Wild Motorcycle Tales - Safe riding is no Accident Page 5

Wild Motorcycle Tales

Safe riding is no Accident

Page 5

I was considering a highway cruiser when I saw a 2001 Yamaha V-Max for sale. It looked unique, and the salesman told me it was definitely not a beginner's bike. I asked my wife if we could afford it, and ended up walking away with the keys to it.

The V-Max is an incredibly fast road shark, and I'm glad that I had been eased in on the Sportster first, since this bike will buck off an inexperienced rider like an unbroken stallion bucks a cowboy.

She was all black, sleek, and could easily do 140 mph on the highway without so much as a shake or shimmy. I rode for a while without a helmet, but after a huge bug slammed into my forehead on the highway and made me see stars one day, I decided to start wearing a full face helmet.

My wife became pregnant with our daughter, and the round trip to Casa Grande took its toll on both my wife and me. We both burned out on graduate school almost at the same time, and decided to quit graduate school and go to work. I found a job in Phoenix, and had my first accident on the way home one night.

It had been raining, and I came up to a choke point on the highway where everyone was forced to slow down. A guy behind me was driving way too fast in his SUV, and slammed on his brakes, spinning his vehicle around in front of me. I braked hard with both front and rear brakes to avoid hitting him and my bike toppled to the left.

The accident gouged my left hand through the leather glove and gave me a spiral fracture on my thumb. Luckily, it only broke the windshield and a mirror on my motorcycle, but the whole experience was sobering enough that I stopped being cavalier and started following the safety tips I had learned through my TEAM training.

From then on I've kept both hands on the handlebars, and I've always worn my helmet.

I decided that driving in all the Phoenix traffic was going to kill me, and I needed to find a job in Tucson so my wife and I wouldn't have such a long drive. I had my second accident soon after finding a job in Tucson, when a driver drove from the far right lane all the way to the left turn lane, cutting in front of me and forcing me to lay my bike down.

My bike slid for maybe 100 yards before it finally came to a rest. I hadn't been wearing my leather gloves since it was my first day at my new job, and I was just going for a short drive to get new work shoes. My hands contacted the asphalt at some point, and I skinned the palms, but beyond that I was unhurt.

A fellow biker ran to my aid after the accident, pulling my bike off the road and helping me to the side. The driver who caused the accident did not stay at the scene, and was long gone. A fire and rescue vehicle came to the scene and patched me up, and I drove the bike home. My bike, despite being amazingly undamaged after such a dramatic slide, had broken the front fork brace and was deemed totaled by my insurance company after the adjustor evaluated all the damages.

She had been a good bike, and I rode her for over 40,000 miles before that accident. It made me very sad the day the insurance company took her away from me.

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