Mr. Smith's Wild Ride

My friend and colleague Sam Smith recently bought a very special vintage BMW "airhead" bike and he is in the process of riding it from Arizona to Seattle. This afternoon, he sent me some photos from the road, which I'm sharing with you along with the rather interesting story of the BMW R90S.

The R90S was BMW's take on a Seventies sportbike, offering 67hp and 125mph from an aircooled 900cc flat-twin.

With a 13.5-second quarter-mile time, the big BMW was able to stay within sight of the mighty Honda CB750, if not the CBX or CB900 that followed.

Sam's bike is Daytona Orange. I suspect he paid the same kind of money that would buy me a new ZX-14R. But I didn't ask. What's important is that he's enjoying a 1,500-plus mile ride on a bike that is personally important to him and that he expects to own for a long time.

You can find out more at the R90S Site. Those of you who are bookworms will remember that Robert Pirsig's companions on the road had a BMW; it was the substantially less powerful R60/2. I was poking fun at Sam Smith that he owned basically the same bike as Oliver Sacks, but I think that a recent comment on Sacks applies to Sam as well:

The qualities that made Oliver Sacks a natural motorcyclist, an essential paradox of a person—he who heads out in order to head inward, who by binding himself tightly to the earth through every sense seeks the frisson of escaping it—are those that made him a great neurologist, thinker, friend, and writer. He is ambitious yet prone to the vagaries of luck.

Now, you see, that's some deep philosophical shit right there. But that's how Sam is. I'm wired more simply, me and myself. I ride a motorcycle because it gets places faster than a car and it is easier to park and because I personally demand that all of my experiences be delivered to me in as unfiltered a form as possible, blood and sweat and scent and pain and ecstasy and crippling depression and technicolor highs, the hot wire to the amygdala, the risk of death triumphant over the certainty of boredom otherwise.

I hope that Sam finds what he's looking for on that long ride, and I hope the same for you, dear readers, and I hope to see some of you out there on that road.