Do you miss your first motorcycle?

A few years ago for an article at Common Tread, I asked several riders which motorcycle from their past they regretted selling. Many of them were sorry they sold their first motorcycle, wishing they’d kept it instead of replacing it when they moved up to something better.

I can’t say I fall into that group.

At age 18, I more or less stumbled into being a motorcyclist, without much planning, by buying a used, unremarkable, massively mass-produced bike with a questionable history (and probably paying too much for it) and falling in love not so much with the machine, but with the world of sensations and experiences it opened to me.

In other words, pretty much the same old story. Millions of us did it.

Even today, the high point for U.S. motorcycle unit sales remains 1973, even though there were about 100 million fewer people in the country then, compared to today. As is so often the case, you can blame or credit demographics. In 1973, the big lump of the Baby Boomer bulge was in young adulthood, prime motorcycling time. At the same time, the Japanese manufacturers were importing relatively inexpensive, easy-to-ride, far-more-reliable motorcycles by the thousands to meet the demand, while Harley-Davidson limped towards its darkest years and the once-mighty British motorcycle industry continued resolutely firing repeated rounds into its foot by building the same old thing, with engines guaranteed to leak oil and headlights likely to fail at the first sign of impending nightfall.

Millions of people in the United States at least gave motorcycles a try during that era, and while many drifted off, some caught the addiction and never shook it. And the one thing that absolutely all riders share is a memory, whether dim or vivid, clear-eyed or nostalgic, humorous or heart-warming or traumatic, of a first bike.

Being in the tail end of the Boomer phenomenon, as usual I arrived a little late to the party, when the snacks are gone and the punch bowl nearly empty, so I didn’t get to participate in the 1973 new-bike buying climax. Instead, I bought one of those bikes that are commonly named as a first motorcycle among my age cohort. In 1979, as a freshman in college, I bought a blue 1976 Honda CB360T for $750, largely because there was no way I could afford to buy or insure a car and the Honda was the best I could do for personal transportation.

There was nothing remarkable about the Honda. It was a perfect example of what later came to be called the UJM, the Universal Japanese Motorcycle, the do-it-all motorcycles imported by the millions by the Japanese manufacturers in the 1970s before the market became segmented into niches other than displacement size.

It was a “naked” bike before we knew bikes could be dressed. Crude, you might say, from today’s perspective. Elemental would be a kinder term. Two spoked wheels, skinny tires, a flat seat for two, and an air-cooled vertical-twin engine. The closest thing to flash it offered was the chromed front fender, a styling touch that was common on Japanese motorcycles of that era and which makes absolutely no sense to me when I think about it today. (Why did designers want to draw so much visual attention to the front fender?)

The best thing about the CB360T’s performance package was that it had a disc front brake instead of a drum, like its predecessors. At 18, I was an unsophisticated consumer by any standards, so it would be many years later when I came to appreciate never having to rely on or service a front drum brake.

The CB was only the second motorcycle I’d ever ridden, following my parents’ old Honda 50 step-through, which I had only ridden in our country driveway before I was old enough to have a license, and thus the CB was also the first vehicle of any kind that I’d operated that had a clutch. The seller didn’t know that, and let me take it for a test ride. Miraculously, I didn’t stall it. Thankfully, I didn’t crash it. All I did was buy it. I didn’t even try to negotiate the price, probably to the seller’s surprise. Later, I learned that the motorcycle may have been left at the owner’s riverfront camp and at least partially submerged in one of the periodic Ohio River floods. I told you I was 18 and a gullible and uninformed consumer. In any case, the stone-simple Honda kept running, despite a variety of odd problems that led me to suspect the flood rumors may have been true.

I rode the CB for a couple of years and survived the old-style method of learning to ride (trial and error, mostly error) in those days before we had Motorcycle Safety Foundation courses in every state. The closest thing to education I received was browsing through back issues of motorcycle magazines in the college library, which is where I came across a piece explaining countersteering. It was one of those moments when I learned how much I didn’t know.

I survived that trial-and-error learning process largely because I lived in a small town with minimal traffic and the Honda’s engine couldn’t pump out enough power to overwhelm the equally mediocre tires, brakes, and suspension of the era. I think how much more stacked the odds are against an 18-year-old today who likely faces heavier and more aggressive traffic and can easily get on a motorcycle making several times as much horsepower as my old CB did.

When it comes to material things, I tend to be more practical and less nostalgic than most. While I was still in college, I was able to scrape together enough money from my summer jobs (college was a lot less expensive back then) to buy a better bike, traded in the Honda, and moved on without a glance backward. On a recent evening when I was coming home after dark on my current Honda VFR800 Interceptor, with its twin LED headlights casting a wide spread of bright, white light ahead, I remembered a night riding home late from a concert on the CB360T, with its single incandescent bulb dimly lighting the way. It was the norm at the time, but today I’m sure it would feel like trying to light the road with a candle in a glass globe.

So unlike some of the other riders I talked to for that article on regrets, I don’t wish I still had my first bike around. Anyway, I fully satisfy any nostalgic yearnings with the 1997 Triumph Speed Triple I’ve owned now for 26 years. Old and cantankerous, the Speed Triple is plenty vintage enough for me.

Yet I do understand why some people wish they’d held on to that first bike. For those of us who have gone on to become lifelong riders, it’s inevitably attached to vivid memories and feelings of discovery. As utterly unremarkable as that CB360T was, I remember coming home from a ride in the summer, parking it in the garage of my parents’ house and listening to the tick ticking of the air-cooled engine as it dissipated its heat, smelling the burnt odor of oil pooling on hot engine parts and the few last wisps of exhaust drifting out. In those early stages of discovery, even an ordinary trip across town to a friend’s house was a ride to savor.

When some smell or feeling triggers those memories, it can draw us powerfully back to those moments when the sensations of riding were as new and vivid as the human drives of love and sex and taking deep gulps of the breath of life. And I can understand why it makes many wish they still had that old motorcycle.