Riding with Dan
by Michael Abraham
Things would have been different, I’m sure, had Mike been able to go. Mike Gunther is my good friend and most frequent riding partner. When I made reservations for the 2003 Marlinton Rally of the International CBX Owners Accociation, he planned to go along, but his parents’ frail health forced a last second cancellation. Mike is a most unflappable human and his presence alone would have stymied much of my introspection.
As it were, I left directly from work in mid-afternoon on Thursday on the great gray CBX for the rally, alone, with Dan.
I took the most direct route, up I-81 to Cloverdale, then US-220 northwards to Clifton Forge. Given the week’s happenings and last-second changes, I fought a sense of unease and impending doom much of the way. On SR-43 towards Millboro Springs, the overtaking of two doublewide mobile home sections drawn by lumbering trucks increased my anxiety by a magnitude. Few terrors in life match passing a 14-foot wide trailer on a 20-foot wide two-lane road.
Once in Marlinton, I was immediately spotted by my best friend of the CBX clan, big John Garasimowicz of Connecticut. John’s a hulking guy, barrel-chested and boisterous, with the language of a sailor and expressive wings. He looks you squarely in the eye when he talks to you, but with only his right eye; the left is dancing unrestrained to the periphery. John spent most of the weekend in near-futile attempts to keep his stubby stogies lit, all the while dispensing his earthbound logic and life philosophies.
I checked into the motel and made the rounds of friends from years past. Gene Brockman, as soft-spoken and pleasant a fellow as has ever been created, is our state director. Newly retired, he wore the satisfied look of a man relieved of a grand burden. Portly Mike Barone, the national director and club president was there from Pennsylvania, as were Dennis and Susan McCartney, Bob and Lori Buehler, always helpful Dave McMunn, Mickey Cohen, and John’s friend Brian. Mike Cecchini brought his exquisite Ducati 888 from Maryland. Its carbon-fiber wheels reputedly alone are worth more than my 1981 CBX. James Elliott was there with several friends from Canada. Ian and Dawn Billingham flew in from England. The parking lot scene was like a motorcycling carnival, replete with tents and tool cases, apparel stands and scores of bikes, old and new.
Motorcycle people are always great to be around. In so many ways they’re just like everyone else, only more so. Motorcycling is potentially dangerous, and those that crave it are just a tad more adventurous than the average Joe. The road can be a capricious mistress, giving great pleasures but occasionally extracting great payments as well. It’s a special breed that accepts the consequences.
My local motorcycling club, Twin Valley Riders, has been particularly satisfying for me. Comprised by professors and mailmen, teachers and firemen, it is such an interesting and nurturing environment that often we’re so enamored with each other’s company at our monthly breakfast rides that we can scarcely stop tire-kicking and hit the road. That’s where I met Dan and I liked him at first handshake.
The next morning under chilly, overcast skies, I was eager to ride. I fell in with David, John, and Dene’ from Minnesota, on a Concours, a Yamaha JFR, and a BMW 1100 RS respectively, if my memory serves me. The official state map of West Virginia has a green splotch indicating the Monongahela National Forest on the right-hand side of the state, and our route on US-219 traced it northward. I clocked 38 miles on the odometer before we encountered the first car we needed to overtake. At Elkins, my escorts turned eastward but I wanted to explore a road to our west, SR 20, so we split. Moments later, the low-lying clouds and rising road met and I encountered patches of fog. At Buckhannon, chilled and hungry, I stopped at a Wendy’s for lunch. Still cold upon departing, I found a Goodwill Thrift Store and bought a sweatshirt for $4.00 to wear between my t-shirt and Cordura riding jacket.
SR-20 is a squiggly line on the map, but the fog and gloom, combined
with a misting rain and dirty roads sapped the confidence I needed to
push the 700 pound CBX to any entertaining speed. Dan would have liked
this road, I thought, as he always sought out the hidden lanes and byways.
With his eager demeanor and ready smile, he always had a destination in
mind for the group. He rode with skill, confidence, and smoothness.
At Webster Springs, the clouds elevated themselves to the sky where they
belonged. Once I arrived in weather-beaten and decrepit Richwood, the
day actually got pretty. SR-39-55 to the Highland Scenic Highway was pure
joy, with fast, open, sweeping turns, clearing skies, and exhilarating
engine noises from the charismatic, venerable six-cylinder engine. On
the Highland Scenic Highway I pushed the bike for a short distance at
triple-digits, just because. Descending to the Williams River, I saw a
small bear sitting by the roadside, sunning himself, unconcerned about
the motorcycle rushing by.
Later, I parked the bike and performed a twenty-minute exercise of disrobing from riding garb, securing it, and donning running gear for a 3 mile hike in the woods. Nearing my fifties, I’m not the runner I once was, but was still able to lumber along on level and downhill sections of the trail. Woods running is one of the few activities more exciting than motorcycling, because although the speeds are miniscule by comparison, the rapid scenery changes and endorphin shots to the bloodstream are intoxicating. Dan came along as well, interrupting me during the quieter moments.
Back to the motel, the carnival scene resumed, with the requisite shots of liquor, tire burnouts, and fireworks working well into the night. Warming ourselves in the brisk evening air by the bonfire, David, who I’d ridden with earlier, brandished a flute and serenaded several of us with lilting tunes in the twilight, including a spirited number from Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. “I get kidded for playing the flute at motorcycle rallies,” he told me. “But (expletive) them if they can’t take a joke.”
I saw a beautiful leather jacket in James Elliott’s booth. I’d wanted one for some time, but the $300-400 price tags had always tempered my enthusiasm. He only wanted $100.00! I asked if he took charge cards for payment as I was short on cash. He said, “No, just mail me a check when you get home.”
Also in his booth was a helmet, clearly damaged from a crash. A lacrosse-ball sized rock was taped to a matching hole through the helmet shell. He told me that the day earlier, a friend of his from Canada had crashed heavily, swerving to miss a deer. His friend’s injuries were severe; much organ damage, a concussion, several broken bones including both legs and vertebrae. He had been airlifted by helicopter to the hospital at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Being Canadian where medicine is socialized, he had no medical insurance. He was alive and conscious but still in critical condition. His physical and financial recovery would likely take a decade or more. Angst sat on me like the afternoon’s fog.
That night, fireworks popping outside my room, I dreamt of medieval torture machinery.
The next day, I rode alone again. I had lunch at a diner in Monterey. I turned west again and rode the magnificent highway US-250 back into West Virginia through the old clapboard towns of Bartow, Frank, and Durbin. Where 250 crossed the high plateau of the main Alleghany ridge, I shuddered in the cold, shivers cascading through my body like the shake of a wet dog. I exhaled a mist of wet carbon dioxide on my face shield and watched it quickly fade to clear again. Strangely, it felt good to be so cold, good to see the intense green of the lush woodlands, good to smell the high-mountain spruce, good to shiver and feel so alive, and good to own and ride such a fine and magnificent machine as the twenty-something CBX.
Dan’s obituary said nothing about the circumstances of his death except to say it was sudden. He was an excellent and experienced rider, thus club members were as flummoxed as they were saddened. Dan lived, appropriately, in Meadows of Dan, Virginia, but was at his hometown on Long Island when he wrecked. Our club president Googled the ‘Net and found the local newspaper’s account which said he’d left a Father’s Day party to ride a friend’s Harley for a few miles and never came back. My own personal guess is that he was involved in some type of road-rage incident, a hit and run, but this rationalization is no more married to fact than anyone else’s. Only one fact mattered: Dan was dead.
Our club’s list-serve was an outpouring of emotion and remembrance, each member expressing shared sorrow and appreciation of his being. Donna Mitchell, as attractive as she is likeable, dated Dan for several years. Once, Dan was ahead of Donna when she was ripped from her BMW by a deer, a terror cleansed from the slate of her mind in trauma-induced amnesia, but he went back to assist her. She said, “He was my friend, one of the best, truest, most loyal friends I’ve ever had. He is one of those people that I knew beyond a doubt that if I ever needed him I could call him at midnight from China and he’s be on the first plane. There was no one quite like him.” Donna lost her only sibling a dozen years ago to disease, and within the past two years lost both parents, and now Dan. “I will miss him beyond words. I can’t fathom that he’s gone,” she confessed.
I was nowhere near as close a friend to Dan as she, so I was able to keep my emotions solidly in check until Laura McElhaney wrote in. Laura and her husband Charles were inveterate distance riders until Charles developed a severe heart arrhythmia and was forced to sell his bikes. A huge part of their lives was gone overnight, but they still had each other and felt fortunate. She said, “One lesson life is teaching me is to love them, don’t leave the important things unsaid, and send them out the door and hope they come back. Sometimes they don’t.” Reading that at my office desk the day before I left for the rally, I wept. Dan was 48 years old, same as me.
Such a tragic loss as this turns any and all of us into philosophers. Sure, we all die; life is a terminal disease. “He was doing what he loved,” some will rationalize. Surely that’s better than death as a bystander to violence. “He was lucky to go while in his prime.” I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. Nobody with an ounce of energy left to shiver on a chilly day, to hug a child, to explore a new place or sip an aged wine, to twist the throttle of a fine machine or rest in a lover’s embrace is lucky to go. Luck is too slippery a concept for me. Is the person who lives – severely injured – through the collision with a deer “lucky” while the person who emerges unscathed less so or more so? Events aren’t lucky or unlucky. Events just happen. What makes a man lucky is his ability to recognize and revel in what life brings him, to treasure his family and friends, his occupation and avocations, most of all his health, and to realize that it could all be gone in an instant.
Still, we all acknowledge that motorcycling has risks. Are we foolish to ignore? If it’s so goddamn dangerous, how can we justify to ourselves and our loved ones that we still do it?
Back at the motel, I entered my bike in the bike show and after I wrote, “Wash Me” on the filthy saddlebags, it predictably lost. At the banquet that evening, our organizers gave awards or door prizes to just about everyone. We congratulated ourselves on another fine rally and strode into the cold evening air to kick more tires and drink more beers.
Next morning I prepared for the trip home under a warming, sunlit sky, precursor to the finest riding day yet. Ed Holm, a young fellow I’d met the night before, said he was headed south, so I offered to lead him on some favorite back roads. We took SR-92 back to White Sulphur Springs, then SR-311 to New Castle crossing the magnificent Peters and Potts Mountains, then bucolic SR-42 to Newport and back home to Blacksburg where we stopped for our first red-light since leaving Marlinton some 130 miles earlier. As I fed him some lunch, he was clearly elated and having fun. He wrote me a few days later, saying, “You made the ride back just an all around great experience, with all those fantastic roads and your calm good humor as well.” Nice guy. Motorcycle guy.
Throughout the trip home, I kept thinking about these words, sent by Chris Hall, president of our local club, to our membership, written long ago by Helen Keller. “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” If there is a heaven above and if Dan was lucky enough to make St. Peter’s cut, he’s probably already got ole Helen on the passenger seat of his Triumph roaming the backroads with him. I’d wager heaven offers no better place to ride a motorcycle than the mountains of the Virginias.
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Author’s note: I departed the following day for the Honda Sport Touring Association national rally in Charleston. My first day there, I rode on SR-16 near the New River gorge, past the crash scene where unbeknownst to me, an unmet club member was likely still over the embankment, writhing in pain, already squarely in the crosshairs of the Grim Reaper as I rode by.
© 2003 Michael Abraham