“Have Fun. Try Not To Die.”

So there she is…

Ready and waiting for him. Ridden hard and put away wet, she still has the mud from her last adventure through the desert Southwest caked to her sides. She’s a badass. Locked and loaded. His steel horse; our steel horse, although I have to admit we haven’t taken a long ride together in a while. 

He’d say it’s because I’m a fair weather rider who can’t tolerate the heat.

I’d say it’s because he keeps getting hurt.

When I met the man he’d already been riding for over thirty years. His boasting, “I’ve never fallen!” was corroborated by the posse of fellow riders who shadowed his every move along the winding roads of Southern California. 

So I got on the back and I never, for one minute, felt afraid.  

Then, when he turned fifty, he took up “off road” riding. Not the kind you do on the weekends with a beer in one hand and a light and nimble bike between your legs. No, he excelled at taking an already heavy touring motorcycle, loading it up with another 50-80 pounds of gear, traveling to Namibia, or the Atacama desert in Peru, and then having the skill/balls/lack-of-sanity to will that now 700 pound sucker up a steep hill composed of loose gravel and rocks the size of watermelons. 

Falling became as common as pooping. 

Picking up the heavy bike on a sandy slope, or after sliding on slippery rocks in the middle of a rushing river, or slow-motion falling with it next to you down a steep and jagged ravine was nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it made for great tales of testosterone-fueled jackassery around the campfire every night. 

As he approached sixty, he took up Crossfit to stay in shape. He needed more upper body strength.

“Not only do I pick up my bike,” he told me, “I ride sweep, so I help all the other guys when they fall.”

Great…and why?

A few years back, on an adventure ride with a particular group of buddies in the wilds of British Columbia, he cracked four ribs in the middle of the trip. Did he stop? Nope. He just kept on riding the rough and ragged terrain, sleeping every night on the hard ground, and picking up bikes for the remaining SIX DAYS without a complaint. 

Until he got home.

Ladies you know how that goes. They’re stoic as fuck until they cross the threshold and see your face. Then they fall apart like a nine-year-old boy. The amount of wincing, whining, and Motrin consumption that took place for the next few months exceeded any woman in the throughs of labor. 

On the next trip with the same group of guys, I got a call on day two from the emergency room. A call that someone in my position (waiting at home while your significant other indulges in life threatening, male-bonding activities) dreads. He’d reactivated an old injury and felt it best to “Let the guys go on ahead”. He drove the seven hours home that same day in great pain and discomfort, and that entire fiasco led to a corrective surgery. Scar tissue had built up from all the riding. He’d never been off a bike long enough to let the injury heal.

I won’t even get into the behavior of a post-surgical husband. I have PTSD and the flashbacks alone may push me over the edge!

Then, in April, all healed up, free of any scar tissue, feeling fit and strong, he headed out with that same group of hoodlums to shred up Colorado, Utah and Arizona. “The trails are brutal’, he texted me everyday; or something to that effect. It should be mentioned that my husband is now sixty-five, a good twenty years older than any of the other guys.

Anyway, I got another call. Only this one was from Intensive Care. That kind that makes your heart race—and then stop—and then do a couple of flips before resuming its regular rhythm. 

“I fell.” he said.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Not bad, really,” he answered.

“I find that hard to believe seeing that you’re in Intensive Care!”

“I have a ruptured kidney and my spleen is pretty fucked up too,” he said. “My MRI should tell us more.”

After two days in Intensive Care in a hospital in the middle of an Indian Reservation in Arizona, a couple of his buddies drove all the way from LA to bring him, and his trusty bike, back home.

So, there she is. Sitting in my driveway, all ready to carry him on another adventure. She knows how I feel about it so she won’t even make eye contact with me. Four days with this same posse in Montana. I have to wait until noon on Tuesday to exhale.

“It’s not all riding,” he said, tying to reassure me. “They’ll be some archery, range shooting and fly fishing too.”

With those guys? Great. What could go wrong…

Pray with me and carry on,

xox