On Wheels: Why I Ride

I'd never heard of the writer Jana Richman before yesterday when I ran across her essay Why I Ride. In it she equates the freedom and strength she finds blasting down Utah passes on her BMW R1100R with the struggles of her female Mormon ancestors. Most of all, we like the passages about riding, like this one:

Trust my tires? Place my trust in strips of grooved rubber wrapped around a thin steel belt strapped to aluminum alloy? Francis Scott Key thought we might place our trust in God; Goethe suggested that we trust ourselves. I can't recall anyone who trusted tires. But leaning into a curve at 65 mph, supported only by physics and a pavement/rubber-contact width of about two inches, it is no time to contemplate the trustworthiness of tires.