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CANYON BITES

      It’s a sunny Sunday morning in the Colorado mountains. Perfect weather. Light traffic. The pavement is clean and dry. Motoring eastbound through the scenic Boulder canyon, Norman and Christine are enjoying the ride and the view. Both riders are wearing protective gear, including high-quality full-coverage helmets. Norman is paying attention to the curves, planning good cornering lines, and keeping his Suzuki well in control.

      Westbound, four motorcyclists on fast sportbikes are dicing with each other, enjoying their race-bred machines, the excellent road conditions, and the rush of friendly competition at the spirited pace, albeit with little regard for speed limits or double yellow lines. At the moment, Mark is slightly more willing than the others to jack up the risks, and his Honda is pulling ahead of the pack.

      Just east of Hurricane Hill, Norman slows the Suzuki for the sharp blind turn through the rocks and leans the bike over into a nice curving arc that should kiss the centerline at his apex. At the same instant, Mark carves into the same turn westbound on his Honda. Mark realizes too late that the curve through the rocks is tighter than he had assumed. He tries to lean the Honda more, but he can’t prevent the bike from drifting wide across the double yellow lines, right into the path of the approaching Suzuki.

      Frantically, Norman shoves the grips toward the right to swerve the Suzuki away from a 120-mph head-on collision. Mark frantically tries to get the Honda turned, but the tires lose traction, and the bike lowsides in a shower of sparks and plastic. The sliding Honda clips the Suzuki just hard enough to send it cartwheeling into the rocks. Mark tumbles to a stop, bleeding profusely but alive. A second later, Mark’s buddies carve around the corner and spin through the mess of wadded-up bikes and bodies. Norman dies instantly, his helmeted head ripped from his body. Norman’s wife, Christine, dies an hour later at the hospital. Mark and his buddies all survive.

      This is a true story, and I’m not relating it just to gross you out. Similar crashes occur over and over again on various twisty highways across America that are popular with weekend motorcyclists. The term canyon racing comes from California, where the twisty roads leading up the canyons are the playgrounds of aggressive motorcyclists. The East Coast has its canyon roads, too, including the famously twisty road through Deals Gap between North Carolina and Tennessee, known by motorcyclists as The Dragon.

The Taboo

      You won’t hear much about motorcycle fatalities from your local motorcycle dealerships or in mainstream motorcycle magazines. Discussing fatalities has long been a motorcycling taboo. If a rider survives the crash, the experience might provide some bragging rights. But talking about the fatalities tends to take all the fun out of the sport for riders, and for those in the industry it has a chilling effect on sales. In general, motorcyclists and motorcycle dealerships don’t understand how to manage the risks of riding, so it’s more comfortable to avoid the topic. Since the motorcycle industry pays big bucks to the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) to solve the problem, the industry attitude is just stay out of their way and let them do whatever it is they do.

      Yes, I understand the discomfort of bringing the risks out in the open and talking about them. After all, part of the thrill of motorcycling is challenging the odds. We ride motorcycles partly because they are more dangerous than other vehicles. Perhaps not talking about the risks will hold them at bay. Maybe talking about risks is inviting the odds to strike. Or maybe we just don’t know enough about managing the risks to know how far we’re hanging it out. For instance, all road racers understand the need for crash padding because they intend to ride at 99 percent of their limits, and they know how easy it is to punch through the envelope. But the street rider may also be riding at 99 percent of the risk envelope when entering a busy intersection. If that’s the case, then why don’t all street riders wear quality crash padding?

      I believe that if we’re to manage the risks of riding, we need to take it personally. We need to understand what’s happening and figure out what to do to keep our risks in check. So let’s ignore the taboo and talk seriously about what’s happening.

       Risk Acceptance

      You’ll encounter lots of other motorcyclists charging ahead aggressively on public roads, seriously captured by a road-race mentality, always measuring their worth in terms of who passed and who got passed. Odds are 10 to 1 the road is clear today, with no sleepy drivers wandering across the centerline and no fresh boulders lying on the road halfway around a blind turn. Of course, on every sunny Sunday on twisty roads across America, a few of those daring riders with a higher risk acceptance lose the gamble. Blind corners are one reason some riders almost always arrive at the biker hangout first. Personally, I’m not willing to gamble my life that the blind curve ahead isn’t blocked by a fallen tree, logging truck, or wandering horse. But, I’ve also ridden with those who don’t share my conservative attitude about gambling my life, and I’ve let them speed ahead.

      The point is, each of us has a different level of awareness about potentially hazardous situations and a different risk acceptance. There are a growing number of motorcyclists who measure their self-worth in terms of their own skill and their personal enjoyment of the ride, not someone else’s. As you grow older, it gets easier to accept that riding on public roads must have a very different focus from riding on a racetrack. I’m out to have a good time, which includes not only arriving home with body and motorcycle parts unscathed but also enjoying the scenery and taking some satisfaction from having the motorcycle well under control.

      If you believe the covers of today’s motorcycling magazines, the purpose of motorcycling is to ride as fast as you can and lean over in the curves until your chicken strips and knee sliders get respectably scuffed. Road racers are held up as our heroes, and race-replica sportbikes are what you really should want. Of course, today’s sports machines really are good. If you could roll a box-stock Honda CBR100RR, a Kawasaki ZX-14, or a Yamaha YZF R1 off the showroom floor and into a time machine and transport it back just ten years, you’d have a faster, better handling motorcycle than the big-buck factory race bikes of the day.

      And that’s really a dilemma for today’s motorcyclists. There’s this image of me on a high-zoot sportbike, passing every other motorcyclist on the road, half Mike Hailwood and half Joey Dunlop. OK, if I were younger, it might be Valentino Rossi and Kenny Roberts Jr. But I don’t ride the track. The dreamy perfect racer image gets pushed aside by the nightmare of a gravel truck making a left turn out of a hidden driveway, a horse that has escaped from a pasture, a splash of spilled diesel oil, or a rusty pickup truck weaving across the line as the driver flings an empty Jack Daniels bottle into my path.

      Sure, I’d like to think of myself as a good rider, but I’d like to stick around for a while longer. I can’t escape the knowledge that public roads are full of hazards that could quickly and permanently end my motorcycling. There are lots of riders who are willing to push the envelope on public roads, but they seem to have very short riding careers. For me, jacking up the risks of a ticket or a crash is unacceptable. I’ve also discovered over the years that what’s important is to enjoy the ride, and only a modest part of that enjoyment relates to speed. There’s tremendous enjoyment in riding a motorcycle at the right speed for the situation, rather than at the maximum speed; getting the motorcycle “in the groove,” and knowing you have more performance in the bank should you need it or choose to use it.

       The Fatality Numbers

      In 2005, more than 4,500 motorcyclists died in motorcycle crashes nationwide. What’s even scarier, motorcycle crashes were typically more fatal than car crashes. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), an astounding 80 percent of motorcycle crashes resulted in injury or death, compared with 20 percent of car crashes.

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