Tales From the Front: 
                                  Vibrante 
                        Copyright 1993 by Dave Laird

Men my age often constantly analyze things, as if seeking to reassure that
everything is still fit, and they are still able to perform those tasks
which they once performed with impunity. It is a rite of passage, for men my
age.

This Tale From the Front deals with such a test. 

The motorcycle had lingered in a dusty corner of the garage for years. The
boundless joy with which it once had greeted the highway was subdued, its
throaty cry silenced in the dim, half-light, its jaunty, rakish lines, once
a constant source of pride, had for too long been ignored, until it was now
a sulking, silent piece of iron and aluminum with no soul. 

Bird droppings from overhead, where the pigeons cooed, mated, gave birth and
died, streaked the leather seat and the fire engine red candy-apple red
metal flake paint job, through lack of use, grew dusty and dim. One fateful
day in August, as the sunlight tiptoed through the window and caught
Vibrante napping, dreaming of endless roads where a spirit could run free, I
chanced to share one of its daydreams, winging across the space, of joy and
pain, of open highways, ice-cold winds and boundless passionate speed. 

With the compassion and wisdom of an old, trusted physician, I took Vibrante
outside, and for a month bathed his wounds, stroked his fine lines with
waxes, emolients and oils, until he glistened. With a fresh battery, new set
of carburator kits, a new tire and we were almost done. One fateful morning
when the sun was still low, I turned the key, and Vibrante seethed,
"Yeesssss" through teeth gritted against sublime pleasure. "Yesssss," he
said, again and again, and roared at the top of his lungs with supreme
pleasure. 

Our first road together that day was one I have traveled thousand times,
Vibrante surged, and cried real tears going down the road, and we were as
one together, in a joyous unison of man, machine and macadam. A pact, once
put aside, was renewed, a bond, once vital was rejoined. 

We roared proudly out of town when the eastern sky was still etched with
gray, when decent citizens are either fast asleep or just stirring in
preparation for the day. In the chill morning air, Vibrante sang to me of
highways we have known together, how life was once, the roar of the wind,
and nights spent sleeping alone together underneath the stars of the desert.
Down past the Grand Coulee we roared, the road almost forgotten in lieu of
the freeway. Fingers and toes tingling from the morning mist, we stopped a
cafe vaguely remembered from years ago when last I traveled this road. 

It was boarded up, now. No pink and organdy curtains hung in the vacant
windows, no wood smoke drifted listlessly from the chimney and the grass now
grew where once there was an indelible path the back to where the outhouse
still stood. We'd had more time, in those days, to enjoy a good meal,
friendship and a good cup of coffee steeped with Jack Daniels, to give it
some authority. We'd had more time to celebrate in sleepy roadside hamlets,
where a bottle of J.D. sat under the counter for old friends, and strangers
got up to help bring firewood on cold winters nights. 

Vibrante sang our song up Highway 2, through the Wenatchee sprawl, and as
the sun finally burned away the mist, my roaring steed and I rode once more
through the acre upon acre of silent apple orchards, with boxes sitting at
the end of each row, ready for the coming harvest, the scent of crisp red
apples on the morning breeze. Just west of Wenatchee, when I stopped to put
some petrol in Vibrante, adjust the chain and speak reassuringly of
pleasures yet to come, my humble steed finally misbehaved. 

A svelte motorcycle road machine pulled in next to where Vibrante stood,
thirstily drinking down premium unleaded.  

"What brand of machine are you?" the chrome and gadget machine purred, with
just a hint of superiority. "You don't look like any touring bike I have
ever seen before." 

Vibrante peered over at the motorcycle, completed with AM/FM radio,
windshield, fairing, CD player, CB radio, trailer, Fuzz-Buster and tits and
snarled, "I am a second generation Triumph Bonneville built for speed and
pleasure, madam. If you will pardon my lack of knowledge, just what the hell
are YOU? You don't look like a motorcycle at all. You look like a Greyhound
bus on two wheels." 

"You piece of antiquity." snapped the Goldwing right back. "You are an
archaic rolling hunk of chain-driven iron. Better you should reside in a
boneyard for aged motorcycles than litter up the highway. Why," the Goldwing
gasped, peering more closely at Vibrante through its shuttered amber fog
lenses, "you don't even have a passable set of turn signals, much less a
drive shaft. I should summon a law enforcement officer right now. After
all," the Goldwing sneered, turning this way and that on its center stand,
"**I** am a Goldwing and I have a CB radio. I can call for help, when
needed."

Before the conflagration could escalate, the Goldwing's owner and mistress
and I separated the dueling steeds long enough to come to agreement. Nothing
would be said regarding the snarling that still rent the air. A road test
was in order, I said as diplomatically as I could, to see whether the
Goldwing could outrun Vibrante. 

The roadway lay before us, and as if every patrolman had heard of our plot,
we could plainly see them queueing up at the doughnut shop for early morning
rations adjacent to where we stood. At the starting line, the Goldwing was
busily entertaining its master and mistress with music and jest, while
Vibrante simply breathed "Yesssssssss," over and over again, in its peculiar
way. 

We were off! Vibrante screamed its defiance through first, second, third
gears. At eighty miles an hour, when I finally sought and was given fourth
gear, within seconds we were pushing one hundred, then one hundred twenty,
one hundred twenty five and still Vibrante screamed his joy back to the sky,
to the wind, but most of all, to the Goldwing who was fading back into the
distance further and further behind us. 

Somewhere, I'll concede, there is a place for pleasure cruisers, replete
with every entertainment device known to man. Some take great pride in
seeing how many devices, chrome gadgets and geegaws they can hang on a
motorcycle. In some terminal cases, the motorcycles get so weighted down
with gadgets and objects of art that they can no longer be driven and are
parked the roadside, made into temples and worshipped by the unwashed
masses. 

But to those who worship only the pain and ecstasy of the wind, itself,
unadorned and pure; to those who still remember the old roads where people
often used to gather and share their love, there is only the sound of the
wind in your ears, the passion for speed and the love/hate synergy between
men and their machine.