Update from Five Dead Riders memorial site

I shot this picture last weekend and now I notice that T.S.S. made the plaque. I don't know who T.S.S. is. See the post right below this one for more info on the incident the plaque commemorates.

© Pseudocognitive

Five Dead Riders

“This marks one of the worst tragedies in motorcycle history. The purpose of this memorial is to never forget those of us who have fallen, and to remind us how precious life is and how quickly it can be taken away.  Live to ride, ride to live, God speed and please be careful.”

I first read that plaque on an unseasonably cool Monday in early August, 2009. High sky, no clouds, 77° at noon. Perfect riding weather on NorCal’s west Sierra slope, and the road we’d been following after bailing from US 50 near Pollock Pines was nearly devoid of traffic. A few weeks earlier, I’d jacked-up my rotator cuff falling down a mountain near that same road, trying to save my Nikon after tripping over some rusty barbed wire. That day, my brother and I continued on to Virginia City, where we ate fish tacos, visited the dead in a dusty 19th Century bone yard, and saw a drunk chick ride a little Ninja down Main Street.

On the way back down the hill we spotted a row of five large crosses sheltered by pines on a roadside embankment. We were racing the sun with no time to stop; I had witnessed the effects of deer on the motorcyclists who’ve smacked into ‘em, and I had no intention of letting one claim me. Just as well, as I was also feeling the need for something stronger than Motrin for that damned shoulder after riding several hundred miles using my other arm to lift my hand to the throttle. We sped past the site and made plans to follow up on it sometime later.

Later wound up taking a few months to materialize. Having failed to win the lottery, I was forced to allow work to interfere with other, more important pursuits. On August 3rd we returned. I wasn't prepared for the intensity of my response.

I am a lifelong, tortured agnostic. I don’t believe in any god, but I don’t actively disbelieve either. There’s a switch in my mind, painstakingly installed and subsequently maintained by the usual combination of genetics and environment, which redirects questions about the alleged persistence of non-corporeal consciousness to an out-of-the-way mental crawlspace. Sure, I think about such things, but when the intractability of the problem wears me down, I just stuff it in that fortified thought locker so I can continue to function in a semi-normal manner.

I had some trouble flipping that switch at the memorial. Memories of riding dirt bikes with my dad when I was a kid, thoughts of my own wife and sons and how my death-by-fiery crash would affect them, the history and physical qualities of the site—all of this contributed to a state that felt like the presence of something bigger. I can do a reasonable job of explaining this with my limited knowledge of neurology, but in this case I'll allow the undefined to remain undefined—to a greater degree than it needs to be—because I like it that way. As long as I make that distinction consciously, it’s cool.

Five stout wooden crosses stand as sentinels for this place that memorializes the lives of five motorcyclists who died on Labor Day weekend in 1989. These crosses line the ridge of a ten foot red dirt embankment along the south side of a sparsely traveled road that gains 4,000 feet in elevation over a distance of about 30 miles as you ride east.

To reach the memorial beyond the crosses, you either scale the embankment or walk along a dirt path threading through the trees from a turn-out half a football field west. Either way, when you get there, be prepared for conflicting emotions. This is a peaceful place, and even the occasional passage of vehicles on the roadway below won’t distract you from contemplating the duality of that peace and the violent collision and fire that claimed five lives. The riders were part of a larger group, maybe 30 or 40 bikes strong, en route to Hope Valley on a bright September morning. The young, inexperienced driver of a west-bound truck hauling wood lost control on the downgrade, and when it was done, James Carter, Jeff Pearl, Jeffrey and Debbie Sund, and Doug Wall were all dead.

Echoes of terror are there if you want them. What would you feel, watching a one-ton flatbed coming at you sideways with just enough time to know your fate but not evade it? Which is worse, blunt force trauma or immolation? Would your thoughts—in that brief interval between threat recognition and fate realization—have any coherence, or would all your energy be spent trying to react? You can ponder those questions when you visit this place, but you’ll also notice how calm and removed it seems, despite the proximity of the road below. You can hear ravens and Steller’s jays. Beds of pine needles, sun-dappled shade, a tree with a trunk and dead limb that forms a big dollar sign 50 feet up. In the summer there are plenty of grasshoppers just outside the perimeter of the little clearing, and western fence lizards skitter around on fallen branches. Life amid the remembrance of loss, the juxtaposition more profound and elemental than what you’ll find at a cemetery. Evidence that not only is Zen something you bring with you and discover more readily when distractions are minimized, but also that a ten foot dirt bank is more than enough mountain to scale in search of it.

In a clearing under the pine canopy there is a simple concrete base supporting a pewter plaque that tells the story. Also mounted on this low pedestal is the engine of one of the bikes, and damage from the extreme heat of the fire can be seen in the parts that melted. Touch it. That V-twin power plant once moved a rider through space and time and spiritual awareness just as your bike moves you now. Examine the bits and pieces of tribute left by other riders. An American flag patch. A laminated card of an artist's depiction of Jesus. Cards bearing the logos of several MC’s and riding clubs. A half-smoked cigar and a sticker with the grinning skull logo of Ironworkers Local 118. Some coins. An old digital watch, cracked and burned and stopped forever. Some .38 Special and .45 long Colt brass. A small brown and white teddy bear. A tiny, bent redwood seedling, nurtured by an elderly couple with a can of water, survivor of winter snows and inadvertently placed boot soles. The old collar and tags of a long-dead, beloved dog.

Leave your own tribute, but respect the tone and nature of the spot and the memory of those whom it honors. Let yourself absorb the detail and the generality, the physical objects, their natural surroundings, and the atmosphere they produce. Don't force it, just let it. If there’s enough of whatever it is to register in the undefined zones of my agnostic mind, it will definitely affect you.

© Pseudocognitive

An excellent memorial-themed ride report from NorCal with some compelling photographs can be found on the John Is On The Road Again blog.


Memorial to Five bikers on SmugMug

I obtained some of the information about the crash from the plaque at the site; the rest of the background information about the incident is from an interesting article by RJ “Cowboy” Carter of the BoozeFighters MC.

Note: In the realm of motorcycle riding, there exist distinctions among the various classifications given to and used by the operators of the machines. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the differences between those who truly are “bikers”and those who are not (not to mention trying to dispel whatever misconceptions some readers may have concerning various stereotypes). For that reason, I have chosen to refer to the people who died in this crash by the more general term “rider,” no offense intended to anyone at all.

Bob’s bobber

Bob rides his bobber. He had some guy build it and now he finally gets to ride. He took off early from his briefcase job in a stifling high rise. He’s waitin’ on his patch he ordered special from some outfit in Hong Kong—twenty bucks on eBay. He intends to be one bad bobber-ridin’ Bob.

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Oakdale, California

They ride. Never mind they started six episodes into season one, or that those helmets are the ones the dealer told ‘em they’d need if they wanted to fit in, or that a fifty mile radius around Main Street still stands unchallenged. At first, the bike was just a religiously DVR’ed plasma screen idea. Now, it’s steel and rubber and chrome and leather and chitinous shrapnel hitting their cheeks and yellow guts on the the leading edge of their Levis and—the one time they gave that V-twin a proper wrist cracking out on 120 just after sunset—the powerful grit-wake of an oncoming Peterbilt. Now they feel it. There are many layers to all of this, and maybe they've found theirs. Who am I to argue?

•••••

Note: This is a photo of a nice couple on a Harley Davidson. Characterizations are wholly speculative, and NOTHING negative is implied. Oakdale is better than Petaluma. I would not say this if it weren’t true, so believe it.

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Sutter Creek, California: Cortical rumblings in a 19th Century brothel

The small California gold rush town of Sutter Creek sits in a bubble of historic isolation almost exactly forty miles east/southeast (crow-flyin’ straight line distance) of downtown Sacramento.  Sure, all the usual 20^th and 21^st Century technological amenities can be found there, and yeah, the town has been forced by economic realities to slightly prostitute itself over the years, evolving into somewhat of a Mecca for yuppie antiquers and the bed’n’breakfast crowd, but scratch that veneer and you can find traces of a simpler and more violent time.  That’s beyond the scope of this report, however.  What follows is just a small one-hour sample of life in Sutter Creek as observed by a guy with a motorcycle, a camera, and several neurological acronyms that follow his name when printed on official letterheads and medical records.

My brother and I got a late start on our ride on that lazy Saturday in January, scrapping the original route that would’ve taken us down to the town of Bodega to poke around where Hitchcock shot “The Birds.”  New plan: Ione – Sutter Creek Rd. A couple of secondary roads to a reservoir with some trout. Pack the five piece break-down and a couple of spinners. Might even stop long enough to fry up whatever fish might cooperate and look for the site of the big gunfight of 1850.  Or not, because I’ll never have the attention span to remember, so why bother trying? Hit me again with yet another serving of ADD-induced pessimism.

Good enough weather once the sun made the low southern sky midpoint. Passed by a good photo opp, south-bound US-99 under the RR crossing just north of the Cosumnes River. I do not recommend stopping there because a car or truck will surely claim you. Dillard Rd., Clay Station, Twin Cities east to the home of Preston Castle, where my grandmother lived for a couple of years as a child while her dad worked in the prison. Ione–Sutter Creek Rd. outta town was a cool meander along the trickling granite-lined stream-bed from which it derives half its name. Watch for a grizzled hill man in an old Ford; he likes both sides of the road. The historic Sutter Creek Palace Hotel and Ex-Brothel on Main Street was our destination, but that guy almost took us both out of the story. Upon arriving, my brother began contemplating revenge as we awaited our grub.

Good hamburgers and other stuff; steak sandwich rumored to be great but I eschew those now because I do not intend to repeat what my last steakwich did to me. Esophageal impactions are no fun, especially when the guy doin’ the endoscopin’ is peeved about being pulled off the back nine. I quote: “What the hell? Don’t you believe in chewing?” On this occasion I had the Reuben, its sauerkraut a token nod to my mostly forgotten German heritage.

The historic Sutter Creek Palace has a glass case of Old West shootin’ irons mounted on the wall of the bar, and the interior in general exhibits vestiges of its former glory (the stairs beckon old, dead cowboys to whatever traces of earthly delights may still be found upstairs, I reckon). The windows in the restaurant section look out onto a mostly ordinary side street, but I was able to observe a cleanly restored yellow Honda Supersport through the wavy hundred year-old silicate until the owner/restorer, Jimmy-Joe, rode off on it.

I had originally intended to take some pictures after lunch along Main Street (where they have a commemorative Old West gun battle every spring during some kind of festival), but the camera didn’t clear leather, because this is where the story takes an ice-water-in-the-face turn. Walking out, initially unobservant due to factors beyond my ability to understand or explain (that happens a lot to me; my docs call it ADD), I then observed a rider from a group that had arrived after us shout something and run outside. My first thought was that maybe someone was jackin’ his bike, but as we got to the sidewalk we saw an elderly man down in the gutter with a head injury–the same nice guy who had been eating at a table close to ours just a few minutes before.

Simple scalp-lac or skull fracture/brain bleed–hard to tell at that point. He fell and smacked the eighteen inch-high edge of the square curb with his right parietal. Three guys already had hold of the victim and were slightly elevating his head. Someone yelled, “911!” and another brought out a bar towel from the Palace to press on the wound. Some guy with a little mustache rolled up in an SUV with several antennae on its roof, stating that he had a radio and would “call it in.” One antenna looked suspiciously like a mag-mount. To my knowledge he did not ID himself to anyone, and there may be some interesting lines to read between in this case, but I lack sufficient data.

Since three guys already had hold of the victim and Radio Dude was an unknown factor, and because I couldn’t tell if the employees were calling it in or not, I used my aging Nokia. Fortunately, CHP actually answered mobile 9-1-1 quickly—on the first ring no less! I had ‘em hand me off to Sutter Creek and then asked if they had the call. They didn’t, so I gave ‘em the info.

Sutter Creek PD has a nice shiny Dodge Charger. I don’t know if they have any other cars (population 2,655), but that particular specimen is cool. It arrived on scene about 82 seconds later. The victim was still conscious and appeared to be about as alert and oriented as he had been inside the restaurant. We got outta the way. This incident is STILL doing some darkly resonant cortical rumbling and I am certain that the impending anniversary of my dad’s death is contributing to it.

Down the street, a passerby stopped and asked my brother about his bike (a massive 2300cc, 3 cylinder British behemoth formally known as a Triumph Rocket III which I call the A-10 Warthog tank-killa), opening with, “Hey, that’s not a Harley!” He proceeded to wonder aloud why so many guys who lived in or passed through the area now rode shiny new Harleys, and then opined that to him it seemed like some kind of fashion statement for many of them, because most of the guys he knew had only started riding a year or two before.  He distinguished between those guys and the ones who’d always been riding Harleys even before the big marketing push. He rides an 80’s Suzuki of some sort and several other bikes, apparently.

Homeward, leaving the disturbing events behind but still wondering (some might say obsessing) about the fate of the old man. Somewhere near the town of Sheldon I noticed that the same group of ten riders I’d seen at the gas station in Ione was following us turn for turn and stopping a football field behind us whenever we paused by the side of the road. They began to close the gap a bit, so we pulled onto the gravel and waited for them to catch up so we could determine their intentions. They turned off toward Wilton. Some might say that my suspicions were close to some kind of edge, but I just call it semi-paranoid conspiracy theorist’s situational awareness (a welcome sign after my momentary semi-fugue state back in Sutter Creek). Never did get a close look at those guys.  In this case, score one for ADD over OCD:  I became distracted by my futile attempts to get a circling turkey vulture to descend within the range of my economy model 200mm lens. The sun set eventually, but I was already home quaffing a Hefeweizen milkshake.
                                        

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.