Dirty Secret

If I were forced to live in a large city I probably wouldn’t ride motorcycles. Connected technology has brought us all closer together, so close that none of us really like what we see from our fellow man. This ubiquitous-connectedness has created a disconnect in a huge quantity of automobile drivers. Proximity sensors that auto-apply braking and lane-holding algorithms are responses to a driving populace that grows ever more disinterested in what is happening on the other side of the windshield. Self driving cars can’t get here soon enough for me.

Public roads are dangerous for motorcycles, no two ways about it, but there is a better place to ride. It’s a place where youthful hijinks don’t end in an expensive traffic citations or death by obliviousness. This place can be found everywhere, mere inches below the civilized world. This place is called The Dirt.

The Dirt is the true and holy Mother Road, unlike The Street, which relies completely on and has to be built on top of The Dirt. The Dirt stands on its own merits needing neither creation nor sustenance. Dirt will still be here long after the last human on Earth has crashed the last Volvo on Earth into the last telephone pole on Earth while sending the last text ever sent…on Earth.

The Dirt encompasses a wide variety of surfaces from graded county roads to nearly impassable paths more suitable to mountain goats. And you can ride a motorcycle over all of it. True, it’s getting harder to find places to ride near population centers. So pull up stakes and move to the less tony parts of the USA where there are miles and miles of dirt roads to explore.

Motorcyclists who start out in the dirt are simply better riders than those that don’t. Finding the limit on pavement is risky, expensive and painful. Those same limits can be exceeded and re-exceeded many times while riding in the dirt, sometimes without any input from the rider. Hell, sometimes the rider is tangled in a bush with a sprained thumb while the motorcycle explores the limits on its own. Crashing in The Dirt is less damaging to both body and bike. I’m not saying you can’t get killed dirt riding but it takes a determined effort to accomplish on your own what a drunken car driver will do for free.

The most interesting, less-picked-over sites are accessible only by dirt roads. Fencing and authorities are few and far between. If you see an abandoned mine shaft that needs falling into or a rusty car that needs a few more bullet holes you can fall or shoot with complete freedom.

Listen, don’t let street riding scares put you off motorcycles. Pick up an old dual purpose bike for a thousand or two and start finding your groove out where it’s safe to do the things you like to do.