At Large

AT LARGE

Helping hands

Steven L. Thompson

IN THE BARREN WASTES OF THE desert, the wine-red BMW R100RT stood riderless on its centerstand. As we approached in my old Dodge camper van, I scanned the areas next to the interstate for the bike’s rider. But all the way up the road to the little rise that loomed like Everest in the stark Arizona flatland, not a soul was in sight.

I slowed and glanced at the BMW as we passed. Its paint gleamed, it wore a sheepskin seat cover, sported a radio and full BMW luggage. Whoever owned this thing, I thought, must have been in a bad way to leave it to the winds and the road jackals.

Some distance over the rise, the rider appeared. He trudged along on the shoulder, silver hair exposed to the desert sun. As I slowed, I saw that he was dressed as well as his bike. He looked up, startled, as I stopped the Dodge. For a moment, while my wife rolled down the window, I could see him warily sizing us up.

“That your RT back there?” I called.

The reference thawed him immediately. He nodded, sweat running down his face.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Out of gas,” he said, smiling ruefully. “Thought I could make it to the next gas stop, but. .

I waved to the side doors. “Jump in. We’ll take you.”

As it turned out, the next station was only a few miles up the road. While we drove, we talked motorcycles. He was going to Texas, he said, to join an old friend for a little 2000mile wander around the Gulf.

Within half an hour, we had him gassed-up and on the road. I waited behind him as he started the Boxer and rocked it off its awkward centerstand. He accelerated onto the sizzling-hot interstate. I followed him until he got off at the station exit. He waved and I honked the horn and that was that. One rider helping another. No big deal.

Or was it? I began to recall the times I’d been stuck on the road with a dead machine. The times somebody had stopped to help. And the times nobody had. There were some of the former, but more of the latter.

The BMW rider had walked a long way in the blazing sun before I stopped. The interstate was flowing with traffic; not choked, but as busy as one of the three main east-west arteries in the country should be at summer’s beginning. Why, I wondered, hadn't anyone else among that wheeled throng stopped for the guy?

Fear, presumably. Or pure selfishness coupled with ignorance. Maybe, ensconced in their air-conditioned cabins, none of the folks in the cars which sped past him really understood what he faced.

Simple ignorance was a real possibility. I remembered a scene from the hot summer of 1964. I’d jumped on my brand-new, 250cc Yamaha YDS2 to make a lunch run from the laundry where I worked after school and on weekends, so hungry I barely got my Bell Shorty helmet on before I rode away. Halfway around the hilltop corner up the road, I hit some automatic transmission fluid and pitched the Yamaha and myself hard down the two-lane. Moments later, as I lay in the driveway of the gas station near the corner, blinking, a woman in a big Chevy Impala stopped next to my bike. I watched her stare at the Yamaha, at me and back at the bike. Finally, she rolled down her window and scowled at me.

“Young man,” she said, in a scolding voice, “you’ve just gotten glass all over the road!” Then she rolled up her window and drove away.

The incident might have become amusing if someone had then stopped to help. No one did. A steady stream of traffic passed as I labored just to get up, then to move the smashed bike and sweep up the glass. Even though I was smeared with blood and dirt, moving only with great difficulty, the eyes that watched me from the succession of cars which passed but never stopped were those of curious but uninvolved people. I was literally a sideshow for them.

Are things better today? We each discover the answer through our own experiences, garnered daily on the road. And as our experiences build, the opinion sometimes changes. But the surprise with which I’m greeted whenever I stop for a stranded rider or driver tells me few of us are willing to stop to lend a helping hand. Even to fellow motorcyclists. Why should we be surprised, if not because the reaction we now expect is exactly that ghoulish indifference I first encountered on my Yamaha?

You don’t combat that indifference with rhetoric. You fight it by example. Among those of us who figure we’re supposed to stop to help when the situation warrants, most of us do so because of an example. In my case, it was my father’s example. He would always stop to help anyone in trouble if he could, and never accepted payment, charging the person he’d aided simply to do the same for the next guy.

This is a pretty simple application of the Golden Rule to life on the road, and few people would dispute its value. But the truth is that, as urban-suburban congestion spreads across America, the frontier ethic embodied in my father’s example is confused by the advent of cellular phones, CB radio, and the proliferating motorist-aid clubs which find their equivalents in touring-rider 24hour help hotlines. Technology may thereby be filling in the gaps created by a wary society, helping in an impersonal way when personal help is impossible or unlikely.

Which is all very well, but didn’t do a thing for that guy on the BMW. It took another motorcyclist to help him. A motorcyclist whose reward for the deed was the deed itself-as is only fitting.

And, of course, the parting comment of the assisted rider: “Cycle World, huh? Sorry. Don’t read it.”

Win some, lose some.