Triumph (Buying and learning to ride a motorcycle in her fifties)

At 50, I thought my colours had faded forever. Then I sat on a red Triumph motorcycle, and everything changed. This is a story of reclaiming my life, finding courage on two wheels, and learning that it’s never too late to ride your own road.

Words & Pics by Samantha Bole

Awkwardly I pulled my leg over her, praying that the salesman wouldn’t notice my shaky hands. It had already taken courage to walk through the doors of the Triumph shop on a busy Saturday morning, weaving through groups of men talking shop as I tried to pass unseen. Only Michael’s enthusiasm got me through the door. We had been there, window shopping the week before, and here I was six days later, with the kind of machine between my legs that I never knew I needed to dream about.

She was red. Her name was Triumph. And somewhere in the marrow of me, I already knew she was mine.

Marcus Aurelius said that the soul is dyed by the colour of its thoughts.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about that. About colour. About what happens when it leaves.

In my twenties I moved imperceptibly from the shallows into watery depths, and as happens when you get deeper and sunlight is filtered out, colours disappear in the order of the rainbow, starting with red. It didn’t happen by accident, but by design, slowly, deliberately, so gradually that I didn’t notice the hand doing it until the light was almost gone. I was running a successful farm, raising and later home schooling two beautiful daughters, and from the outside it looked like a full life. From the inside, I felt I was being systematically unmade.

My daughters were the shards of light that gave me direction and prevented my drowning. But nonetheless I was so shut down, that at rock bottom I found myself in a mental health facility. What happened there was not what I expected. I was pulled, without warning, into a kaleidoscope of the colours of living. Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. I was, truly, saved.

That was the beginning of a long road back. Eight years of healing and doing the hard work that nobody sees, as I walked away from my old life, the therapy, the reckoning, the slow and unglamorous process of remembering who you actually are underneath everything that happened to you. I arrived at fifty without having lived the bold, beautiful, true version of myself that had been quietly erased over decades. But I arrived. And four years before my 50th, I met Michael, my ride or die, who would sit beside me through all of it.

It was alongside him, sitting pillion on his bike, that something new began to stir.

There is something about being on the back of a motorcycle moving through South African landscape that does things to you that nothing else quite can. The Cradle of Humankind. The Magaliesberg with mist sitting in the valley. The long straight roads south of Johannesburg where the bushveld opens up and the sky becomes the whole world. The helmet goes on, the world muffles, and everything sharpens — smells of veldfire, KFC and dust hit differently when you can’t speak, can’t scroll, can’t be anywhere but here. The engine becomes the only sound that matters and every sense recalibrates. In a world that never stops talking, a motorcycle helmet is the last place you can be genuinely alone with your thoughts. I breathed all of it in from the back seat, and somewhere in that breathing, a whisper started. Quiet at first. Easy to dismiss.

I want to ride.

Not ride pillion. Ride. My own machine. My own road. My own terms.

It was the kind of thought that felt both completely natural and slightly absurd at fifty. I had never been on a motorbike as a rider. I had no framework for it, no history, no community. What I had was a feeling, and after eight years of learning to trust my feelings again, I had decided that feelings deserve to be followed.

So we went window shopping. Just to look. Absolutely just to look.

3. Triumph - There is something about being on the back of a motorcycle moving through South African landscape — There is something about being on the back of a motorcycle moving through South African landscape.

The Triumph Speed 400 was the first bike I ever sat on.

I didn’t ride her. I didn’t even turn the key. I just sat there, in that showroom, on a busy Saturday morning, with the whole weight of her between my legs and my hands on those handlebars, and I felt something shift. She was the first colour I had lost, red, and she had come back to find me. The salesman was talking. Michael was smiling. And I was somewhere else entirely, in a conversation that had no words.

Despite the knowing, the plan for the day was to sit on many more bikes. It didn’t change a single nuance or raise a single question. Except how I was going to buy a bike double my budget. I’d been advised to buy a small bike, learn to ride, and then buy my dream bike once I felt confident. But Michael found her second hand, 3,900km on the clock and not a scratch on her.

I bought her. Without a licence. Without ever having ridden. Without a single logical reason that would satisfy anyone who needed logic.

I called her Iron Rose. She was the Iron in my resolve and my daughter, Annie Rose, who had passed away, was the spirit.

She spoke to me in a soul language, and she dyed my thoughts with everything red brings to the table, love, passion, excitement, confidence, fire, leadership and courage. These were the first emotions I had lost and, it turns out, the last to return. You don’t plan for that kind of recognition. You just say yes.

Learning to ride at fifty is not a graceful business.

I want to be honest about that, because anyone who tells you otherwise is leaving out the best parts. Michael, being Michael, decided that two days before my first official lesson I should get a head start. We found a park nearby and he walked me through the gears on the grass. I was doing fine, right up until going around in little circles became too boring to tolerate, which didn’t take long. So I took myself onto the road in completely wrong footwear. I had understood a flat shoe, which was required for my first lesson, to mean not a high heel and certainly hadn’t considered the little rubber heel on my vellies…

Armed with determination and first gear, exclusively first gear, I went and then stopped to jiggle the bike around to face the way I had come and found myself suddenly, comprehensively compromised. A car. A speedhump. A pothole. A wet road. And me, in “heels” with my foot unable to slide, in first gear, making the classic beginner’s error of looking down at exactly the wrong moment. Where you look, the bike goes. This I would learn formally two days later. What I learned that afternoon was a more immediate lesson, the Triumph, all 170kg of her, landed on the kerb with more damage than I’d like to admit. Not nearly as much, however, as my bruised ego.

The car that had been approaching stopped. The driver got out to lift the bike. It was someone I have known since Grade One, who rides his bicycle at my folks’ bike trails. I swore him to secrecy on the spot and I am choosing to believe he will keep his word.

Thank goodness for the lessons that followed, taught by a wonderful woman, in lady language, which as it turns out is exactly the language I needed.

But there is also the first time it clicks. The moment when the machine and the body stop arguing and start speaking the same language. When you come out of a corner and something in you goes completely quiet and completely alive at the same time. When you pull up somewhere, take your helmet off, and feel like a version of yourself you recognise from a very long time ago. It sounds graceful but also includes more stalling than you could have imagined!

My mom will tell you I was a model child, until I turned fifty. She’s not wrong. But what she might not have known was that the model child had spent a long time waiting for permission to become something more. Triumph gave me that permission in red paint and engine noise.

4. Triumph - Ride. My own machine. My own road. My own terms — Ride. My own machine. My own road. My own terms.

Here is what I dream about now.

I dream about the R71 through the Magaliesberg, early morning, the kind of cold that wakes your face up and makes everything sharp. I dream about the Garden Route, those curves along the coast between George and Knysna where the Indian Ocean appears between the trees without warning and takes your breath clean away. I dream about Clarens in the autumn, the sandstone going gold, the Free State air tasting different at altitude. I dream about the Sani Pass one day, that brutal, beautiful climb into the Drakensberg where the road tests everything you have and the view at the top earns every metre of it. One day.

I dream about riding with my daughters on the back. About them seeing their mother on her own terms, making her own road, choosing her own direction. That one matters more than any destination.

And I dream, honestly, about becoming competent enough that the bike disappears, the way the best tools do, and what’s left is just movement, and road, and sky, and the particular freedom that only comes when you are completely present and going somewhere you chose.

Marcus Aurelius was right. The soul is dyed by the colour of its thoughts.

Mine is red again.

Triumph. I am me, but better.