Andrew Gow's interest in motorcycles began as a practical solution to a financial challenge. In the early '80s, Gow was a student at the University of Carleton in Ottawa. While he couldn't afford to drive a car to his classes, he could afford a practical Honda motorcycle, which he maintained himself for years. But now, the director of Religious Studies spends hours fixing motorcycles and scooters that are anything but practical - the more unusual and obscure, the better.
Q: How did you learn to fix motorcycles and scooters?
A: Oh, by trial and error, by breaking things and skinning my knuckles, and asking people who might be willing to help - like friends who had motorcycles in high school. So, it was a very busted-knuckle kind of greasy experience in the parking lot.
Q: What is it about working with these machines that you enjoy?
A: When you're working with gasoline and motors and brakes, you have to focus on what you're doing because it's important; and not doing things right could have consequences. Same thing as when you're riding a motorcycle - you can't be planning your next article, or thinking about your next lecture. Academia is my life; it permeates every pore of my day. There's not a moment that I'm awake that I'm not thinking about my job. And this is one of the very few ways in which I can get away from it, and focus enough to be away from it.
Q: What about social connections? Has the hobby broadened yours?
A: Fixing motorcycles was both a social activity but also kind of a community thing for me, especially at one point. One of my friends in Edmonton and I maintained a kind of informal fixing collective where we used his garage and a neighbour's garage as an open spot for friends and neighbours who had motorcycles that needed fixing.
Mainly younger people with older bikes that needed work showed up. And we showed them how to fix things and we rescued a number of bikes in the neighbourhood that were rotting. We also got our own kids riding little scooters and motorcycles to some extent.
Q: As far as the scooters, have you always been interested in them as well?
A: No, those are a more recent interest, largely because of a particular group in Edmonton [Crude City Scooter Club]. That group is composed of a wild assortment of people including an automobile mechanic who has a degree in philosophy, and a former lawyer who runs a guide dog organization, and a welder, and a produce shipper, and an oil rig fixer and a farrier. It's a whole range of people interested in helping each other to fix, in many cases, rather exotic and complex machines. One of them has an Italian background, and his skills have been especially helpful in ordering parts, and interpreting repair manuals in Italian.
Q: Do any of the skills you've developed as a professor translate to fixing motorcycles?
A: The skills that make a person a good researcher are very similar to the skills that make someone a good mechanic. And for that matter, a good electrician. You need to be working - if you will - in applied logic. In the case of many of my buddies, you need to be able to read Italian or German or French in order to find out anything about them at all because there's often nothing about them at all in English. If you want to be able to order parts, you need to write to someone in German. The same skills that make me a humanities researcher - working on European topics - have been very useful in working on old motorcycles and scooters.
Q: You wrote an article for the motorcycle magazine, Cycle Canada, about the psychology behind the types of machines you collect - what are some main points from that piece?
A: One of the main points is that people of certain social backgrounds and classes are strongly attracted to certain motorcycles. So, people who ride really big, loud motorcycles, versus people who ride really tiny, quiet motorcycles, they're making conscious choices about how they present themselves to the world. In my case, I've always been attracted to German and Italian motorcycles probably because of a certain unconscious snobbery. I often chose form over function; very complicated and failure-prone motorcycles appeal to me. It has to do with my upbringing, and stuff over which I don't have a lot of conscious control.
Q: So what is it about really complex machines that appeals to you?
A: It's the challenge and the puzzle factor. To get something that requires a very large set of parameters to be correct in order to function at all. It's an intellectual puzzle that has to do with mechanics and electricity, and all kinds of other inputs, aesthetic ones as well, no doubt, and they all have to be sorted out. And they all have to be working together in order for this thing to function.