Chest Pains.
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.