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" My wife, Lisa, has been a biker for more than 40 years. As a teenager, she had a boyfriend who rode a Hercules. He was a maniac, prompting Lisa to get off the back of his bike and teach herself how to ride on a 1969 BMW R60/2. She is impossibly cool and sexy when she rides. The leather jacket with just enough jagged scuffs. The well-worn gloves slipped over the cuffs. The way she shakes her luscious mane of jet-black hair after she takes off her helmet. Every man who does not ride is a sucker for a woman who does. We met in 1998 in Seattle. After copious amounts of booze and cigarettes at the hip late-night spot Palace Kitchen, she took me back to her house to see her bike, another &amp;#039;69 R60/2. Without going into detail\u2014although this is a magazine dedicated to detail\u2014it turned out to be a very dazzling night, the equivalent of a 1,200-cc V-twin. I knew Lisa loved me when several weeks later she let me try the bike. It had a kick-starter that would not budge. Lisa gently asked me to step aside and turned it in one downward stroke. She then carefully showed me the basics: the clutch and shift levers, the front brake lever and back brake pedal, the throttle. I pulled in the clutch and revved up the throttle. I did not stall out. I was impressed with myself. Lisa was not.  &amp;quot;Why are you revving the throttle?&amp;quot; she asked. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t that what Sal Mineo did in The Wild One?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sal Mineo wasn&amp;#039;t in The Wild One.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Anyway, that&amp;#039;s what all bikers do in biker films.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You realize revving the throttle like that is pointless unless you ride a Harley-Davidson and think you&amp;#039;re required to make a lot of noise.&amp;quot; Lisa told me it was all about timing: clutch lever slowly out, throttle slowly open, smoothing into first gear, and then clicking it up the ladder. Her last words were &amp;quot;Just don&amp;#039;t tip it.&amp;quot; Well \u2026 Lisa came running.  &amp;quot;Are you okay, baby? Is anything hurt?&amp;quot;  Just for the record, I was fine, too. Thanks for asking. Lisa promised another lesson soon. Sixteen years later, with me on the cusp of 60, it still hadn&amp;#039;t happened. I hadn&amp;#039;t touched a motorcycle since.  I always felt terribly left out. Lisa often described to me the singular feeling of being completely in the moment on a motorcycle, every fiber of focus on the ride to the exclusion of all else, the way in which the seasons change in the course of a single mile\u2014the summer heat of a straightaway, the autumn cool as you slice through a shade of trees.  She belonged to Seattle&amp;#039;s Vintage Motorcycle Enthusiasts club and had a coterie of male biker buddies. They rode Indians, Ariel Square Fours, Norton Manxes, and Aermacchis. And, as far as I could tell, they had not shaved since 1967. When Lisa got on the phone with one of them or saw them in person\u2014usually at Seattle&amp;#039;s legendary repair shop Poke&amp;#039;s Cycle, which has since closed\u2014they might as well have been speaking in tongues: pistons and pushrods and crankcases and camshafts. Since the only method of propulsion that had ever made intuitive sense to me was the car Fred Flintstone drove, the language was intriguing. So was how they all seemed much happier when their bikes did not work than when they did. Discussions became animated as each expressed their own diagnosis with absolute conviction\u2014even after being overruled. The brotherhood and sisterhood of bikers was definitely a little weird. But there was also something beautiful about them, an entire culture dedicated not only to their bikes but also to each other. They were individual and idiosyncratic, the last gasp of American renegade, the essence of existential freedom, hitting the road and passing minivans in which families headed for some crowded vacation spot already were trying to kill each other.  I got tired of wondering what it would be like to ride a bike. You only live once\u2014although many would argue that bikers don&amp;#039;t even live that long, given the danger. That was part of it too: a way of feeling young and daring, a late-life crisis where the red sports car wouldn&amp;#039;t work because I had already done the red sports car in the midlife crisis. So in the summer of 2014, I told Lisa I was going to learn how to ride. She supported and encouraged me, although she thought I had little shot of staying upright. I was determined to prove her wrong. NEXT MONTH Buzz Bissinger is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist and the author of Friday Night Lights. In next month&amp;#039;s issue, he takes his motorcycle license test \u2026 on a Yamaha scooter.     This story originally appeared in the March 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a19213/27-pmx-2016-03-01-welcome-to-biker-land-193-3/>