America is a beautiful thing…
Headed home. Before I do, I want to talk about my motorcycle, the Revival.
The Revival is a 2021 Harley Davidson motorcycle, a remake of the iconic 1969 Electra Glide, the classic Hog. Harley Davidson made 1500 of these bikes. Mine is number 1307, Lucky 13.
It’s a horrible touring motorcycle, it’s astonishing how bad it is. The seating position is that of an old-fashioned wooden school desk; feet flat, back straight, 90-degree angles at hips and knees. The impact of any and every pothole, expansion joint and lousy bit of asphalt is transmitted directly up your spine. And because your feet are forward of your hips, you can’t use your legs to protect your back. Bumps hurt.
It weighs 864 pounds. (roughly twice the weight of my BMW touring bike). Maneuvering the bike in and out of Waffle House parking lots and around gas pumps is risky and slow (and they’ve got those big plate glass windows at Waffle House so you’ve got an audience). And you can’t get off and push it around, as I routinely do with other motorcycles, because once that 864 pounds starts to shift from vertical, it gets heavy fast and you want a leg on either side to catch it.
It handles like the hog that it is; as you set up for a turn — freeway on-ramp, one of Tail of the Dragon’s 318 curves, whatever — you’re on the brakes early because slowing down takes a while, it tips into the turn slowly and reluctantly and waddles you up to the apex. As you pass the apex and try to straighten the bike up, it resists the pull on the bars and you struggle with it, you struggle until the double yellow line and oncoming traffic are getting uncomfortably close and the bike is again vertical, you then exhale and start getting ready for the next one. It’s got very little ground clearance, so you can’t lean it very far without dragging hard parts on the pavement.
It has 97 horsepower. For an 864-pound modern motorcycle, that’s way, way, way underpowered.
The Revival is the best touring bike I’ve ever owned. By far. It represents America at one of its finest hours, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Civil Rights, color TVs in walnut cabinets, shag carpeting. It’s good union jobs and a livable minimum wage. It’s the Camaro, the Mustang and the Coupe DeVille with white wall tires. It’s Janis, Grace, Jimi and John Fogerty. It’s Nixon before most people knew he was Nixon. Sure, we had Viet Nam, but the tide was turning and Walter Cronkite was on it. The Japanese motorcycle invasion had started but we didn’t know it, all we knew about Japan was that we’d beaten them in The War. America sat astride the Harley Davidson Electra Glide and the world with pride.
Fifty years later, people of America love the Electra Glide’s revival, the color, the lines, the stature, the heft, the Americanness of it. It can’t be defined by numbers or feel at the handlebars and butt, it’s defined by the woman in the parking lot who wants a picture, the black kid on the horse, the Iraqi immigrant, the woman with the prosthetic leg. The Revival is flawed and ridiculous and it’s us. And everyone wants to talk about it. And about themselves. Wandering these United States talking to people and retelling their stories, the Revival is perfect. The Revival is a celebration of us…