I was out riding with my buddy Chris on a fine, warm Sunday in November. The sky was deep blue, and the leaves were finally turning brown (hey, this is Texas). Motorcycles were everywhere, like someone had poked a stick into a hive and all the two-wheeled creatures came swarming out to taste the light.
We were threading along Farm to Market 1431, a road that twists and turns up the north side of Lake Travis in Central Texas, when a pack of six sport bikes came from the other direction. The riders were crouched low and serious, all carbon fiber and neon leathers like the bad guys in a sci-fi movie.
As they flashed past, every last one of them dropped the left hand low and open, palm forward, fingers spread in that casual V that looks half peace sign, half papal blessing. Chris and I answered in kind, almost without thinking. It’s a reflex, like touching the brim of your hat used to be. The wave doesn’t care about your politics, your bank balance, your religion, or whether you think loud pipes save lives. It only asks one question: Are you one of us? If the answer is yes, the hand comes out.
They saw another rider on two wheels, willing to trade the safety of four wheels for the pure joy of leaning into a curve until the white line comes up to greet you. That was enough. More than enough. That’s the miracle of the wave. It’s the last honest handshake left in America. Truck drivers have their own version (a couple of fingers lifted off the steering wheel), but it’s not the same. Theirs is acknowledgment. Ours is a commitment.
If you see a bike on the shoulder with its rider crouched beside it, staring at some mechanical betrayal, then you stop. It doesn’t matter if you’re running late, or if the rider is wearing colors you don’t much care for, or if it’s starting to rain sideways. You pull over, put your side stand down, and walk back. Because someday that might be you, sweating over a busted clutch cable in 97-degree heat with the cell phone showing “No Service” and eighteen-wheelers blowing past hard.
I learned this the hard way a few years back on a ride to Leakey. My old BMW R65 ran out of gas about 5 miles west of Vanderpool, and I coasted to a stop in a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse. Yeah, I should have filled up at the Lost Maples Country store, but I was sure I would make it to Leakey.
Five minutes later a ratty Kawasaki KZ1000 pulled in behind me. The rider was a big, sunburned guy with a gray ponytail and a tattered Harley of San Antonio T-shirt. He had a full tank of gas, so he was smarter than I. We rummaged along the side of the road and found an empty water bottle we used to transfer a half gallon of his gas to my Beemer.
He refused the ten-dollar bill I tried to hand him. “Just pay it forward, man,” he said, fired up the KZ, and putted off towards Leakey without even telling me his name. That’s the commitment of the wave: the promise that we look out for each other. The wave and the stop are two sides of the same coin. One is greeting, the other is duty. Together they form a kind of portable civilization we carry with us on two wheels.
Of course, there are heretics. You’ll see the occasional rider who keeps both hands clamped on the bars as if the oncoming bike carries leprosy. Sometimes it’s a new rider who hasn’t learned the code yet. Sometimes it’s a poser on a bike still wearing the factory dust. Sometimes it’s just a jerk. We should forgive them all.
Chris and I rode until the sun was below the horizon, and we must have exchanged the salute fifty times that day. Each one felt like a small reaffirmation that there are still pockets of decency rolling around on two wheels.
