The Big Blue Ambulance
The Big Blue Ambulance
LEANINGS
PETER EGAN
Have you told your dirtbike riding buddies you’re 62 years old?” my doctor asked last Wednesday as he studied the X-rays. “No,” I said, “I told them I’m 48.” “Well, young man, you’ve got three broken ribs on your left side and three broken bones in your left foot. I can’t believe you drove yourself all the way back to Wisconsin from Wyoming without checking into an emergency room.” “The guys I was with,” I explained, “wanted me to go to the hospital, but the driver’s seat in my Ford van was the only comfortable place to sit. I couldn’t lie down and I couldn’t stand up, so I figured I might as well strap myself into the van and drive home.”
“Well, you probably aren’t going to be riding a motorcycle again for two or three months.”
This was not especially good news on the first true week of summer, exactly one day after the summer solstice, but you have to play the cards you’re dealt. Or, in my case, the cards you’ve dealt yourself. All our wounds, as former CW Editor Allan Girdler once observed, are self-inflicted. I’d willfully broken at least three of my own basic laws of motorcycling.
First, after three perfect days of trail riding, I’d decided to go for “one last ride” with the guys late in the afternoon before putting my bike in the van for the trip home. It was that always dangerous “hour of the long shadows,” as I call it in skiing, the fading time of day when you’re mentally disengaged and just a bit tired.
Second, because it was just going to be a short, casual ride up a nearby trail, I didn’t put on any body armor other than my helmet, motocross boots and knee protectors. No chest, elbow, hip or back protection. Yup—you guessed it—I was “not planning to crash.”
My third mistake was just a basic technical error, usually made by rank beginners: Out-riding my vision in the gathering darkness, I’d dropped both wheels into an unseen rain rut in the trail and then tried to roost out of it, rather than just stopping.
Sure as Newton, the bike instantly flicked itself sideways and spat me onto the ground like a badly aimed Roman catapult, then bounced off my ankle. I slid down the trail for several feet before a large boulder intercepted my rib cage.
Wind knocked clean out of me, I spent about a minute in the fetal position, gasping for air with a strange whooping sound, while closely inspecting the writhing grubs and worms that had been living peacefully under the boulder before I’d displaced it.
Truthfully, I thought I was a goner, just on the theory that you can’t hit anything that hard with your chest and live. Luckily, I was wrong, and the guys soon had me on my feet, limping around, wheezing and grousing.
Damage to my DR650 was minimal— dented tank (my aftermarket plastic one had not arrived before the trip), snappedoff mirror, bent shift lever. I climbed carefully onto my bike, hit the start button and she was running. Slowly, we all rode the easy two miles back to the ranch house, where I put a bag of ice from our beer cooler against my ribs.
Ranch house, you say? Beer cooler? Sounds nice.
And it was.
You see, my riding buddies, the brothers Mosiman (Mike, Bob and Dave) and their cousin Mike, gather every year for some trail riding at the old Wyoming ranch that once belonged to their grandparents. The ranch is in a lovely valley on the western edge of the Black Hills, not far from the South Dakota border, so there are lots of good singleand double-track trails to explore. And this year, they were kind enough to invite me along, possibly for comic relief, as not one of them has
crashed his brains out in many years.
So, I loaded the DR into my blue Ford Econoline and headed west, through Minnesota and South Dakota, down through the Black Hills to Newcastle, Wyoming. There we met and headed out to the ranch for three days of the best riding imaginable. Cow trails, Jeep trails, old railroad beds, ghost towns and the ruins of mines.
The evening I crashed, we were returning from a forested plateau known to the Mosiman brothers as “the old Indian burial ground.” When the boys were young, they and their mother used to find red and blue Indian beads among the pine needles. While we were there, poking around for artifacts, thunder rumbled and pitchfork lightning rustled nervously through the hills and cliffs above us.
Omens, perhaps?
Custer died for our sins, as the book title says. Or maybe he died for our right to ride dirtbikes in the Black Hills. As we got on our bikes to leave, Mike actually said, “I don’t think the Indians want us here.”
Half an hour later, I was on the ground, all busted up.
I slept fitfully that night, through a tremendous thunderstorm, complete with hail and high winds, but the morning was beautiful and clear. The guys gave up trying to talk me into heading for the E.R. in Newcastle—or allowing them to personally drive or fly me home—and reluctantly loaded my bike and luggage into the van.
Bob Mosiman, who lives in Illinois, followed me most of the way home with his SUV and bike trailer, in case I needed help. We stopped for the night in Sioux Falls, where he fueled the van for me, and then I cruised across Minnesota, crossed the Mississippi at LaCrosse and headed home.
On the way to our house, I stopped at the Stoughton Hospital emergency room for a few X-rays. Barb met me there.
As I pulled into the hospital parking lot, I realized this was the third time I’d arrived home from a bike adventure in this same blue van, limping from my injuries and slightly the worse for wear. Daytona...Mexico...the Badlands... Maybe I needed a new/luckier truck.
Or better judgment.
Barb unpacked my riding gear this morning, and I noticed, while lying on the sofa and popping another Vicodin, that my chest protector was undamaged and just like new. □
