Winter Riding Tips: "Riding with Rilke" by Ted Bishop

Last week a group of riders on the "oilheads" list ("www.snafu.org/oilheads") -- owners of boxer-engine BMWs from 1994-on -- discussed salted and sanded roadways, and cold tires and pavement as possible causes of a minor spill by a fellow rider out on a 40 F degree day. It became clear, after looking over the origins of the posts, that these opinions reflected one group whose local climate requires a more or less clear end of the riding season for 2 - 5 months, and another who ride year-round. The latter able to ride, not out of bravery or lack of sense - but by choice or luck in geographic location. This was reflected in the sentiments of a Florida member who opined that he has no time to clean his bike at the end of the season because the last riding season ends on December 31, and the new one begins on January 1.

The hidden tragedy of mono-seasonal riding will be lost on this fellow rider. Having no time even to clean and polish his steed also means he lacks an appropriate season for reading and reflection on the experiences of others. I do, aplenty. Here are a few of my favorite books on the experience of riding. Maybe another time I'll share favorite books on the technical side of tuning bikes and riding technique; racer biographies; coffee table books...

"Riding with Rilke" by Ted Bishop
For fans of the German romanticist poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose compassionate poems of angels inspired Wim Wenders' haunting film "Wings of Desire" (US release 1988), you may be disappointed to find Rilke gets just a page in the Epilogue. But Bishop, by trade a professor of English at the University Alberta, Edmonton, cites one stanza of Rilke to capture what I think all of us ride for. That moment in a ride when the bike disappears beneath us and we cease to ride but to fly like the shaft of light from our headlights, "...when I seemed to be riding that beam, to be that beam, streaming down the open highway. Pure motion. Pure space."

Although Ted Bishop is a scholar of modernist writers Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, his writing is evidence again that when PhD's or pipefitters get on our bikes, we all meet in a parallel universe of shared experiences. The desire to get to the byways of the heartland. To sense the change when the road dips low into a pool cool moist air at the edge of a marsh. To smell the air we cut through - a damp forest, a barn of ripe manure by the road, the scent of fabric softener streaming from a dryer vent somewhere - all insensible to the occupants of a passing car. Planning for a trip, aren't we all overtaken with that irrational justification of needful purchases to make the trip safer and more comfortable: accessories for the bike, a new helmet, boots, gear and maybe... a new bike.

Bishop's scholarly interests coincide with the unique physicality of riding the open road as it transform the journey into the most revealing component of the destination. He's an archive junkie. Diving into the physical archives collected from a writer's daily world and those close to him or her, are to him, like a weeks-long ride rich with the unexpected: tangible, physical delights and disappointments.

So convincingly does Bishop illustrate the parallels with archival scholarship and the road trip, that he received an arts grant to describe the experience he acquired riding his Ducati Monster from Edmonton to Austin, Texas on a research trip. To make the telling of the trip even more meaningful, Ted Bishop wrote his book while convalescing from a massive highway crash that left him in a body cast for several months. The book begins and ends with this experience. The road trip is the memory recounted from inside that suit of plastic armor.

I met Ted Bishop a week ago at an author reading in an independent bookstore here in Ann Arbor. A wet heavy snow was falling hard and the audience was small. His animated reading, personal anecdotes and long friendly chat with others after the reading were evidence of how much he cares about riding, his profession and sharing both with anyone in range of voice or pen. I have several friends who are distinguished scholars and who have been enthusiastic riders. I enjoyed Ted Bishop's literary insights as much as the ones from behind his windscreen. I'm not a person of letters, but this was one of the best road-trips I've read since Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." "Riding with Rilke" is a best-seller in Canada. Read it and tell a friend about it.

I meant to write more. Coming next:

"The Perfect Vehicle" by Melissa Holbrook Pierson (1997);
...which I selected because of the cover illustration - the 1954, 500cc Moto Guzzi V8 GP bike

"Top Dead Center" by Kevin Cameron (2007)
... because I've always wanted to be a curmudgeon with a racing pedigree and an engineering degree from MIT who writes for Cycle World.

"She's a Bad Motorcycle" edited by Geno Zanetti (2002)
... because this is a compilation of classic motorcycle lore culled from the writings of 25 different gifted rider-authors.