Driving a motorcycle is a sensual, visceral, and immediate response. It’s the blast of air parting in an almost physical way around your body. It’s the feel of heavy steel machinery between you thigh’s and knees as you move through turns, running a good road on a clear morning. It’s the taste of wet grass, deep woods, damp river banks, and freshly cut hay that finds its way to the back of your throat. You know and experience what is around you and feel the very sensation of motion itself, in a way that you never can behind the wheel of a car.
In a car you drive a road; on a motorcycle you feel it. On a motorcycle every rise and dip, every change in surface or cant, every turn and straightway, is a temporal and physical experience. In a car you are enclosed, removed from what is without by the machinery that moves you, the windshield, the air-conditioning, the heater, the radio, the upholstered cradle of your seat, the locked doors the surrounding frame, they all separate you from the reality of the road and the weather. On a motorcycle the machine and the environment are an integral part of the experience. Coming home in the afternoon, the sun touches your shoulders with great warm hands. Somewhere in the middle of a long day of riding – especially on curves, where the lean and torque, body and bike angle, gravity and speed, determine the physics and the line of movement – the machine becomes an extension of the body, a melding of what is human and what is mechanical.
– Karen Larsen “Breaking the Limit”