Part III: Scooter guy gets hog endorsement. But why?

As DMV added a motorcycle endorsement to my Oregon driver’s license, thanks to my passing a week-end training course, I doubted I would ever again ride a motorcycle.

Let me explain.

Above all, the 15- hour course taught me healthy, possibly life-saving suspicion of motorcycles Some of the course was in a classroom dripping with cautionary tales; most was spend maneuvering these snarling two-wheelers around a parking-lot practice course.

In my first two Red Electric episodes about this nervy adventure, I mentioned a young woman who on the first day of trying out motorcycling, managed to overcome a bad case of literal foot-dragging and bike toppling. Yet by the end of four hours of patient instruction, she was zooming around the parking lot with the rest of us.

Well, on Sunday, the second and last day of in-the-saddle riding, she didn’t come back. She’d had it with motorcycles, a friend of hers in our class reported.

Hearing this, my first thought was “too bad,” and my second was “prudent decision.”

Now that I have passed the course and have my motorcycle endorsement, I’m with her. This is not a sane means of transportation.

The rest of my classmates would certainly beg to differ. They could hardly wait to get out on the open road, zipping around curves, blasting up hills, sucking up the asphalt. And I must confess I felt some exhilaration even on the parking lot, leaning into curves, hearing the rasp of the engine, feeling the surge of acceleration.

But I also took the warnings of our instructors seriously. This is one dangerous way to get from point X to point Y, and the fun parts can be the most dangerous. Solo accidents on motorcycles (ie. accidents involving no other vehicle) most frequently happen on those heady curves.

Want more abnormal? Try this: You shift with your big toe (an unnatural act if there ever was one), there’s a growling monster between your legs and the training manual is a catalogue of highway horrors and perilous obstacles— loose gravel, ruts, MAX rail grooves, wet pavement, wind, rain, bugs and rottweilers.

No, I’ve added my motorcycle endorsement in case I decide to purchase a heftier scooter for puttering around city streets. As is, I scoot on a small, 49cc-engined model, classified as a moped. My scoot is perfectly adequate, but I may want to explore scooter options at some point. For one thing, my scoot has a two-cycle engine, which pollutes than its bigger four-cycle cousins.

Riding motorcycles over the past couple of days did teach me a few handy lessons. Let's face it, riding a motor scooter is not a whole lot less dangerous than riding a motorcycle. I can apply new knowledge about how to spot a host of new dangers and about how to avoid them. I even picked up a few cornering, braking and maneuvering skills.

So I’m glad I took the Team Oregon Basic Motorcycle Training class, even for reasons that have little to do with motorcycles, except to convince me that I never want one.

Scooter Guy learns to shift gears: Part II

On this crisp Indian summer morning, 12 of us gathered in the upper parking lot of the PCC Sylvania campus to get up close and personal with a dozen motorcycles.

I’d brought my motor scooter for the hands-on, but then I figured, what the hell. How often to I get to learn to ride a motorcycle?

And learn I did, along with the 11 others.

Among us were folks who hadn’t ridden for 20 years. There were wives and girlfriends who were tired of clinging to love handles at 70 mph.

And then there were the neophytes. Scootering didn’t quite put me in that category, but motorcycles are a whole new world.

One young woman was a true wobbly novice, and I ended up running the course behind her. She kept dragging her feet, literally. She wouldn’t get up enough speed for the bike to stay upright. I watched her toppled three times. I thought the instructors might give up on her, but they kept at it. At the end of four hours, she was a happy cruiser.

And so was I. Starting, stopping, up shifting, down shifting, turning. The last isn’t as easy as it sounds. Motorcycle wisdom: Don’t look where you are going; look where you want to go, it’s the only way to get there. Aaaah sooooo ....

At the end of my time circling the parking lot (we each went about 11 miles without going anywhere in particular), I ached in places I have never ached before.

We had a two-hour classroom session after the time on the bikes. It was all about “mental motorcycling,” which is another way of saying “staying alive on two wheels going very fast.”

The course is lardered with acronyms to make the material stick. SIPDE is probably the most important one as it deals with raw survival. It covers the essentials of disaster avoidance. "S" is for Scan — as in keep your eyes open, WIDE open and on the move. "I" is for Identify — looking isn’t the same thing as seeing and recognizing. "P" is for Predict — as in, if I hit that truck that just pulled out in front of me I will die, on the other hand if I …. "D" is for Decide, as in what do I do to stay alive. And "E" is for Execute — DO IT!

Not a bad list. It might even come in handy for making lasagna.

Tomorrow we mount the bikes again to learn about swerving and braking in curves. Should be a blast.

After that, there’s the multiple-choice classroom test and, if all goes well, I’ll be certified as capable of riding one of these things. Hard to believe.

Scooter guy joins a biker pack: Part I

Last night’s first session of the Team Oregon motorcycle basics course was all in a classroom at PCC Sylvania. Book learning, or to be more exact, course manual learning.

The instructor was a slight young woman with the unlikely given name of “Kentucky.” She was an odd mix of caution and whimsy. “You like your brain? Remember to fasten your helmet,” she said with an earnest smile.

Tomorrow morning at 7:30 the class throws their collective legs over the bikes. I’m not sure the world is ready this. Some of us are utter newbies to motorcycles. Kentucky warned that some folks simply freak with a bike between their legs.

Based on what we have learned so far, I’m convinced that riding a motor scooter (that’s what I ride) is to driving a motorcycle as flying a kite is to flying a 747.

In a way this course (three classroom sessions and two rubber-meets-the-parking-lot classes) seems like overkill as I have no intention of riding a hog or sow or whatever.

Some of my classmates, however, are raring to go. We have a 16-year-old who can take apart a two-stroke engine blindfolded. He wants his license cycle endorsement big time and bad — like yesterday! We have a grandmother who craves adrenalin highs. There is a squad of beefy guys who are simply out to connect with a missing part of their personas.

It should be a wild morning on the PCC Sylvania upper lot.

My take-away from last night’s class is that a biker can’t be too well protected. I never realized the kinds of body armor these road warriors encase themselves in. Gloves worthy of a medieval joust. A helmet that puts another skull plus padding around the brain. Boots to keep blazing-hot exhaust pipes from charbroiling ankles. Ear plugs to ward of the engine's incessant rumbling growl.

I mean these people are encased. Are they having fun?

Are you kidding? They can’t wait.

And all I want to do is scoot from ‘hood to ‘hood on my faux Vespa.

I’m off to study my Basic Rider Training Guide, a manual designed to prepare me to mount in the morning — and fire up!

As my Quakers friends say, hold me in the Light!

Fear is my co-pilot

I’ve owned my sea-foam-green motor scooter, a Chinese Vespa knock-off, for three months and about 300 miles.

For the first two months, each time I would mount the rasping two-cycle steed I had this vague feeling that I was placing myself at death’s door.

Which was good because it made me hyper-alert. As I set out down our impossibly steep hill, I ventured into a wilderness infested with four-wheeled contraptions driven by creatures blind to two-wheel conveyances.

Bicyclists know the feeling, and, yes, twice a week I get on my folding bike to ride to the Southwest Community Center to exercise. Truth to tell, half the exercise involves going to and from the center.

I came to rely on my state of heightened, anxious awareness on scooter and bike. I found it carried over to driving my little SUV, which I’ve used sparingly this summer, thanks to my “alternative” forms of transportation. (Goal: make the SUV the “alternative”)

Who knows, perhaps scootering and biking made me more careful about picking up sharp objects as well.

But about a month ago, after dozens of successful scoots, I got on the steed and something was missing: fear.

Strangely, I missed fear. I wanted it back. Without it, I felt vaguely insecure. Hmmmm, my lack of fear was causing fear, but a different kind of fear — the fear of being oblivious or overconfident, rather than the fear of having a car door opened in my face or being blind-sided at the corner of Sunset and Capitol.

Fortunately, this earlier fear of bodily injury or worse, had prompted me last June to sign up to take the Basic Rider Training Course offered by Team Oregon, a motorcycle safety organization. The wait lists were so long that the earliest I could take the course was late September.

It is late September and I take the three-session course starting tomorrow. Just in time to re-instill a little, or a lot of, fear.

Of course, I’ll share the experience with you here. But for now, just the thought of the course is frightening. And that’s a good thing.