Sam's Mirror

That shiny bit on that tree you see back there is the bashed left-hand rear-view mirror from my Dad's DRZ400S Suzuki. It marks the spot where he had a particularly nasty little spill on the first week-end of May, 2005. The mirror's still in the tree and we stop and pay homage to the Crash Godz whenever we make the run through that part of the back country, between Bucksnort and Hurricane Mills, on a seven mile chunk of road that we call Goat-Dog Road.

We call it Goat-Dog Road for a couple of reasons. First, there are a couple of farms that have herds of goats. Second, a year or so ago Sam, Little Pinto and yours truly were banging through there and a goofy looking hound dog came wailing out from a farm-house and proceeded to run through the woods with us for over three miles, and I mean full-tilt boogie run. The road has several climbs and descents with switch-backs and this dog would freaking pass us on the inside, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth! We stopped once near a ditch that was full of rain run-off and he went over and leapt in it to cool off and he came over and let us all pat him on the head, we fired our bikes up and he headed right back out with us. He was one of the coolest dogs I ever met and we always have a laugh whenever that gets brought up, and that road to us will forever be named Goat-Dog Road.

The piece of road that got Sam is carved out of chirt and the spot of the crash is a heavily downhill sweeping left-hander that is ugly and off-camber to the right, and it leads to a right-hand, hair-pin, switch-back turn. There were five of us riding that day and the roads were dry as hell and really hard packed with little rolling marbles all over the place. The going was quite treacherous. We all struggled through there and I personally, had more than a couple of roller-coaster stomach moments as we passed through Goat-Dog Road.

Doing the Columbo detective bit, this is what we came up with regarding Sam's tip-over. It was a low-speed low-side where the front-end just washed away from him to the right, to the outside of the sweeping turn, and the bike spit him over the left handlebar at a forty-five degree angle. He hit left shoulder and left side of his helmet first, and then the bike followed him down and tried to chew off his new SIDI motocross boot. We don't really know if the helmet impact knocked him out or if the whiplash from the quick-snap toss over the bars got him, but he was gone for a few minutes there. Out like a light. And as a result of that few minutes of unconsciousness he lost memory of most of the whole day.

Let me just say Thank God for some real safety gear y'all. I just cringe whenever I see somebody riding a motorbike and there is none apparent. But of course, nobody heads out on a ride thinking they're going to have a crash. All of Sam's gear did it's respective jobs and there were no real injuries. He was sore as hell with some bruised ribs, probably from that mirror as he went over the bars. And he had a bruise on his left butt and a sore ankle, but hell, three hundred plus pounds of DRZ flopping down on your leg will do that.

Nope, no injuries really, except for one, and it's not really medical or physical. Sam's injury is the invisible injury. This particular injury is also the hardest one to fix, and I've been trying to fix it for six months now. And that injury is the injury to his riding confidence. A lingering doubt in his mind about whatever mistake that he thinks that he may have made in that corner. He begs to differ with me on the confidence thing, saying instead that he's just a bit more careful now. I have a little different read on it and we have chosen to respectfully disagree, and as long as he doesn't choose to dis-own me for this then I guess I'm doing okay.

And again, what I couldn't get into his head then, and I can't get into his head now is that it could have been any one of the five of us that day that had that tip-over. The road was just that damned unpredictable that day.

More to come from Goat-Dog Road.......