Noise, Speed and The Love of Riding a Honda CB360

There is a spirit in an engine. 

My first car was a sky-blue ’80 Corolla. I drove it all night through Texas; it smelled like an old leather glove. The radio was broken. I remember a drive on a night so black we could have been in space. The moon rose across the windshield somewhere between Dallas and Austin. Just the sound of wind and engine. Just my headlights bouncing off a gravel shoulder. I was 16 and thought I could live in a car. 

Five or six years earlier I’d been sitting in Austin traffic in the summer looking out the window of my mom’s station wagon, watching a ’70s Honda Shadow pull level with the glass. I remember the sound of the bike’s engine and the black and gold swoop on its tank. Heat waves off the asphalt made it shiver.

At a festival in Texas I shared a campfire with a woman named Darlene. She traveled America with her Harley. I remember someone saying, “Catch her if you can. Once she’s gone, she’s gone.”

I didn’t start riding motorcycles for another 20 years. 

We’re encouraged all our lives to make choices prioritizing our safety. We learn to be afraid. But fear is a knife at the throat. 

A woman I met recently told me, “Life isn’t safe. You’re given a gift of life and you have to make use of it.” Her name is Lee. She rides a Triumph Tiger, a Yamaha R3 and a Vespa. 

In the fall of 2017, a rider friend of mine spotted a ’76 Honda CB for sale in Nyack. I knew nothing about motorcycles. I saw the high CL pipes and the elegant tank, the 360 cc engine. 

There’s something brave about a ’70s Honda. The bike was older than I was. It was a traveler from another time.

I bought it for $1200 cash.

Machines contain pieces of us: I think of the optimism that went into their creation. They may be the product of someone’s best hopes. But they also discourage hubris. 

The bike was bleeding fuel and brake fluid by the time my friend and I got it back to his house. We drank beer in a November garage and huddled near a space heater, staring at the Honda now parked next to his big sport bike, trying to figure out what to do now. Every bolt needed tightening. My friend thought it needed a new wiring harness; he was right. That winter I read online forums and manuals like they were novels. My boyfriend Chris gave me a set of wrenches. He helped me replace brake lines, gaskets and the stator rotor.  

Most of the work I couldn’t do myself. For the big jobs, like the wiring harness, I found passionate mechanics. Passionate, because mechanics who work on these old bikes approach the work as a calling. They’re driven by the love of machines. 

A month ago, just before a scheduled trip, a bolt vibrated loose and fell into the engine to ricochet around like shrapnel. It required a top-end rebuild (thank you, Gary). When I worry about breaking something on the motorcycle, Chris says, “Anything that can be broken can be fixed.” The first time I tried to ride, I dropped the bike in the dirt with my leg trapped underneath. We got up and kept going.

This learning process requires humility, the grace to admit when you need help and the courage to ask. But on my worst days the machine can bring me back to myself. The spirit speaks to me from a place of noise and speed. 

When I ride, my body is connected to the machine. Every gesture and impulse focuses through it. We balance together in the pull of our shared momentum until we are part of the road, and part of the wind. 

We called her Ruby. We named her because she is feisty and possessed. I’m learning to ride with Ruby.

I’m learning about interdependence. Every motorcyclist chases the thrill of freedom. Some of us prefer to ride alone. But the two-wheeled world relies on this: people have been there to help me. A motorcycle friend is a comrade in arms. They know about the spirit in the engine. 

We have miles to go. I’m about to switch out her gas tank; I’ll put on gloves and a respirator and clean the rust out of the new/old one from Gary’s garage, fill it with bolts and acid and shake it ‘till the metal shines clean. She’ll have a black and gold swoop.