Clears up a lot of misconceptions...Fast!
Sit up and take notice of the time that is left. Don't know how long it will take to make the concept stick but I will keep on until I get the point. Here it goes.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Rode home from Phyllis/Stuart’s in a tremendous rain storm. From my seat I could see long bolts of
lightning out in the East over the Shawangunks.
The vista from some of the hill tops on route 17 was enough to crank me
several notches on the Caution meter. Then I hit the rain and the Caution meter broke off as it cranked
all the way at the end of the scale and snapped. I had hit some showers just as I
passed out of Wurtsboro but they were nothing.
When I got to Blooming Grove and turned onto 17 the temperature dropped
and it got darker, grayer.
Right after the on ramp the downpour started but I thought
it was hail. The sound it made when it
hit my face shield was like pennies hitting a storefront window. A .22 caliber sound muffled by the padding in
the helmet. It was cold too. It began to soak through on my boots and the
deerskin gloves. They became nothing
more than sponges. The rest of me was
dry-ish. I figured I would be soaked
through if the intensity of the rain continued.
Surprisingly the traffic slowed significantly. Usually people in cars and trucks have a false
sense of invulnerability when they hit a heavy rain. I felt stable despite the rain and comfortable
at fifty, maybe fifty-five. But traffic
slowed to forty-five and I felt boxed in with the “wakes and wind” of tons of
automobile all around me. Not to mention
a tractor-trailer or two in the mix. I
can handle the road and the weather but I was straining a bit trying to predict
what all those autos might do in the blinding downpour. My mind was processing a thousand bits of
information a second. My eyes scanning
the wheels and the lights of the cars and the water on the road and the buckets
of water coming down. Truthfully, riding
the motorcycle is not something I was thinking about. That was happening automatically. All systems were in survive
mode. If I don’t know how to ride by
now, I thought to myself, I won’t be learning here.
Exit 130 off of route 17 was like a river. If anything the rain was getting harder. On the north bound side there was a line of cars
pulled off the road with their lights blurry through the rain and haze on my
helmet shield, they looked like a string of pearls on a gray velour
display. I was in the ramp up the Long
Mountain Parkway-in the left lane wanting to go about fifty. The cars were remarkably all on my right and
I pulled past and into the front of the line.
No trucks in front of me with their accompanying, buffeting wind. No super slow economy car full of
grandparents and kids doing thirty.
Nothing but road and a few miles of very wet, but none-the-less,
magnificent scenery. I was very
lucky. I only looked back in my rear
view mirrors once and I saw the line of cars and trucks half a mile behind me- I
never looked back. Didn’t use the brakes
once until I hit the traffic circle at exit 18.
Same on the “Goat Path” below the Bear Mountain Bridge. Just
lucky.
When I got home I was high.
I had taken on less water than I had thought. The rain suit worked. I pulled the over clothes off and hung them
to dry. There was a dry towel on the
work bench. I dried off the instrument
cluster on my bike and the face shield on the black helmet. Then I dried my hair.
