Primal Memories
This post is in: Motorcycle Riding
Do you remember where it all started for you, this two-wheel passion thing? Of course you remember that first motorcycle ride, as surely as you remember your first carnal experience. Odds are that you remember your first bike as clearly as your first lover. While those memories of that first ride and first bike are certainly strong, clear, and close to the surface of our awareness, I believe that for most of us, those memories are not truly the primal ones, the ones that really inspired our moto-selves.
Somewhere, perhaps deeply buried or simply unrecognized by our conscious minds, there lays a deeper memory. An experience or happening in our lives that came first in the sequence, which programmed us into the bikers we have grown to be. It is the first line of moto-code in our two-wheeled DNA. This often simple, maybe even innocuous experience became the first turn in our learning curve of self that ultimately brought the bike/s into our garages and landed this blog on your screen today. Ponder it for a moment or two. Can you trace it back past the obvious?
I think I may have traced mine back, but the pathway to awareness that I took today came not from an intended introspection but rather from telling my wife the history of one of the objects from my past that lives in my garage. Let me explain. My garage is equal to the size of my house; it is home to my motorcycles and, like yours probably is, is also filled with all those things that as a packrat I cannot bear to discard. I spent today working in the garage clearing an area for a workbench and reorganizing my assorted packrat stuff. It was near the end of this process that the awareness of my primal memory arrived.
Mary, my sweetheart, brought me a cold beverage, and while I took a short break from my work to talk with her, she asked about an unusual piece of furniture sitting in the pile of stuff I was rearranging. My father, who was a carpenter, made the item in question; it was designed to custom-fit in an apartment my parents and I lived in long ago. My father passed away when I was six and my mother kept it when we moved because it was one of the things he had made. However, it did not fit in any place my mom lived since I was ten. When my mother passed in 1990, it came to my garage, and it hasn’t found a purpose in any place that I have lived, either—that is, until today. It carried a memory revealing a purpose so much deeper than its function as a piece of custom furniture.
During the process of relating the idea and the origin of this object to my sweetheart, I described my childhood home to her. I told her of the floor plan of this railroad-style flat and where it was located in the South Bronx. When I described my room, I came across that primal memory. My bedroom was the last room in the back and its windows faced towards the middle of the city block. About three blocks from my bedroom windows was the Cross Bronx Expressway, a fifties-style, sunken highway that cut across the Bronx, connecting the northeastern suburbs and states with New York City and the George Washington Bridge.
That major artery, while not as crowded then as it is today, was busy all day and night with traffic. The canyon-like structure of the road made the sounds of engines and spinning wheels echo through the local streets and alleyways and into my bedroom. When I was describing that room and the sounds that inhabited it, I had one of those moments of clarity that is often accompanied by an expression of: Aha! Those first years of my life I slept to the lullaby of the road as it played its constant, almost unnoticed drone over the slumbering city. I realized that the music of engines and the road was ingrained into me from way before I even saw my first motorcycle. For me, that was the first line of code that programmed the wanderlust and moto-mania into my soul. Till this day, whenever I sometimes hear a motor roaring in the distance or the chorus of singing tires and honking horns, I feel a sense of comfort in those sounds. I reconnect with my Primal Memories.
Copyright Bill Hufnagle 2014
