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Riding the Range
Riding the Range
Stress, Success
and Failure at the School for Street
Motorcyclists
By Jeffrey the
Barak
Published May 2002
It may be a cliché to call this a mid-life
identity crisis, but at the ripe old age
of 45 I suddenly find myself with an overwhelming
desire to put an amusement park between
my legs.
What kind of amusement park? The wet kind
with killer whales or the kind with G-forces,
twists, turns and acceleration? Of course!
I suddenly want to ride a motorcycle.
Thirty years of car driving have not delivered
banking, leaning and acceleration comparable
to the forces available to a motorcyclist.
The bike is the ultimate thrill ride that
can go anywhere and deliver a tilting picture
of the world flashing by. To ride is to
become intimate with the air around you.
The air becomes your aura, something that
doesn’t happen when you simply roll
down the window in your Ford.
And then there is self-image! There’s
the image of spluttering around on an old
Italian two-stroke scooter with a fifties
style Italian beauty sitting sidesaddle
on the back seat. There’s the image
of a racing styled street bike with a rear
mono-shock, dipping into the curves and
prancing out into the straights. And of
course there’s the fat and noisy giant
cruiser, gleaming in the sun and setting
off all those useless car alarms.
Why now? Why at 45? Well every boy likes
his toys, and a quarter of a century ago
I came pretty close to becoming a motorcyclist.
But a deadly meeting between a close friend’s
head and the asphalt and a visit to the
motorcycle ward of the local hospital inspired
me to retire to the metal shell of the motorcar
for the rest of the century.
But lately I’ve been standing in the
wind upon a 15MPH electric scooter, obeying
bicycle laws and diligently calculating
battery range and distances between two
points. It occurs to me that with the proper
training, the chances of getting injured
in a motorcycle accident are no greater
than the chances of being wiped out in the
bike lane. It’s time for a calculated
and managed risk.
With this in mind, I part with $200 and
sign up for a 16 hour Basic Rider Course
at the Motorcycle Training Center in North
Hollywood, California, otherwise known as
1-800-CC-RIDER. Eight hours in a classroom
and Eight hours on a small motorcycle in
a huge college parking lot, guaranteed to
greatly increase your chances of survival
in the traffic, and also a way to waive
the riding part of the DMV test that adds
that magic letter M to your driver’s
license.
They provide the bikes and the helmets;
I bring the gloves, boots and eyewear. The
instructions are clear. Boots must cover
the anklebones; leather gloves must cover
the wrists and there should be no bare skin
showing on the legs or arms.
Easy you say, just wear jeans and a leather
jacket! Well it’s not that simple,
90-degree April temperatures in North Hollywood
have led to the rules relaxing as far as
upper body clothing goes. They let you ride
the range in a sweatshirt.
My first morning in a sweltering and stuffy
classroom under the supervision of an instructor
named Cary, is fun, aside from the heat.
North Valley College is air conditioned,
but apparently not on this day. On the way
in I see the earlier students riding the
range in their first and second on-bike
classes. The bikes look reasonably new and
everything looks like a fun game.
In the classroom for the first of two four-hour
sessions, I am relieved to note a slow pace
of learning. The information exchanged in
over four hours is the equivalent of say
four minutes in an advanced physics lecture
room.
We are shown slow and amusing videos depicting
talking bikes and bad actors, but it’s
not all bad. There is a fairly well produced
video section explaining leaning and controlling
the machine. This first four-hour classroom
session is really to prepare us for the
written test the second week and also to
prepare us for our bike time on the range
early the second morning. The characters
that make up my fellow students vary greatly
in age, appearance and attitude. A young
girl named Linda arrived late this first
morning and having heeded the warning in
our mailed reservations, proceeds to beg
for forgiveness and permission to join.
The instructor has clearly already decided
to give her a break but she begs in such
a lovely manner that watching this is a
pleasure.
Our teacher teaches in the friendliest
way possible and introduces us to basic
principles such as the most critical differences
between riding and car driving.
The words stability and vulnerability sum
it all up. We know riding motorcycles is
potentially dangerous. It’s about managing
the risk to make it as safe as possible.
That’s why we are here on the range
instead of learning the hard way out there
on the streets and highways.
We learn that in the event of a mishap,
which is a nice way of describing a potentially
lethal and certainly painful accident, the
proper gear can often prevent injury. We
learn that knowing when and how to corner,
swerve and brake can often help us to avoid
collisions.
From time to time Cary repeats something.
He had pre-warned us at the start of the
class that when he did this, it was a tip
that we would be tested on the answer. From
time to time a key point would be repeated
three times, a sure clue that it would be
on the test the following week.
And then we get to ride our invisible bikes.
In the classroom we are instructed on types
of bikes, types of helmets, types of clothes
and pre-ride checks of the motorcycles.
We are taught to mount and dismount our
invisible steeds and act it out en masse
in the class. We are taught about braking,
stopping, shifting up, shifting down, and
the "friction zone" which is the
point when the clutch begins to engage during
the easing out of the left lever.
We are told where we will usually find
all the controls, levers, buttons, taps
and stands on the average bike and what
to do with them. Finally, Cary demonstrates
the hand signals that our instructors will
use to communicate with us tomorrow morning.
And all this in 90 degree heat and no air.
And then it’s the cool dark fog of
the next morning. Sunday at 06:00 for an
06:30 start. The first thing that happens
is they put you on sport bike and have you
traverse a canyon at 100MPH. No really,
after an inspection of your clothing to
make sure you listened in class the day
before, each student is assigned to a motorcycle
according to size. The tallest guys got
the dual-purpose trail bikes and the tiny
Asian and Latina girls get the mini-cruisers
with the low seats. I got a plain vanilla
extra boring Honda 250. This was okay for
my nervous reintroduction to riding after
a 24-year gap since my last experimental
attempt but I have to say that the handlebars
were a bit low and it was later going to
prove difficult to maintain the knuckles
higher than wrist position that prevents
the over-use of throttle. But then I’ve
always had wrists that don’t bend up
very far; I have to do push-ups with my
fists because I can’t put my palms
flat on the floor.
Now it is plain to see at this point of
the course why the graduating students are
able to reduce their chance of an accident
by 90%. We are gradually introduced to safe
control of a basic motorcycle, one slow
step at a time.
We go from finding the controls to walking
the bike forwards and backwards to mounting
and dismounting and then straddle walking
the bike. The latter technique definitely
puts the pressure on the men in the class
and there is quite a lot of standing and
adjusting of pants following each extended
straddle walk. Next, each half of the class
pushes the other half and releases them
so that they coast across the range and
brake to a stop.
Almost riding now, we are taught to find
the friction zone, that place in the release
of the clutch where the engine begins to
engage the drive train. Everything is introduced
to us a step at a time and under full supervision
for our own protection.
Gradually, as the morning progresses, we
get to ride the course in first gear and
we get to stop many, many times. It’s
repetition that we need and better here
than out on the street. It slowly begins
to be second nature to start, shut down,
mount, dismount, take off, stop and corner.
Then we swerve through cones and ride in
progressively smaller ovals, both clockwise
and counter-clockwise, all accompanied by
full explanations.
Now I have to be honest, I run into some
problems. It takes me a while to learn to
apply my brakes smoothly. My Phat Flyer
Electric Scooter is to blame for this. Braking
on the Flyer requires a very hard and fast
squeeze to have any effect. That’s
not a good idea on a motorcycle! But the
hardest thing for me is to get my right
arm low enough to get it below the level
of my knuckles. Consequently I tend to have
a little too much throttle from time to
time. Other than that, I am able to control
my little bike very well. My biggest screw
up is during an exercise towards the end
of the day that involves stopping with the
rear brake only and shifting down to first
at the same time. My stopping distance is
triple the expected and my revs are embarrassingly
high. I get it right on the second attempt
though.
Some of my classmates are not doing so
well. One of the charming tiny Asian girls
falls off the bike a couple of times and
eventually leaves the course to return for
a second attempt at a future date. Another
gentleman who is rather portly keeps stalling
his bike. This is a guy who has already
purchased a new Harley Davidson and is just
dying to be able to ride the thing.
On a slow tight turn that involves downshifting,
braking, turning tightly with the clutch
in, and then easing out the clutch and applying
throttle to power out of the curve, I actually
get a "perfect" comment from the
strict military style instructor called
John. This pleases me immensely.
After four hours we have gone from being
unable to hold up a machine to being in
fairly good control of the same machine.
The sun is out, it is beginning to get very
hot, and we are all physically drained.
The afternoon class is about to do what
we had just done, in sweltering heat. Driving
home in the insane flow of the busy freeway
at 80MPH in my car I try to imagine myself
being in the same spot on a motorcycle.
No way man, I am not ready for that yet!
A week later and we are back in the classroom.
The air conditioning works today and there
is yet another different instructor. Throughout
the classroom portion of this course we
follow the same format as the previous week
but deal with more advanced topics in order
to prepare us for the second day of riding.
The videos seem a little less corny and
the written test at the end seems very easy.
I didn’t stick around for the results
but I’m sure I scored close to 100%.
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The following morning we are back on the
range for our second and last riding class,
with our fifth and sixth new teachers. Today’s
class is very challenging. We stop straight
with locked rear wheels, we weave through
cones, and weave and steer through widely
split cones. We straighten up and come to
a short stop from a banked curve, and we
swerve past an imaginary truck and stop
alongside on command. We even ride a figure
eight, calculating the gap in the traffic
that is our fellow students. I had been
allowed to ride a different bike on this
day, thereby solving the too-low handlebars
problem.
Linda, the girl who arrived late for the
first class, expressed trepidation at every
stage, but then succeeded in executing each
stage without a problem. Towards the end
of the session, we are involved in exercises,
which require us to go one at a time through
the range. So here we are in traffic, in
a long stationary line of bikes in the increasing
valley heat, with our engines running and
sickly exhaust gas filling our lungs and
clothing. I am getting a headache.
We take a break to fill out a customer
satisfaction questionnaire. We rate our
six instructors on various aspects of the
job they have done and fill in suggestion
boxes. I suggest repainting the lines and
cleaning the cones for better contrast.
I can barely see either.
And then it’s test time. The instructors
take off their nice friendly hats and put
on their DMV strict hats. They tell us not
to be nervous because we have to completely
screw up and lose more than 20 points to
fail the test. Linda says she is nervous
and I feel nervous myself, even though at
this point in the game, I have already made
the decision that motorcycling is just not
for me. There are just too many outside
risks. We may have been taught control of
the machine, we may have been taught how
to scan, interpret, predict, decide and
execute, and we may have increased our odds
by being here for sixteen hours, but I have
made this decision without even realizing
it, until now.
Test time. We line up in a line of eleven
bikes. For the test we repeat a handful
of the exercises we have done in the class.
We have been told to relax. We know it will
take a royal screw up to lose enough points
to fail the test. Here we go.
Weaving through cones. I did this before
without a problem but now I’m off course.
I can’t possible turn enough to get
to the left of the next cone so I slow.
Too much! My foot goes down - automatic
points loss. I still can’t get back
on the right line through so I just pass
the cones and head for the corner. Exiting
the corner, still bewildered, I cross the
outside yellow line. I make a complete screw
up of the test. There are two more tests,
but it’s too late. We return our bikes
to the grid for the second class to use
and power off for the last time.
The instructor calls me over. "Jeffrey",
he says. "Twenty-one points deducted."
I tell him I know. I completely messed up
the first part. "You can take the test
again." He says. "Just call the
office and come down at the end of a four
hour class and see if you can get in to
retake the test".
At this stage I really wish I had lost
a couple less points so I could be done
with it all, but I decide to wait for Monday
morning to make a decision. I follow him
over to the rest of the group. He tells
them they all passed. I realize I’m
the only one who failed. Linda runs over
and hugs the instructor and we all laugh
at her display of exuberance.
Two weeks later, my ten classmates will
receive their certificates. They are to
go and get their full licenses and practice
what they have learned in as little traffic
as possible until their confidence rises.
I drive my car home and then go for a short
ride on my electric scooter. Standing up
in the breeze at 15MPH in the back alley
it actually feels pretty fast, and quiet,
and it doesn’t smell. I shower, take
a nap, go to my dance class and six hours
after the rider course, my nostrils are
still giving me carbon monoxide. No wonder
I couldn’t find those cones!
Do I rebook the final test and get a letter
M on my license or just walk away with sixteen
hours of life’s experience under my
belt? I still can't decide. I don't want
to become a CC Rider, but it seems a shame
to waste those sixteen hours.
Jeffrey the Barak
is the publisher, editor and designer of
the-vu. He's very good at driving a car.
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