All things considered, I’m doing really well. My ankle is still stiff and painful when I first start moving, but it’s just fine once I get it warmed up. In fact, I’ve started running on the treadmill to try to drop some of the weight I put back on after losing 30 pounds on my “crash diet.” The ankle is really the only remaining physical issue I have — everything else has healed up just fine.

Mentally, I’m still not quite there. (Ba dump bump!) Even though I don’t remember the crash, it’s still in my head enough that I’m not riding with as much confidence and aggression as I used to. I’m back to my old form while lanesplitting, but put me in the twisties in the canyons and pucker factor starts setting in. But I’m getting it back, slowly but surely. I went for a ride with some of my club guys last weekend and for the first time in a long time I was riding with the “fast” group again instead of bringing up the rear with the pussies slow guys.

And I finally went back and completed that turn that took me out. The weekend before last I went back to the crash site for the first time. The club is calling it “Two Buck Turn” now, so I signed a roadside reflector, took some pictures in the street, and actually completed the turn successfully.

So one year later I’m in pretty good shape, I’m still riding, and I’m still happy to be here. You can’t ask for more than that…

So I’m going to consider this the last waypoint on my road back to recovery from my crash. It’s been just under four months and I’m feeling pretty good. The shoulder-blade feels just fine (and never really did give me much of a problem); the ribs still feel a little creaky right around where they put in the chest tubes, but it’s more an ache than a pain; the mangina has healed up nicely; and my friends and family are enjoying the kinder, gentler Chuck since the surgeons apparently took out my mean along with my spleen. The ankle has been the last vestige of injury, and while it’s still achy and I limp when I walk on it, I can walk on it. And of course, I can ride. So clearly I must be recovered.

I’m still planning to write up the gory details of the hospital experience one of these days, but from this point on I’m considering the accident and my recovery to be old business and I’m putting it behind me.

Of course, I do still have another month left on my handicap parking placard. No sense in letting that go to waste…

I got to talk to him briefly on New Year’s Eve, so I sort of got to say goodbye, but it was still shocking how quickly after that it took him. He sounded strong when I talked to him, even though he was saying he only had maybe a week or two left, so I didn’t quite believe it and I told him I’d call him again in the next couple of days. He’d been holding on for so long that I thought he had more time. He didn’t.

So here’s to Wizard. He was a great guy, the kind of person you loved the minute you met him. I’m glad I got the chance to know him.

Here’s a couple of pictures I took of him. The first is at the Love Ride in November of ‘07, the second was taken in Reno in April of ‘09. This is how I like to remember him: smiling, strong, having a good time, being the Wizard we all loved so much.

Wizard at Love Ride

Wizard on his bike in Reno

Ride free and easy, brother. I miss you already.

The biggest thing holding me back was my left ankle — I dislocated it really badly and I wasn’t allowed to walk on it for what felt like forever. First I was in a cast, then I was in a “walking boot” but not allowed to walk on it, and I finally got clearance to put weight on it just before Thanksgiving. At that point I couldn’t put any significant weight on the foot, so I was still gimping around on crutches, but a week later I had moved on to a cane. And most importantly: I quickly built up the strength in my left foot to be able to get the bike off the kickstand.

That was the final hurdle: If I could get the bike off the kickstand and only had to bring one cane vs two crutches with me when I rode somewhere, then it was time to ride somewhere. Which is exactly what I did.

So last Sunday I finally got my knees in the breeze again and put 75 miles on the clock. I was a little shaky at first, but I felt pretty comfortable by the end of the day. It was awesome. My wife, however — she is not thrilled…

And I have to show off my cane holder because I think it’s fucking brilliant. I Googled “cane on a Harley” and “motorcycle with a cane” and crap like that before I rigged it up, looking for ideas, but there’s nothing on it out there. Until now. So here, for all my fellow motorcycle-riding gimps, here’s how to carry your cane on your motorcycle:

Zip-tie a scrap piece of PVC pipe to the saddlebag guard. The cane handle will slip in here.

Zip-tie another piece of PVC pipe to the TourPak mount — the cane will slide through here to keep it from flopping and rattling around

Here’s how it looks in action

Here’s another angle

One more angle — this time with the rider (me)

I did have one more problem beyond getting the bike upright and carrying the cane — the walking boot I have to wear makes shifting gears an adventure, and it’s impossible to put the kickstand up because the boot hits the floorboard and I can’t angle my foot over. So the cane was good for more than walking:

You can also use the cane to pull up the kickstand

You can also use the cane to pull up the kickstand

Heel & toe shifters? Nah, just the heel — for up and downshifting

It’s great to be riding again. I just don’t want a repeat of this:

I remember the ride up the 101 to meet them — I was blasting along, hitting 95 at times, splitting through traffic with my head on a swivel, watching for cops with a sick certainty in the pit of my stomach that I was going to catch a ticket, but too eager to meet up with my brothers to slow down. I saw plenty of cops going the other way, especially once I got on the 33, but none of them bothered me. It was a great ride up.

I got there in about an hour and met up with the guys. There were five or six of them there, and we all hung out on the front porch for awhile, bullshitting, drinking coffee, and being entertained by the kid next door who keep coming back to tell us “jokes.” Good times. After an hour or so we decided to hit the road.

For me and the other guys who live near me in the Valley, the obvious route home was to just turn around and go back the way I had come up. Boring. Instead, we decided to make it a big loop and take the back roads to Frazier Park, then take the 5 home from there. We saddled up, gassed up, and hit the road. Four of us rode out together, with me bringing up the rear.

We went up Highway 33 for about 20 miles, then split off on Lockwood Valley Road. I don’t remember a whole lot about the ride. I remember that it was fun, that we were hauling ass and had the road to ourselves. I remember that I kept monkeying around with my GPS, trying to plug in our destination so I could figure out how much further there was to go. I know I finished doing that because I remember thinking we were getting pretty close.

Then everything goes south.

The guys tell me the marks on the road show that I locked up both wheels and laid the bike over on its left. My bike was in 3rd gear, it was an easy entry to an easy turn, plenty of visibility, no reason to have gone down. I’ve seen the pictures and videos from the scene, I’ve read the data from my GPS, and they’re right. There was absolutely no reason for me to have braked like that and to go down.

The GPS shows that we had come out of a turn into a straight-away. I accelerated up to 48 mph, then began slowing as I approached the next turn. GPS shows me slowing to 30 (which ties in with the bike in 3rd gear — downshifting), then the track ends where I went down. I suspect that I had just initiated the left turn when I locked up both brakes for some reason, and the angle of the bike made both wheels sort of “squirt” out from under me, low-siding the bike and slamming me shoulder-first into the ground. The question is: why the hell did I lock it up?

The only explanation that makes any sense is that something jumped out in front of me. It was dusk, so it’s very possible that a deer jumped me, or maybe a rabbit, or who knows what. Me? I blame chupacabra.

I don’t remember the crash at all. My first memory is of being face-down in the road with one of my brothers kneeling next to me with his hand on my back, asking, “Are you okay, brother?” and me answering, “Noooooooo……” I remember that, and pain.

My memories there at the crash scene are really jumbled. Apparently I was very animated, asking the guys to take pictures and video, flipping people off, complaining that it was taking too long for the ambulance to get there, and generally being a pain in the ass. You know, being myself.

Here’s a shot of the crash scene. That’s me face-down (notice the unnatural angle of the left ankle. brrrrr!), that’s my bike with the American flag just beyond me on the side of the road.

Apparently all that happened to the bike was the crash bar was bent back about half an inch and was ground down on the bottom. No other damage to the bike at all. So I took all the damage instead. That’s fucked up.

When I went down I dislocated my left ankle, broke my left shoulderblade, six ribs on the left, blew up my spleen so they had to remove it later, and punctured my left lung. It looks like I stuck where I landed — no slide, no roll, no bounce. I just hit, and my body absorbed every little bit of the impact. I really need to learn how to bounce.

The crash scene was so remote that they flew me out by helicopter, which was pretty cool. I remember being on the ground and when I heard the helicopter coming, saying, “But I can’t pay for that!” and one of the firemen reassured me that Ventura County doesn’t charge for Life Flights. I am now officially a fan of Ventura County.

One of my brothers got the video of the helo taking me out of there. You can’t see it in the video, but I’m in the helicopter holding my right fist up in the air as we take off. The flight nurse kept trying to push my hand back down, but I kept throwing that fist up there for my brothers.

About this video… It illustrates one of the things I love about my club: No matter how bad things are, we can still find something to laugh about. In this case, I’m all busted up and going to the hospital, but everyone still cracks up at the pilot’s question over the radio at the end. And to explain the question… One of my club brothers — the one shooting the video — is an actor and was in one of the Terminator movies. He gets recognized quite a bit for it, and that’s what the pilot is asking about.

I loaded the GPS track into Google Maps. Here’s the last 20 or so miles of the route, with the pin showing where I went down. Check it out:

View Larger Map

Aaaaaanyway… This entry is getting pretty long, so I’ll cut it off here and get into the hospital and medical stuff in the next one.

Never forget.

I kept noticing my rear tire was looking more and more like a racing slick and I kept thinking, “Yeah, I need to take care of that. Next paycheck for sure.” Then I’d get on and ride for another couple of weeks until I’d notice the tread was getting low and think, “Yeah, I need to take care of that. Next paycheck for sure!” Lather, rinse, repeat. Until the other day when I noticed there was a white patch in the middle of the not-tread-anymore and took a closer look. It had progressed beyond not-tread — now it wasn’t even rubber, it was cord.

Oopsie. This paycheck. For sure.

It turns out there were two spots where it was down to the cord, each on opposite sides of the wheel. Weird. I guess the shop where I had it mounted must have balanced the hell out of it…

I got a little over 8,000 miles out of this last tire, and probably only the last 500 or so were suicide miles. Not bad, especially for a Kenda. But now I’m giving Dunlop a try. I figure maybe Harley’s on to something with all those D402s they sell as stock.

It finally occurred to me to post an ad on Craigslist saying I was looking for a floorboard, and within about two hours I had three offers in my in-box. One of them turned out to be from the P of a local MC whose members I run into from time to time, so I worked it out with him. He dropped it off at my place this morning and I had it installed about 10 minutes later. Nice. Now I can go back to really scraping through the turns again instead of being frustrated at the silence.

Here’s some before and after shots, just to prove that I wasn’t making it all up.

I also “fixed” my saddlebag today. I discovered when I was washing my bike the other day that one of the saddlebags was missing a little rubber cushion that sits between the bottom of the saddlebag and the support rail beneath it. The saddlebag has been sitting directly on the rail and muffler support bracket, with the bag rubbing the paint off the support rail and the muffler support wearing a hole in the bottom of the saddlebag. Judging by how deep the holes are in the bottom of the saddlebag, it looks like it’s been like this since I got the bike.

I’ve always had this metallic knock that sounded like it was coming from the engine but didn’t sound like an engine-knock kind of sound, if that makes any sense. I’m wondering (hoping, actually) if this is what it was — the saddlebag rattling on the muffler mount. I’m going for a ride with the guys tomorrow, so I guess we’ll find out. (Edit: It wasn’t the saddlebag. Whatever it is that’s knocking is still at it.)

And, again, here’s a few pictures to prove I wasn’t making it up. I’m feeling very defensive today, apparently.

My bike gets this weird slow wobble when I’m going through a long sweeper like this one, and at first that what I thought it was. The ass end starts oscillating and the handlebars start gently wobbling and the whole bike feels like it’s weaving. It starts out slowly, gently, and it builds the longer I hold the turn until I counter-steer to stop it. This time, though, it did all of that, but bigger. And counter-steering didn’t stop it. So I backed off the throttle and that helped a bit.

But it did it even more in the next sweeper, and then I could feel the ass-end trying to track out sideways when I was going straight, and I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe I’d broken an engine mount, but when I pulled over I found that it was a flat rear tire. Another flat rear tire.

I’m a magnet for flats. Always the rear tire, though, never the front. But I’ve had more rear flats than anyone I know. This is my first one with this bike, but on my last one I got something like three flats in one year. It seemed like every time I turned around I was sitting on the side of the freeway waiting for a flatbed truck to show up.

And then there’s this bike… My buddy came with his truck and picked me up and we got the tire fixed, but as we were driving to the shop it occurred to me that this is the third truck my bike has been in the back of. Between broken throttle cables and work transportation issues and flat tires, my bike spends a hell of a lot of time in the backs of trucks.

So I offer these pictures, photographic evidence of how I and my bike roll: in the bed of a truck.