Wild Motorcycle Tales Here's a great story from Jeff Ross. Got your own story? Send it to me. Riding, Icing & Sliding This takes place in December 1972 while I was stationed at Ft Hood Texas and about 19 years old. Back then you had to wear a helmet in Texas. I remember this incident very well, have not exaggerated or embellished it, and I even remember the names of the other riders. It was a Sunday afternoon, and myself and three friends were returning from the weekend in Dallas. I was solo on my CB 450 in the rear, with John W. on a CB 350 Scrambler (driver and passenger) and Kenny N. on a CB 500 solo up front. We drove those little things everywhere; they seemed like real road machines then. Normally no problem. This day however there was a sudden severe storm developing and we were on I-35 South refusing to exercise good judgment and stop. One of those deals where the temperature drops 30 degrees in a couple hours. It was raining turning to sleet and the temperatures were dropping rapidly but we were cold and wet and so decided to push on and get back because really there was no other good option, or so it seemed at the time. Driving very carefully of course, can you believe this? Sound like a typical recipe for disaster? "Duh!" had not been invented yet. Icing began just south of Waco. The helmets with face shields were at least keeping our faces from freezing. The daytime speed limit then was 70, and we were doing at least 50. Somewhere just short of Temple, spaced out and running with the flow of traffic, the CB 500 was going over a bridge (just a culvert overpass really) and just went down before my eyes. Boom! Wow! It happened so fast - no skid - it seemed like it just collapsed. Next the 350, with passenger, went down. Oh-Oh . . . No time to brake or swerve (plus I was numb from the cold), physics was totally in charge. As soon as I hit the bridge down I went too. So there we are, four people, three bikes, sliding down the bridge on a sheet of ice like glass. This is a problem yes, but the potential bigger problem was, as I noticed as I went round and round on my back, the semi bearing down on us from the rear, and cars behind him sliding all over trying to get control. As I am spinning round on the ice, I am watching the driver of the cab-over semi sliding left and right across both lanes, heaving on the wheel and trying to slow it down without jack-knifing. I experienced that slow motion effect. I was trying to kinda swim a backstroke on the ice in desperate attempt to get to the shoulder - but just kept going straight along with the rest of the pack. The things you do when you are faced with do or die . . . We slid along for what seemed like forever, finally stopping spread out across the two lanes. The bikes slid a bit further than we did. Somehow, the truck and the cars behind were able to stop just past the end of the bridge where we all came to a halt. The trucker certainly did a fantastic job in controlling that rig. We immediately jumped up and dragged the bikes off the road - wasn't hard at all. The trucker took off straight away as he didn't want to get rear ended. A state trooper (DPS) showed up in about 45 minutes as we stood there forlornly freezing, had us sit in the cruiser to get warm, and he had the base call a couple friends of his who had pick-ups to come get us as all we had a few bucks between us; a towing service was out of the question. Now this is what still amazes me to this day. It was so icy on that bridge . . . How icy was it? Well it was so icy that there was not so much as a scraped turn signal or handlebar grip or peg on any of the bikes. Our clothes - other than being wet you could not tell we had been sliding along the road - and nobody even had a bump or a bruise. In fact the trooper just assumed we had stopped out of good sense and was amazed when we told him what had happened. Also, my friends had never noticed the semi until it was over as they were not spinning like I was and never thought to look behind. I did learn from that experience to watch bridges in general for icing, not to drive motorcycles in icing conditions, and I still wear a helmet to this day, which in 1975 I am convinced saved me from a severe head injury. That is another story . . . PS: This this is the only picture I have of the 450. -- Jeff Ross (Bonedoggy)
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© 2015 Walter F. Kern. All rights reserved.
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