Recreational Rider

I enjoyed a good nine hours of riding today. I followed back roads from Yea to Longwood, to Nagambie and Heathecote, to Seymour and Strath Creek, down through Whittlesea and back through the twisting apple orchards of outer Hurstbridge. The day behaved like a golden summer should, the world pleasure brimmed with meaning, and I enjoyed the fact that motorcycling can be anything, whether playful or serious. It's nice to enjoy it so much but not take its definition too seriously.

Remembering

"It isn't all those promises that you vow to keep then don't,
It isn't that the world will end but the likelihood that it won't.
O alarm, o wonderful alarm,
Wake me up from remembering..."

I employed my machine today to lose myself in a place of chill and fog. The summit of Mount Donna Buang was reminiscent of La Verna, where once I wandered among millennia-old chapels, through a silent icy forest, before joining the Franciscans in solemn chant. This Boxing Day was like that one except somehow wrong: Winter in Summer.







The tower looked at me through the dense white, almost ominously.



As did other objects and life.



The silence and slow walk through deep fog shifted something inside me.  I was taken back to that monastic Italian winter more than ten years ago.  Something about this place breathed, and I felt its breath in the quiet trees and cold stones. And I felt, too, the different like which has grown in me since.









As I walked, I thought of these words which suggest a journey I had made inwardly, in the years since that day in La Verna:

"He who knows how to breath in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances are that it will chill him. The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible - but how serenely everything lies in the sunshine! How freely one can breath! How much, one feels, lies beneath one!"

Stone Jug Creek

When I feel like riding out I'll do it despite the strange days of a purple summer. Rain hangs rather than dust. But in my head something else hangs, just out of reach and with no name. Enacting the ride is a way for it to materialise. It is gone when I sleep in everyday distractions, but when my spirit is restless it is there - when music or words wake me up. It is a dream of the place I'm riding through, as though the dream fills up a missing half of the reality. I imagine the place while I'm there. Like we imagine our lives even as we live them. One sees things otherwise missed, and creates new things.  And all the while the rain hangs.

Rosy and I made easy confident sweeps through King Lake National park. Then she left me due to a lack of sleep.





And so I rode to Strath Creek, overtaking Sunday drivers with my chin on the tank for extra speed. I ate my lunch with a churning stomach, thinking of the rider Rosy knew who was killed last week when hit by a speeding taxi.

Then a motley group of riders pulled up, each a minute apart, and all laughing. We are all going to die, but you can choose to laugh in the meantime. And if there can be no imagining when you are dead, then there is no possibility of death's nightmare beyond what you imagine now. And you can change the now, because right now red blood flows through your veins. And what better a joyful assertion of your humanity than to mount a motorcycle? Most things are better in the wind.

At Trawool I took a new road - Upper Goulburn Road - which hugged the river until Tallarook.





Another new road - Pyalong-Seymour Road - and I made my way to Heathcote and coffee. From there I dropped to Mia Mia and paused, before choosing a farm road in preference over the main route. It had no name, but ran parallel to Stone Jug Creek.






I enjoyed different speeds on this road, cruising along between 40 and 50kph while sitting and looking about, or standing on the pegs and pushing along at at least 60kph, on my road-bike with road-bike tyres. I disliked the feeling at greater speed of the rear fishtailing ever so mildly on the gravel - I thought at first I had a rear puncture - and so I chose the these paces and really enjoyed the surroundings. That's the way to do it! Leave hustling for the tarmac.





And that's what I did: plodded along the dirt, and when I met the tarmac of the Burke and Wills Track, I opened up into my beloved staccato drum roll of an engine, rolling on and off between 4000 and 5000 rpm.  I sat at the speed limit.  A hoon appeared on the straight and attempted to ride my backside, but each time we entered a set of twisties he would lose more and more ground. On a long set of straights he would appear again, desparately breaking the speed limits, and then we'd meet the twisties and I'd laugh as he was lost again. This bike can be flicked effortlessly at freeway speeds through a tight mountain road. I love my SR500, which draws forth different elements of my being on any ride: contemplation and imagination here, adrenalin and the pulsing of spirit and blood there.

The First Day of Summer...

...was wet. But it was the least wet day of the week according to the Bureau of Meteorology, from among the days I have free.

And so I put myself out there, stretching my body across time and place under a cobalt sky, cornering through rivers of spilled rain.

I rode the Burke and Wills Track north-west of Lancefield to Golden Point, past rivers that had flooded, and broken bridges.







I made a friend on the way.





Eventually I came to a marker of Major Mitchell's visit at a place which hasn't changed since.





At Chewton I had lunch before riding to Newstead and making for Dayelsford.

At Shepherds Flat I came across a house which I shared with you a month ago. It is deteriorating quickly.



Riding through Hepburn Springs I followed a small sign to a tourist attraction, which turned out to be a "blow hole". It was in a small national park, potted with old mine shafts and diggings, and the hole was dug through a hill so that a stream flowed through


and came gushing out the other side.


With the recent rain it was a crashing of water.







As I walked through the forest back to the carpark the bush was populated with visions of nineteenth century diggers, ambling past and acknowledging me as though this were an everyday event, which of course it was. So spying my motorcycle among the trees was an incongruent sensation. What is that? A replacement for the horse, you say?



I rode on through Daylesford and via Trentham to Woodend. There I found my indicator had broken off and was hanging by its wires, so I sticky-taped it in place and, with the day darkening, decided to ride up Mount Macedon to the soldier's memorial cross. Those roads are especially twisty in the wet, but I entered English-Gentleman-mode and plodded along on my big single, dodging fallen trees through the mist.

Once again I encountered the left-behinds of Major Mitchell.






From the cross I could see Melbourne.


And to continue the theme of incongruity, a neo-classical garden amidst Mitchell's bush.





I rode home down the Calder Freeway from Gisborne. The bike sat comfortably on 95kph - it is the perfect motorcycling for having a great ride while keeping your license. The characteristics of its engine were a thrill all day, as I rolled on and off in a crescendo and decrescendo drum-roll that made braking unnecessary. And at idle, "Pup pup pup pup pup pup". The truth is that our days are numbered. And this was a day well-lived.