I’ve always hated Harleys.
Loud, heavy, overwhelmingly ridden by garbage people so desperate for attention they’ll take a second mortgage on their trailer to buy a machine so inefficient, so obnoxious and so loud that windows rattle as they roll by.
If the noise of that altered exhaust somehow isn’t enough to garner your attention, some of these clowns install boom boxes on their fairings so everyone in a three-block radius can also hear their crappy taste in music, violating a humanity-wide rule most of us learned by the time we were 14 years old: No one wants to hear your damn music.
Look, dude. I’m sorry your dad never hugged you. And I’m sure that shriveled raisin between your legs must be awfully distressing. But the rest of us have lives to live that weirdly don’t involve you, and don’t need to, so maybe just shut up a little?
I don’t dislike motorcycles. I rode one for several years as my only transportation. It’s Harleys, Harley people, and Harley culture, I believe humanity would do well without. (This is a great time to tell me how you own a Harley or your uncle’s cousin’s best friend Leon does, and neither you nor Leon is one of those obnoxious Harley riders at all. I’m proud of you and Leon. Doesn’t mean I’m not right.)
I’m thinking about all this while lying in my tent, about midnight on a shake-down run, listening to the geese settle in for the night. One of those Temu Hell’s Angels vroom-vrooms past in the distance, trailing some crappy music like an asynchronous fart. I’m a good five miles away from any road. As quiet as everything else is, that over-heavy hunk of steel was the only thing I could hear. It’s sound finally passed in several more miles.
There was a nice lull after that, interrupted by a car or two. Then another. Then a jet ski (Aqua Harley) came screeching down the river. Two people out for a midnight stroll spoke to each other as if through a bullhorn.
When all the people finally settled down, I could hear the cicadas calling out for sex, the frogs croaking for the same, and the tree branches dancing in the wind. I could hear the rhythm of nature, finally.
But this momentary silence of humanity betrayed how its everyday volume dominates, at best obscures, and at worst obliterates the rhythm of nature. Each voice out of tune. Every machine out of step.
Human beings are too loud. The machines we create are worse. The other animals must be driven mad by it. Just as I fly into a private but very real blind rage at the sound of a passing Harley, every frog or fox, deer, cicada, heron, or goose must also yearn to tell all of humanity to just freaking tone it down for a minute.
The answer, of course, lies in walkable, bikeable cities and a vast infrastructure of trails like the one that brought me to this lovely patch of nature near a river, where I can bitch about everyone else’s noise and feel quite superior indeed.
I wish more people would take the time to pack up, even for a night, and ride out past the cell towers and listen to the silence.
It’s nice. And it might change you.