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| my little Pentax in action |
Disoriented and a little lost, I missed the lens and looking for good subject matter to memorialise our motorcycle escape of the day. As the pillion, it's what I do. Pillion's expected duties: look good on the bike, buy lunch, take pictures.....and most recently, don't start any fights.
When it was proven in a 2008 BRC motorcycle class, I couldn't and shouldn't drive a 2-wheeled cycle on my own, I searched for and rode with many kind motorcycle enthusiasts who offered a second seat and shared the ride. Making a record of the outing was a subtle way to insert myself into the motorcycling community. It has evolved into a psuedo-elite assignment that validates my thirst for this culture of challenge, resilience and the other adventures. But then a day came when I didn't have my trusty, tiny Pentax adventure camera; left behind in my son's back pack, it would not be back in my hands nor on a ride for a week.
Nonplussed at first, my empty pocket was merely a brief distraction; until he started the engine and the bike rumbled to life. The first few feet of rolling out the door yard felt oddly unfamiliar to me. Then refreshingly intimate as my attention was more focused on my bikerman chauffeur, now held with both of my hands, the lo ride motor-sickle steady and sure beneath us, my heightened senses of riding 'naked' (at least visually naked) filled my internal moment of re-adjustment. One layer , my small camera, removed and I was flying through the vast surround of green, and wind, breathing wholly the familiar smells of engine heat, biker leathers and sweat-stink helmets. I, boots hooked on the chrome pegs, grooving with my driver's every lean and list of his vintage bike as we threaded potholed lanes, rounded sweeping corners, and brushed arching trees pushing into our lane, without the distraction of composing a picture, was filled with a rush of gratitude.
Riding on a motorcycle bathes your senses in the all of it. Keeping my little camera in my hand or up to my eye was as dense a filter as a suit of armor. While it taught me to view the scene from the perspective of a framed and finite image, which in time, honed my mind's eye for that capture, it often left me deeply disappointed that the vast enormity of the sky or the expanse of mountain or meadow scapes, the depth of color and weight of the air, was left out of the captured picture. My photos are meant to stimulate imagination of voyeurs or to evoke a latent, complex memory within our ride; both of which seem to elicit the dimension of time and space that we travelled through.
Riding naked, visually naked, was a rebirth into the censorial infinity of motorcycle riding. Travellers through time and space, awakened to every fragile element of living...that's why we ride and why I some times won't take pictures.
~ luv, peace and love ~ el
special thanks to the biker chauffeurs who shared the ride, sparking a romance for motorcycling and with deepest gratitude for my bikerman who rolls the sentimental journeys with the one he calls, Pillion Resa (my biker name)
