My youngest, my one-and-only Meg of the satiric tongue and mermaid hair, asks me if I was at Woodstock. No, I respond (this is all in text messages), that famous rock concert/love fest/mud bath was in New York and I was on the west coast in a body cast because I’d almost been killed in a motorcycle accident. “You were almost KILLED?!” Meg expresses shock in a stockade of question marks and exclamation points. “Why didn’t I ever know this???!!!”
Then I think of this blog and remember that its purpose is to record family history. I grew up knowing far too little of my family’s past. I hope my children will know more.
Chris turned one when I was in the hospital, in June of 1969. I seem to remember his coming with Celia on his birthday. It was Seattle’s Public Health Services Hospital, now defunct as a hospital (the building was occupied by Amazon for a while; I don’t know what’s there now). It was one of the teaching hospitals for the UW School of Medicine, where (the UW hospital) Kate was born later that year. (Another bedside moment was Celia telling me, as I lay on my back in traction, that she was pregnant.) There were wonderful moments such as these in that hospital bed, but most of the time I was doped up against the pain. And against the difficulty of sleeping on my back with my arm held up in the rigging. But I get ahead of myself.
It’s hard to say exactly what turned me into a motorcycle freak, other than the usual male fascination with speed and machines. I had always been obsessed with cars, and any day dream or fantasy that didn’t involve sex was about cars. (Guns also, I should add, sex, cars and guns; good things come in three, right?) Owning an actual sports car, a Healey or an MG or one of the more exotic machines I saw in Road and Track, was impossible for a middle class high school boy. But as the object of fantasy, well. That’s another thing, and completely possible. I could pretend, and in the summer especially, mowing the lawn (we had a very large yard, and it was my job to mow it) I could relieve the tedium of plowing back and forth across the grass by imagining myself at the wheel of something low and red and topless.
When it came to actual cars, I wasn’t practical, nor did I know as much as I should have. When I got married, on my 24th birthday, my bride, Celia, had some money. To my shame, I persuaded her to leave our lovely honeymoon spot in the White Mountains and drive into the nearest city and buy a used, blue Austin Healey 3000. When my dad, who really did know cars, saw it he was clearly skeptical as to its condition and value. I can’t remember the details, but I think the shocks were bad. I thought that, as a Healey man, Dad would simply approve of the purchase and congratulate me. To his credit, he did not express scorn, but neither did he clap me on the back and welcome me to the select circle of auto aficionados, as I’d hoped he would.
The Healey didn’t last long. I mean, in my ownership. I lost control on an icy road in Saratoga Springs NY that winter, 1967-68, and totaled it. (Actually, and as most car owners know, “totaled” does not mean “this car is a total wreck and not worth fixing.” It simply means “this here British sports car is too expensive to repair so we’re going to pay off your loan and sell your car to someone who would be happy to fix it.” A few weeks after the insurance settlement I saw my Healey on the street in Saratoga, repaired and looking more fetching than before.)
I can’t remember what we did for transportation the rest of that winter. In the spring, before we left Saratoga Springs, we bought a 1952 Chevy, a heroic vehicle which I wish I still had. It took us from coast to coast in the summer of 1968, with baby Chris in a bassinet in the back seat. But that is another story. This one is about motorcycles. And about that brush with death.
I had a friend in Saratoga Springs, Harold Britton. Harold had two immensely important influences on my life. He taught me those two great folk songs, “Banks of the Ohio” and “Long Black Veil.” And he sold me his 1954 Harley Davidson hard tail.
And that was the beginning of my love affair with motorcycles. The Harley needed work, so I moved my wife and myself into a large walk-in closet and moved the bike into our bedroom (which had back door access), where it smelled of gas and oil and got fixed enough to ride. It started hard – I suspect it badly needed a valve job — but my 24 year old right leg was strong and I could kick enough life into that old engine that I was able to ride the bike to work, and then back to Massachusetts, where, being practical enough to realize that I couldn’t easily move a wife, baby and ancient Chevy to Seattle along with a cranky old bike, I sold it to my brother Blackie.
But I remained hooked. We had not lived in Seattle for more than a month before I got the itch to buy another bike. At the time, Honda had graduated from the friendly little 60 and 90 and 120 cc models (“You meet the nicest people on a Honda” rang the ad jingle) that countered the stereotype of the tattooed, chain-encumbered “biker” on big, 1200 cc Harleys, and was now producing technologically advanced and seriously fast street machines. Please understand that we are talking advanced and fast by the standards of 1968. That was when the Honda 450 showed up in American show rooms, a handsome machine sporting a 450 cc twin overhead cam engine. I walked into University Honda in Seattle and learned, much to the surprise of my youthful inexperience, that salesmen have ways of directing potential buyers to the money needed to buy their products. I managed to avoid the loan sharks, though. I was in the Navy and learned I was eligible to join the Navy Federal Credit Union, which for some strange reason thought I was a good credit risk, and lent me the money to buy a shiny red new Honda 450. I was in heaven.
The problem was that at University Honda I ran into a serious motorcycle crowd. No, not Hells Angels. These were guys who raced motorcycles at weekend events. They were cool, and they were friendly, guys with the real common touch. They hung out at University Honda, where one of them was a Honda Factory-trained mechanic. They drank at the Blue Moon tavern after work and raced on weekends. I was already besotted with power on two wheels, now I was coming under the charismatic influence of cool guys who knew how to race those machines. About six or eight months later I traded the 450 for a Bultaco Pur Sang, a serious dirt racing bike. And that was the deep end of the pool for someone who was still doing the dog paddle. I should have signed up for beginner classes. Instead I bought an old Ford panel truck from one of those bike friends so I could truck my Bultaco around, and went riding in the dirt. And that was where I nearly met my Maker, in a small dirt-bike-rider’s wilderness in West Seattle.
How we ran into each other, I and David Miller, he with the Honda factory training and some genuine pretensions to riding skill, no one knows. David and I were the only witnesses to the accident, and we were rendered seriously unconscious by the collision. It was clear that we had run into each other, but how it happened has never returned to my memory. If David has finally remembered, he hasn’t said. I woke up in the hospital with total amnesia. In addition to a serious concussion, I’d suffered a compound fracture of my right humerus as well as of right tibia and fibula. (And a serious laceration of my right knee, but “serious” is relative here. The cut sewed up and healed easily.) The problem was what to do with the broken arm. It took nearly a month to prove that it wasn’t going to set in traction. My orthopedist, Dr. Lester, finally decided on a bone graft, a plate screwed into the bone across the fracture, and a body cast to hold everything in place. This in addition to a full leg cast to stabilize the broken right leg. I headed to the OR.
Treatment of bone fractures has advanced a lot in 46 years, so an orthopedist today would probably look at that awkward plaster cast and scratch his head, and, reading the clinical reports from 1969 would probable think, “I could have had this kid out of that hospital bed in under a week.” As it was, I lay in traction for a month, went into surgery, and, totally plastered, returned to our house in the University District early that summer. I enrolled in courses at the UW, read Thoreau, slept on my back, and one day that fall was freed from the cast.
I could have been dead and, some might argue, probably deserved to be. But I was alive and still in love with bikes. In January 1970 I bought my friend Eric’s 1969 Triumph Bonneville. But no, Meg, I never made it to Woodstock.
At Every Gate 