It’s just pressure…a subtle push on the right handlebar…almost a thought really, but it yields decidedly unsubtle results as I throw the Valkyrie into a hard right turn. Tires squalling, I pilot the big machine between two cars and across three lanes of the highway.

I push her hard. Right to the edge of our ability. It speaks of a lifetime of lessons…some painful…that I know exactly where that is.

Passing the rumble strips and shoulder transition gives us a little bounce as I push, harder this time, on the left handlebar, flipping us into a hard left and scattering gravel just in time to miss the guardrail. It’s close, but I’ve no attention to spare for that. My eyes are fixed ahead and left…on the place I WANT to be…as I adjust the trajectory of the turn and avoid the car behind me by twisting the throttle to its stop.

The suspension works flawlessly. The powerplant seems to bend space and time to my will. The machine howls in ecstasy. I can’t reliably claim that I didn’t howl right along with it. At this moment, the line between us…where the man leaves off and the machine begins, is impossibly hard to find.

And that’s as it should be. As it must be. Our fates are indelibly intertwined. Right now…in this moment…skill, design, performance, and perception will decide whether we survive, or perish in a tumbling mass of smashed man and shattered machine.

It’s an intricate dance…this high-speed swirling stream of concrete, flesh, and steel, and today somebody’s missed a step.

Just ahead an errant cage changes lanes and hits another, getting sideways and crossing several lanes of traffic. Scattering debris and smoke it glances off the unyielding Jersey barrier as sparks fly and the front bumper and fender sail off. Having lost little speed, the car bounces off and begins its journey back across the river of cars.

Despite the critical nature of piloting a steel cage at 80-mph surrounded by others of unknown skill trying to do the same, most drivers are distracted or inattentive enough that they are mostly unaware of what’s happening ahead. Anything out of the ordinary can be catastrophic.

This is out of the ordinary, but there are precious few brake lights. It will be sheer luck if the sliding, damaged car makes it across without another impact. Unfortunately I’m right in the danger zone.

The next few seconds are important. Others, suddenly aware of the immediate danger, are starting to react. Some are reacting badly…blindly swerving and standing on the brakes. Space closes in around me as my awareness seems to expand outward. I can feel the space and taste the capabilities of the machine I am astride. If we all do everything exactly right, perhaps we’ll all make it home today.

It’s over in the blink of an eye. The Dragon and I rocket past the damaged car and into the free space it had just come from just as it is hit again by the car behind me. Not much to spare. Not a sure thing. There might have been another way for me to live…another vector, but if so I never saw it.

One option. One possibility. One path. I’m seldom reduced to so few. Some would say I’m lucky to have had that one. Lucky to have made it through.

But I have a secret…Luck, you see, is a fickle, vindictive, impossibly bitchy mistress. If you trust only to Luck she’ll bed you soundly, and then smile sweetly at you even as she feeds you to the wolves.

But Luck can be influenced…courted…seduced. With a firm hand, courage, and preparation, Luck can be tamed. Luck can be had.

Yeah. Luck can be a bitch. But she’s mine.

Preparation means learning and practicing the skills to keep yourself alive. Extreme, lock to lock turns. Counter-steering. Maximum performance braking. Throttle-to-the-stop acceleration. Hyper-awareness.

Skills. Anybody can ride a straight line down the highway. You’d damn well be able to do a Rhodonea too. Teleportation might come in handy too!

Preparation also means choosing and maintaining a machine that is up to the challenge and suits the rider perfectly.

Preparation can take a lifetime. Usually does in fact…one way or another. Riding is not for the timid, and the lessons never stop coming.

Do it right and the impossible becomes achievable. Do it right and you can find the edge. Do it right…and maybe…just maybe…Luck won’t toss your ass right over it.

The machine and the man. Engineering and art.

But there’s another element.

Neither the design of the machine or the art of the rider is enough by itself. Together they are more then either could hope to be apart. The machine enables the riders skills to be expressed. The rider enables the machine to perform its function.

The line there blurs too…there must have been art in the engineering, or the machine would not be able to respond to the engineering in the art of riding.

They are indelibly blended.

If done exactly right…with a little passion thrown in…together they can have soul.

And as in anything worth doing…that is the critical element.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Lady with her cell phone jammed in her ear changed lanes right on top of me on the commute in to work this morning. I was not in her blind spot…she made no effort to clear the lane at all…just came over, and fast.

High-speed…and 5+ lanes of wide open traffic.

I’m usually quite good at anticipating traffic conflicts, but sometimes there is just no reason for what they do. Occasionally there’s no where left to run either.

Hit the horns (4, 120db electrics) and grabbed the binders…full performance braking (if you don’t, you should practice this). Squalling tires right on the edge of lockup. That Valk rocks…very good braking and feedback…you don’t really want to lock either wheel at these speeds so precise control is required. You also need to continue piloting…

None of this phased her. She just kept coming.

I kept moving left and braking hard, inches away from her, and finally slowed enough to snick in behind her just before I would have hit the HOV divider…which at that point was an end-on concrete wall. Ugh.

Then off the brakes, down a gear, and goose the hell out of it so the dingleberry behind me that’s NOT paying to attention to what’s happening 100 feet in front of him and is coming up friggen fast doesn’t run me clean over.

Right AND left highway pegs were folded up after this…indicating light contact with the car and the wall…unless they’re just psychic.

A very near thing.

The offending car changed lanes and lost herself in the flow, leaving my lane wide open and me finally with the time to wonder why she did it in the first place.

Says something that it doesn’t even piss me off anymore. I’m not sure I want to think too much about just what it says…

They’re gonna kill me one day…but you know…I’m only a biker…

All I could think…when trying to bleed off the speed and praying she didn’t hit HER brakes (that would have been the end of me), was, “Man, what a pity all I did was give the wife a peck on the cheek in way of saying ‘CUAgain’ this morning.”

Ur…that may be paraphrasing. It really was an overwhelming regret.

It was probably more like, “Dammit! I should have gotten laid this morning!”

Well, what? I *am* a guy…and I wasn’t hungry.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

When I was a kid, a coyote (the people smuggler kind, not the Canis latrans type), dumped a truckload of illegal migrants on the road by our farm. One-hundred plus degrees, and 500+ miles from the Mexican border (Texas is a BIG place)…these people had been locked in a sweltering truck for a while. They’d been robbed and abandoned. I was never clear whether they were coming from the border, or heading back.

A dozen ragged men, women, and children staggered up the long driveway and surprised me in our yard, where I was working on something or other.

I was a kid (14/15 or so), and I was by myself. They could have taken what they wanted. What they did was ask, a little bit desperately, for water.

I showed them to the water hose and turned it on. I then entered the house and fetched a bunch of those new-fangled two liter plastic soda bottles that our family had consumed, and passed them around so they could take water with them.

They drank their fill, filled their bottles, rinsed the dirt and sweat from their bodies and clothes, thanked me (some of the women with tears in their eyes), and left.

I was a kid then. I didn’t understand the complexities of the migrant debate. I didn’t understand that my actions at the time could be construed to be illegal by any law-enforcement or government official that decided to be a dickhead.

Fast forward some 30 years.

I’m no longer a kid, at least on the outside. I understand the issues and pitfalls inherent in US/Mexico policy and the migrant debate. I *believe* that immigration policy should be reasonable and enforced. I know the issue is not easy, or simplistic. The problems and solutions are and will necessarily be, complex.

So, when banging through the withering heat in the Texas wood country a few years back, when I stopped to take a leak and an obvious illegal migrant lady stepped out of the deep woods and asked for water (agua por favor señor, hay niños…) while looking back into the woods, what do you think I did?

Well, I gave her the three bottles of water and the plastic two-quart canteen I was carrying on the bike and watched her leave.

I may have outgrown my naiveté (note, I did say “may”), but I have not outgrown my principles.

I’m a Texan. I’m in Texas. When somebody asks for water and you can spare it, you. give. it. to. them.

It’s not complex.

Turns out my actions that day were observed. Within minutes of setting out again I was accosted by a couple of dickheads (note, this is not due to their office, this is their personal choice) in a green INS truck from a “mobile command and observation” post “down the road a bit”. I was threatened with arrest, tickets, impoundment, etc if I didn’t tell them about my “network” and show them exactly where I had been standing at the edge of the woods.

The female of the two apparently could not believe I just stopped to take a piss, and when I told her I didn’t really want to show her exactly what I was doing, she snapped at me that if I didn’t show her and right now, I’d be arrested. So, I proceeded whip out my pointy bits (I’m a “pointer” as opposed to her being a “setter”) and piss on their tire. Piss on demand. One of my proudest moments.

Even though I was following orders, they were not amused.

Eventually I got tired of the pair and their refusal to summon local law enforcement or at least a DPS guy, so I told them, and I quote, “Piss off.” mounted my Valkyrie, and left at what was no doubt an unsafe speed. They could have shot me or arrested me…they tried neither.

I’ve taken some criticism over these actions but hear this…

I believe in the rule of law but…if the lawmakers or enforcers make the decision to be a dickhead, OR somehow think that they can make it illegal to give a thirsty person water in the Texas heat, they have plainly, explicitly, and irrevocably abdicated any authority they actually had over me.

It’s a complex issue. There are a lot of sides.

But water is life. You ask, you get.

I woke in the night recently, thinking of these people.

I have my demons…and lord do I have my failures…my nightmares.

But at least denying desperate, thirsty people water is not one of them.

What would you have done?

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Ran across an entry in my journal from last summer…guess I had not blogged it. Here ya go!

I hit a bat on my Valk last summer…I’ve hit them before, but never this bad.

I was moving 80+, he/she must have been going for all his bat speed in the opposite direction…sucked over the windshield and hit me right in the upper chest/lower neck. In/above/went down in the shirt-collar.

Bat was pulverized. Broke my skin in numerous places (even had to pull a couple bones out of my skin), plus I got to inhale blended bat squeezings mist cloud goodness.

If you were to stick a bat in a blender and serve it up as some sort of protein smoothie…well, I *know* what it tastes like. I do NOT recommend this as a flavor or as a deodorizer.

Had a hard time breathing for a while as the impact had my neck muscles spasm-ing, and yes, I had the “raspy” voice for several days.

I barely slowed down and just headed for the hospital. I was…once again, covered in blood, mine and the bat’s.

The nurse screamed when I said gruffly, “I am the Batman” and handed the smushed bat to her (she was wearing gloves). You’d think an ER nurse would expect that sort of thing.

I got a whole lot of attention, a good cleaning, a new sort of paper-like shirt (that shredded before I was 3 blocks down the street), and a whole bunch of shots, most of which I have no idea what they were. Frankly, I think they had some exotic stuff that was gonna go out of date and wanted a chance to use it.

I think I am the most rabies vaccinated man in the state at this point. This makes the third occasion in the last couple decades or so.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer