Thanksgiving Tears
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Road Captain
Joined: Jun 2007
Posts: 512
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From: Escondido, CA
Thanksgiving Tears
This last July, Mike Hendrix, a columnist for Outlaw biker magazine, Sportster rider, and blogger, lost his wife in a Sportster accident while they were out riding together. For Thanksgiving, he has shared his thoughts about this on his blog. If your Thanksgiving isn't complete without a lump in your throat, then read on.
She was beautiful, brilliant, funny, and well-read. She had been married a scant two years, and had been riding Harleys only just over one. She was daring, fierce, and independent; a thoroughbred, with much in common with the spirited hunter/jumper horses she rode professionally for most of her life. She had just moved South after a life spent in New York City; her career was beginning to move forward again in leaps and bounds after a brief stall due to a serious injury and a couple of other, more minor setbacks. She rode her pearl-white Sportster carefully and sensibly, eschewing undue risk and recklessness in favor of enjoying nice, leisurely rides on back roads and scenic country lanes. The horses were a somewhat different story; she’d known them longer.
She was 33, which is too young to die. But despite all she was, all she was becoming, all her potential, and all she meant to all the people whose lives she touched — and they were many — she did die. And I saw it. And can’t stop seeing it.
We all, all of us who live this lifestyle, are as familiar with the risks as with the rewards. The feral joy of flying down some old two-lane blacktop with the sun on your face and the wind at your back is ruthlessly counterbalanced by the ever-present possibility of a fistful of loose gravel in the wrong place at the wrong time leading to being torn literally to pieces in another senseless tragedy. Every time we saddle up is another roll of the dice; we know it, and yet we go out and do it anyway.
An old greybeard Harley guy told me years ago that the first time you swing a leg over one of these things without being a little afraid, that’s the time you need to start thinking about selling it and walking away for good. He was right, like the older ones usually are. After all, so many of us are denied the opportunity to get where the old road dogs are, to learn the lessons that only survival can teach. Their knowledge — and the price they’ve paid for it - demands that we pay careful attention.
Indian Larry died a couple of years ago, only a few miles from where I sit typing this. Think he woke up that morning knowing that he was going to end up a pile of parts lying broken on the asphalt before sundown? Hell no. Think he woke up that morning knowing he might? But of course. And yet he went out and did it anyway.
What makes us do it? What makes us all so willing — so downright eager, some of us — to spit in the devil’s eye; to take those unnecessary chances; to gamble with our very lives, for the sake of a thrill the average squarejohn citizen can’t even get his mind around, much less appreciate?
[color="#333399"][font="arial"][size="2"] I don’t have the answers. I’m sure you’ve guessed that the lovely and audacious woman I spoke of above was my beloved wife, who I had the honor and good fortune to ride beside for far too short a time. After the accident that claimed her life, I considered giving up riding for good, as has many a better man than I after such an ordeal. I’ve been riding my entire life; riding has been a comfort to me when nothing else worked, a source of exhilaration and bliss when all seemed dark an
She was beautiful, brilliant, funny, and well-read. She had been married a scant two years, and had been riding Harleys only just over one. She was daring, fierce, and independent; a thoroughbred, with much in common with the spirited hunter/jumper horses she rode professionally for most of her life. She had just moved South after a life spent in New York City; her career was beginning to move forward again in leaps and bounds after a brief stall due to a serious injury and a couple of other, more minor setbacks. She rode her pearl-white Sportster carefully and sensibly, eschewing undue risk and recklessness in favor of enjoying nice, leisurely rides on back roads and scenic country lanes. The horses were a somewhat different story; she’d known them longer.
She was 33, which is too young to die. But despite all she was, all she was becoming, all her potential, and all she meant to all the people whose lives she touched — and they were many — she did die. And I saw it. And can’t stop seeing it.
We all, all of us who live this lifestyle, are as familiar with the risks as with the rewards. The feral joy of flying down some old two-lane blacktop with the sun on your face and the wind at your back is ruthlessly counterbalanced by the ever-present possibility of a fistful of loose gravel in the wrong place at the wrong time leading to being torn literally to pieces in another senseless tragedy. Every time we saddle up is another roll of the dice; we know it, and yet we go out and do it anyway.
An old greybeard Harley guy told me years ago that the first time you swing a leg over one of these things without being a little afraid, that’s the time you need to start thinking about selling it and walking away for good. He was right, like the older ones usually are. After all, so many of us are denied the opportunity to get where the old road dogs are, to learn the lessons that only survival can teach. Their knowledge — and the price they’ve paid for it - demands that we pay careful attention.
Indian Larry died a couple of years ago, only a few miles from where I sit typing this. Think he woke up that morning knowing that he was going to end up a pile of parts lying broken on the asphalt before sundown? Hell no. Think he woke up that morning knowing he might? But of course. And yet he went out and did it anyway.
What makes us do it? What makes us all so willing — so downright eager, some of us — to spit in the devil’s eye; to take those unnecessary chances; to gamble with our very lives, for the sake of a thrill the average squarejohn citizen can’t even get his mind around, much less appreciate?
[color="#333399"][font="arial"][size="2"] I don’t have the answers. I’m sure you’ve guessed that the lovely and audacious woman I spoke of above was my beloved wife, who I had the honor and good fortune to ride beside for far too short a time. After the accident that claimed her life, I considered giving up riding for good, as has many a better man than I after such an ordeal. I’ve been riding my entire life; riding has been a comfort to me when nothing else worked, a source of exhilaration and bliss when all seemed dark an
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