Bike Has a New Look

Once, when I was sailing on San Francisco Bay in some really bad weather, I looked out on the water and I noticed that mine was the only boat out there. A few minutes later, about a mile off in the general direction I was heading, a bolt of lightening struck the water. I put the first piece of information together with the second piece of information and was able to spot the trend towards and undesirable result. It's this kind of thinking, this ability to pick out the subtleties of a situation, that has allowed me to run a successful business. Today, I was able to, once again, connect the dots and adjust my plans to meet the challenges of the day.

I noticed that there where no other motorcycles out on the road today, unless I just missed them because they where buried in the sand drifts. I also noticed that I was having to lean my bike over sideways to make it go in a straight line. I also noticed, that after driving through the fifth one mile stretch of hard blowing sand, that I was actually getting sand inside my closed helmet and somehow into the crotch of my pants. I also noticed the dark clouds building in front of me in the shape of an anvil. I was also able to notice when a gust of wind tore the windshield right off my bike.

After pulling off the road and checking my shorts for accidents, I decided to head for the nearest town. I was on a Navajo reservation heading towards more of the same so I turned towards Flagstaff and left my windshield in the sand.

Failure is always a chain of intricately woven events. I thought about this while listening to the face shield on my helmet starting to crack and tear. I thought about how one thing leads to another and if you can prevent the first event in the chain, then you prevent all the events. I would have been happy to never learn that my helmet was poorly made and that would have never come up if I'd checked the weather before I left this morning.

When I arrived in Flagstaff, I was a little shaken. I was going to call my Mommy, but being a grown man, I pulled out my Platinum Card and called the number on the back instead. American Express arranged a nice hotel room for me and told me how to get there and that everything was going to be fine.

Here is the funny part: I've 'learned' the lesson about 'checking the weather' a few times already. Thinking about it now, almost every time I've gotten myself into serious voluntary trouble, it was weather related. For the record, here they are:

1) Gilligan impression in St. Vincent with Leigh, Les & Rachel
2) Scud running in the Bay Area while exceeding the Pilots Operating Handbook's demonstrated crosswind component with Leigh
3) Demonstration of the temperature's effect on take-off distance with Mom, Barbie and Whitney
4) Super-Speedy trip to the Farralon Islands by using maximum outgoing current with David
5) All-day mountain wave riding and rivet test at thirteen thousand feet without oxygen with Leigh

To this list I can now add:

5) High-speed tooless wind sheild removal demonstration with Leigh and Scarlet

The two things all these events have in common are: I was steering & I didn't check the weather.

My therapist, the one who ruthlessly abandoned me, always stressed that everything is linked to my childhood and my family of origin. Besides getting excited at the fact that my parents are to blame for everything, I've had to work at tying my adult tendencies to my early childhood development. Not to get too deep here, but I think I don't check the weather because I grew up in Southern California where we didn't have any.