In 1997, Melissa Holbrook Pierson published The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles, a delightful book that chronicles her love of motorcycles as well as the unique historical and cultural context of the two-wheeled world. In 1998, while struggling for graduate school in Philadelphia, I bought a motorbike and learned to ride.
In my first year of loving motorcycles, I read – no, I devoured – Perfect vehicle. Pierson not only artistically expresses the full range of emotions, feelings and experiences familiar to any motorcyclist and evokes the concept of “go to live, live to go”, she also taught me about the exciting new world I had come to live in.
When I read Pierson’s account of buying a Moto Guzzi Lario from a small European bike shop called The Spare Parts Company tucked away down a narrow street in the Old City area of Philadelphia, an which I regularly explore during late-night pub visits and weekend wanderings, I feel an even stronger connection to her book. I’ve been to the shop before and my girlfriend at the time was a friend of the owner.
Advertisement
On the occasion of our 25th anniversary Perfect vehicleConsidered one of the best books ever written on motorcycles, we reprinted a review published in the August 1997 issue of the magazine. horseman and can be found on our website this. We also reprinted Pierson’s introduction to the Spanish edition of the book, published in 2021 by La Mala Suerte EdicionesThe first and only publisher for motorcycle books in Spanish.
Scroll down to that intro and visit MelissaHolbrookPierson.com to order her books.
– Greg Drevenstedt, editor
About ‘Perfect Car’ Spanish Version
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Twenty-five years have passed since I started writing Perfect vehicle and the moment you are reading these words. The motivation to write, quite simply, is unbridled joy. Why has no one ever told me that motorbikes are very transportable? Why don’t people know how they have influenced, how they have enriched and condensed the experience? How are they a powerful force for self-interest?
So I tried to say in my book every last thing I could think of to say about these machines that both capture and embody the human imagination. But no one can say how much about what is essentially infinite can include “everything”. Even I will continue to find more things, and more things to say. I wrote articles, poems, and another book about bicycles. I’m still not happy. The meaning of the ride is never-ending, which is why we ride: to taste immortality in its now resounding form.
Related: Melissa Holbrook Pierson: Vol. 9 of the Rider Magazine Internal Podcast
A quarter of a century is a long time. Enough time for everything to change – governments rise and fall, species disappear, cities spread, new technologies revolutionize everyday life and restructure our brains. In that long period of time, I can now report, much has changed about motorcycles. And very little. There have been technical advancements to the bikes we ride – fuel injection, ABS, “walking by wire” (I’ve explained it to me half a dozen times to no avail), things that used to be it’s clear that machines are now controlled in the dark by computer chips. For me, it’s no longer the lengthy garage chatter between friends, where I’ll marvel at the ingenious arrangement of parts reflected in the minds of people for I am the equal marvels of nature: they manage to understand how complex systems, biomes of motorcycles, operate together and apart.
I always knew my bike had a heart, but now it has a brain of its own. In its advanced evolutionary state, it can only be taken care of in the office of the proper neurologist, I mean, the crypto trader. This has created an unhappy gap between the soul of the machine and its operator, but the trade-off is performance far beyond the imagination of the last century.
There are simultaneous changes in the types of riders. The so-called adventure bike has become extremely popular, with global journeys on it once rare but now being taken by an incredible number of people of all ages, countries, and regions. nationality and gender. The percentage of female riders has more than doubled since I started riding, and these women often pursue it in cultures that openly oppose it. They do not care; they do it anyway. That’s how powerful gravity is: we risk our lives to do it.
Related: Writers and Racers: Meet Melissa Holbrook Pierson and John Ryan
Much of the verbal talk has become reality, at least in the United States, about the “gray” of motorcyclists, and the sport’s decline in popularity among young people, who supposedly more interested in virtual life than reality with the weather and its difficulties and 360 -The view on a disappearing but still stunning planet. Economic factors are often discussed. But that’s in the little corner that I write. Turn the scope to India, which has emerged as the largest motorcycle market in the world, and watch (as I did for myself recently) the crowd of young people mesmerized by driving and where it takes you. I’m not worried about the crash of the motorcycle. The planet itself will be destroyed long before the particular happiness of riding a horse brings.
I, too, have come closer to my end. Going towards it on my bike has been the only sensible mode of transportation these years.
Motorcycles amplify all that is glorious about life. It’s not a supplement to waking up in the morning, or an occasional job. It explains everything, gives a purpose to being and a place in both community and history, things that remain and forever are inseparable, just like the road itself. I’ve lost dear friends who just happened to die doing what they loved the most. But that’s random, not causal. Riding a motorcycle has brought me the deepest friendships I have ever known, acceptance into worldwide brotherhood and the ultimate knowledge that love is real – love for collection. The collection of inimitable parts opens the mysterious door to the most important experiences, as well as the love between two people brought together by what I can only consider a magical agent. Yes, motorbikes are even matchmakers for lovebirds.
A lot has changed in the years since then. A lot of things have been preserved. I still feel so much anticipation and hope and longing and a little bit of anxiety every time I hit the first gear. The world becomes new on every ride. But now I knew a deeper secret, one that I had lived and witnessed time and time again. Motorcycles save lives.
