Darwin's Signals
Darwin's Signals
AT LARGE
Steven L. Thompson
REARWARD VISIBILITY IN A JAGUAR XJ-S is dismal, but I did see the yellow-clad motorcycle messenger slip across three lanes of traffic and halt behind me at the light. I glanced ahead, down Finchley Road, and realized the guy was going to need some help when the traffic light changed. Conditions in this part of London were always jammed, and now, at rush hour, it was worse. When the light changed, I edged the Jag sideways to give the messenger more room. I waved to him and slowed down. He didn’t react as I’d expected.
Instead of swooping past me on his Yamaha 550 Vision, winding it up in second, he began to lunge, then hesitated, staying by my right rear quarter panel until we were across the box. Then he screamed his Yam past my window and narrowly missed an oncoming truck. At the next light, he turned back, a furious scowl on his young face, and yelled obscenities at me.
Confused, I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t taken the slot I gave him when it was clear, and when I’d gestured. We crept forward in the gluey stink of diesel fumes to the next light. So dense was the traffic that not even the messenger’s skinny Yamaha could thread through the snarl. I swung the long snout of the Jag alongside him and ran down the window.
He glared at me with that typical car-hating look we motorcyclists wear when we’re trapped among the behemoths, and waited for what he thought would be my explosive retort.
Instead, I asked him why he’d reacted to my politeness with hesitation and a dangerous pass. It took a second for my Yank accent and question to penetrate, but the scowl slipped a bit as he thought about his answer. Finally, just as the light ahead went yellow, he yelled, “In this country, mate, we use the bloody indicators!”
He had a point. Having lived in England for almost seven years, I should have remembered. You signal a following vehicle to pass by momentarily flashing the offside turnsignal. Not with a hand signal.
In context, the messenger’s response was the correct one. Living on the ragged edge of mayhem all his working day, the motorcycle messenger, more than any other twowheeled professional, has to master the visual signals around him just to stay alive. But in truth, we all should continually refine our signal-processing facilities, because it’s reacting to these visual clues that often makes the difference between a trip to the hospital and a trip to wherever we thought we were going.
When my stepson began to ride, I figured it might help him if I jotted down some of the signals I’d discovered to be useful in daily survival. The list was a lot longer than I’d thought, and as I reran traffic situations that had scared the bejeezus out of me for the previous 20 years, I realized there was almost no end to those signals, which, like some form of Darwinism, sort out those among us who can not only ride but learn enough to keep riding in the face of an increasingly hostile environment.
Some signals stand out. I’d been told, for instance, sometime around 1963, that maintaining eye contact with another driver is the safest way to avoid contact with his vehicle. It took several near-misses with people who had locked eyeballs with me and then proceeded to plough into the space my bike was about to occupy to convince me that eye contact was not enough. I had to watch their vehicles’ signals—the front wheels of their car or truck, and continue to measure closure rates.
Just as the safetycrat old fogeys had predicted I would, the longer I rode, the more I began to realize that I could assume nothing about the intentions of the cars around me. Except that they were probably going to do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time. I learned to scrutinize the cars and roadside, the road itself, even, as a fighter pilot in enemy territory has to, scanning for threats, fixed and mobile.
As I sat in the Jag behind the messenger, I recalled the worst example I’d ever seen of a misread visual cue. It was the awful accident I’d witnessed in 1973, at the base of the Mount Rose Highway where it joins U.S. 395 in Nevada, between Reno and Carson City. Southbound on 395, there’s a left-turn lane for people heading east towards Virginia City. A woman in a Dodge crept forward in this lane, blinker going, as I watched from the stop sign to her right. A guy on a chopped Hog approached northbound, legs straight out on highway pegs, girlfriend perched behind, both wearing helmets. It seemed as if the usual would happen; the Dodge would turn left just after the Hog rumbled by. But it didn't work that way.
Somehow, the Hog pilot missed his visual signal that the woman was creeping, not stationary. He remained too far left in his lane, and clipped the chromed snout of the Dodge. In an eyeblink, he and his girlfriend were airborne, the Harley tumbling end-over-end. The image is seared in my memory of them in midair, frozen in a semi-fetal position, their unbuckled helmets arcing gracefully away from their heads.
The Highway 395 tape stopped playing in my mind as I watched the London messenger dart into a narrow gap in the traffic ahead. Another Jag driver might have wanted to say something else to the guy who’d used such obscenity in response to a kindly meant gesture. But the messenger was me. He was all motorcyclists. So I would have said something else to him, had he not slipped so deftly between the wheels and steel of London’s gridlock.
Stay suspicious, son. I’d have said. And stay alive.
