Ok worry warts, get ready for inflammation.
It was saturday morning... yesterday. I had just headed out on the road and wasn’t more than a kilometer
away from where I spent the night and I got into an accident. The road had been exclusively dirt for the last 150 miles or so. Sometimes it was decent hard-pack but often it was littered with deep potholes and these small water crossings - basically it was a single lane dirt road snaking through the high mountain terrain of the Peruvian Andes. There are no guardrails on these roads and often a tiny slip would precipitate a flight to the bottom of massive cliff. All of this, and somehow you have to share the road with commercial semi trucks.
Then it came for me. This huge semi truck was barreling at me
and he just wouldn’t give me an inch. He
was on the cliff side, and I was waiting for that instant when you know they
see you and they move at least a tire or so to make some room. This instant never came. He kept his path straight for me, his tire
right in the last track of normal road.
I just kept waiting for him to yield and I didn’t really slow down much
either. I remember just thinking a frantic but simple ‘why’
as I steered the bike onto the tiny hump of a berm that bordered the
ditch. This hump was like a 4 inch deep
clay paste. My front tire slipped out
from under me and the bike shimmied out of control. I was high-siding and heading back into the
semi. He seemed to be on the gas because
all I remember is feeling the friction and the force of banging into the side
of him – and those big black wheels were just flying, right at my body
level. I sort of dove away from the
truck at the same time I was connecting with it. As I dove I went up and over the bike landing
out in front of it, flat on my stomach, facing the back of the truck as it drove on. I immediately got to my feet and looked at my legs and feet – I
was standing, I still had both feet – how did they not get caught and mangled
in those wheels? The bike looked to be
in worse shape – there was plastic everywhere – my instrument cluster had exploded
like a piñata and was littered all over the road. All that was left was the ignition cylinder,
sitting there alone. It reminded me of
wrecked bikes I’d seen at Bill’s Boneyard, a motorcycle junkyard in Salt Lake.
My first thought was that the trip
was over. The bike is done, it’s all
over. I don’t think I felt like “im
quitting riding” right off the bat, but it's been on mind since. I put the key in and tried to start it –
nothing. One thing that struck me was
that neither of the wheels looked like they’d been damaged – I expected to see
spokes all over and the bead broken around a flat on at least one of the tires. I decided that I would get all of it
trailered to Cuzco and figure things out there – I'd just wait for a pickup of a
commercial truck and be on my way. I
stripped the bags and waited. One guy
stopped and yes he was a cargo truck headed for Cuzco but said he wasn’t
allowed to take the bike, or me. After waiting a while longer I decided to take my gear back to Kishuara
and try to arrange a ride from there, maybe the policia guys could help
me. Someone pulled over in an suv, three
middle-aged Peruvians. After we loaded
my bags the guy asked if I really wanted to leave my bike there on the side of
the road. I said maybe we could push start it if he and his buddy would
help me pull it out of the ditch. And like that, it came back to life – it felt like I was driving some mangled
Frankenstein of a bike and soon it would all just give-up and grind to a halt.
My cop friends greeted me with
concerned faces. The honcho, a 26 year old from Cuzco, and I pulled off some of the
headlight plastic to expose the frame and attempted to bend it back into
place. We were reasonably successful and
the fender no longer made contact with the headlight. It still looked frankled. The headlight didn’t work, I had no speedo or
odometer and it all just hung there in this mash of splintered plastic and
cables. After we finished the bike and
we were going to head up to get breakfast, I got a little emotional. I didn’t cry or make a scene. I just hung my head like I was trying to
touch my toes and I couldn’t help tears from forming. I thought about how close it was – if I had
moved to the shoulder a bit earlier I would have been thrown in front of the
semi and not into its side. I thought
about my body getting trampled and crushed under the meat-grinder tires. I thought about Debbie and my Mom, how they might feel, how it would be so selfish to go out and get myself killed like this. I thought about people coming to clean up the
bike and my body –what they might say, maybe it would be the same cops I stayed
with. I
thought about my head hitting the front of the semi, my brain smashing against
the side of my skull, pulped, everything over – blam – on a cold morning beside
a mountain road in peru.
We didn’t talk much at
breakfast. I just put my head down and
worked the plate. I didn’t give a f*ck
about getting peru-belly or avoiding any of the food, I ate with vigor. We took pictures before I hit the road and we
all shook hands. I felt like saying that
they were my angels, but decided that sounded gay and didn’t. I offered money and of course was turned
down.
Back on the road - headed to Cuzco and Machu Picchu.
