Cheap Seats

Cheap Seats

CW SPECIAL SECTION

IT WAS ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S PAL GERTRUDE STEIN, according to Wikipedia, who took her car to a Parisian shop to have some work done. Unimpressed by the repair, she complained to the shop owner, who then yelled at his young mechanic: "You are all a génération perdue!"— a lost generation. Those in their 20s and 30s today aren't suffering from collective PTSD brought on by WWI, since many of them didn't go to war, but they probably have played enough "Call of Duty" that they'll think they did 40 years from now.

Apart from the rise of the video game and reddit.com, a forest of condos and strip malls that sprang up on the vacant lots where many of us learned to ride years ago didn't help steer kids into motorcycling. And the ascension of the sealed-for-life Camry didn't lead any new Bruce Springsteens to claim they'd found the secret to the universe in the engine of an old parked car. To pound the nail home, the economic meltdown of the past half-decade has been particularly tough on the young people and blue-collar dudes who once were the biggest buyers of motorcycles.

It didn t help matters that most manufacturers were caught flat-footed by the Great Recession or that we magazine types were happy to be caught up in an upward spiral of faster, better, more expensive. Once again, we all learn that hard times bring out the good in most people and teach us to appreciate the small things. Small things displacing around 250 cubic centimeters, for instance, that take us to our happy place and leave enough change in our pockets for a hamburger and a Coke when we get there.

Here's to the new wave of first motorcycles that old guys will be bending our monitors about 50 years from now. Heck, a few of them are good enough to ride off into the sunset even if you've been at it since the Hoover administration. Happy days are here again. Grab your ticket to ride.

John Burns