Revving up the rebel streak on the back of a bike

By MICHELE HEWITSON

In my reckless youth I rode motorbikes. By that I mean I rode on the back of motorbikes. The boys drove them. This was the natural order of things. It could be argued that it is always far more reckless to ride pillion than it is to drive because there is no control. Because the boys on whose motorbikes I rode pillion made my small attempts at recklessness look about as rash an act as confronting a cowering mouse in a kitchen.

These were boys who tore around on mud tracks on trail bikes for fun on the weekend and who rode, with the same sort of abandon, bigger bikes on public roads to get from home to party. Sometimes they fell off.

Other people, adults, worried about these things. I can't remember ever feeling frightened.

I can remember liking riding pillion. Especially on a summer's day, heading, fast, to, say, the Puhoi Pub (where the boys with the really big bikes, the tats and the leathers got drunk under the hot sun and then got back on those machines which made enough noise to drown out the cicadas).

I liked the way you'd lean into the curves. I liked going fast, faster than the cars with the families and the picnic baskets.

It could well be that I liked, too, the feeling of rebelliousness that came with being on a mode of transport identified with the young and foolhardy and those who dwell on the outside of nice society.

People look at you when you're on a motorbike. They see the bike and the leathers and whatever they think about people on motorbikes. But they can't see your face.

There is an anonymity attached to being on the back of a bike which is somehow liberating.

Then one of those reckless boys ran into something more solid than a motorbike and died. I stopped going on the back of motorbikes.

Quite a bit later I became the sort of person who went in cars with picnic baskets and looked at people on motorbikes with a censorious eye.

So quite how I ended up on the back of an 1850cc bike dubbed Road Rage, with a man who joked that we would be attempting to break the World Pillion Speed Record, is beyond me.

Sometimes you'll do anything to get out of the office.

But I suspect, too, that a peculiar sort of nostalgia for the recklessness of youth kicked in.

As you get older you get cautious: you might remember the joy of turning handless somersaults but you're sure as hell not going to risk breaking your neck to do one.

Ray Pratt, who designed these custom-made bikes, did not seem to be the reckless type. He holds the New Zealand title for the fastest quarter-mile in something called the A dragbike category.

He won it in a time of 9.3 seconds at 149 miles an hour (239 km/h).

How fast will we be going today? "The speed limit," he says. Later, as he peeled me off the back of his leather jacket, he said we'd been doing 170 km/h. I think he was joking.

There's a distinct culture attached to these big motorbikes.

Why, for example, do they look like cartoon bikes? With their exaggerated proportions they look like the fantasy bikes little boys spend hours drawing. And why, when you could get a sleek new car with leather seat, automatic windows and airbags for around $70,000 would you opt for something with no windows?

It's about making a statement, of course. That, while you could easily afford a new BMW 3-series, you haven't bought in. That while your hair might be short and you go to work in a suit, in your mind you're still a rebel. Such a bike says that you've never really grown up.

So, that's me in the picture: a 30-something feeling like a 16-year- old.

I never thought I'd discover nostalgia on the back of a bike.

It was somehow liberating.