Barber’s Motorcycle Museum is in Leeds, Alabama. It is the largest motorcycle museum in the world.  Cool? Yes.  That means it is 20 minutes away from us.  I’ve been twice.

Do I ride motorcycles? No.  My father had a motorcycle when I was a kid & I would ride on the back, holding onto him tight.  I remember leaning into a turn, it was a dance. The power to lean into a turn, instinctually knowing, just how far gravity will allow it, before it would tear you down, was the reason man made the Motorcycle. Man wanted to defy gravity & maybe teach it a few things.  I was eight. I understood then why both my father & his father both rode motorcycles. Sir Isaac Newton would have loved a motorcycle.

My father crashed once.  I heard that was all it takes to stop wanting to ride.  His bike had a big safety bar that wrapped itself around his front wheel.  That bar saved his life or leg.  He was alone, on I-89 around Montpelier & crashed.  He remembers people standing over him as he took his helmet off, he heard, “OH, MY GOD!”  says a shrieking woman.  My father starts checking for his missing body parts & he says to the woman, “WHAT?!”  She said, “You’re Dr. Begun!” The woman was a patient.  Dad was very sore for a few days, but had no real marks to show anyone the terror he felt.  So he got back on his bike & continued to ride until he reached about 62. Then he gave it to my brother.

I do have a great love & respect for motorcycles.  Personally I can think of nothing that bends & twists chrome like a motorcycle.  It’s the photographer in me that has continued to love the bike.  Chrome is a mirror, a mirror that distorts the world in all sorts of ways.  As an artist, the first watercolor I painted was of an engine from a photograph I had taken ten years earlier.  The engine was a Harley Davidson, it belonged to a woman, she had all the bells & whistles on that engine, to match the chrome that reflected life all around it. and I saw it.