Commuting.

There is something about an air-cooled, carbureted motorcycle engine and a cold, clear winter day that just goes together. Peanut butter and jelly. Gin and tonic. Cigarettes and coffee. Stockings and high heels -- take your pick. It just works.

Objectively, I know the reason. Colder air is denser and contains more oxygen, which means a more volatile fuel-air mixture and a bigger bang for the given jetting and displacement. Bigger bang equals more power, which is why land-speed records have always been set at low elevations and preferably in cool temperatures when the air is densest, viz the Bonneville salt flats at dawn.

I am not about to set any speed records, but I love to ride on a clear winter morning.

I have owned modern bikes, and can appreciate everything that they have to offer in terms of real brakes and predictable suspension. What they do NOT offer is the innate pleasure of owning, riding, and mainting something that has more personality than most people of my accquaintance.

My ride is a 1976 BMW R60/6, which I bought the same year that I got married. It is only slightly younger than I am, though arguably better maintained. The R60 was the redheaded stepchild of the /6 line, the last bike that BMW made with a drum brake up front, its undersized cylinders fed by a pair of quaint little roundslide carbs. Whereas the 750 and 900cc versions of the same bike are recognized as landmark touring machines before the era of fully-faired roadburners, the R60 occupies a peculiar niche, slightly underpowered and tremendously underappreciated. They are the best-kept secret in the pantheon of vintage Beamers.

What the uninitiated fail to understand is that an R60, properly tuned and with a few minor tweaks, is one hell of an enjoyable ride. To compensate for the smaller displacement, they fitted the bike with a different camshaft than its larger-lunged brethren, allowing for more valve overlap and thus a higher effective compression ratio. With less torque and horsepower to apply, the engineers in their wisdom fitted a shorter-ratio gearset, making for less speed at the top end but a snappy ride up to about 70, which is realistically as fast as you want to go with those drum brakes. Whack the revs up to five and a half then short-shift it up through fourth gear and you'll see what I mean. Get the front suspension dialled in (either progressives or the heavy-duty stock springs, which I use), put a decent set of shocks on the back and swap out the standard Metzlers or Dunlops for a set of Bridgestone S11's, and all of a sudden you have a sweet-handling, silky-smooth machine with enough oomph to get out of its own way and the legs to take you anywhere.

The great secret about the R60 is that the top end is grafted onto a crank and drivetrain that were designed to accomodate half again as much displacement, which means that the machine is massively overbuilt for the moderate stresses imposed on it. They are, as a result, the longest lived of the '70s bikes; I know of several with well over 300k on the clock that are still running strong, their bottom ends untouched through the course of half a dozen ring and valve jobs. An email accquaintance of mine recently rode his successfully in the Iron Butt rally, covering 10,000 miles in ten days while touching all 4 corners of the continental US. Riding in a sea of Goldwings, K12RT's, and ST1300's, he finished the rally with minimal drama then returned to his daily commute.

My own commute has changed of late, in some ways for the better. After years of a straight shot downtown on I-5, I have begun a daily trek across the 520 to Redmond, 18 miles door-to-door. Without traffic, 20 minutes; during rush hour, bring a snack and something to read, you may need it. Thank God for the HOV lanes.

In the mornings, though, there isn't an isssue. At 5:30 I roll the bike out of the garage without starting the engine, so as not to wake the boys; I coast silently downhill along 133d street for a few dozen yards before I hit the starter and fire it up. By the time I hit my on-ramp, I have backed the choke to halfway; as soon as I am up to speed I open it the rest of the way as the bike warms up. Even this early the traffic on 5 south is surprisingly steady, and I bob and weave through the clumps of semis and contractor's vans down through Northgate and the University district. Coming over the ship canal bridge, the city rears up between Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, with the lakeshore curving away below me on both sides. In daylight, Mount Rainier overlooms the entire prospect like an outsized scrim painted on the morning sky itself.

Just past the bridge I duck into a tunnel that drops down and hooks hard left at the bottom, enough so that it's easy to come in too hot and and find myself braking hard at the apex. The curve is tight and fast enough that more than once I have touched metal to the asphalt just before it straightens out. On rainy days I scrub the speed off hard coming down from the freeway and clench my teeth just a little as I lean it over.

Out of the tunnel, 520 picks up arrow-straight for the shot across Lake Washington. Over the Montlake cut, with the houseboats glowing like a string of Chinese lanterns, past the avian silhouette of Husky Stadium against the hazy sky, then onto the floating bridge, skimming so close to the lake that I feel like I am riding directly on the water's surface. Even in the inkblack predawn I can make out the lake on either side, the upwind portion rucked up in a courduroy chop, the downwind reach as smooth as as swath of fresh snow. Later in the spring when I crest the Eastern highrise and approach the outskirts of Bellevue, I will see the first vermilion edge of sunrise framing the peaks of Snoqualmie, reflecting off of upslope snowfields in an explosion of color. Right now, however, a week before the solstice, the ascent towards the Sammamish plateau is a headlong rush up a darkened staircase framed only by the retroflective guardrails on either side.

All of this transpires to a soundtrack. Last year I blew the entirety of my Christmas gift card swag on a ridiculously good pair of Etyomotic earbuds, which jack into a matchbook-sized ipod in the breast pocket of my jacket. They sound better than any pair of full-sized speakers I have ever owned. The ipod shuffles 200 songs that comprise a snapshot of my musical history, running the gamut from Springsteen wailing out "Candy's Room" to Ice Cube and Snoop's assault-rifle delivery on "Go to Church". In between there's a whole lot of Death Cab, Dire Straits, Miles, Moby, James McMurtry, and everything in between. Imagine bursting out of a darkened tunnel pulling hard at the top of third gear and power-shifting into fourth as you snap the bike upright and tuck down over the tankbag, Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene" winding up to a frenzy and the fully warmed-up engine breathing deep of the crisp clean saturated air and howling with satisfaction... at that moment I feel as close as I can to the way my four-year-old son must feel every morning at first light when he flings back the curtain at his bedside and proclaims, regardless of the weather and to noone in particular : "It's a beautiful day"!

I love my commute.