War Story

I’ve been a bit distracted this morning…which has delayed posting...but the distraction has been very pleasant. An old friend, workmate, and partner in crime (as in late nights at the bar) just happened to google my name last evening and found EIP, and thus…me. We’ve exchanged 12 e-mails (I’m counting both hers and mine) since last evening, including four this morning. Catching up is great fun! I can add another notch to the “bennies of blogging” gun…

Now about that war story...

Blog buddy Morgan posted a truism in the comments to one of my recent bike posts: “Dress for the slide, not the ride.” And at the risk of being redundant: “Truer words were never spoken!” Up until the last motorcycle I always…repeat: always…rode in full leather. As did The Second Mrs. Pennington. In my case it was a one-piece set of black 60’s-vintage English road racing leathers I bought second hand in 1968 (don’t laugh). I wore those leathers for over 20 years and only stopped wearing them because they were destroyed (totally) in the event that made me give up bikes for ten years. I tempted fate when I got back into bikes back in 1999—I didn’t replace my leathers; I simply wore Levis and my trusty, beloved USAF A-2. (I could digress at length about my A-2, but I’ll resist.) No more. New leathers are at the top of my “must buy” list. Now, about that event…

I was living in Detroit, it was around 1986 (or so), and I was riding a Suzuki GS-700 at the time. My in-laws lived in Harbor Beach, MI, about three hours north of Detroit in Michigan’s Thumb. My proxy daughter was visiting us at the time, and we (TSMP, our proxy daughter Robin, and good friend and neighbor Kim) decided to head north for the weekend to visit TSMP’s parents.

Slight digression... When I say “proxy daughter,” I mean a friend, not a relative. We met Robin when she was a student at the DoD high school in High Wycombe, England, back in 1981. The high school was a boarding school for kids who lived at bases that didn’t have a high school of their own, and there were many such bases. TSMP worked at the school for a brief period and enrolled us in the Proxy Parent program, which was designed to provide the boarding kids a place to go…in a family environment…to get away from the dorm. Robin was our proxy daughter, and we became fast friends. Robin is no stranger to bikes, and was my accomplice on the Mad Sunday adventure in the Isle of Man. Yep, she was on the back of the LC when we crossed Mt. Snaefell at well over 120 mph. (End of digression)

So. Back to the tale. We decided Robin and I would take the bike and TSMP and Kim would drive up in the car. The route is all freeway from Detroit to Port Huron, but after that it’s a well-maintained two lane road that skirts the shores of Lake Huron all the way up to Harbor Beach. Robin had never seen the Great Lakes before so we stopped at nearly every roadside turn out after Port Huron to gaze upon the lake, at Robin’s insistence. We fell behind TSMP and Kim by about 30 minutes as a result.

I was cruising along at 70 mph about five miles south of Harbor Beach when it happened. And it happened QUICK, as these things usually do. There was a sedan in the left lane about three car lengths in front of us. All of a sudden the driver turns left, right into our path, with no warning whatsoever. I grabbed all the brake I could, the bike swung left…hard…and we impacted the rear quarter panel of the car, doing about 60 – 65 mph. I heard Robin scream “NOOO!!” just as we hit. I was catapulted over the car’s trunk and impacted about 15 feet beyond the car, rolling, tumbling and sliding an additional 40 feet or so. I didn’t think I was ever going to stop. When I finally did come to a halt I lay there for 30 seconds or so, wiggling my fingers and toes and then running my hands up and down my legs to check for pain. There was none. I jumped up and ran back towards the car…

Robin wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t fly over the car as I did; she hit the rear quarter panel full force and dropped like a stone. The impact broke her femur in two, but without a compound fracture. Robin was conscious and in great pain, crying about her leg, but seemingly otherwise intact. The driver of the car, a 17 year-old girl, was out of the car and standing over us saying “I didn’t see you! I didn’t SEE you!” over and over and over. Fortunately for us, the residents of a near-by house had heard the impact, looked out to see me cart wheeling down the road and had immediately called the Harbor Beach ambulance service. They were on the scene in about ten minutes.

In the mean time my back had stiffened up and I couldn’t stand up straight. The pain intensified and was excruciating by the time the paramedics arrived. (It turned out I had two compression fractures in my lower vertebrae.) So…the ambulance pulls up, two paramedics jump out carrying what looked like plumbers tool boxes full of medical supplies. They were amazed that there was no blood, no road rash, no abrasions, no nothing except for Robin’s broken leg and my back pain.

To make a long story shorter, we were loaded up into the ambulance and taken to the Harbor Beach hospital, where we were met by TSMP, Kim, and TSMP’s parents. The one doctor on duty took care of Robin first, setting her leg and getting her ready for a transfer to the Bad Axe hospital, where she would have further surgery to put a surgical steel rod in her leg. But…at least we were alive and wouldn’t carry terrible scars for the rest of our lives. My compression fractures healed quite nicely, except for the slipped disc I experienced a few years later, an injury I’m certain was related to the accident but cannot prove. And the lawsuit was settled out of court. In our favor.

That accident was enough to make me give up bikes for ten years. I took away a couple of lessons from the experience, the first being you can do everything right and still get hurt on a bike…it’s the “other guy” you can’t account for. The second was an object lesson about the value of full protective gear. I’m not gonna roll those dice again, this time. Full leather saves skin, and lots of it.