P A R T 3:
D O N T
S L O W
M E
D O W N
POST: 0011
PROSE
12-09-02021
R E A D P A R T 1 ⇛ H E R E
R E A D P A R T 2 ⇛ H E R E
Eight weeks after his friend crashed and died, that guy I follow on social whatever-the-hell crashed too.
He was blasting a stretch of highway, east out of Flagstaff, and must have caught an air pocket or a cross breeze, because he got the speed-wobbles real bad. His front wheel was shoved left, then it swizzled to the right to compensate. But it overcompensated, so it swizzled back left, then right, then left, then right, faster & faster, wriggling like a snake on amphetamines till the tail end spun out. He went over the bars, then the bike went over him. 200lb of human and a 800lb of sparking debris rolled and slid together. It took a ¼ mile for them both to come to rest on the rough of the roadside.
On my own ride, traffic is thin and I’ve got room to play. My motorcycle⇋body is swimming through traffic like a tiger shark: single-purposed and cold-blooded. I’m in the pure land of primordial alertness, sensing the subtle changes in the 500lb of internal combustion between my hamstrings. I’ve become the laws of motion, torque, and matter, slipping through the resistance of air. Delicate equations, changing lanes at 85mph, being careful to miss the dangerous bounce of protruding road reflectors, careful to keep the wheels on the road. Only later will it be called “careful.” Right now it is just friction.
That guy I follow on social whatever-the-hell wakes up in the bright sterility of hospital digs. His world is tubes and beeps. Skittish nurses and crying kin. His legs don’t work anymore, and no one wants to look him in the eyes. Life becomes new, very new, very fast.
He could have throttled down, eased the clutch in at a perfect pace with the front brake. Maybe he did all those things and it still didn’t matter. Maybe he panicked. Maybe hindsight is the mind-killer. Why add a post-mortem pre-mortum? He is alive. He has more choices than his friend, whose choices were all smashed against a cinder block wall.
He can choose to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming a motorcycle⇋body. He can become a lesson of the cost of dancing in sin with speed and desire. He can be the PSA. He doesn’t like this choice.
I’m still on my ride, at 90mph now. I’ve heard those lessons and denied their premise. For better or worse, I’m of the ilk that must know via gnosis. I need to taste the stakes. When I look down I want to see a street flowing under me that is real; that I am real. No hypothetical stand-ins for street and steel.
Because to those who ride motorcycles, that guy is no lesson. He is the sharp chord, the scream, the shadow side of our collective that makes our risk and our ride so palpably delicious. The bit of salt in the caramel. The bitters in the sweet, swirling Dark & Stormy. He rode next to the chaos goddess of risk, as I also do each ride. As time goes on, he chooses to view his crash as a celebration; an offering on behalf of the collective. When he looks at the hospital floor, he learns to see the road again. Life becomes new, very new, very fast. He knows how to cope with fast.
Through social posts, I see his recovery like a flipbook. He jury-rigs an ego and existence from the salvaged parts available. He finds new parts: presence, hopeless rage, and creeping gratitude. He gets sober. He gets engaged. He gets a minivan with a ramp. He has an AA group of motorcycle crash survivors. He has rigged a Smith & Wesson Model 617 holster to his wheelchair.
Just remember to clamp the brake; that recoil is no joke.
I’m humming in my lane now, humming at 65mph. I feel a wobble, a tremor. I pull in the throttle and coast it out for five seconds, then ease back into fifth-gear. Nearly home–where most accidents happen–or so I’ve been told.