That’s the opening line of a short story I wrote more than a decade ago.
I might as well share it with y’all, as I’d always intended it as the first installment of a much larger project.
A work of which I have, to date, completed only two episodes.
And the second episode isn’t even… the second episode.
So you can’t read Episode 2 yet, let alone Episode x. And even Episode 1 will have to wait until the end of this Thought.
Which begins:
It was a damn fine day to crash a motorcycle.
I’d known it would be (a fine day, that is) for the better part of a week, as I’d been watching the weather forecast. For weeks I’d peered wistfully through my den window at innumerable gorgeous autumn days while it became increasingly clear 2020 would be my lowest mileage year since 2003, which was in the midst of The Boy Scout Leader Era.
After a spate of damp chilly weather, it was becoming clear that Wednesday November 4 would be perfect. I’d found my calendar that day surprisingly free of afternoon meetings, and blocked the time as “Gone Riding” in recompense for a small fraction of two and half holidays I’ve recently forsaken, not to mention several weekends, double shifts, and more all-nighters doing Plex work than I’ve wracked up in any single month of my career.
An unfortunate aspect of Working From Home is that all-nighters – for which I’m fairly notorious at Plex – used to carry a lot more logistical inertia.
By the time the quarterly company meeting was over the day had warmed to an entirely acceptable temperature, the forecast sunny with 0% chance of precipitation. I departed at about 12:30 EDST.
1:30 per the dash clock which always remains set to RST (Riding Season Time).
Traffic sucked.
I played the “drive 5-10 under on the straights so I can at least do the speed limit through turns” game with fair success, but quickly realized it was folly to attempt any specific intended route. At White Lake Road the line in the left turn lane was stupid. But nobody was heading west on Andersonville Road, so that’s the way I went even though I knew it was possible I’d end up turning around if Davisburg Road was still detoured down a dirt road west of town, as it had been for months.
Andersonville was really nice. The pavement is fresh, I had it mostly to myself, my tunes were rockin’, the day could not have been more pleasant, and I ultimately learned that Davisburg west had finally reopened. When I got to Milford Road nobody was heading south, so I went that way, as those are some of my favorite area curves.
Then I turned around and rode the curves again northbound.
I continued to South Fenton Road west.
A route I’ve been crafting for years would have taken me southwest out of Fenton on State Road, but it was closed for construction.
“Good”, I thought, because the pavement there is the worst on the entire route.
But the closure forced me to take the main drag from Fenton through Linden and Argentine, with all the traffic and traffic controls that I’d finally figured out how to avoid using a detour that probably doubles the distance but is generally untraveled, has a few curves, and only three stop signs.
Past Argentine the traffic evaporated and I had a very pleasant ride indeed, though in the back of my mind I was already pondering how I’d get home without riding through Fenton. It might come down to, gasp!, taking the freeway.
My favorite local ride continued through Byron, where I stopped at the riverside park for a swig from my canteen and to clean my visor.
Westward, then northwest, through Bancroft, then West Grand River Road which had been glorious with fall color the last time I’d been on it, weeks earlier, but was now largely bare branches and rusty oaks. West through Laingsburg. Then Round Lake Road, the final curves of the route.
At this point I usually turn around, but it’s only another few miles to the home of my dear friends Richard and Andi, and since they’re retired I doubted dropping in would be a problem. Indeed it was not, and I got to see their granddaughter Ava too – all outside and at a good social distance. I made it a quick visit, as I’d surely run out of daylight if I lingered.
My return trip was the reverse of the ride west, until Byron where I gassed up and checked the map, looking for a new way home since my painstakingly perfected one was temporarily kaput.
Googlemaps quickly identified a route basically bereft of curves, but importantly well clear of Fenton. The directions would have taken me southeast, a left on South Crossfield, north several miles, then east eventually to my choice of routes having avoided the entire Argentine-Linden-Fenton-Holly grind which by now would be in the throes of rush hour.
But pulling away from the pump I looked east and thought, “I’ll bet if I just head down this local street I’ll hit Crossfield.”
Yeah, no.
I zigzagged north and east and occasionally west until I was out of what counts for town and met a more significant road heading east. Looked to me liked the one I wanted, or close enough.
Yeah, no.
After a mile or so it did a little jog that was fun to negotiate, but then the pavement ended.
The gravel road that continued was in good condition, fairly smooth, and hardened by chloride treatment that had obviously spent plenty of time baking in the sun. It was going in the right direction and would certainly intercept Crossfield before too much longer.
In retrospect I should have rejected it on the basis of the pea gravel scattered across that hard, rather oily surface.
To shamelessly self-plagiarize once again, this time from Rim of the Valles Caldera, “I pondered my choices. One would be to return the way I’d come. My second option was to accept the unknown challenges of the road ahead. I elected to go forward.”
I was soon moving at a good clip. I found myself expanding the evaluation of my latest set of tires, which are Continentals because the Michelins I’d prefer are no longer produced in sizes that fit the wheels of what for the past couple of years has been a “vintage” motorcycle. I’d concluded the Contis are “acceptable” and they even seemed to be performing reasonably well in this off-highway situation, which is not an application for which they were designed – or, at this moment, optimally de-pressurized.
I topped a rise and finally saw South Crossfield Road, traffic moving in both directions on the far side of a stop sign.
I tapped the brakes three times, but the tires immediately skidded on the pea gravel, imparting distressingly little retardation to my forward velocity.
I spent some time considering whether I might at this moment be happier had I not removed the anti-lock brake system years earlier.
It was the first time I’d entertained such a thought with anything approaching this degree of intensity, as for decades I’ve been quite happy with the brake system modifications I’ve made, for a variety of inter-related reasons. This was the first event in which having ABS might have mattered.
But I ultimately concluded ABS would not have saved my bacon in this situation. I wasn’t about to spill due to wheel lockup; that common benefit of ABS wasn’t the issue. The problem was honoring the stop sign, and while theoretically ABS might have done a slightly better job of optimizing what little traction was available, the laws of physics were not in my favor, regardless of whatever degree of computerized assistance might have potentially been available. I was simply moving faster than I should have been given the pea gravel and the now descending grade of the roadway.
At any rate, I disregarded further contemplation of that matter and dedicated my neurochemical activity to analyzing relevant kinematics.
Thinking in a way I doubt any form of artificial intelligence is yet capable, I considered the fact that the space adjacent to my throttle hand was a grassy embankment.
It was potentially useful as a means of more favorably adjusting the vector sum of my vehicle's momentum and the force of gravity.
It also looked like a soft place to fall down, if worst came to worst.
Which it did.
I was probably doing twenty-five, maybe thirty miles per hour when both the Continentals declined to surmount a vertical lip between the roadway and the embankment. Nada 3 rolled to the right, the opposed twin engine’s right cylinder augured into the embankment, and the bike’s kinetic energy was converted into a combination of heat, mass displacement of soil, and the mechanical deformation of various materials and components that make up Nada 3.
My kinetic energy sent me tumbling up the embankment.
The grass was as soft as a gym mat.
Rising to my feet I quickly assessed I was completely uninjured.
This realization was very refreshing compared to my last rapid unplanned dismount from a single-track vehicle. In 2018 when I’d come off my bicycle, I’d cracked at least one rib and been lucky not to break my wrists.
This day, instead of my all-but-naked body smacking flatly onto the pavement, I’d tumbled with what might not have been a complete absence of grace onto what was essentially a cushion, while wearing high-tech body armor from head to toe. That gear had done its job well indeed and seemed none the worse for the wear.
As with my bicycle spill my helmet was unscarred, having never touched the ground.
My recollection of every millisecond of the event was vivid, which was a good feeling. Having no reason to suspect closed head injury is always nice.
But this simple test provided no evaluation of whether the brain I’d started with was all that good.
“That was stupid”, I scolded myself, and immediately began tallying demerits.
The guy whose pickup I might have T-boned had I not gone for the embankment saw it all. I waved at him that I was OK, but he turned and drove over and helped me get Nada 3 upright again. I didn’t really need his help, but it was certainly appreciated; at this point my priority was to create an illusion of normalcy in case a cop might roll by.
Nada 3’s condition was somewhat less sanguine than my own.
The plastic throttle body cover had popped off, but it was undamaged and I simply snapped it back on. The brake lever and right-hand mirror were rotated slightly out of adjustment as was the auxiliary headlight; everything returned to proper orientation without issue. The cylinder fins were loaded with dirt and organic debris, most loose but some jammed in. The rocker cover was scuffed; my old friend had acquired a bit more “character”. A rear turn signal lens broke but would be a simple superglue repair. The saddlebag lower mount needed a bit of persuasion that my biggest pair of ChannelLock pliers would easily provide.
Nada 3 started without hesitation or complaint, and I was quickly on my way back home.
I still failed to avoid riding though Fenton.
* * *
As promised, the next blog post contains One Slip: Chapter 1.
Both this vignette and the larger work it introduces are decidedly works of fiction. But in the context of what you've just read it's worth noting that a crucial few seconds of action are described exactly as I experienced them one damn fine day in early 1994, when Nada 3 was still on her first pair of tires.
I might as well share it with y’all, as I’d always intended it as the first installment of a much larger project.
A work of which I have, to date, completed only two episodes.
And the second episode isn’t even… the second episode.
So you can’t read Episode 2 yet, let alone Episode x. And even Episode 1 will have to wait until the end of this Thought.
Which begins:
It was a damn fine day to crash a motorcycle.
I’d known it would be (a fine day, that is) for the better part of a week, as I’d been watching the weather forecast. For weeks I’d peered wistfully through my den window at innumerable gorgeous autumn days while it became increasingly clear 2020 would be my lowest mileage year since 2003, which was in the midst of The Boy Scout Leader Era.
After a spate of damp chilly weather, it was becoming clear that Wednesday November 4 would be perfect. I’d found my calendar that day surprisingly free of afternoon meetings, and blocked the time as “Gone Riding” in recompense for a small fraction of two and half holidays I’ve recently forsaken, not to mention several weekends, double shifts, and more all-nighters doing Plex work than I’ve wracked up in any single month of my career.
An unfortunate aspect of Working From Home is that all-nighters – for which I’m fairly notorious at Plex – used to carry a lot more logistical inertia.
By the time the quarterly company meeting was over the day had warmed to an entirely acceptable temperature, the forecast sunny with 0% chance of precipitation. I departed at about 12:30 EDST.
1:30 per the dash clock which always remains set to RST (Riding Season Time).
Traffic sucked.
I played the “drive 5-10 under on the straights so I can at least do the speed limit through turns” game with fair success, but quickly realized it was folly to attempt any specific intended route. At White Lake Road the line in the left turn lane was stupid. But nobody was heading west on Andersonville Road, so that’s the way I went even though I knew it was possible I’d end up turning around if Davisburg Road was still detoured down a dirt road west of town, as it had been for months.
Andersonville was really nice. The pavement is fresh, I had it mostly to myself, my tunes were rockin’, the day could not have been more pleasant, and I ultimately learned that Davisburg west had finally reopened. When I got to Milford Road nobody was heading south, so I went that way, as those are some of my favorite area curves.
Then I turned around and rode the curves again northbound.
I continued to South Fenton Road west.
A route I’ve been crafting for years would have taken me southwest out of Fenton on State Road, but it was closed for construction.
“Good”, I thought, because the pavement there is the worst on the entire route.
But the closure forced me to take the main drag from Fenton through Linden and Argentine, with all the traffic and traffic controls that I’d finally figured out how to avoid using a detour that probably doubles the distance but is generally untraveled, has a few curves, and only three stop signs.
Past Argentine the traffic evaporated and I had a very pleasant ride indeed, though in the back of my mind I was already pondering how I’d get home without riding through Fenton. It might come down to, gasp!, taking the freeway.
My favorite local ride continued through Byron, where I stopped at the riverside park for a swig from my canteen and to clean my visor.
Westward, then northwest, through Bancroft, then West Grand River Road which had been glorious with fall color the last time I’d been on it, weeks earlier, but was now largely bare branches and rusty oaks. West through Laingsburg. Then Round Lake Road, the final curves of the route.
At this point I usually turn around, but it’s only another few miles to the home of my dear friends Richard and Andi, and since they’re retired I doubted dropping in would be a problem. Indeed it was not, and I got to see their granddaughter Ava too – all outside and at a good social distance. I made it a quick visit, as I’d surely run out of daylight if I lingered.
My return trip was the reverse of the ride west, until Byron where I gassed up and checked the map, looking for a new way home since my painstakingly perfected one was temporarily kaput.
Googlemaps quickly identified a route basically bereft of curves, but importantly well clear of Fenton. The directions would have taken me southeast, a left on South Crossfield, north several miles, then east eventually to my choice of routes having avoided the entire Argentine-Linden-Fenton-Holly grind which by now would be in the throes of rush hour.
But pulling away from the pump I looked east and thought, “I’ll bet if I just head down this local street I’ll hit Crossfield.”
Yeah, no.
I zigzagged north and east and occasionally west until I was out of what counts for town and met a more significant road heading east. Looked to me liked the one I wanted, or close enough.
Yeah, no.
After a mile or so it did a little jog that was fun to negotiate, but then the pavement ended.
The gravel road that continued was in good condition, fairly smooth, and hardened by chloride treatment that had obviously spent plenty of time baking in the sun. It was going in the right direction and would certainly intercept Crossfield before too much longer.
In retrospect I should have rejected it on the basis of the pea gravel scattered across that hard, rather oily surface.
To shamelessly self-plagiarize once again, this time from Rim of the Valles Caldera, “I pondered my choices. One would be to return the way I’d come. My second option was to accept the unknown challenges of the road ahead. I elected to go forward.”
I was soon moving at a good clip. I found myself expanding the evaluation of my latest set of tires, which are Continentals because the Michelins I’d prefer are no longer produced in sizes that fit the wheels of what for the past couple of years has been a “vintage” motorcycle. I’d concluded the Contis are “acceptable” and they even seemed to be performing reasonably well in this off-highway situation, which is not an application for which they were designed – or, at this moment, optimally de-pressurized.
I topped a rise and finally saw South Crossfield Road, traffic moving in both directions on the far side of a stop sign.
I tapped the brakes three times, but the tires immediately skidded on the pea gravel, imparting distressingly little retardation to my forward velocity.
I spent some time considering whether I might at this moment be happier had I not removed the anti-lock brake system years earlier.
It was the first time I’d entertained such a thought with anything approaching this degree of intensity, as for decades I’ve been quite happy with the brake system modifications I’ve made, for a variety of inter-related reasons. This was the first event in which having ABS might have mattered.
But I ultimately concluded ABS would not have saved my bacon in this situation. I wasn’t about to spill due to wheel lockup; that common benefit of ABS wasn’t the issue. The problem was honoring the stop sign, and while theoretically ABS might have done a slightly better job of optimizing what little traction was available, the laws of physics were not in my favor, regardless of whatever degree of computerized assistance might have potentially been available. I was simply moving faster than I should have been given the pea gravel and the now descending grade of the roadway.
At any rate, I disregarded further contemplation of that matter and dedicated my neurochemical activity to analyzing relevant kinematics.
Thinking in a way I doubt any form of artificial intelligence is yet capable, I considered the fact that the space adjacent to my throttle hand was a grassy embankment.
It was potentially useful as a means of more favorably adjusting the vector sum of my vehicle's momentum and the force of gravity.
It also looked like a soft place to fall down, if worst came to worst.
Which it did.
I was probably doing twenty-five, maybe thirty miles per hour when both the Continentals declined to surmount a vertical lip between the roadway and the embankment. Nada 3 rolled to the right, the opposed twin engine’s right cylinder augured into the embankment, and the bike’s kinetic energy was converted into a combination of heat, mass displacement of soil, and the mechanical deformation of various materials and components that make up Nada 3.
My kinetic energy sent me tumbling up the embankment.
The grass was as soft as a gym mat.
Rising to my feet I quickly assessed I was completely uninjured.
This realization was very refreshing compared to my last rapid unplanned dismount from a single-track vehicle. In 2018 when I’d come off my bicycle, I’d cracked at least one rib and been lucky not to break my wrists.
This day, instead of my all-but-naked body smacking flatly onto the pavement, I’d tumbled with what might not have been a complete absence of grace onto what was essentially a cushion, while wearing high-tech body armor from head to toe. That gear had done its job well indeed and seemed none the worse for the wear.
As with my bicycle spill my helmet was unscarred, having never touched the ground.
My recollection of every millisecond of the event was vivid, which was a good feeling. Having no reason to suspect closed head injury is always nice.
But this simple test provided no evaluation of whether the brain I’d started with was all that good.
“That was stupid”, I scolded myself, and immediately began tallying demerits.
The guy whose pickup I might have T-boned had I not gone for the embankment saw it all. I waved at him that I was OK, but he turned and drove over and helped me get Nada 3 upright again. I didn’t really need his help, but it was certainly appreciated; at this point my priority was to create an illusion of normalcy in case a cop might roll by.
Nada 3’s condition was somewhat less sanguine than my own.
The plastic throttle body cover had popped off, but it was undamaged and I simply snapped it back on. The brake lever and right-hand mirror were rotated slightly out of adjustment as was the auxiliary headlight; everything returned to proper orientation without issue. The cylinder fins were loaded with dirt and organic debris, most loose but some jammed in. The rocker cover was scuffed; my old friend had acquired a bit more “character”. A rear turn signal lens broke but would be a simple superglue repair. The saddlebag lower mount needed a bit of persuasion that my biggest pair of ChannelLock pliers would easily provide.
Nada 3 started without hesitation or complaint, and I was quickly on my way back home.
I still failed to avoid riding though Fenton.
* * *
As promised, the next blog post contains One Slip: Chapter 1.
Both this vignette and the larger work it introduces are decidedly works of fiction. But in the context of what you've just read it's worth noting that a crucial few seconds of action are described exactly as I experienced them one damn fine day in early 1994, when Nada 3 was still on her first pair of tires.
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