A half hour earlier I was sitting on my deck under a great red maple, enjoying the gorgeous weather that had finally arrived after far too many weeks of rain. I looked up from the magazine I was reading to see my wife come out of the house, a telephone in her hand. Her expression was that of alarm. My son had just called after arriving at his summer job as a gas station attendant. Apparently there had been a serious accident only moments earlier involving a motorcycle right in front of the station. If you knew my son, you would also know that he isn’t big on sharing his day-to-day activities with anyone outside his closest circle of friends, so this event must have been traumatic for him to actually call us. My first thoughts were selfishly the hope that it was not anyone that I knew. The Eastern Ontario HOG chapter was having a poker run that day and I wondered if their route would have included highway 16. I quickly decided I had to go and check on my son, and face my apprehension.
I walked up to a small group of men surveying the scene and asked them if they knew what had happened. I was momentarily taken aback when I learned that I was speaking to the owner of the wrecked car. From him I learned that his two kids were in the back seat, but had suffered only minor injuries from the impact and subsequent flying glass. He told me he was heading north and was slowing down to make a left hand turn into the gas station. He had not quite come to a full stop when the motorcycle hit him from the rear. A heartbeat later, a body had bounced off his hood. I turned my eyes towards a full coverage helmet sitting in the middle of the road. I then looked back to a medical van parked just behind the little red car. Between the two vehicles I could just see what must have been a body covered by a tarp. I was told that this was the female passenger who had flown over the car. The rider, who was in serious condition, had already been taken away to the hospital. I suppose I should consider myself very fortunate that in my thirty plus years of riding, I can count on one hand the number of bikers that I personally knew that have gone down. To be more precise, I only knew one. I first met Marla Garber in the late seventies during a rally put on by a club I once belonged to. At that time she rode a Yamaha xs11, but later on wore out a number of Electra Glides crisscrossing the continent while writing for Canadian Biker and Supercycle. Over the years, I would run into her on occasion and say hello. The last time would be in the early nineties while participating on a poker run organized by Heavy Duty Cycles. I was never to see her again as her life was suddenly extinguished sometime later when she lost an encounter with a truck. Although I didn’t really know her very well, for some reason her passing had had a profound impact on me. As I watched, an officer spray-painted a marker on the pavement where the collision had occurred. Another measured the distance of the tire marks. A female investigator walked over to us and very discreetly started to question the driver of the car. I took that as my queue to leave. With a final assurance of his well-being, I said goodbye to my son and headed back home filled with sadness. Tragic events such as this are a reminder for the rest of us to be even more alert and vigilant when out traveling on the road, especially when on our two wheelers. Although we all accept the higher risks of our greater vulnerability, we should not become complacent in the operation of our Harleys. I know that I sometimes enter a form of nirvana when riding. The feeling of the bike under me, the wind in my face, and the smells and sights of the countryside all conspire to put me on another plane. Although I never stop monitoring my surroundings subconsciously, I wonder if that is good enough. The next
morning as I drove to work, I crossed over a fluorescent X on the
highway, the only evidence of a life |
I