The world's very first motorcycle sprang fully formed from
the head of an idiotic inventor who wanted more excitement from the wheel.
Something involving chrome.
Other inventors had already discovered axles. As a result, giant
pyramid rocks were easier to push around, baby skin stopped burning when
buggies were rolled under shade trees, and piecrusts became consistently more
uniform in thickness.
But the idiotic inventor wanted to go fast.
I learned in today's "History of the Motorcycle"
class that just a few modifications to a standard bicycle brought that
inventor's dream to life. And the small
motor wedged between his legs necessitated a frantic attempt to invent BALANCE.
Several continents owe their robust economies to the
invention of the motorcycle. Somebody had
to pound all that horseshoe metal into handlebars. Then somebody
had to grow more horses after motorcycles sped by and sent the animals into
cardiac arrest.
Emergency rooms were invented to treat not only the back
problems of those who dragged dead horses off the roads, but the inner leg
burns caused by whatever heated up enough to make a motorcycle go so fast.
The History of the Motorcycle also led to the History of the
Messy Breakup.
For one excruciatingly tense semester, my college roommate
managed to hide a second-degree burn she'd acquired from the muffler of our
other roommate's boyfriend's motorcycle.
Yes, I went to Peyton Place University. (Ask me to sing the PPU Fight Song!)
A tub of strange salve stayed buried in the plastic toiletry
bucket she hauled back and forth to the bathroom; rolls of gauze cowered
beneath her mattress. Worst of all, she
kept her right leg fully clothed in spite of Phoenix temperatures that refused
to dip below 100 degrees, even at night.
If I squinted, her one-sided capris turned her into a peg-legged
cheerleader.
But she kept that fakey smile going and used her littlest hi-how-are-yew? voice the whole
time. The stress level in that dorm room
was so high that Woofer, our little break-the-rules songbird, ate through a bamboo
bar on her cage and tried drowning herself in our break-the-rules fish tank.
When the boyfriend's true colors burst forth in a series of
cad-like events, the burned roommate confessed
to the spurned roommate and neither
spoke until we could finally drive as fast as possible away from each other
that summer.
Messy. Messy breakup.
Early motorcycles were used by military policemen in Europe
to catch bad guys.
So the bad guys invented faster motorcycles.
The policemen, not schooled on the finer points of fuel
consumption and wind drag, invented motorcycles with little sidecars to hold an
extra policeman.
The bad guys got away.
Someone pointed out that while it was fun going fast on
motorcycles in a futile attempt to arrest bad guys, it would be super fun to go fast on motorcycles for
no apparent reason at all!
So somebody invented Sturgis, South Dakota. Somebody put two motorcycles together,
attached a roll bar, and called it a 'dune buggy.' Somebody invented the helmet and somebody
else beat him to death with a kickstand.
I took care of trauma patients in ICU for a couple of decades. We called motorcycles "donor cycles"
because the best organs were harvested from patients who had not been wearing
helmets when they crashed.
You know how some parents fight for - or against - early sex
education in schools? I'm proposing a
more basic anatomy lesson aimed at keeping kids alive long enough to even
consider having sex.
The lesson, recited on the heels of the Pledge of
Allegiance, goes like this: "I know
in my happily beating heart / that all the chaps and leather jackets and gloves
and boots in the world / will decidedly not
keep my tiny eggshell skull / from cracking open like a melon / when introduced
to two thousand pounds of late-for-work metal / whose driver is applying
mascara / while approaching a four-way stop."
Depending on the school district, you could even add a
little "amen" at the end for religious purposes.
I will admit that working as a nurse warped my daughter
Abi's childhood just a tad since I insisted her first helmet be strapped on as
she emerged from the birth canal. The
ultrasound measurements were wrong - the helmet covered both eyes - but that
soft spot remains intact to this day.
(The downside was that we had to guess at her hair color until it
emerged from the helmet's ear holes at around second grade.)
Humans still struggle with balance. When we are young we crave the rush that
comes from standing on the bumper of a moving car - but when we have young, our life's mission is to
deny them that very experience. We
become smarter with every single thing we survive. We worry ourselves into knots giving our Little
Ones the shortcuts, clearing every highway in hopes of preventing bad things
from veering into their lanes.
And then they leave for college and get a couple of
roommates of their own.
I loved going super-fast when I learned to ski. So did Abi.
But when I watched her go fast,
I was the adult who had learned the truth about the stationary nature of
trees. And - still - I let her go. In spite of my instinct to preserve her
unbroken bones, I knew what was happening in that little space between her
stomach and heart each time her skis left the planet to catch even the
teensiest bit of air.
Balance.
I had a funny feeling that the motorcycle's inventor was not
somebody's mother, and my suspicions were confirmed in today's class.
In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler decided the scenery was passing
much too slowly. He'd not heard about
cranial nerves, so he took a two-cylinder, coal-powered, steam engine and
attached it to a wooden bike. He also
didn't know about spinal reflexes, so he went ahead and climbed on.
And all his mother could do was worry.
Here's hoping she was comforted many nights by dreams revealing
an odd, box-like contraption cradling her stubborn child's head.
I happen to find it beyond incredible that mothers can sleep
at all.
(Need help figuring
out what just happened in your life?
Easy Peasy! Next week I'll tell
you how to interpret Tarot cards.)
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