TOWNSHEND — Spring brings warm days and clear roads. For many of us, this means one thing: motorcycle weather. In April, the dream of running down a long stretch of smooth road on a new motorcycle is contagious.
When I was in high school, I had a friend who was obsessed with owning a motorcycle. Dylan didn't want just any motorcycle. He wanted an '86 Ninja.
At that time, the Ninja was different from other bikes. It was the hottest new motorcycle on the market.
Several of us made a pilgrimage to the motorcycle showroom to look at the bike. It was a huge machine, bright red with fat tires and a speedometer that went up to 130 miles per hour. There was an air of menace about it. The Ninja looked fast and dangerous.
Dylan had to have that motorcycle. There were no two ways about it.
The only problem was money. He got an after-school job, and then he started working weekends. After a while, it was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to come up with the money.
He didn't let it stop him. Reagan was president, credit was easy to come by, and anything seemed possible.
After a marathon of begging, he got his parents to cosign the loan. The Ninja would be his.
There was only one problem. He didn't know how to drive a motorcycle.
“Can't be much harder than riding a bicycle,” he said.
* * *
It wasn't long before he had his first crash. He showed up at school wearing a sling on his arm.
“Hit a patch of sand going around a curve,” he said.
It didn't slow him down any. He rode fast and hard, and everyone around him knew it was a matter of time. His death was waiting for him on some lonely back road. His parents were worried sick.
When he went head on with the tractor-trailer truck, it almost seemed like an anticlimax. He took a curve too fast and blew past a stop sign. As they say, it happened so fast.
“I went up in the air, and next thing I knew, I was on top of the trailer,” he said. He had the faraway look of someone who has met his own death.
He was eerily unscathed. His face bore an odd set of scratches, but other than that, he was fine.
The truck driver wasn't so lucky. He had a heart attack and went to the emergency room.
* * *
Dylan got hit with some fines, and his insurance went up a lot. The cops were pretty angry at him and gave him a stern lecture.
I remember seeing the Ninja sitting in his driveway, battered and wounded like a veteran of some secret war.
Things weren't the same after that. He rode the Ninja, but he was careful. He stopped at red lights; he slowed down going into curves.
There was something else, too: he didn't seem the same in some fundamental way. He complained about the unfairness of it all - the insurance companies and the court system - but you could tell his heart wasn't really in it.
A few years later I ran into him at a diner. He was in one piece and going to college.
I didn't ask him if he still had that bike.