target fixation

So yesterday was the story of yesterday. Today is the story of today.

[This was written Monday night, but needed a lot of cleanup before posting.]

Point 2 of motorcycling knowledge for those of you who don't ride: The most difficult issue to overcome while learning to corner is target fixation. Basically, where your head points is where the bike goes. Seems simple, but it's not, because you naturally want to look at road obstacles, because your mind thinks that you'll be able to dodge them. You won't. You'll track right into them. Instead, you have to look for the clear path past them and through the corner. In a hairpin, that means you're looking back over your shoulder with little or not view of the pavement directly in front of you, and definitely not looking at the fast-approaching far shoulder, which is where you'll land if you miss.

This becomes absolutely crucial when said far shoulder is about two feet wide, and on the other side of it, there are a few hundred feet of sheer drop into the ocean.

It becomes double-plus crucial when you're entering said corner really hot after making an illegal pass on a cage with Indiana plates that was driving 20 under. You'd look like a total asshole for crossing the double yellow only to plunge directly into the Pacific ocean.

But yeah... that's how I spent most of my afternoon.

As before, this morning I woke up in the latest of the fleabags, wrote the prior post, then got on with getting on, at which point I noticed that the clip link's clip had yet again jumped ship. Awesome. Being in Point Arena, there was no phone service, much less internet, (much less a motorcycle shop), but I suspected that Santa Rosa would be big enough to have a shop that was open. (Point 3: Many motorcycle shops are closed Sunday and Monday.) I put this at about 90 miles, with about 70 on the coast. (It turned out I was 5 over on both estimates.) So my options were to ride 70 miles of twisting coastal highway with a chain that could theoretically let go at any time or... well... there wasn't an "or", so off I went.

Points 4 & 5: Losing a chain while riding is a big deal. A motorcycle needs to accelerate through corners. If it stops accelerating mid-corner, it falls over. This is potentially a problem, especially when falling over leaves the possibility of ending up in the ocean. Best-case, when the chain comes loose, the rear wheel loses power, the motorcycle can't accelerate, etc. Worst-case, the chain wraps itself around the rear wheel and jams on the swingarm, locking the rear wheel, greatly increasing the speed and violence with which the motorcycle falls over while simultaneously decreasing the amount of control the rider has over the process.

My approach was simple: If it was going to go, it was going to go. The transition from fine to disconnected would happen in a fraction of a second, and short of finding the right part, there was nothing I could do to stop it, so I may as well just ignore it.

So off I went with Schrodinger's chain. Fortunately, California's northern coast is beautiful. Staggeringly beautiful. Have I mentioned that? It is. My thoughts were soon not with the chain, but rather on trying to stay focused enough to not take a long ride down into the drink.

This was something of a losing battle. I was still completely subsumed by the beauty that surrounded me. Fortunately, my body can apparently ride a motorcycle on muscle memory alone.

That whole time, somewhere in the back of my mind was percolating the thought I could probably make LA by night.

Santa Rosa was amusing. Everything I don't like about California piled together in one place. It did have a Cycle Gear though, and they're open Mondays. They also had a bin full of clip link clips, which the tech gave me a small handful of, and warned me that I should really be using a rivet link. "I know."

Clip number four went on in the parking lot. It was (and still is) secured with some RTV silicone. That done, it was time to make progress to San Francisco to meet FGBKim for lunch.

Bombed down the 101. Found parking right in front of the burrito place. Met Kim and her very cool friend whose name I can't remember. Apologies to both if I was a little out of it. I blame road madness.

It's now 3:15 PM. LA is supposedly six hours away. This is looking very possible.

I-5 is the quickest, easiest way south. Throw sense out the window and head out Skyline Boulevard. Another beautiful road. Catch 9 to the coast. Lane split for the first time (legally) until 1 clears out. It quickly narrows, then finds its way back to the cliffs. This just went from "not the fastest way" to "midnight may be optimistic". Don't care. I'm sleeping in LA tonight.

Cages litter the road, but I am a passing machine. Comes from learning to ride in the city. Every opportunity taken, but no one endangered.

Points 5: Cages, I mean no specific offense, but I need to go faster than you. It's not a death wish. It's physics. At low speeds, the bike wants to fall over. I have to plan my throttle, braking, turning, and shifting to account for this. Additionally, I don't like being stuck behind you, because you generally suck at driving, and when you arbitrarily hit the brakes in a turn, that really throws me off, because...

Point 6: Most of steering a motorcycle is actually counter-steering. To turn right at greater-than-parking-lot speeds, I actually turn the bar left, the bike leans over to the right, and then goes right. This is automatic and completely intuitive. At parking lot speeds, it steers like you'd expect, which is a lot more dicey and harder to control. I try to plan my corners so that I don't have to transition between the two kinds of steering mid-corner, because that gets annoying.

In short, the bike is comfortable at high speeds and difficult at low speeds. Let me pass. I'm going to anyway. It's a lot more convenient for me and a lot less terrifying for you if you don't make me do it the hard way.

The coast never ceased to be beautiful. Not for a moment. That was the solace I took while waiting behind cars. Single-laned, traffic-signaled construction zones started appearing where slides had happened, and by jumping line, I could more-or-less ensure that I wouldn't pass many cars between. Better, no one seemed to care. No one got angry. The further I pressed south, the more motorcycles filtering through traffic seemed to be a natural thing.

Have I mentioned that it was beautiful there?

Eventually, the road straightened out. I made tracks toward my penultimate gas stop for the day. Closing on sunset, I made the call: LA by midnight, for sure. Pointed the bike down the 101, set the throttle to a fast cruise, and made time through the night. The last five miles tacked on an extra half-hour. Only three days from the I-5 debacle in Tacoma, and I'd already forgotten what a mess traffic can be, but Los Angeles was quick to remind me. Being unsure of filtering etiquette on surface streets, I mostly stuck to staying in my lane. Eventually, as it always does, traffic cleared, leaving me a few blocks from my destination.

Parked in a garage, I bid farewell to the bike for the night, and lugged my bags to my brother's apartment, looking forward to whatever is next.