Motorcycling is in the blood and it is a family I will always have at my side

One of my fondest memories with my father is a road trip we took through Virginia on the back of his Road King. – Megan Dwyier


The motorcycle industry is known for rough and tumble personalities and fearlessness. Growing up in the industry, these stereotypes angered me: my father was not a gang member; he looked more like Santa with a shorter, colored beard! Sales associates at the local Harley Davidson dealership sales bought me birthday gifts; these were nice, caring people I interacted with on a weekly basis, not what the media portrayed. And they were not fearless.

When I was about five my mother told my father he needed a hobby, so he went and put his name on the waitlist for a brand new Road King. Motorcycling had always been one of his passions; as a teen he started in the same dealership that I work in now, but, as many men do, he gave up his motorcycle when my mother put her foot down. To be fair, he had taken a corner too sharply and only the license plate had saved her from flying off the back, but that’s a story for another day. For my brother and I, the prospect of a motorcycle was thrilling! These iron horses were the dinosaurs of adventure, and nothing was better than riding with our Daddy.
One of my fondest memories with my father is a road trip we took through Virginia on the back of his Road King. It instilled a love of nature – there was something so magical about riding on the open road and having an unperturbed view of how green the grass looked against the Blue Ridge Mountains and how the hills rolled along with us. During the trip I fell asleep in grass, jumped a fence to get closer to a waterfall, fell asleep in a fancy restaurant after executing perfect manners all night, and made new friends at Bed & Breakfast. Almost all of which shocked my father. When I was that young, motorcycling was nothing more than a fun adventure that let me have time alone with my Daddy.

Motorcycling isn’t all fun and games, though. When I was 10 my father took a trip to the Artic Circle from Virginia. During this trip my mother sat my brother and I down on my bed, and with sunshine flooding my messy room, told us our father had died in Montana. Thankfully, this was just a serious case of miscommunication; he had suffered in a severe accident, but wasn’t dead. Yet, when we picked him up at the airport, he was unrecognizable. I feared him and felt forced to help him through his recovery, because I couldn’t even bring myself to look at him. Following his accident I refused to get on a motorcycle for nearly ten years. I learned fear, while my father jumped right back into the dangerous waters.
At 18 I was hired in a local dealership as a cashier, and I continued to work and grow in the dealership on breaks from college. By 19, I was once again on the back of a motorcycle. This wasn’t magic, though; it was realization through other children’s eyes that motorcycling can be filled with heartbreak. I saw other fathers leave their children behind, and I wondered how those fathers could be so careless. I realized that all the heartbreak was associated with human error – you could crash a motorcycle as easily as you could fall down the stairs.
With this knowledge, I began to overcome my fear. I approached a co-worker with whom I was close to and asked for help. He put me on the back of his bike and rode gently until I was comfortable enough to go further distances and dip lower in the curves.
The next step was my license. I aced the classroom period, but the practical frayed my nerves. I almost didn’t finish the course. Every time I picked my feet up and let the bike roll, I felt the fear crash low in my stomach. The morning of the exams, I rolled over in my bed and examined the knots in my stomach. I was terrified, but that’s why I was there: to overcome the fear. Also, my father always taught me to finish what I started, so that is just what I did.
Growing up in the industry you learn all sides to motorcycling. There are gangs; there is a general lack of respect for authority; there are injuries and deaths. There are also good people, laughs, and good memories. There is freedom and there is family, and what you find in that family is respect. They all have fear, but it is a healthy fear, one that leads them to respect the roads they ride, the machines they love, and the people they support. That’s what my father taught me when he showed me that motorcycling is in the blood and it is a family I will always have at my side.
By Megan Dwyier