My friend Broschat [ http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/ ] is buying a new Miata after fifteen years without a car. This is not a midlife crisis since we’re neither of us midlife anymore, (we're more like “zesty sexagenarians”: I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a sexagenarian?) And why put a negative spin like “midlife crisis” on a spontaneous exaltation of the life force? Not that anybody has, but just in case.
The second comment to his blog announcement, though, while well-meaning I’m sure, is exactly the kind of response I often if not usually get when I mention that I ride a motorcycle: “I think the closest I ever came to dying in a car [his respondee responds] was in a Sprite when I was 16. I wasn't driving. The throttle stuck and we went over the edge of a road with a 5' drop off. We ended up on top of and in line with a stone fence that was below the drop off. If the car had rolled we would have had our heads driven into the ground.”
People can’t seem to not make statements like this about motorcycles and apparently sports cars. It’s a curious, almost instinctive response. If I say I take frequent showers, nobody ever responds that showers are one of the most dangerous things you can do in your home. If I say I have to get out my ladder and clear out the rain gutters, no one asks if this scares me more than the thought of a home invasion by Islamic terrorists looking for evidence that I eat pork and read Salmon Rushdie. (Yes and no.)
So I just say something like, “I try to be careful.” I’m very superstitious, so I would never mention that I’ve ridden since I was seventeen without an accident or injury, which wouldn’t be exactly true anyway but too complicated to explain further. (Knock on wood.)
I don’t mention that my wife rides horses and has had numerous accidents, one serious enough to put her in a hospital and wheelchair, followed by months in a cast and on crutches. But no one ever says to her, “Oh, horses are so dangerous. My husband has been in a coma for eight years, ever since he fell off his horse and hit his head on a fence post.”
I never point out that when these folks pick the kids up in the minivan after school and drive them to karate lessons, they’re risking the whole family’s life and are at far greater risk of calamity than I am on my motorcycle. Not mile for mile, but over the course of their lives. Yet I think almost no one puts their kids in the car with a sense of impending doom. They’re more like, “I hope nobody says “Happy Meal” before we get to karate lessons."
Not to mention karate lessons.
None of these fatalistic responses to riding bothers me particularly; I just find them peculiar. But I would like the world to know that if I get squashed like a bug under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler, I’d rather it happen on two wheels than four. And that I consider horses to be four-legged killing machines, secret carnivores that will run you into the low branches of a juniper tree and feed on your broken corpse until the paramedics arrive, but I’m glad my wife rides and has so passionately enjoyed it these several decades. And I hope Broschat loves his Miata to death (I could have chosen a better expression here) and drives it safely without a scratch on either it or himself for a long as he can still pass the vision test when he renews his license.
But if the unthinkable should happen, I’ll feel better on learning that he was out driving a little too fast on a beautiful spring day with the top dangerously down, rather than getting jostled on the Metro platform and pushed in front of a train. Also, I’ll hope he was with a beautiful woman, no older than forty-two, and miraculously uninjured.
Now rock climbers, though, those people are fucking nuts.
No comments:
Post a Comment