In a piece he wrote for Road & Track magazine in 2020, longtime automotive and motorcycle (Cycle World) writer Peter Egan reflected on the decade—the 1980s—he spent in California writing for both publications. “…It’s hard to look back without sounding overly blissed-out and buoyant. I’m afraid it can’t be helped. I simply can’t remember anything negative about the whole experience. There wasn’t a single person…with whom I didn’t enjoy traveling, working, or socializing,” Egan wrote. “The stars had aligned…we were fully immersed in our time.”
Egan’s rapturous reflections are appropriate for a man who, from my position 500 miles to the east of his Wisconsin home, appears to have lived a blissed-out existence. Egan’s decade in California coincided with motorcycling catching a wave of popularity that didn’t end until Egan decided to unwind his career. The stars, indeed, had aligned.
In today’s fractured, fragmented, diminished media landscape, it’s difficult to fathom the status Cycle World once enjoyed. In the US, from the 1980s to the end of the century, Cycle World was the primary conduit between motorcycle manufacturers and enthusiasts. There were other, smaller magazines, but Cycle World was the one. This significance also contributed to the magazine having a self-satisfied earnestness that made it read, in its lesser moments, like a two-wheeled Foreign Affairs. It’s why many of my contemporaries migrated to English magazines—predominantly Bike, where I got my start as a freelancer—but, still, I read Egan. Because no one else is Peter Egan.
Egan’s world is one of meaningful fellowship with like-minded friends, who, like Egan, restore old cars, fettle old bikes, helm old sailboats, fly old airplanes, and covet old guitars. I began to think of Egan’s world as residing in a universe just slightly removed from the one in which the rest of us exist, reminiscent of the sphere fashioned by Garrison Keillor in the now-defunct National Public Radio program A Prairie Home Companion. Egan’s world, of musty-smelling, warmly glowing tube amplifiers, single-weight motor oil, and single-malt scotch, is as comforting as sinking into a bath after a rainy ride home. Even Egan’s wife, Barb, isn’t of our world. She exists in Egan’s writing as adults exist in children’s literature—from the knees down. For the most part, he keeps her out of it. But we learn enough to know of their affection. Barb bought her husband a new CB350 back when they were impoverished newlyweds. And when she isn’t willfully climbing on the back of his motorcycle, to go wherever, whenever, she’s saving wayward cats from the ravages of midwestern winters. She is, as old-timers say, from good stock.
What separates Egan from his contemporaries is that he possesses a writer’s voice and sensibilities. These attributes can’t be faked, forced, or learned. The process of writing is like walking along the narrow edge of a two-by-four overtop roiling vats of cliché, mawkishness, and cloying sentimentality. One misjudged footfall and oops, down you go. On the death of Soichiro Honda, Egan writes “Mr. Honda’s bikes took me across Canada, through college, off to visit my girlfriend on a summer of weekends, around the track on my first season of roadracing, down Highway 61 to New Orleans, across the Mojave Desert, up Pikes Peak, touring with my new bride, and on a mad autumn dash to the USGP at Watkins Glen. And back. Always back.” The words that makes this passage sing? “…a summer of weekends.” Not summer weekends. Egan’s phrasing suggests his age, his wonder, and summer stretching overtop the horizon.
Egan strikes gold with uncanny regularity. From a pilgrimage to Woodstock, New York (in his 356 Porsche) to search for the exact spot where Bob Dylan crashed his Triumph in 1966, Egan writes, “Triumphs and the songs of Bob Dylan meant a lot to me at the time of his crash, and they still do. So it was just a place I had to go, to see for myself, as if to visit an incident from my own past at which I had somehow failed to be present.”
Reading The Best of Peter Egan, a collection of his stories from Cycle World, is as rewarding as it is frustrating. The book is poorly designed, with amateurish stripes of color on each page to denote the decade in which a story was published. But most galling were the number of typos, which makes me question whether anyone at his publisher, Minnesota-based Motorbooks, bothered to pass an eye over the texts. Even more appalling is the disregard with which Cycle World’s own online archive treats Egan’s work—it’s so poorly transcribed it borders on illegibility. Someone within the Octane empire (the leisure vehicle financing company that currently owns what remains of Cycle World) should lose a finger over this.
As someone who’s trundled over much of the same terrain subject-wise as Egan—we’ve both reviewed dozens of motorcycles in print—I revere Egan’s ability to encapsulate the essence of a machine, especially if it’s a bike I’m contemplating for purchase. Or a bike I’ll never throw a leg over. In the former, Egan’s vetting is as trustworthy as a weekend-long test ride. In the latter, his experiences are a form of vicarious ownership. This skill is far knottier than it seems. It has nothing to do with wheelbase, horsepower, suspension componentry or the motorcycle’s country-of-origin. It’s about weighing intangibles, and Egan’s ability to do so with inscrutable accuracy is unparalleled.
My win-the-lottery motorcycle purchase, for years, was a Vincent Black Shadow. That is until Egan owned one. His surprisingly downbeat appraisal cured me of my desire. But his praise of the 1990s Ducati 900SS inspired me—once depreciation had worked its wonders—to buy one myself. “The SS is almost spidery,” wrote Egan, “as if the wheels, seat and engine were held together by gossamer—but without the frame flex that fanciful description might imply.” And then, on the looks of the thing: “The 900SS’s styling…seems to have improved with age, rather than becoming dated. Not modern, necessarily: just timeless. The full fairing looks to me like a welding tip flame captured in red fiberglass.”
No writer can be all things to all people all the time. Occasionally, I wished Egan focused his critical gaze on aspects of the motorcycle trade, used his skill and stature to be a slightly more subversive writer. Tackle things like the tedious sexism in some of Cycle World’s late-last-century advertising, or contemplate the missteps of manufacturers. I’d have loved an Egan essay on Honda’s Pacific Coast, or on the half-assed attempts at reviving legacy brands like Norton, Brough-Superior, Crocker, and Vincent. I also had the feeling—though I can’t point to a specific passage to substantiate it—that Egan downplayed his intellect so as not to alienate a portion of his readership. Egan, for his part, knew motorcyclists, a notoriously blue-collar crowd, wouldn’t tolerate a poet on an Olivetti. He kept his world local, focused, folksy. Peter Egan knew exactly what he was doing. And we’re all the better for it.