The Motorcycle Diaries

Reality Check I:

Today, I assisted in a physical therapy session of a 28 year-old man with a tragic story - one that hit home pretty hard. Coming around a corner on the highway, a sad excuse for a human being with an astronomical blood-alcohol level and big car failed to stay in his own lane and plowed into him at some 100 km/h. It would have been a bad accident had this patient been in a car as well. Not so lucky... He was on his Harley-Davidson 883 Sport motorcycle, doing his own 70 or 80 km/h.

The result? He had his right arm amputated on impact, severe nerve damage to his lower left leg (irreversible, in case you don't know) and spent a month in a coma. Today, I watched him struggling to tie his shoes with his remaining left hand and hobble out the door with a cane which will be his partner for life.


Reality Check II:

Riding my own motorcycle home tonight in heavy traffic, I came to a fork on the road. Making a soft right turn at the fork, going some 50 km/h and following a car in the middle lane, the left lane opened up completely. I proceded to accelerate and pull out to the left lane to pass him. At that exact moment, he decided he was on the wrong side of the fork and threw his vehicle to the left, only a couple of meters ahead of my front tire.

In a fraction of a second, I hit the brakes hard and nearly lost control, skidding both right and left with front and rear wheels. My motorcycle is big, bulky, not very maneuverable, and to have maintained it upright was, if I may say so, pretty impressive of me. Had I gone down, things would have certainly been ugly. The guy driving the car obviously did not see me and apologized profusely after the near collision, which, if it weren´t for my pounding heart and my trembling legs, would have made me forget that anything had even happened.

Mind you, the point here is not to illustrate what a good motorcyclist I am and how quick and accurate my reactions are. Quite the contrary: It doesn´t matter that I am (or my patient above was) a good, conscious motorcyclist with good reflexes.

What matters is - and the truth of this is quite a bit more drastic when you're sitting on a motorcycle - that life is, in essence, a one-ton weight hanging off a piece of string. And more often than not, someone else has the scissors.