Heads at the Little Big Farm. 5.
1984. Fast Bike Ride.
“Some would suggest that the extension of consciousness into devices, beginning with the first tool, reached its zenith with the invention of the motorcycle.”
Konsk: Technology, the motorcycle as a route to altered states of consciousness.
The traffic became denser at first as Spicer made his way towards the town centre. This part of the journey, slow and awkward, was an unwanted necessity if he wished to reach the open roads in the countryside beyond. He both hated and loved its stop-start nature, for while allowing time for the engine to warm up, it left him free to vent his growing rage upon the urban world.
The High Street was a slow crawl, first passed British Home Stores and families squeezing through the double doors; fighting to buy their useless, coveted crap, was his thought. Then Woolworth's with its usual clots of Saturday morning kids jostling to spend their pocket money at the pick-and-mix counter.
“Rot your teeth!” Spicer yelled in passing, “Little twats!”
He opened the throttle in short bursts, allowing the bike to surge forward to overtake the stalled traffic, squeezing between narrowing gaps, forcing cars to brake suddenly and pedestrians crossing the road to leap back in fright. His response to their angry looks or the blare of their horns was to present the gloved two fingers of his left hand and spit phlegmatically at the windscreens followed a litany of curses.
Next was Curry's with a window full of the latest electrical goods, transistor radios, stereo systems, colour television sets and across the road, Dixon's with a near identical range plus cine and 35mm cameras.
Spicer was shaking his head in disbelief at it all. Its just crap! He was thinking, what is the point of accumulating yet more crap? Because its better than the last lot of crap? Its still fucking crap!
Something nameless was surging within him, a growing intensity that he masked with his familiar anger. Something's gonna happen, he thought. He could feel it. Summat’s gonna fuckin’ happen!
At the foot of the hill, a cluster of people were gathering, more arriving; placards were being handed out.
Another pointless fuckin' demo, shaking his head again, thinking protesting for the right to crawl underground and sweat at a coal face, digging the black gold for the Man! He couldn't believe it.
“Wasting yer time!” He roared as he passed. “You need fuckin' guns!”
Each set of traffic lights served only to increase the rage, winding him up as he in turn wound the throttle. He forced his way through to the stop line and waited, holding the machine in first gear, alternately releasing then gripping the clutch lever, allowing the bike to make little leaps and bounds forward, as though it were the barely controlled force, rather than him. The front tyre edged over the line, the rear kicked up flecks of gravel that resounded tinnily against the bright paintwork of the surrounding vehicles.
Settling his battered helmet more firmly upon his head and re-seating the goggles around his eyes, he wound the throttle open and closed. The diminutive racing baffles in the silencers added a distinctive crackle to the exhaust note. With each howl he peered into the cars to either side, begging for a response to kick against. None came; the occupants paid very close attention to their instrument panels, their hair or radio and tried to ignore him.
Lucky for them, thought Spicer, fucking lucky for them! Fuckin' wimps!
At the next set of lights he flipped up the cap on the petrol tank and swayed the bike from side to side, sloshing the volatile liquid about inside, twisting at the throttle till the two-stroke motor fairly screamed. He was not just ensuring there was a sufficient quantity; could he make out the fuel level falling?
"The sooner it’s gone, eh?" He grated, “the fuckin’ better.”
He thrust his helmeted head towards the cars on either side, each in turn.
“The sooner its fucking gone, eh? Eh?”
At least part of the reason for his attachment to this two-stroke was its justifiable reputation for being a thirsty beast. Not that he cared from a monetary point of view, being as he was a practised syphoner and stole the bulk of his petrol anyway.
No, his real reasoning, flawed or not, was he thought that the sooner the oil was used up and the tottering edifice of capitalist, consumerist society had collapsed in the stinking heap of its own waste products, the better, for him and those like him.
He looked up and around, as though rising from an inner reverie and took up his chorus.
"The sooner it’s all fuckin' gone, eh?" He raged at an elderly man in the vehicle to the left who remained sitting rigidly face forward.
"Then we'll fuckin' see, eh?"
He stood up tall astride the bike and looked around him, lips twisting into a fierce grin. He found himself surrounded by lumbering family estate cars, young faces pressed against the glass, wide eyes glued on him.
“What’ll you do then, eh?” He roared at all and sundry, “You’ll be knackered then, yer bloody jobs and mortgages won't help you then, will they? Fuckin’ wankers!”
The needle of the tachometer swung wildly with each scream of the engine, climbing the dial towards the thin red line. The traffic light ahead still showed red and Spicer thought he was beginning to detect a similar coloured haze growing at the periphery of his vision. One eye, the right, began to screw itself closed, drawing up that side of his face, the nostril flaring, lips forming a twisted half snarl. Better hurry up, he thought, summat’s definitely gonna happen.
"Better fuckin' hurry up!"
He was about to plant a booted foot in the curvaceous rear body panel of a Baron import when the light went amber. Automatically Spicer dumped the clutch and the front wheel leapt from the tarmac as the bike lurched forward.
"Fuckin' lucky for thee!" He yelled, balancing the onrush of power against gravity to keep the front wheel floating as he tore across the junction.
He wound the bike up through the gearbox, muttering a last few incoherent curses to himself before the wide beam of his attention began to narrow down to a precise focus through his clenched right eye.
There was a long, fast left that peeled off the one way system and on into a steady climb out of town with the bulk of the traffic in his direction falling away. He eased the throttle back for the speed camera, passing it at a mere 8% over the national limit and giving it the fingers.
Then he eased his bum back into the hump of the seat and critically assessed the road conditions. The surface was reasonable, dark tarmacadam having been re-laid recently and not too badly with only a minor rippling, noticeable as a slight tremble coming up through the front forks.
Of course there had been a few additional essential diggings almost immediately after the new surface was finished, water pipes, more phone lines buried in a narrow trench just out from the gutter. These resulted in the odd patch of raised tarmac but nothing too serious. The road had dried well after a brief shower sometime earlier but the air still felt slightly damp. This was a good thing, Spicer reasoned, meaning that the carburettors were sucking in a tad of moisture that, as water did not compress well, marginally increased the compression ratio of the engine and thus the power. Nice.
The arrhythmic rattle of the two-stroke engine finally evened out as the motor reached operating temperature and now took on a fluid wail, rising and falling as he explored the responsiveness of the throttle.
Not bad at all, he thought. In fact, fuckin’ good with the possibility of excellent! So long as no other fucker fucks things up.
The traffic on his side of the road had become lighter still, useful spaces beginning to appear between vehicles. Spicer started to really wind it up, turning the twist grip back a little further and letting the rev counter needle just float into the red before making each gear change. The accompanying howl of the motor approached a screaming crescendo before dropping as he shifted gear to begin its cacophonous climb once again. The cool morning air blasted at his exposed cheeks and nose, bringing the red of blood to the surface.
As he got faster, more information came in and there was more processing to be done with less time to do it in. He pulled the throttle back, moving out to take a car with the slightest shift in body weight. This one’s a Morris Traveller with wooden framing to the body; wooden framing! Can you fucking believe it? A momentary vision of two kids pressing against the side window, then there’s a car coming at him, fast, a little white face with a round O of a mouth. Curl back in, cog it down a peg and wind it back up, out around the next, save the seal sticker peeling on the back bumper, oncoming truck, got time to take the next as well? Yeah, fuck it, open it up and hang on; listen to that wail!
It’s going well, although he doesn’t allow himself to become complacent. The moving obstacles are well spaced, allowing a sustained high speed without the need for hard braking, just the fast curving in and out around the vehicles he overtakes that now appear to be coming backwards towards him. The oncoming traffic is rushing at him at combined speeds in excess of a hundred and ten miles an hour. This is exciting. The assessment of the complex, three dimensional, ever-changing situation becomes very rapid, nearly instantaneous, intuitive, no time to consciously think about it, running on nerve responses, a habitual feel, the drumming of the shock absorbers, the pull of gravity defeated by the acceleration.
Consequently, there is less room for anything else. Time falls away, all the concerns of past and future drowned in the howl of the exhaust note as he is compressed into this densely packed now. Personality, character becomes only a minor detail, of little consequence, left behind like the cars he overtakes, barely visible in the blur of the bar end mirrors where they shrink rapidly to points before fading out of existence.
It is no longer a person, Spicer, riding a motorcycle, but rather a focus of awareness that extends into the machine and bleeds out into the surroundings. Who is to say whether he feels the slight grain of the road surface through his hands or the tyres? Down where the front wheel meets the tarmac, small pieces of gravel leap up and flick away. As he cranks it over the double white lines waver under his toe.
At the top of the hill, with the needle well stuffed into the red in fourth he kicks it up into top and winds the throttle back as far as it will go, against the stop. There's a screaming from vocal chords and exhausts and a right smack in the seat of the pants as the duo lurch forward and over the brow of the hill between ranks of towering beech trees. There is the familiar illusion of a vast vista rushing away before him into far, blue hills, the sides of the roads converging to a distant, single vanishing point upon which his attention is riveted.
Everything falls away, even his anger, stripped away and abandoned in the twin spirals of blue smoke that curl behind him and are gone. He becomes motionless, it is instead the world that tilts and adjusts itself around him, hurtles beneath him, rushes around and past him. Reality simplifies to a single now through which flows only information, energy, totally lacking in labels. A fragile peace descends upon the universe and the entity once known as Spicer.
Thanks for reading. As always, comments welcome. That’s the lot for this latest batch of Konsk, for now. Next up is back to the Real Coed Y Brenin with Penrhos Wood, the ecosystem that developed after the ice retreated, a primaeval forest of largely Welsh oak (sessile oak) that persisted for many thousands of years before the local aristocrat decided to have it cut down to smelt iron and make money for him.
An early example of capitalism’s exploitation of the natural environment that had him dragged before the highest court in the land, the Star Chamber and committed to imprisonment in the Tower of London but not because of his act of environmental destruction- the plot thickens! Till then, stay safe, if you can. Hwyl! Chris.