Many of the same joys of walking that are lost when you drive are also lost when you ride. But many more are preserved.

A car is very much the 'unit' by which roads are designed and operate. A lane is built wide enough to hold one car with some margin. Because of this, driving on sane roads in a sane manner quickly feels less like moving through the world and more like the occupation of a series of predefined slots, connected by predefined manuevers. You are one unit large; you are in one of these lanes.

Driving in steady highway traffic, for example: you continue down your lane at an even speed, scrupulously maintaining the right spacing from the car in front of you -- the white lines on the ground to each side and the trained-in following distance overlaid ahead on your vision carving out a rectilinear envelope of space you, the experienced driver, hold position in -- not following it as it moves down a static highway, but keeping motionless in its center as you and the envelope form a unit that stays still as the world whips past. A lane change becomes almost a fixed-action pattern -- signals on, two beeps of the flasher filling a mental capacitator that lets you know you've taken it slow enough, head craning to your right shoulder to check the slow lane, followed only fractions of a second later by the eye-on-the-ball-type guided movement of your hands on the steering wheel to begin moving the car, at a rate gentle enough that you can -- just as automatically -- jerk the steering wheel back in the other direction when and if your eyes, looking through the always-shrinking gap between the B and C pillars, catch glimpse of a right-lane bandit roaring up behind you. By the time your thoughts catch up -- assuming emergency hasn't galvanized your attention -- you're safely halfway over the line.

The simple fact that a motorcycle is smaller than a car demolishes so much of this slotted nature. In order to avoid writing the eighteen millionth slop-pile of paragraphs about freedom, The Wind In My Hair or On My Legs, The Open Road, etc. - none of which are what I'm talking about - I have to fall back on one of my favorite types of sources: an essay I heavily skimmed on the computer once and have never been able to find again.

The essay -- that I never read in its entirety -- was on the opening of the movie Stalker -- which I have never seen. It focuses on the way the protagonists' beaten-up UAZ features in an early scene where the characters of the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor sneak into the Zone past military checkpoints (allegedly -- again, I've never seen it).