I moved out here from the Midwest to this city on a desert almost three years ago. In Chicago there is a hopping vintage and café motorcycle scene. In Milwaukee the café bike culture is solid and eventful. One thing I noticed when I started investing myself in the bike world here in Phoenix-land was that the aesthetic leans to the cruiser and the chopper.

Why is the vintage and café scene so thin here? There are a lot of vintage bike aficionados here in the Valley, but they seem to keep to themselves. There are also a lot of people caught in-between: they have some kind of custom or bobber or rare bike, but it isn’t exactly a café and it isn’t exactly a chopper, so where do they belong?

Cultures vary from locale to locale. For some reason, café culture cemented itself in the Midwest and places in northern California, but a more chopper “kulture” tied itself to so.Cal and the Southwest.

I am one of the people caught in-between. I have a somewhat rare bike that is not a sport-bike, not quite vintage, not exactly a café bike and not a chopper. I have had café bikes in the past and built some fun rides, but I don’t have one presently. So, where do I fit? I gravitate to the vintage bike crowd because we share a philosophy and relationship to motorcycles. People who get their hands dirty and understand what it’s like to have to figure out a way to bend metal to make a part fit from a wholly different bike. The motorcycles themselves are often somewhat laborious to ride. There is no traction control or modern suspension. Riding a vintage bike is a physical, visceral event.

Café bikes have a unique aesthetic. Hard, uncompromising, fast. There is a toughness to their straight line build: head bracing into the wind, legs back on rear-sets, arms reaching for the clip-ons. I like tough.

But the Southwest’s idea of tough is housed in a lanky, leaned back, arms reaching upwards to hold the bars of the raked out front end. I appreciate the style, but it’s not my taste. The choppers don’t handle well, you can’t run twisty roads with that awkward frame. I like my form with  function and café bikes are created to handle well and race around twisty roads.

So, why is there not more of a café and vintage scene here? It is not for lack of love of the style. This question has perplexed me since I arrived and I still have no answer.

I know that I begin an awful lot of my writings with the phrase, “I still can’t believe that I live in such a beautiful place,” but every time I go for a ride I am amazed by the fantastic landscape that makes up the southwest, specifically, central and northern Arizona.

Today I went on a usual little jaunt out to Bartlett Lake. It’s a fairly quick ride, usually started with a visit to the Cave Creek Coffee Company. Then off on the nicely curvy 20 miles of road out to Bartlett Lake. It’s close enough to town that you can just pop over for a quick morning ride, but it’s isolated enough that you feel refreshed and out of the city.
I couldn’t do that in Chicago!

It’s fun riding with people who I ride with frequently; you learn each others patterns and rhythms and riding styles. There is a synchronicity that happens while riding with a known group. There is a certain communication among bikers and it gets tighter once you have ridden so many miles together. An outside observer might think we read each others minds, but it’s more that we know our friends’ body language so well our response to a gesture or movement is almost instantaneous. In order to have a pleasant, not knocking into each other ride, we have to adhere to some agreed upon standards that you theoretically don’t have to discuss; it’s part of the motorcycle way. (“Motorcyclist’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind”?) But sometimes you find a rider who doesn’t ride in formation, who squiggles wherever on the road they want with an uneven rhythm. We don’t like riding with those guys and they don’t get invited back. This is all part of the Social contract, which as laid out by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, is both a philosophy on governance and community harmony.

Last night my boyfriend and I went out to eat with his nine year old daughter. He told her not to eat with her elbows on the table, then consulted her to not bounce around in her seat. When she asked the inevitable “Why not?” he talked to her about how when in public one needs to behave politely. This answer was not satisfactory, although she did settle down.

This started me thinking, “How does one explain the concept of the Social contract” to a nine year old?