Softness for a Long Ride
A conversation I routinely have with a friend in the community is about the definition of a “long ride.” Is it the one where you have to refill your gas tank? The one that lasts more than an hour? Is it a full day of riding? It is the motorcycle rider’s version of the Sorites Paradox, the philosophical problem of trying to define something that has no obvious boundary. At what point does a pile of sand stop being a pile?
Imagine walking into a room and finding a pile of sand. I hand you a box of cups, scoops, shovels, and other containers and tell you to remove one scoop. After each scoop, I ask, “Is there still a pile of sand?”
You keep going.
Eventually, you get to the point where you can no longer take a full scoop, so I tell you to take a pinch. Again, I ask the question. A few hundred grains remain. You brush some away with the tip of your finger. Is it still a pile? Eventually there is a single grain of sand sitting on the floor. Is that a pile? Obviously not. But what about two grains? Three? Ten? A hundred? At some point, somewhere between the first grain and the original pile, the thing ceased to be a pile. The problem is that there is no obvious moment when it happened.
Motorcycle riders have the same problem with distance. If you only ride once a month and your usual trip is ten minutes down the road to the coffee shop, an hour to the neighboring town might feel like a long ride. Someone who commutes an hour each way might barely register that as a ride at all. We can probably agree that someone like LongHaulPaul, or anyone chasing an Iron Butt certification, is doing a long ride. We can probably also agree that ten minutes to the coffee shop doesn't qualify. Everything in between gets murky. There is no line painted across the road that tells us where riding becomes long.
For me, the definition isn't particularly clear either.
I routinely ride from home to a garage in North Seattle, which, depending on traffic, can take an hour and a half each way. I might spend a few hours there before turning around and coming home. I don't consider that a long ride. I don't even consider it a medium ride. I am just riding to get somewhere. The motorcycle is transportation, and the destination is the point.
Over the weekend, though, the weather was beautiful. The fall colors were beginning to show themselves, and I wanted to get out. There wasn't an errand. There wasn't anyone waiting for me. I didn't have anywhere I needed to be. Around midday, I loaded up the bike and pointed it toward the mountains. I was low on gas, so my first stop was the fuel station. I filled the tank to about three-quarters and kept going. I didn't have a particular destination in mind, only a general direction. Eventually I settled on a lookout at the top of a mountain. It took about an hour and forty-five minutes to get there. I sat for a while and watched the sun move across the landscape. I wrote a little in my journal. I tried not to get irritated with the people wandering off the trails and trampling the alpine landscape. Eventually I headed back down the mountain, stopped for something to eat, and started the ride home. The trip back took about two hours. Near home, I stopped for gas again.
That, I might consider a long ride.
The strange thing is that the amount of time between starting the motorcycle and putting it back in the garage wasn't particularly different from one of my Seattle garage trips. The distance wasn't extraordinary. I hadn't crossed some magical threshold of miles or hours. What changed was the intention.
I wasn't riding to arrive.
I was riding to ride.
(Of course, the motorcycle matters too. Two hours on a dirtbike seat is a brutally long ride. Two hours on my V-Strom or Tenere is barely worth mentioning. Even the machine becomes part of the equation.)
I was sitting in my garage recently having this conversation again with someone while we worked on some bikes. They sat in a folding camp chair while I tightened some loose bolts. Conversation flowed and swirled like the whiskey in our glasses. It wandered from life choices to the meaning of random words and eventually to which farkle we were going to buy next for our bikes. I missed out on these kinds of garage conversations when I was younger. Only recently have I started gathering a tribe around me for them. I find myself wanting to go to the garage even when there is nothing particularly important to do. I can spend an evening moving tools from one drawer to another, listening to 90s ska, drinking a cheap beer, and thinking about life. There is something satisfying about doing seemingly meaningless things alongside people you have come to care about.
All of that is irrelevant for the moment, except for what was on the chair.
Laying across the seat was a piece of roughed-up sheepskin. Not one of those beautiful, Instagram-worthy sheepskins that drape over a chair in a carefully arranged living room. This one had been weathered by use, by dirt and rain and the particular indignities that come with being strapped to a motorcycle. Although, somewhat ironically, the other half of this particular sheepskin lives inside my house. It sits on the footrest of my favorite chair beside the fireplace and has become one of my cat's favorite places to sleep.
The sheep it came from lived on my home island. It was raised on a farm with a deep generational connection to my own family. The sheep belonged to a heritage breed brought to the island by one of the other homesteading families, part of the long and tangled history of people and animals making lives for themselves in the same small piece of land. I like to imagine that there is some parallel connection between us. That we both have the soil of the island in our blood. That the sea mist from the crashing waves filled both of our lungs. That the scent of Nootka rose, cedar, madrone, and camas settled into both of our lives, familiar and impossible to reproduce anywhere else.
The island has a particular perfume, and once you have lived with it long enough, it stays on your skin.
Shortly after buying my Tenere 700, I did several long-distance rides and discovered that my ass had opinions about the matter. I was dealing with soreness, along with the usual battle between overheating and being too cold. I started looking for something that might make the miles a little more comfortable. There are plenty of modern technical solutions for motorcycle seats, and many of them work beautifully. But standing at the farmers market one day, I found myself drawn to something much older.
A sheepskin.
There is something about riding with wool beneath me that connects me to a much older kind of traveler. Long before motorcycles, before engines and asphalt and suspension, people were putting wool beneath themselves to make the hard miles a little kinder. A sheepskin belonged to the saddle, to the horse, to journeys measured in days rather than miles. It was warmth and padding and a small act of practical wisdom. If you are going to sit on something for a long time, find a way to make it gentler.
The machine beneath me is thoroughly modern.
The impulse is not.
We are still animals trying to make the journey more comfortable. We still find ways to put a little softness between ourselves and the hard world. The road changes. The machines change. The reasons for traveling change. But the basic human instinct remains. And so when I settle onto that sheepskin and feel the wool beneath me, I think about all of those travelers who came before. The riders on horses. The people crossing distances before roads were paved. The farmers who raised the sheep. The homesteaders who brought a breed of animal to an island and made a life there. My own family, living and working on that same piece of earth.
One half of the sheepskin stays beside the fireplace. The other comes with me when I ride.
Maybe that is why I don't think a long ride can really be measured in miles. Or hours. Or tanks of gasoline. Maybe it has something to do with intention. Whether you were riding toward something or simply riding because you needed to go. Maybe it has something to do with what you noticed along the way, who you shared the road with, or what you carried home.
That night in the garage, I put the seat back on the bike and slipped the sheepskin into place. I ran my hand across the worn wool for a moment before closing the garage door.
I still don't know exactly where a ride becomes a long ride.
Maybe there doesn't need to be a line.
Maybe the distance that matters isn't the distance between where you started and where you ended.
Maybe it is simply what you carry home.
BOOK: The Old Ways - Robert Macfarlane
This book is about paths, walking, landscape, memory, and the layers of human history embedded in places. It seems fitting.
SONG: Ends of the Earth - Lord Huron
The beat and melody is perfect for a ride, but the lyrics also hit home in a special way.
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
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