sold the Bandit a few months later. Colleen said it was the only time she ever thought he might be close to tears. He had no way of knowing, then, that he had pancreatic cancer, and that after the Bandit there would be a couple years with no motorcycle rides, then a couple years of real shitty cancer. There would be no more opportunities to ride the chicken strips off the tires of any other bike. In his final months, we watched a lot of MotoGP races together, and his old riding buddies would come to visit him, but instead of showing any regret, or aching for a chance to feel the toe of his boot graze the tarmac at corner apex, he chalked it all up fatalistically as “half a century is a lot longer than most people get to ride these things.”

And here I am, waiting for my new pen to ink up. No matter how I try to parse it, this is still a whole lot more tolerable than waiting for the latest OS Tahoe upgrade to finish doing whatever it does. It’s just a pen, and in time, it will be ready to write. Then, I can try to learn cursive again, because why not?

So, anyway, the Avinoxalypse. I don’t really have anything to say, because I really don’t care. I probably should care, because this is supposed to be where I make a living, but I just don’t. I don’t care that a new motor platform just walked clean around all the hand-wringing power output laws and everyone is now guaranteed to dive headlong into a power/range arms race that Richard Cunningham presciently referred to over a decade ago as “a race to the bottom.” I don’t care because I don’t ride e-bikes. There will be ramifications, I am sure, both within the industry and with how mountain bike access is gained or lost moving forward from here. But I don’t feel like wrestling with any of that because, by and large, this seems to be what a whole lot of people want.

People want More. And Avinox delivers that. Such is life. But life isn’t always about More.

I don’t want More, anymore. Sometime back around 2012, when my dad was cheering for Valentino Rossi even as he was himself about to get shown the door by his own treacherous pancreas, I stopped wanting More. I still want. But I don’t want More.

During that time, as I tried to process my father shrinking to nothing in front of me, I rode bikes slowly and cried a lot. And that riding slow, for the first time in maybe my entire adult life, taught me something new. Sometimes you see more by slowing down. Sometimes you feel more. That’s a lower case “more”, and the distinction is important. Bicycles for me are these incredibly simple things. Even the complicated ones are simple. They take my effort and stretch economy out of it. My legs, my lungs, my heart. I push into the pedals, I move forward. Some days are faster than others, some are slower. But it’s me, and this simple device. And that is enough. To get supercliché about it, as the Zen monk (or maybe Albert Einstein) allegedly said; “I ride my bike to ride my bike.”

Adding a motor in between my mashing feet and the spinning rear wheel makes me go faster, but it also fuzzes up whatever conversation I am having with the ground I am riding across. The motor give me access to More; More speed, More distance, More laps, but it doesn’t resonate for me in the same way. It’s like typing on a keyboard instead of carefully scratching out letters into words into sentences. And that is fine, but getting More out of my riding is not something I really need. I could probably draw a line between writing this now and the first time I stripped all the gears of my old Yeti. Or how awesome it was to grow up in New Zealand, mostly barefoot. There is liberation and enlightenment in simplification. For me, anyway.

I’m an old hippy, with a sweet new fountain pen. One day, I suspect, something will happen with mountain bikes like what happened with my dad and his Suzuki Bandit. When that day comes, I’ll quit riding. Maybe take up yoga and practice my calligraphy. Until then, I will keep on trying to get more from life out of less, not More. Thanks for the pen, Pete. She’s a beaut!