Turn It Around

See me? I'm the soaking wet one.

I was all set for motorcycle safety class at the technical college in Columbia. I'd been told to expect a roomful of young guys and an instructor in leather chaps who sauntered around asking each person why he was taking the class. Almost all of them would answer "To meet girls."

I was so excited by this prospect. I was going to position myself in such a way as to be the last one asked, so that I could shock them all by answering, "To meet girls." Oh! I was going to be so funny, the class clown!

Imagine then, my disappointment when, not only was the instructor not wearing leather chaps, but out of eleven students, nine of us were women. Actually, I wasn't disappointed at all. Female Power! When it was my turn to answer why I was taking the class, I said, "I'm tired of riding bitch." Which was, in fact, the truth.

We spent precious few hours in the dry warmth of the classroom. We bitchen biker babes (and two unremarkable guys) spent twelve hours in the pouring rain "on the range." The high both Saturday and Sunday was 44 degrees. I'm not whining. Okay. I'm whining. Where was that hot March weather that caused my impulse purchase of a motorcycle last weekend? The only thing that kept it from being utter misery was this thought: I'm learning to ride a motorcycle!

Notice Grumpy's big black and yellow umbrella. Grrr.

There were two teachers. One (let's call him Friendly) was nice when we screwed things up, couldn't navigate the tightly-spaced cones, dropped bikes. Friendly would gently correct and then, when we got it right, he'd smile broadly and clap and say, "Yeah! There you go! Good job!" The other one, Grumpy, yelled a lot, and groaned, and yelled some more. "No, no, NO!" He'd scream. On the off chance we did something right, the best we could hope for was a grunt.

When it came time for the road test, I am sure I'm not alone when I say how much I dreaded putting my cold, wet crotch back on that cold, wet seat for another round of Grumpy's yelling. Two of us were hypothermic to the point of teeth chattering. We sat on our wet bikes in our wet clothes waiting our turns to complete seven impossible exercises, like make two consecutive U-turns in a blue box the size of my living room without going outside the lines. Then get the bike up to 18 miles per hour and come to a sudden stop in an orange box the size of a laptop. The colors were impossible to distinguish on the wet pavement in the gray light of the late, rainy afternoon.

We did it!

Discouraged and discontent, hungry, and shivering, I was sure I was failing.  I completed only one U-turn and it was well outside the lines. When I stalled in the little orange box, Grumpy said "Arrgh." His pen seemed to move independently as it checked boxes on his clipboard in a very negative way.

In the end, we sat in the classroom watching an extremely boring video on DOT Snell motorcycle helmets while casting surreptitious glances as Grumpy scored our tests. That might have actually been worse than riding in the rain. But when he did the first nice thing he'd done all weekend and handed out bright orange envelopes to every last one of us, we celebrated with stale Krispy Kremes and took turns drying our crotches with the Xlerator hand dryer in the women's bathroom.

We were ready to ride.