11.26.96 - 0200 - Washington, D.C.

All right. It may have stopped raining; I don't care. When I wake up in the morning, I'm gone.

Ever since I came home from last year's abortive ride, I've been psychologically packed to take off again. Two weeks ago I started sticking things into real, not psychological, bags. Eighteen hours ago I stuffed everything on the bike. It looked pretty good, far less crowded and bulky than last year's packing job. I couldn't have done better, I said to myself with a satisfied smirk.

Then Susan made a couple of pounds of chocolate chip cookies. Since I'd rather leave the gas tank behind than those, I completely repacked the duffle bag and left saddlebag, mysteriously gained a lot of room somehow, and wound up with a setup that requires me to take only the duffle and the tank bag into the motel at night. And I didn't leave a single cookie behind. I should have known that no matter how well I think things out, when someone presents me with a bundle of chocolate chip cookies, I can always find a way to do it better. If only the rest of life were so simple.

You know the drill from here: Bristol, Tuscaloosa, Port Allen, Galveston. John andI will meet at the Motel 6 in Katy TX next Monday, have some new shoes stuck on the bikes the next morning, and head for McAllen. From there it looks like Ciudad Victoria, Tampico, Vera Cruz, Palenque, Comitan, and Antigua. We'll probably stay there or Guatemala City for a few days while I have a major service done on the bike. I know the service manager there, Arne Sapper. He's third generation Guatemalan who looks more like a gringo than you do. Then we blitz to Panama, figure a way to mail the bikes to Lima, and aim south.

My mood couldn't be better. It truly couldn't. When I back out of my driveway in a few hours, it'll just be a matter of watching miles unroll in the rear-view mirror until I see the driveway again. I've done everything I can do short of hiring a proxy to take the ride for me. This is one trip I think I'd really rather do myself.

I'll pick up mail one more time not later than 1000 EDT today. At that point you can re-route my mail to your mailbox. Anything that hasn't gotten to me by then will come to you. I'm not carrying the modem with me even to Texas. From this day forward, you are my voice. I hope you can hit C sharp; I never could.

Wish me luck, Mike. When I see the isles beneath the wind, I'll send you a post card . . .

Bob Higdon's World Tour II took a turn for the worse on Thursday, December 5, 1996 when he had an accident with a bus in Mexico. He broke his left wrist (not to mention the BMW R80 G/S).

Bob had surgery on Friday. With 6 screws and plate to keep him company for probably the remainder of his life, he can look forward to many years of fun explaining to airport security why the metal detector is singing the blues.

Despite the bad news, a full recovery and use of his hand is expected. He'll be back riding in two months or so. John McKibbin has been with Bob the entire time, a godsend according to Bob, and will help him transport the G/S back to the states. Bob should arrive back in the U.S. sometime around December 12, 1996.

For those of you wanting to blame those dangerous motorcycles, I am on crutches this week, unable to walk with a leg fracture after slipping on a piece of *paper* at work. At least Bob was enjoying what he was doing when the accident occurred.

I'll keep you posted as I get more news from the front lines.

Michael Kneebone
President,
Iron Butt Association
[email protected]
http://www.ironbutt.com

Essentially what happened was that at 1100 on 5 December I ran into the back of a Mercedes bus. I mention the name only because I did a hell of a lot more damage to it than I did to my BMW bike, a chuckle I experienced during the 1.2 seconds I was airborne after the crash. Before I had stopped rolling, I knew that I'd broken my arm and that the trip John McKibben and I'd been taking was over. We'd been in Mexico 23 hours.

I was taken to a dispensary in the closest town, Llera, fortunately just two kilometers down the road. I was lucid but shocky (90/50). They had no radiographic equipment there, so I was stabilized (at no cost) and then taxied back to the civil hospital in Ciudad Victoria. For the medically-inclined, the principal injury was a compound, comminuted fracture of the distal aspect of the left radius, basically a broken wrist with a vengeance.

The miscellaneous injuries were the usual whiplash that will evaporate by Christmas, a few loosened lumbar discs that will find their way home in a while, and even more wrecked cartilage and ligaments in the left knee (a suffering piece of my anatomy that has been repeatedly and systematically singled out for trashing since 1964). But compared to the wrist, all of that was academic. I'd spent too much time being the grandson and son of doctors --- not to mention 20 years of defending physicians and hospitals in malpractice suits --- to kid myself about the situation.

With a compound fracture, the rules change. You try to operate faster than the infection sets in. There was never any serious thought given to transporting me back to Texas. I underwent surgery that night and I now possess a plate with six screws that should guarantee I set off some metal detectors at airports for a while.

The rest of the story is one of just unalloyed blind luck that hasn't stopped yet. I'm home with the bike tonight, courtesy of the collaborative generosity of a ton of people, principally Mr. McKibben, whom I'm nominating for the Nobel Prize in the Mother Theresa category. On good days I'm a difficult person to support; John never blinked. He has carried me often for so long during the past week that I will never be able to repay him for his selfless kindness.

I believe I know why this accident (and the similar rear-ender I had 18 months ago) happened. I also believe there is a cure.

I'll elaborate later.

Although I'd originally planned to head south from D.C. on 24 October, my birthday, John McKibbin and I began trading e-mail shortly after I'd made an announcement of my plans to ride to Chile and Argentina. After last year's debacle, I wasn't making any bold promises about ultimate goals. My initial hope was to be able to make it to Virginia, a four-minute ride. Any mileage beyond that I'd consider to be merely gravy.

It took John about 48 hours of mulling over the issue before he decided to sign on. Within a period of about three weeks he had obtained permission from his wife to ride off for seventy days, a carnet, return tickets for himself and the bike from Santiago, and all necessary shots, visas, and paperwork. We'd spent more time elbowing back beers at rallies over the years than ever riding together, but here at least I knew I would be in the company of a guy who could organize the invasion of Europe if necessary, and do it on time and within the budget. As it turned out, I couldn't have needed someone with such talent any more than I did.

We met in Houston on the evening of 2 December, had dinner with Morris and Betsy Kruemcke and Mike White, and appeared the following morning at Wild West Honda in Katy. By noon we were rolling south with new shoes and clean oil. We stayed in a cinder block truck motel in Alice that night. At dawn the next morning we continued south to Hidalgo, the border town where we would get insurance. By noon we'd changed some dollars into pesos, made it through customs with no problems, and were picking our way through the dusty streets of Reynosa. I felt as if I were home again. We made Ciudad Victoria by late afternoon, a pleasant town of about 300,000 laid back souls. Ice storms were whacking the northeast U.S. while we turned on the air conditioner in the room in Hotel Sierra Gorda (Fat Mountain) on the south side of the central plaza.

And it really is a fat mountain at the base of which Victoria sits. It goes almost all the way to the Pacific ocean. When Hernando Cortez returned to Spain after subduing the entire Aztec empire, people excitedly asked him to describe what the country was like. He crumpled a piece of parchment in his hand, tossed it on a table, and said, "That is a map of Mexico." It's true. I've told people that when you get into those mountains, you don't think you're ever going to get out.

Tuesday, 5 December, would be a dog day, maybe a five hour hop south and east to Tampico, a Gulf Coast town without any significant tourist attractions but with the cheapest Coronas in all of Mexico. We were on the road by 1000. Two sets of small mountains lay between us and the turnoff east to Tampico. We passed some slow traffic on the first set of hills but stopped to take pictures at the Tropic of Cancer. The traffic we'd passed then got back in front of us. We stayed behind it through the next range of hills. John led on his KLR650.

When the road began to flatten out, I looked down at the map to double check the location of the left turn. I knew this road. I'd been over it last year. But something was bugging me. I looked down at the tankbag map again. When I looked back up, I was heading straight for the back of a stopped bus. I never hit the brakes. All I could do was swerve slightly to the right. The impact was at the left handlebar (breaking my arm), engine guard, and left knee. I sailed into the weeds. I muttered a quiet "Goddammit" to myself when I looked at my left wrist. It was a clear trip-ender. The turnoff to Tampico was not 200 yards to the south of where I lay.

John ran over to me. I told him we were finished with the ride. My left knee was throbbing, having whacked the bumper of the bus. At least it was in one piece, almost certainly thanks to the Kevlar pad in the Aerostich Darien pants. I made the obligatory inquiry about the bike's condition, but it was merely small talk. I didn't give a damn about how it felt. It turned out that the damage appears to be entirely cosmetic; if I had two good hands, I could fix it myself in a few days without breathing hard.

That, for the remainder of the trip, was the extent of the bad news. From that point forward everything that could have gone wrong never did. Every single problem was solved immediately and relatively inexpensively. I was splinted at the scene by a passing paramedic and taken to a dispensary at Llera, a village 2km to the south. They cleaned me up and stabilized me. Without x-ray equipment there, I had to go back to Victoria. Someone called a cab and stuck me in it. John secured the bike at a roadside stand and threw my luggage in the back of the taxi. Ninety minutes later I was in the civil hospital in Victoria, looking at some pretty ugly x-rays. Surgery was unavoidable. The fracture was open. Evacuation to Texas would have been not only stupid but dangerous. I talked to the orthopedist. He sounded as if he knew what he was doing.

Pat Widder has told me of an experiece he had being hospitalized in Mexico some years ago. Mine could not have been more different. They treated me like visiting royalty, whether it was because I can speak some Spanish, looked like a paying patient, or just due to my natural cuteness I'm not sure. While general surgery wasn't on my list of things to see and do on the ride, it at least makes a good story, and I'm always interested in one of those. My last conscious thought after being wheeled into the operating room that night was that the circulating nurse was in the wrong line of work; she should have been in the Miss Mexico pageant. I couldn't be in that bad shape, I smiled grimly. And then it became dark.

By 1100 the next morning John had recovered me. Back in the Sierra Gorda we plotted the easiest way to get me and the bike out of Mexico. The bike was arguably the more difficult problem. When entering Mexico with a vehicle, your credit card is stamped to ensure that when you leave the country, your vehicle will leave too. You have six months. We decided to ask the hotel parking lot chief to help. Ultimately, for about $300, he retrieved the bike in Llera, then drove me and it across the border to McAllen and dropped us at the Motel 6. For him that constituted a round-trip of about 550 miles. He was happy; I was happier.

The post-op visit with the surgeon was routine. He put a firm cast on the forearm, charged me $1,000, and said that the prognosis was "bueno." The hospital bill was about $345, including $100 for the O.R., $12 for the AIDS lab work (negative, thanks), and $30 for a private room. Most, if not all of that, should be recoverable from my traveller's insurance policy. I didn't have trip cacellation coverage. Given my sad history south of the Rio Grande, that's the one item I really need .

After that it merely became a question of handling the last 2,000 miles. Eventually I decided to rent a Ryder 10' truck (trust me here: don't even bother calling those creeps at U-Haul), stick both bikes in it, and hump eastward. It was actually cheaper to do that than fly home and leave the bike at the dealer in Katy. I dropped John off in Aiken SC and continued north, arriving home exactly one week to the hour from the time of surgery. The bus wasn't making any claims, the cops visited me in the hospital but never filed a report, and the bike was undeclared at customs without a second glance. A million things could have gone wrong; nothing ever tried to.

So, you ask (as did I more than a few times), what is this new talent I've found for driving into the rear of stopped vehicles? I believe the problem lies with the bifocals I've been wearing. The focusing distance seems to be about 14", fine for looking at a wristwatch, but useless when trying to see the instrument cluster (accident #1) or the tank bag map (accident #2). In each case I was dropping my head down below the horizontal instead of keeping my head level and glancing down. There's a world of difference in those two actions. One retains peripheral vision; the other kills it. If this hypothesis is accurate --- and I obviously hope it is --- then the problem is easily solved with some bike-specific glasses.

But my eternally pessimistic bike guru, Joel Rosenthal, thinks that I have just grown senile and contemptuous of how quickly a motorcycle can bite the hand that steers it. Maybe. But over the years, I've been right more often than he has. Doug Jacobs thinks I ride too aggressively in traffic, but I spent 15 years, 200 days/year, commuting in the worst traffic D.C. could throw at me and never hit the deck once. For now I'll go with the bifocal theory, since it explains the known symptoms and offers a simple solution. That's what Occam's Razor is all about.

This much is clear: The next time a bike pitches me into a hospital, I'm buying a damned car.

Finally, 90% of the miles I've ever ridden have been by myself. This time a solo ride would have been beyond disastrous. John's assistance was total and unrelieved. Without his aid there would have been very little happiness to report here. He did it all. And for anyone considering whether bothering to learn Spanish is worthwhile, I can say only that whatever effort you can make to do so will be rewarded on an hourly basis. With the exception of a single customs agent at the border, we met no one whose English was as good as my Spanish. You will find that to be true even in some of the best hotels along the Gringo Trail. And the more dramatic the problem becomes, the more dramatic will be your need to communicate. Eso es, amigos.

This will be my last mass blast before I head to Las Vegas. The way I'm rolling 7s and 11s, I could double my net worth before the sun next sets on Caesar's Palace. I appreciate your having let me abuse your mail box in this fashion for this and the previous two posts instead of forcing me to do it piecemeal. The happy days of 90 words/minute typing are behind me for a while.

Yesterday I had a cubic meter of wax blown out of my ears. Being neurotically solititous about my hearing naturally had ended up driving me into an otologist's office. Years of jamming ear plugs into my head slowly but surely guaranteed that wax was being cemented against the ear drums, much worse on the right side than the left. Maybe when I'm 80 I'll be able to hear pins drop in the house next door, but at age 57 I could barely hear a shrieking Elvis Costello unless the volume was above level eight.

The technician said she'd run a bottle of warm, soapy water into my ear and repeat until all the impacted wax was out. I asked her what the record was for the most number of bottles used. "Eight," she said after a moment. Apparently that isn't a popular question. It took 0.5 bottles on the right and 1.5 on the left, proving that the goo a Mexican doctor had given me and which I'd been religiously dumping into my right ear, four drops at a time, four times a day for a week, really did loosen up some of the crud.

I asked what, if anything, I could do to try to avoid the problem. "Keep using that stuff you got in Mexico as needed," she said. "Come back in a year if you need to." When I inquired about using Q-Tips --- I never do --- she winced and said in that case I ought to plan on returning in four months. My mother always told me that the only thing I should ever put in my ear was my elbow. The technician said my mother was right. Listen up, OK?

Today I went to see my orthopedist, another guy in the long line of doctors I once defended in a bozo malpractice case. You really get to know someone well when you're the only thing standing between him and some red-eyed plaintiff's attorney.

He opened the cast, took x-rays of the wrist and knee, and said that the guy in Mexico had done a terrific job --- excellent reduction/alignment/fixation, good circulation, temperature, etc. He bitched at me for not having exercised the fingers or knee sufficiently and began to launch into a series of grim warnings about muscle atrophy, loss of range of motion, and so on. I just sat back and smiled. I'd taught him to sing that song twenty years ago and he'd learned the tune well. I merely reminded him that exercising is painful and that I can't stand to see anyone in pain, especially me. Still I promised to do better. Anything is possible, I guess.

There was no fracture in the knee, nor any evidence of cartilage or ligament damage --- edema, nothing more. Anyone reading this who doesn't get on the phone to Andy Goldfine at Aerostich before the next riding season begins is n-u-t-s. That Kevlar pad saved my knee, period. I'll never forget the sight of Mickey Mantle swinging at a pitch toward the end of his playing career, missing, and collapsing in the batter's box in pure agony. That's just the beginning of what a bad knee can do to your life.

The stitches in the arm (18, I counted) were pulled. No infection. The incision starts about 3" above the thumb and wanders lazily along the left of the forearm (ulnar) ridge for another 4". I hope it leaves an ugly, reddish-blue scar, a remembrance of yet something else motorcycling has done for me. A bike really is the sort of gift that keeps on giving.

He's going to yank the cast for keeps on 2 January, way ahead of schedule, else I'd have to wait until he returns from his mid-winter skiing sojourn in Cortina D'Ampezzo. You really have to admire that kind of ruthless, in-your-face arrogance, especially when they hand you a staggering bill at the end of the session. Well, maybe $332 isn't staggering, but I keep hoping that one day my ticket will have the lucky red star. I never tire of telling these guys that I'm used to the Mexican scale when it comes to medical bills and that I'm simply a retired, pre-homeless pensioner with no visible means of support (and obviously no medical insurance), but they just chuckle and slink back to their counting rooms to wallow in their endless mounds of loot. God, I do love it so.

When the cast comes off, the bone will be about half-healed. "That means NO 'SICKLE for another month!" he said with a frown he surely reserves for wounded biker trash. This comes from a guy who used to race Porsches at Summit Point. I can wait. My guess is that forty-eight hours after the cast is tossed into the dumpster I'll be ensconced in Ed Culberson's old room in the posada in Antigua, Guatemala, signing up for six weeks of intensive Spanish language therapy. On the way home I could hit Daytona for Bike Hell Week. There are worse ways to spend the dark days of winter, I sincerely believe.

Hasta luego y nos vemos.

Bob Higdon

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