My Decent (Part One)

I must admit that I went into riding with truly innocent reasons. My first and foremost thought in getting a motorcycle was to have a cheap form of transportation. I also wanted to get back to riding motorcycles after a 20-plus year hiatus. As I considered how much I could spend on a bike (not much) and what kind of bike I wanted to ride (no crotch rockets, please) I never truly considered owning a Harley. Perhaps it was cost. A good illustration of this is an encounter I had in a local motorcycle shop. In the early part of my bike hunting expedition, I would drag my family with me all over the valley, looking in every motorcycle sales floor I could find. I was getting re-acquainted with the motorcycle market and what it had to offer. I was partial to Hondas, as the previous bike I owned was a 1984 Honda Sabre. It as a bit of a cold-blooded bike, but once she warmed up, it was fun to ride. In this particular dealership, there were several used bikes I looked at. The one that caught my eye was a 2004 Honda VTX 1800. This bike was a beast of a bike: huge 1800cc liquid-cooled engine, smoke silver paint and chrome for miles. It only had 5,500 miles and the dealer was asking $7,000 for it. Next to the Honda was a 2007 Harley Sportster. It was at the opposite end of the beefy scale to the Honda it sat next to. The sporty only had a 883cc engine. It was short and light and it looked anemic next to the metric brute. I think it only had a thousand miles on it and it showed. It looked like it had never been ridden. The price tag? $8,995. I didn't even get on the thing. I simply smirked at the outrageous price tag and continued to drool over the Honda. To me that experience summed up my feeling about Harleys: you are overpaying for the name. Why would I buy an underpowered, under-featured bike when for less money I can have a badass bike with tons of bling?

Flash forward to today, where my 2004 Sportster sits waiting and its all I can do from playing hooky to go on a ride on it.

What happened between the Honda wanderlust to now? Why does my closet look like the men's section of the Harley-Davidson Motor clothes catalog? I would hate to think that I was somehow sucked into the marketing genius that Harley-Davidson has crafted though many years. It rivals the brand prowess of Apple. The ability to create a brand that is so appealing that people will pay good money for your product based on brand strength alone is a marketer's wet dream. But I don't think I am that sheepish. I think my ascent (descent?) into the Harley world has more to do with how the products are intertwined with the culture of the people who use them...