The Baja, the Condo Boardroom, and My ’79 Shovelhead
Three days in the Baja on my old Hog
Five diverse, inexperienced people surviving and succeeding on a condo association board is daunting. Having just spent three days on a motorcycle run through the Baja Desert peninsula with four new guy friends resonated with similarities. It truly takes all types, and the key is figuring out how to get along and use each other’s assets while protecting the weak spots. Each condo board has individuals with a lot to offer. Too often their potential contribution gets left in the dust because of the inability of the group to function. Diversity is good. Being nonjudgmental and having a willingness to listen is vital.
I’m a born and bred Boston guy who got hooked up with a transplanted New Jersey guy, two native Southern Californians, and one guy who would never tell. Conflict? Maybe. The invitation to this jaunt came about a month ago from a fellow I had met through a friend of my wife. Bill Murphy was a long-time motorhead and always looking for somebody new to share an adventure.
“Hey, how about a guy’s weekend in Mexico?” said Wild Bill.
“Why not?” said I.
Nothing to lose. Bill had three or four other guys who he thought would join us. Didn’t matter much to me. I was just happy for an excuse to get in the saddle for three days in some strange new place. Bill was the big thinker—the idea man. He was a big old ex-marine, six foot three and three hundred pounds, with a short graying brush-cut, familiar with the Mexican jaunt who loved the outdoors.
Friday morning rolled around, and I rolled up to his house in Irvine to hear that two out of the original five had been replaced. The third, Jeff, Bill’s pal of thirty years, was currently broken down on the way over to the jump-off point. Bill was heading out to rescue him and would be back in twenty minutes. The other two new guys should arrive soon. And off he went. Once Bill got a goal in mind, it didn’t matter much what fell in his way. He was going for it. Single-minded focus and determination, with a license plate frame that said, “Danger builds character.” You need guys like that.
Five minutes later, the two newbies pulled up, each riding late-model Harleys. One was that well-known “Full-Dresser” touring bike that weighs about eight hundred pounds soaking wet. It had just two hundred miles on it and was Dick’s first Harley. Dick was a slightly balding custom house painter in his late fifties and seemed very happy with his entry into the H-D mystique. He carefully dismounted to display his Harley Davidson helmet, boots, socks, jersey, and reached for his H-D water bottle to freshen up. He was one happy Harley Davidson recruit. We shook hands, and he proudly showed me his array of three leather pouches, all mounted on his handlebars.
New Board Members Contribute Enthusiasm and Optimism
“This one’s for my sunglasses. This one’s for my garage remote control. This one’s for my cell phone, and my freeway speed pass transponder fits right in my saddle bag by my water bottle.”
He was one proud and happy camper. Gotta love the enthusiasm of the new guy on the block. New board members aren’t that different. They come to their first meeting full of the enthusiasm and hope that they now have status and can make a difference. They just can’t wait to get home to their spouse and share all their accomplishments. Oh, yes, Dick did pull out his digital camera and insist on pictures. This was an event that would recur every time we stopped, be it for gas, the Mexican Federales, or just lunch. Dick was going to have a record of this event. He was our scribe.
Detail-oriented Planners Have Their Place
Alongside Dick was Les. Les was riding the single most popular bike in America, the Harley Davidson Heritage Soft-tail Classic. For those of you who know, I need not say more. For those of you who don’t, you wouldn’t understand anyway. Les is a successful mortgage broker, also in his late fifties but with swept-back blondish hair going a bit to gray. His helmet had the look of pure shiny chrome and shaped like the head of the Alien creature in the Sigourney Weaver movies. He was slick. Later on in the trip he would have the opportunity to explain to me in excruciating engineer-oriented detail how he and his brother had managed to retool the exhaust and the fuel system to squeeze eighty horsepower out of a V-Twin powerplant meant to put out just sixty-five.
“Les the Mortgage Broker,” or “Les TMB,” had two other bikes in his collection and pointed out that he really needed two more to satisfy his needs. Les TMB was an experienced rider. He had never been to the Mexican Baja but had carefully planned our route from Irvine to the Mexican border. We would have only three or four miles on the freeway and the rest on beautiful winding mountain roads on the Ortega Highway to the Anza Borego Desert on the other side. He had his maps but had left his bifocals at home, so he couldn’t read them.
Les TMB was an extremely meticulous planner who had a great respect for detail. I am not. The fact that we got lost three times on the way down did not escape me. It didn’t bother me either. I was just there for the ride. One mountain road was as good as another. But you do need planners on your team. You need people who are dedicated to details. You just have to be ready when all those plans and details don’t work out exactly the way they are supposed to. They never do, but that’s life on the condo board as well as in the Baja. But you need those guys.
Wild Bill pulled up about twenty minutes later, as promised. Buddy Jeff was following him. They both drove big old Suzukis, famous for dependability and speed. Most grizzled H-D riders refer to them as “rice rockets,” or “crotch rockets” for the more colorful. Jeff was having an electrical problem, the bane of any motorcycle, be it Milwaukee Iron or Japanese.
Deal with the Unexpected and Move On
We didn’t get much time to meet Jeff except to see a wonderful smile that showed all thirty-two white teeth. We were late and needed to get going. Jeff’s Suzuki then broke down again just five hundred yards down the road. We left him with instructions to swap for Wild Bill’s daughter’s bike and to meet us down in Ensenada for dinner. We left him on the corner of Jeffrey Road and Irvine Boulevard. None of us expected to see him again. Sometimes you just gotta move on.
The three hundred mile trip down was fairly uneventful, except for the three miscues in directions previously mentioned. No big deal really. We stopped several times for gas and a beer and got to know each other a bit. All three of them wore long pants, long sleeves, and leather boots. Les TMB had a stylish denim jacket. I wore shorts, a T-shirt, and an old pair of Jack Purcell sneakers. They had saddlebags filled with rain gear, change of clothes for three days, power bars for interim sustenance, and who knows whatever else. I had a skinny nylon zipper pouch with two pairs each of underwear and socks. My toothbrush was in my back pocket with my Lipitor. I took a fair amount of good-natured abuse in regard to my manner of travel. Truth is the next day, three of us were in shorts and T-shirts. Les TMB didn’t give up his denim jacket.
Crisis #1: Insurance
When we got to the border at Tecate, we faced our first crisis. Wild Bill and I walked up to the little hut where you buy Mexican insurance. You really need this, not so much to protect your bike but because if you don’t have it and get in an accident the Federales will throw you in jail. We’ve all heard stories about Mexican jails, and nobody was interested. So Bill and I paid our $23 for three days’ worth of coverage and got $100 American changed into pesos for the trip. Dick and Les TMB were distraught. They wanted to get comprehensive insurance to protect against theft. It wasn’t available, but it’s barely even available in America. Bikes are just too easy to steal, and the premiums are about 30 percent of the bike’s value. To me, it’s just part of the risk. Not to Dick and Les TMB.
Their bikes each cost about $30,000. Dick’s was just a week out of the showroom. Bill and I sat at the border crossing for twenty-five minutes while the other two went from building to building, trying to find additional insurance. Who could blame them? Well, it wasn’t to be. Bill explained to them that the place we were staying at in Ensenada was a great seaside resort that had a huge twelve-foot wall all around it. The actual parking area was a good mile inside the grounds, and there were security gates along the way. This was one safe place. Not to worry.
“But what about the second night?” they lamented. Well, we had no reservations for the second night, but we planned to make it back up to Mexicali, another border town, and we could always just cross back over into Calexico on the American side for the night.
“Oh well, I guess we’ll go,” Dick said, but not before calling his wife on his cell to check in and tell of his quandary.
“Yeah, we stopped to get insurance. But not enough. No, Hello? Hello? Honey you’re breaking up.”
The Need to Know: Full-disclosure or Not?
Bill and I wildly waved our arms and made motions for running our fingers across our throats and for hanging up. Dick didn’t get it. This was not “need to know” information for the wife at home. It would not enhance her weekend. Kind of like when you decide what you’re going to tell the rest of the condo residents after a tough board meeting where the news is not good. The choice is full-disclosure all the time, or maybe a little discretionary silence when knowledge will not enhance the overall neighborhood ambience. Maybe wait till the crisis is over and then tell the full story? We each had our own perspective. Dick had a right to his, and he exercised it. He would pay the penalty.
Sometimes when you’re faced with a serious glitch in that new roofing project that threatens to cost an extra $10K or a problem with the landscaping that might mean you have to dig up and replant the back forty, you have decisions to make. Do you really need to let every neighbor know every step of the way, or is your obligation to inform them when the ifs become realities? Open governance is a popular theory. It is not always the most efficient or effective way of doing things. There are some extreme possibilities that are not always essential to share. A guideline might be, “If they can’t do anything about it and it’s not yet final, let’s see what hard information we can share and what conjecture we should keep to ourselves.”
We crossed the border. Three yards down the street, I stopped to remove my obnoxious, heavy helmet that the state of California had required me to wear. Talk about lifting a weight off your shoulders. I won’t go into the conflicting theories on the benefit or detriment of motorcycle helmets. Let’s just say I was the only one to stop and take mine off. The others just stopped, waited, and said nothing. That’s the nonjudgmental part. Sometimes you just have to do what’s right for you and let other people do what’s right for them. Nobody wanted to hear or give any sermons.
The rest of the way down to the Estero Beach Resort, just a few miles beyond Ensenada, was uneventful. It just kept getting hotter, an easy 115 degrees by midafternoon. Bill and I paid for everybody’s gas because, in their frantic quest for the unobtainable insurance, Dick and Les TMB forgot to get dollars changed into pesos. We pulled up to the twelve-foot-high walls, as advertised, went through the security gate, and drove down to the main hotel area through another security gate into the parking lot by the bay.
The Glue: You Need Those Kind of Guys
We just about fell over. There was Jeff’s Suzuki parked by itself. We were whooping and hollering in amazement. We found Jeff out by the veranda bar on his third margarita with the remains of a huge platter of real Mexican nachos. He had his thirty-two-tooth grin on and was just as happy to see us as we were to see him. He had stopped at a dealership in Lake Forest, got the electrical problem fixed, and took the coast road straight down to Ensenada. It was actually about two to three hours quicker than our mountain route, and riding the coast isn’t such a bad a choice. Same goal achieved, different route, another good lesson for a condo board meeting.
Five very happy campers. We swiftly caught up with Jeff in the margarita department and were all asleep by 9:45. In that short two hours by the bay south of Ensenada, Jeff proved to be the Mr. Nice Person of the group. The wonderful smile was backed up by a personality to match. His warm fuzzy style of communication brought us all even closer. A pat on the shoulder, a playful poke in the ribs, and an easy laugh made the road ache disappear. The Cuerve Gold Tequila probably helped too. Jeff had been down to the Baja with Bill dozens of times and even knew some Spanish that he artfully employed with the waiter and service people who had the same warm reaction to him as us gringos. When you have a group of five individuals with different agendas and different styles, you absolutely need a guy like Jeff that just adds the social glue no matter what the challenge. His communication skills brought everybody together. His reward was to bunk in with Wild Bill, whose snoring was prodigious. But never a complaint from Jeff, who just rose about a half-hour later than the rest of us, trying to recoup the sleep he had lost the night before.
The next two days were filled with riding through the Baja desert in heat that climbed too high to describe. Back in Irvine, they were in the midst of a heat wave that brought the temperature over a hundred. You can just imagine what it was like in the desert. Or maybe you really can’t. Jeff’s gas tank held only two gallons, 90 miles worth, while the rest of us had driving ranges of between 125–250 miles. We stopped as needed for Jeff with never a complaint. On one 115-mile stretch between San Felipe and Mexicali, Jeff had to flag down one of those famous “Green Angel” emergency vehicles to siphon some gas to get him to the next stop. Jeff was not the planner that Les and Dick were. He just relied on providential good luck and was never disappointed.
The detail of the trip was in the riding. We would generally cruise down the straight two-lane highway of the desert at a steady 80 mph. Les TMB and Bill were the speed demons of the group. Les’s Soft Tail was tricked out to do 158 mph, and he proved that frequently as he blew by me like I was parked. Bill would be second to nobody and was usually ahead of Les. They would always be waiting by the side of the road, way up ahead. When Dick and Jeff and I caught up, we’d all admonish each other on the importance of staying together in the desert, and then Bill and Les would blast off again.
Nobody broke down. We just went at our own pace. When we climbed into the mountains with the tight S-curves and switchbacks, signs warned to reduce speed to 20 mph. I would drop down to about 35, and Wild Bill would accelerate up to what seemed like 68. He would lean into those mountain hairpins till his bike was barely 30 degrees off the pavement. I spent half my time looking over the side of the road for a “Bill Stain,” but he was always waiting for us by the side of the road, about twenty miles ahead.
I have never encountered any human being with driving skills at that level. He was a big idea man with the courage of his convictions and a great leader for the adventure. Les TMB and Dick were the planners and worriers. Les TMB had style. Dick had humility. Jeff was the unifying force that brought comfort, and I ended up being just a bit of a curmudgeon.
It was the last day heading back. Les TMB and Bill were discussing what route to take because the route Les TMB had planned once we crossed the border seemed to have disappeared, and without his bifocals he couldn’t find it. We all had driven about twenty miles north into the cooler mountains when Bill blew by and signaled me to pull over. We had to turn around. We were not on the planned route through the scenic part of the mountains. It was cooler, not scenic. I liked the cooler part, but I followed along back down the mountain onto the desert floor where the temperature was hellacious. We sat in a group in the sun for nearly twenty minutes while Bill and Les TMB discussed alternatives with Dick and Jeff. I didn’t care one way or the other. I just wanted to go. And in fact, after twenty minutes of getting nowhere, that’s what I did.
“I’m heading that way.” I pointed. “If you guys decide it’s wrong, then somebody come and get me. You drive way faster than I do anyway, and it won’t be a big deal. I will not sit here one second longer watching my skin blister and suppurate. I’m outta here!”
I fired up my scooter and got into the wind and some level of comfort. Twenty minutes later, Bill snapped by me in a heartbeat with Les TMB not far behind. Apparently the road I had taken was acceptable after all, and we continued the trip. So my single contribution to the adventure was to break the stalemate that kept us going nowhere. I didn’t plan. I didn’t know. I just had the confidence that after forty years of bike riding all over the country, I would not get hopelessly lost and would eventually find my way back home. What I also knew was that we could still be sitting there in the desert sun, listening to the detailed, meticulous planner try to reach agreement with the big picture adventurous single-minded guy. Dick would go along with whatever decision surfaced, and Jeff would make everybody feel good about it.
My contribution was to take action, any action, and know that things would work out one way or the other. You need those kinds of guys too. Don’t you?
There is one final lesson to be learned here. We drove through Mexicali at the end of the second day on our way to spend the night across the US border so Les TMB and Dick could be happy with the insurance situation. We passed several beautifully big resorts with huge walls and security gates. But we kept on going to get to a Best Western in the United States with no security at all. We stopped and discussed the options. Here I made another contribution, or tried to.
“Why not stay down here in Mexicali with what looks like good security? If we stay in Calexico at the Best Western, you’ll be insured, but it’s a border town with a huge record of auto theft and no security. Chances are much better that you’ll get your bike stolen there and not here.”
“But at least there we’ll be insured,” said Dick and Les TMB.
“But here you won’t need to worry because it won’t get stolen at all,” I repeated.
They wanted to cross the border. They would rather play to lose. I actually didn’t care that much from a practical point of view. I drove an old ’79 Low Rider with over 400,000 miles and sufficient oil and road grease covering it. It was barely recognizable as the classic old Harley Shovelhead that it was. Kind of like my own little antitheft device. Much better than LoJack. No self-respecting bike thief would even give it a second look. At each roadside rest stop when we finished razzing Dick about all his Harley Davidson decals and constant phone calls to his wife, he would take his turn and ask me, “Now what year was it that you last washed your bike?” By the way, we stayed at the Best Western in Calexico.
We all did fine. We made it to Julian by midday on Sunday, had the obligatory apple pie and ice cream, compared our Lipitor dosages and cholesterol counts, and mounted up for the home stretch. It had been a great trip. I am certain I will never choose to drive through the Baja in late spring again, but we are planning a trip to Big Sur or maybe Taos in the fall. I’d ride with those guys again, although bottom line was that poor Dick lost his bowling privileges for three weeks.
Full disclosure—a good idea or not?
Coming back along the Ortega Highway is always pleasant. It’s a beautiful road with home as the destination. A stop at The Lookout is customary. Just a ramshackle snack bar sitting on the edge of a scenic gorge with a big dirt parking lot and plenty of benches, picnic tables, and boulders to sit on and look out over the panorama with thirty or forty scooters parked in the lot. The crowd is a mixture of graybeards and manicured cell phone yuppies who wear full leathers in the summertime. Nobody seems to be too judgmental. The graybeards do a lot less chattering.
The five miles leading up to The Lookout is a wonderful winding two-lane just a tad wider than much of the rest of the road, and you can really fly. You’re heading uphill, so with the throttle wide open, you can maintain great control. Passing slower traffic is no problem, and most everybody on the highway is courteous and pulls just a foot to the right to give you an easier time. Well, most everybody. The five of us blew by an old pickup that decided that today was not a pleasant kind of day and moved to the left just as Les TMB was passing him. Les is a skilled driver on a fine motor and made it by him, but not without a quick juke to the left into what could have been oncoming traffic, but wasn’t. I was close behind and passed on the right as I saw what was happening. No harm, no foul. We heard the guy’s horn complaining behind us. He tried his best to stay on our tails.
The Lookout loomed ahead, and we slowed to enter the crowded parking lot. Bill went in first, then Dick, and Jeff right behind. Les and I slowed to let the path clear. Les pulled through, and I followed. Just as I left the pavement and hit the dirt of the parking lot, that asshole pickup truck came roaring into the lot, cut right in front of me, and tried to grab a space that wasn’t there. I grabbed my front break, stood on my rear brake pedal, and went right down with 750 pounds of Milwaukee Iron on top of me.
The bike fell to the right, and for the first time in forty-three years, I was under it with the hot exhaust pipes branding my entire calf and upper thigh with what I’m told is 1800 degrees of hot blue steel from my twin exhaust pipes. Adrenaline is a reality, and I guess it was that wonderful chemical that gave me the strength to push the nearly half ton of machine up and off me within about two to three seconds. The pain of the burn has about a half second delay before it hits your brain and then rapidly becomes meaningful. With both hands, I pushed the bike up with such force that it went over on the other side. I got up, lost my balance, and fell right back down on top of those very same pipes. Right on my ass. It burned through my jeans in a millisecond and seared right into the fat of my butt cheeks. I leaped up as quickly as I could, slipped, and fell again, right back down on those same pipes and then just rolled off onto the ground. You’ve probably seen those restaurants that advertise Mongolian Bar-B-Q, well this was Jewish Bar-B-Q.
It all took less than eight seconds. The driver of the pickup leaps out of his cab and starts screaming at me for driving so fast up the mountain road and passing him and I deserve what I got and worse. He was a skinny, tattooed, greasy-haired low life with a mean look and a loud wise-ass mouth, and I just lost it. Maybe it was still the adrenaline. I felt the pain in the background being crowded out by my own rage. I whipped my helmet off, grabbed it by the strap, walked up to his loud ugly mouth, and rapped him upside the head with my helmet as hard as I could and then hit him again and then again. He went down, and I hit him again square in the face with my helmet and took out his nose. He wasn’t shouting anymore. In fact he was pretty silent. I had given him a solid kick in the groin while he was on the ground. Then I dropped my helmet, grabbed him by the shirt and his greasy ugly hair, and dragged him three feet across the dirt to my bike and jammed his bloody face right onto my lovely hot pipes.
He then began to make some noise. It was a guttural shriek as beautiful as you would ever want to hear. I picked his head back up off the pipes and shouted something and took the greatest joy in smashing his face, lips first, right back down on the pipes, generating another extraordinary sound of agony. I cauterized his bleeding nose—no extra charge. Right in the middle of this, I got hit on the left side with a flying tackle that knocked me off the skinny SOB. Bill thought it was enough and felt the best way to end the incident was to hurtle his 310-pound frame at me rather than trying to discuss alternatives. You need guys like that.
I picked myself up. Looked at my leg for the first time and began to feel the onset of the pain. I went back to my bike that was still lying on its side and managed to get it upright. I kicked out the stand, let it rest, looked it over, and got my breath. I felt a thread of nausea wandering up from the pain and realized there was quite a crowd all around. My instincts told me it was time to leave. I took a deep breath in through my nose, swung my sautéed right leg over the saddle, hit the starter button, and heard my ride come to life. Nothin’ can stop it. I kicked it into first and slowly pulled out of that dirt lot and onto the pavement.
Then I was doing sixty in a second or two with the wind in my face and the pain introducing itself to my brain explaining in its own subtle way that we were going to be in for a challenge. The most uncomfortable part at that moment was my ass. My leg was in the wind with nothing touching it. My inner thigh was also pretty much in the wind with no contact. But my ass was on my saddle, and it hurt. Really hurt.
A couple of minutes later, Bill came whizzing by doing about a buck twenty and signaled me to pull over. I like Bill. I really do. I respect Bill. You just have to. But I didn’t pull over.
I don’t know why. I still don’t. I was riding, and I was good and I didn’t want to do anything but ride. Ride home. My mind wasn’t really functioning in its normal rational mode. I was fifty-eight and had just done something violent, for the first time since ’69, back when I was a combat medic. Violence tends to put your psyche in a different gear. Can’t explain. If you’ve been there, I don’t have to. If you haven’t, there’s no use in trying. But I think I’ve used that phrase before. Sorry.
Bill pulled in front of me and slowed down to my speed. Les came up alongside me next and signaled to pull over. Then Dick and Jeff were behind me. I pulled over.
“You all right?”
“You better take a look at your leg. That’s nasty.”
“Naw, I just need to get home. Let’s go.”
“You’ll never make it. That’s a bad burn. You need to get to the hospital.”
“I’m going home."
“Bub, you’re being crazy. You need to take care of that. It will get infected. We need to get you to a hospital.”
I had spent a great deal of time in my ugly youth at Fort Sam Houston. I had been assigned to the burn unit at the Brooke Army Medical Center where all the kids returning from ’Nam who had encountered massive applications of napalm were treated. I knew a lot more about the treatment of burns than I wanted to. They were right. I needed to clean it out. I had been rolling in the dirt. I had to debride the wound and clean it out. That was the right thing to do.
Les checked his map. “There’s an aid station three miles up the road. It’s where the forest rangers hang out. Let’s stop there. They must have first-aid stuff.”
“Okay, lead the way.” Les pulled out first. Bill pulled out alongside me. Dick and Jeff tucked in behind us. We got to the aid station in just a minute or two.
Nice guys they have working there. Firefighter types. One was younger, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven. The other was in his mid-thirties. They seemed to know a little about first aid, but in fact I knew more. I let them take my vitals and then used their equipment and cleaned out my calf and thigh, but I really couldn’t do much about my ass. The younger one was saying I should put on a dressing. He was wrong, but I was polite. The older one insisted they transport me to the hospital. I refused.
“Your pulse is 180 and your blood pressure is bottoming out. You’re in shock. You don’t know what you’re doing. Hey, guys, can’t you do something about your dumb old friend here? This isn’t right.”
They made me sign a waiver with Bill signing as witness and then started telling me again how I was in shock and how the pain was really just starting and in an hour it would become so bad that I’d faint and go off the road and on and on. I shook both their hands with a sincere smile and walked back to my Scoot. Bill and Les were starting to question me and convince me to listen, but they know how I get. Bill followed me all the way back to Irvine. Les, Dick, and Jeff decided to continue on the more scenic route through the mountains and got home about three hours after Bill and me. Bill never left my side until I pulled into my driveway and then he went on down to Sav-On to get me some spray antiseptic. He looked me square in the eye and got a coherent smile and a wink and he was off.
“Call me if you need anything.”
“Keep the rubber side down!”
I had about two hours before my wife would be home. This was not going to be easy. I got myself upstairs and swallowed three left-over Vicodin from an old out-of-date prescription. I took the garden hose and did a better job of cleaning out the burns and dropped my pants to do what I could with my ass. It was not only difficult to reach back there, but the stretching really aggravated the burns on my leg. I knocked down 1,000 mgs of Ibuprofen and found some of that Bactine kind of spray to act as a topical anesthetic for the burned area. It didn’t seem to do much. With my limited knowledge, I sat out in the backyard with the hose on a slow trickle just keeping the wounds irrigated.
The pain was beginning to muster its forces. Pain is a chemical thing. It’s all in your head, just chemicals sending messages to your brain. That’s all. You have to hold on to that thought. Another thought crept in there that said, “Maybe I should get to the doctor and get an updated prescription of Vicodin or something.”
Two hours later, my life’s partner breezed in from shopping with the girls.
“How was your trip?”
“Great, really great. Mexico is something else.”
“Why are you watering your leg? What the hell is that? What did you do?”
It was clear that I was all right. That was the most important thing. She had to see that I was all right and able to chat, and it was just one of those little things that seem to happen to me. Not to worry.
“What the hell happened to your leg? Are you crazy? We need to get you to the hospital!”
“Calm down. It’s just a burn. It’ll be okay. I’ve done this a million times before. It will heal.”
“You’ve never done that before. I can see the muscle. Are you crazy? Look at your thigh! You have a hole in it! We need to go to the doctor. Right now!”
“Honey, I’m fine. Go in the house. Just let me sit out here and relax for a while. It’s Sunday. The doctor isn’t there anyway. Just go inside. Please.”
She did. It was about 3 AM before I realized that I would definitely be going to the doctor some time very soon. I used up all the old Vicodin and chased it with an Ibuprofen and Zantac cocktail. I did that every two to three hours and managed to hold off passing out. I lay in bed on my left side and really had trouble getting up, so I had to bother my poor bride to keep getting me damp face cloths and ice wraps. She didn’t get much sleep either, but she’s a gem. She didn’t say one more thing about doctors or hospitals. I guess she knew I knew.
At 7 AM, she got me into the car and over to the doctor’s office. They took me right into a treatment room. The doctor looked at it and explained the difference between first-degree burns, second degree, and third degree. I had a good selection of all three. The good news was that second-degree burns have already burned through the nerve endings, so the pain is nonexistent. It’s only the first-degree burns at the edges that hurt. They really hurt. He said I had to go over to the Anaheim Burn Center to see a specialist, but that’s another story.
He gave me a new prescription for the pain and special dressings and a tub of silver nitrate. Great stuff that silver nitrate. He left shaking his head, and one of his nurses came in to dress the wound. She was young and pretty and made an audible “ugh” sound when she saw it. There was just a tinge of fear in her eyes, and a greenish hue appeared under her eyes. She swayed a bit on her crepe-soled white nurse shoes. I told her I would be happy to do the job, just hand me the materials and scissors and stuff and I could handle it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ve done this hundreds of times.”
In fact, I had, just not on myself. I did need her assistance with my ass. But we handled that last, and she was getting more comfortable and secure. I didn’t hurt her a bit. She smiled and thanked me and kind of suggested that it would be nice if I didn’t tell anybody that she assisted instead of doing it. She was young and cute, with long auburn hair and a great smile.
I said, “Sure.”
Getting up and on my feet was quite a chore and would be for the next four to six weeks. Skin has a lot of important functions. One of them is to kind of hold you all together in a nice envelope. When you tear a large portion of that envelope, two things happen. The rest of the envelope gets pulled in unusual ways that are actually quite painful all by themselves. Second, your skin is a major source of insulation for your body. When you lose a large part of that, you get very cold. It was over eighty degrees outside. It was the summer, but I was freezing with constant chills for most of the next month.
The recuperation was fairly uneventful. The great and wonderful doctors at the Anaheim Burn Center insisted on surgery because so much of the underlying skin had been burned away. They told me without it I would be looking at a six-month recovery period and have major scarring and disfigurement. I chose not to listen to them and was back on my Scooter in six weeks with only modest scarring that is now all but invisible. Silver nitrate is a remarkable substance that promotes healing in a magical way. Keeping yourself clean, changing the dressings every four to six hours, and keeping somewhat flexible, as painful as that is, seemed to be the right formula. I knew what I was doing, and it was my body anyway. The last thing I wanted to do was get into a California operating room.
By the way, I never did beat the crap out of that guy in the pickup. I should have. I really should have. But the truth is I just stood there glaring at him while he shot his mouth off. Then he kind of looked down at the dirt for a minute, looked up, and apologized.
But I wish I had.
Three days in the Baja on my old Hog
Five diverse, inexperienced people surviving and succeeding on a condo association board is daunting. Having just spent three days on a motorcycle run through the Baja Desert peninsula with four new guy friends resonated with similarities. It truly takes all types, and the key is figuring out how to get along and use each other’s assets while protecting the weak spots. Each condo board has individuals with a lot to offer. Too often their potential contribution gets left in the dust because of the inability of the group to function. Diversity is good. Being nonjudgmental and having a willingness to listen is vital.
I’m a born and bred Boston guy who got hooked up with a transplanted New Jersey guy, two native Southern Californians, and one guy who would never tell. Conflict? Maybe. The invitation to this jaunt came about a month ago from a fellow I had met through a friend of my wife. Bill Murphy was a long-time motorhead and always looking for somebody new to share an adventure.
“Hey, how about a guy’s weekend in Mexico?” said Wild Bill.
“Why not?” said I.
Nothing to lose. Bill had three or four other guys who he thought would join us. Didn’t matter much to me. I was just happy for an excuse to get in the saddle for three days in some strange new place. Bill was the big thinker—the idea man. He was a big old ex-marine, six foot three and three hundred pounds, with a short graying brush-cut, familiar with the Mexican jaunt who loved the outdoors.
Friday morning rolled around, and I rolled up to his house in Irvine to hear that two out of the original five had been replaced. The third, Jeff, Bill’s pal of thirty years, was currently broken down on the way over to the jump-off point. Bill was heading out to rescue him and would be back in twenty minutes. The other two new guys should arrive soon. And off he went. Once Bill got a goal in mind, it didn’t matter much what fell in his way. He was going for it. Single-minded focus and determination, with a license plate frame that said, “Danger builds character.” You need guys like that.
Five minutes later, the two newbies pulled up, each riding late-model Harleys. One was that well-known “Full-Dresser” touring bike that weighs about eight hundred pounds soaking wet. It had just two hundred miles on it and was Dick’s first Harley. Dick was a slightly balding custom house painter in his late fifties and seemed very happy with his entry into the H-D mystique. He carefully dismounted to display his Harley Davidson helmet, boots, socks, jersey, and reached for his H-D water bottle to freshen up. He was one happy Harley Davidson recruit. We shook hands, and he proudly showed me his array of three leather pouches, all mounted on his handlebars.
New Board Members Contribute Enthusiasm and Optimism
“This one’s for my sunglasses. This one’s for my garage remote control. This one’s for my cell phone, and my freeway speed pass transponder fits right in my saddle bag by my water bottle.”
He was one proud and happy camper. Gotta love the enthusiasm of the new guy on the block. New board members aren’t that different. They come to their first meeting full of the enthusiasm and hope that they now have status and can make a difference. They just can’t wait to get home to their spouse and share all their accomplishments. Oh, yes, Dick did pull out his digital camera and insist on pictures. This was an event that would recur every time we stopped, be it for gas, the Mexican Federales, or just lunch. Dick was going to have a record of this event. He was our scribe.
Detail-oriented Planners Have Their Place
Alongside Dick was Les. Les was riding the single most popular bike in America, the Harley Davidson Heritage Soft-tail Classic. For those of you who know, I need not say more. For those of you who don’t, you wouldn’t understand anyway. Les is a successful mortgage broker, also in his late fifties but with swept-back blondish hair going a bit to gray. His helmet had the look of pure shiny chrome and shaped like the head of the Alien creature in the Sigourney Weaver movies. He was slick. Later on in the trip he would have the opportunity to explain to me in excruciating engineer-oriented detail how he and his brother had managed to retool the exhaust and the fuel system to squeeze eighty horsepower out of a V-Twin powerplant meant to put out just sixty-five.
“Les the Mortgage Broker,” or “Les TMB,” had two other bikes in his collection and pointed out that he really needed two more to satisfy his needs. Les TMB was an experienced rider. He had never been to the Mexican Baja but had carefully planned our route from Irvine to the Mexican border. We would have only three or four miles on the freeway and the rest on beautiful winding mountain roads on the Ortega Highway to the Anza Borego Desert on the other side. He had his maps but had left his bifocals at home, so he couldn’t read them.
Les TMB was an extremely meticulous planner who had a great respect for detail. I am not. The fact that we got lost three times on the way down did not escape me. It didn’t bother me either. I was just there for the ride. One mountain road was as good as another. But you do need planners on your team. You need people who are dedicated to details. You just have to be ready when all those plans and details don’t work out exactly the way they are supposed to. They never do, but that’s life on the condo board as well as in the Baja. But you need those guys.
Wild Bill pulled up about twenty minutes later, as promised. Buddy Jeff was following him. They both drove big old Suzukis, famous for dependability and speed. Most grizzled H-D riders refer to them as “rice rockets,” or “crotch rockets” for the more colorful. Jeff was having an electrical problem, the bane of any motorcycle, be it Milwaukee Iron or Japanese.
Deal with the Unexpected and Move On
We didn’t get much time to meet Jeff except to see a wonderful smile that showed all thirty-two white teeth. We were late and needed to get going. Jeff’s Suzuki then broke down again just five hundred yards down the road. We left him with instructions to swap for Wild Bill’s daughter’s bike and to meet us down in Ensenada for dinner. We left him on the corner of Jeffrey Road and Irvine Boulevard. None of us expected to see him again. Sometimes you just gotta move on.
The three hundred mile trip down was fairly uneventful, except for the three miscues in directions previously mentioned. No big deal really. We stopped several times for gas and a beer and got to know each other a bit. All three of them wore long pants, long sleeves, and leather boots. Les TMB had a stylish denim jacket. I wore shorts, a T-shirt, and an old pair of Jack Purcell sneakers. They had saddlebags filled with rain gear, change of clothes for three days, power bars for interim sustenance, and who knows whatever else. I had a skinny nylon zipper pouch with two pairs each of underwear and socks. My toothbrush was in my back pocket with my Lipitor. I took a fair amount of good-natured abuse in regard to my manner of travel. Truth is the next day, three of us were in shorts and T-shirts. Les TMB didn’t give up his denim jacket.
Crisis #1: Insurance
When we got to the border at Tecate, we faced our first crisis. Wild Bill and I walked up to the little hut where you buy Mexican insurance. You really need this, not so much to protect your bike but because if you don’t have it and get in an accident the Federales will throw you in jail. We’ve all heard stories about Mexican jails, and nobody was interested. So Bill and I paid our $23 for three days’ worth of coverage and got $100 American changed into pesos for the trip. Dick and Les TMB were distraught. They wanted to get comprehensive insurance to protect against theft. It wasn’t available, but it’s barely even available in America. Bikes are just too easy to steal, and the premiums are about 30 percent of the bike’s value. To me, it’s just part of the risk. Not to Dick and Les TMB.
Their bikes each cost about $30,000. Dick’s was just a week out of the showroom. Bill and I sat at the border crossing for twenty-five minutes while the other two went from building to building, trying to find additional insurance. Who could blame them? Well, it wasn’t to be. Bill explained to them that the place we were staying at in Ensenada was a great seaside resort that had a huge twelve-foot wall all around it. The actual parking area was a good mile inside the grounds, and there were security gates along the way. This was one safe place. Not to worry.
“But what about the second night?” they lamented. Well, we had no reservations for the second night, but we planned to make it back up to Mexicali, another border town, and we could always just cross back over into Calexico on the American side for the night.
“Oh well, I guess we’ll go,” Dick said, but not before calling his wife on his cell to check in and tell of his quandary.
“Yeah, we stopped to get insurance. But not enough. No, Hello? Hello? Honey you’re breaking up.”
The Need to Know: Full-disclosure or Not?
Bill and I wildly waved our arms and made motions for running our fingers across our throats and for hanging up. Dick didn’t get it. This was not “need to know” information for the wife at home. It would not enhance her weekend. Kind of like when you decide what you’re going to tell the rest of the condo residents after a tough board meeting where the news is not good. The choice is full-disclosure all the time, or maybe a little discretionary silence when knowledge will not enhance the overall neighborhood ambience. Maybe wait till the crisis is over and then tell the full story? We each had our own perspective. Dick had a right to his, and he exercised it. He would pay the penalty.
Sometimes when you’re faced with a serious glitch in that new roofing project that threatens to cost an extra $10K or a problem with the landscaping that might mean you have to dig up and replant the back forty, you have decisions to make. Do you really need to let every neighbor know every step of the way, or is your obligation to inform them when the ifs become realities? Open governance is a popular theory. It is not always the most efficient or effective way of doing things. There are some extreme possibilities that are not always essential to share. A guideline might be, “If they can’t do anything about it and it’s not yet final, let’s see what hard information we can share and what conjecture we should keep to ourselves.”
We crossed the border. Three yards down the street, I stopped to remove my obnoxious, heavy helmet that the state of California had required me to wear. Talk about lifting a weight off your shoulders. I won’t go into the conflicting theories on the benefit or detriment of motorcycle helmets. Let’s just say I was the only one to stop and take mine off. The others just stopped, waited, and said nothing. That’s the nonjudgmental part. Sometimes you just have to do what’s right for you and let other people do what’s right for them. Nobody wanted to hear or give any sermons.
The rest of the way down to the Estero Beach Resort, just a few miles beyond Ensenada, was uneventful. It just kept getting hotter, an easy 115 degrees by midafternoon. Bill and I paid for everybody’s gas because, in their frantic quest for the unobtainable insurance, Dick and Les TMB forgot to get dollars changed into pesos. We pulled up to the twelve-foot-high walls, as advertised, went through the security gate, and drove down to the main hotel area through another security gate into the parking lot by the bay.
The Glue: You Need Those Kind of Guys
We just about fell over. There was Jeff’s Suzuki parked by itself. We were whooping and hollering in amazement. We found Jeff out by the veranda bar on his third margarita with the remains of a huge platter of real Mexican nachos. He had his thirty-two-tooth grin on and was just as happy to see us as we were to see him. He had stopped at a dealership in Lake Forest, got the electrical problem fixed, and took the coast road straight down to Ensenada. It was actually about two to three hours quicker than our mountain route, and riding the coast isn’t such a bad a choice. Same goal achieved, different route, another good lesson for a condo board meeting.
Five very happy campers. We swiftly caught up with Jeff in the margarita department and were all asleep by 9:45. In that short two hours by the bay south of Ensenada, Jeff proved to be the Mr. Nice Person of the group. The wonderful smile was backed up by a personality to match. His warm fuzzy style of communication brought us all even closer. A pat on the shoulder, a playful poke in the ribs, and an easy laugh made the road ache disappear. The Cuerve Gold Tequila probably helped too. Jeff had been down to the Baja with Bill dozens of times and even knew some Spanish that he artfully employed with the waiter and service people who had the same warm reaction to him as us gringos. When you have a group of five individuals with different agendas and different styles, you absolutely need a guy like Jeff that just adds the social glue no matter what the challenge. His communication skills brought everybody together. His reward was to bunk in with Wild Bill, whose snoring was prodigious. But never a complaint from Jeff, who just rose about a half-hour later than the rest of us, trying to recoup the sleep he had lost the night before.
The next two days were filled with riding through the Baja desert in heat that climbed too high to describe. Back in Irvine, they were in the midst of a heat wave that brought the temperature over a hundred. You can just imagine what it was like in the desert. Or maybe you really can’t. Jeff’s gas tank held only two gallons, 90 miles worth, while the rest of us had driving ranges of between 125–250 miles. We stopped as needed for Jeff with never a complaint. On one 115-mile stretch between San Felipe and Mexicali, Jeff had to flag down one of those famous “Green Angel” emergency vehicles to siphon some gas to get him to the next stop. Jeff was not the planner that Les and Dick were. He just relied on providential good luck and was never disappointed.
The detail of the trip was in the riding. We would generally cruise down the straight two-lane highway of the desert at a steady 80 mph. Les TMB and Bill were the speed demons of the group. Les’s Soft Tail was tricked out to do 158 mph, and he proved that frequently as he blew by me like I was parked. Bill would be second to nobody and was usually ahead of Les. They would always be waiting by the side of the road, way up ahead. When Dick and Jeff and I caught up, we’d all admonish each other on the importance of staying together in the desert, and then Bill and Les would blast off again.
Nobody broke down. We just went at our own pace. When we climbed into the mountains with the tight S-curves and switchbacks, signs warned to reduce speed to 20 mph. I would drop down to about 35, and Wild Bill would accelerate up to what seemed like 68. He would lean into those mountain hairpins till his bike was barely 30 degrees off the pavement. I spent half my time looking over the side of the road for a “Bill Stain,” but he was always waiting for us by the side of the road, about twenty miles ahead.
I have never encountered any human being with driving skills at that level. He was a big idea man with the courage of his convictions and a great leader for the adventure. Les TMB and Dick were the planners and worriers. Les TMB had style. Dick had humility. Jeff was the unifying force that brought comfort, and I ended up being just a bit of a curmudgeon.
It was the last day heading back. Les TMB and Bill were discussing what route to take because the route Les TMB had planned once we crossed the border seemed to have disappeared, and without his bifocals he couldn’t find it. We all had driven about twenty miles north into the cooler mountains when Bill blew by and signaled me to pull over. We had to turn around. We were not on the planned route through the scenic part of the mountains. It was cooler, not scenic. I liked the cooler part, but I followed along back down the mountain onto the desert floor where the temperature was hellacious. We sat in a group in the sun for nearly twenty minutes while Bill and Les TMB discussed alternatives with Dick and Jeff. I didn’t care one way or the other. I just wanted to go. And in fact, after twenty minutes of getting nowhere, that’s what I did.
“I’m heading that way.” I pointed. “If you guys decide it’s wrong, then somebody come and get me. You drive way faster than I do anyway, and it won’t be a big deal. I will not sit here one second longer watching my skin blister and suppurate. I’m outta here!”
I fired up my scooter and got into the wind and some level of comfort. Twenty minutes later, Bill snapped by me in a heartbeat with Les TMB not far behind. Apparently the road I had taken was acceptable after all, and we continued the trip. So my single contribution to the adventure was to break the stalemate that kept us going nowhere. I didn’t plan. I didn’t know. I just had the confidence that after forty years of bike riding all over the country, I would not get hopelessly lost and would eventually find my way back home. What I also knew was that we could still be sitting there in the desert sun, listening to the detailed, meticulous planner try to reach agreement with the big picture adventurous single-minded guy. Dick would go along with whatever decision surfaced, and Jeff would make everybody feel good about it.
My contribution was to take action, any action, and know that things would work out one way or the other. You need those kinds of guys too. Don’t you?
There is one final lesson to be learned here. We drove through Mexicali at the end of the second day on our way to spend the night across the US border so Les TMB and Dick could be happy with the insurance situation. We passed several beautifully big resorts with huge walls and security gates. But we kept on going to get to a Best Western in the United States with no security at all. We stopped and discussed the options. Here I made another contribution, or tried to.
“Why not stay down here in Mexicali with what looks like good security? If we stay in Calexico at the Best Western, you’ll be insured, but it’s a border town with a huge record of auto theft and no security. Chances are much better that you’ll get your bike stolen there and not here.”
“But at least there we’ll be insured,” said Dick and Les TMB.
“But here you won’t need to worry because it won’t get stolen at all,” I repeated.
They wanted to cross the border. They would rather play to lose. I actually didn’t care that much from a practical point of view. I drove an old ’79 Low Rider with over 400,000 miles and sufficient oil and road grease covering it. It was barely recognizable as the classic old Harley Shovelhead that it was. Kind of like my own little antitheft device. Much better than LoJack. No self-respecting bike thief would even give it a second look. At each roadside rest stop when we finished razzing Dick about all his Harley Davidson decals and constant phone calls to his wife, he would take his turn and ask me, “Now what year was it that you last washed your bike?” By the way, we stayed at the Best Western in Calexico.
We all did fine. We made it to Julian by midday on Sunday, had the obligatory apple pie and ice cream, compared our Lipitor dosages and cholesterol counts, and mounted up for the home stretch. It had been a great trip. I am certain I will never choose to drive through the Baja in late spring again, but we are planning a trip to Big Sur or maybe Taos in the fall. I’d ride with those guys again, although bottom line was that poor Dick lost his bowling privileges for three weeks.
Full disclosure—a good idea or not?
Coming back along the Ortega Highway is always pleasant. It’s a beautiful road with home as the destination. A stop at The Lookout is customary. Just a ramshackle snack bar sitting on the edge of a scenic gorge with a big dirt parking lot and plenty of benches, picnic tables, and boulders to sit on and look out over the panorama with thirty or forty scooters parked in the lot. The crowd is a mixture of graybeards and manicured cell phone yuppies who wear full leathers in the summertime. Nobody seems to be too judgmental. The graybeards do a lot less chattering.
The five miles leading up to The Lookout is a wonderful winding two-lane just a tad wider than much of the rest of the road, and you can really fly. You’re heading uphill, so with the throttle wide open, you can maintain great control. Passing slower traffic is no problem, and most everybody on the highway is courteous and pulls just a foot to the right to give you an easier time. Well, most everybody. The five of us blew by an old pickup that decided that today was not a pleasant kind of day and moved to the left just as Les TMB was passing him. Les is a skilled driver on a fine motor and made it by him, but not without a quick juke to the left into what could have been oncoming traffic, but wasn’t. I was close behind and passed on the right as I saw what was happening. No harm, no foul. We heard the guy’s horn complaining behind us. He tried his best to stay on our tails.
The Lookout loomed ahead, and we slowed to enter the crowded parking lot. Bill went in first, then Dick, and Jeff right behind. Les and I slowed to let the path clear. Les pulled through, and I followed. Just as I left the pavement and hit the dirt of the parking lot, that asshole pickup truck came roaring into the lot, cut right in front of me, and tried to grab a space that wasn’t there. I grabbed my front break, stood on my rear brake pedal, and went right down with 750 pounds of Milwaukee Iron on top of me.
The bike fell to the right, and for the first time in forty-three years, I was under it with the hot exhaust pipes branding my entire calf and upper thigh with what I’m told is 1800 degrees of hot blue steel from my twin exhaust pipes. Adrenaline is a reality, and I guess it was that wonderful chemical that gave me the strength to push the nearly half ton of machine up and off me within about two to three seconds. The pain of the burn has about a half second delay before it hits your brain and then rapidly becomes meaningful. With both hands, I pushed the bike up with such force that it went over on the other side. I got up, lost my balance, and fell right back down on top of those very same pipes. Right on my ass. It burned through my jeans in a millisecond and seared right into the fat of my butt cheeks. I leaped up as quickly as I could, slipped, and fell again, right back down on those same pipes and then just rolled off onto the ground. You’ve probably seen those restaurants that advertise Mongolian Bar-B-Q, well this was Jewish Bar-B-Q.
It all took less than eight seconds. The driver of the pickup leaps out of his cab and starts screaming at me for driving so fast up the mountain road and passing him and I deserve what I got and worse. He was a skinny, tattooed, greasy-haired low life with a mean look and a loud wise-ass mouth, and I just lost it. Maybe it was still the adrenaline. I felt the pain in the background being crowded out by my own rage. I whipped my helmet off, grabbed it by the strap, walked up to his loud ugly mouth, and rapped him upside the head with my helmet as hard as I could and then hit him again and then again. He went down, and I hit him again square in the face with my helmet and took out his nose. He wasn’t shouting anymore. In fact he was pretty silent. I had given him a solid kick in the groin while he was on the ground. Then I dropped my helmet, grabbed him by the shirt and his greasy ugly hair, and dragged him three feet across the dirt to my bike and jammed his bloody face right onto my lovely hot pipes.
He then began to make some noise. It was a guttural shriek as beautiful as you would ever want to hear. I picked his head back up off the pipes and shouted something and took the greatest joy in smashing his face, lips first, right back down on the pipes, generating another extraordinary sound of agony. I cauterized his bleeding nose—no extra charge. Right in the middle of this, I got hit on the left side with a flying tackle that knocked me off the skinny SOB. Bill thought it was enough and felt the best way to end the incident was to hurtle his 310-pound frame at me rather than trying to discuss alternatives. You need guys like that.
I picked myself up. Looked at my leg for the first time and began to feel the onset of the pain. I went back to my bike that was still lying on its side and managed to get it upright. I kicked out the stand, let it rest, looked it over, and got my breath. I felt a thread of nausea wandering up from the pain and realized there was quite a crowd all around. My instincts told me it was time to leave. I took a deep breath in through my nose, swung my sautéed right leg over the saddle, hit the starter button, and heard my ride come to life. Nothin’ can stop it. I kicked it into first and slowly pulled out of that dirt lot and onto the pavement.
Then I was doing sixty in a second or two with the wind in my face and the pain introducing itself to my brain explaining in its own subtle way that we were going to be in for a challenge. The most uncomfortable part at that moment was my ass. My leg was in the wind with nothing touching it. My inner thigh was also pretty much in the wind with no contact. But my ass was on my saddle, and it hurt. Really hurt.
A couple of minutes later, Bill came whizzing by doing about a buck twenty and signaled me to pull over. I like Bill. I really do. I respect Bill. You just have to. But I didn’t pull over.
I don’t know why. I still don’t. I was riding, and I was good and I didn’t want to do anything but ride. Ride home. My mind wasn’t really functioning in its normal rational mode. I was fifty-eight and had just done something violent, for the first time since ’69, back when I was a combat medic. Violence tends to put your psyche in a different gear. Can’t explain. If you’ve been there, I don’t have to. If you haven’t, there’s no use in trying. But I think I’ve used that phrase before. Sorry.
Bill pulled in front of me and slowed down to my speed. Les came up alongside me next and signaled to pull over. Then Dick and Jeff were behind me. I pulled over.
“You all right?”
“You better take a look at your leg. That’s nasty.”
“Naw, I just need to get home. Let’s go.”
“You’ll never make it. That’s a bad burn. You need to get to the hospital.”
“I’m going home."
“Bub, you’re being crazy. You need to take care of that. It will get infected. We need to get you to a hospital.”
I had spent a great deal of time in my ugly youth at Fort Sam Houston. I had been assigned to the burn unit at the Brooke Army Medical Center where all the kids returning from ’Nam who had encountered massive applications of napalm were treated. I knew a lot more about the treatment of burns than I wanted to. They were right. I needed to clean it out. I had been rolling in the dirt. I had to debride the wound and clean it out. That was the right thing to do.
Les checked his map. “There’s an aid station three miles up the road. It’s where the forest rangers hang out. Let’s stop there. They must have first-aid stuff.”
“Okay, lead the way.” Les pulled out first. Bill pulled out alongside me. Dick and Jeff tucked in behind us. We got to the aid station in just a minute or two.
Nice guys they have working there. Firefighter types. One was younger, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven. The other was in his mid-thirties. They seemed to know a little about first aid, but in fact I knew more. I let them take my vitals and then used their equipment and cleaned out my calf and thigh, but I really couldn’t do much about my ass. The younger one was saying I should put on a dressing. He was wrong, but I was polite. The older one insisted they transport me to the hospital. I refused.
“Your pulse is 180 and your blood pressure is bottoming out. You’re in shock. You don’t know what you’re doing. Hey, guys, can’t you do something about your dumb old friend here? This isn’t right.”
They made me sign a waiver with Bill signing as witness and then started telling me again how I was in shock and how the pain was really just starting and in an hour it would become so bad that I’d faint and go off the road and on and on. I shook both their hands with a sincere smile and walked back to my Scoot. Bill and Les were starting to question me and convince me to listen, but they know how I get. Bill followed me all the way back to Irvine. Les, Dick, and Jeff decided to continue on the more scenic route through the mountains and got home about three hours after Bill and me. Bill never left my side until I pulled into my driveway and then he went on down to Sav-On to get me some spray antiseptic. He looked me square in the eye and got a coherent smile and a wink and he was off.
“Call me if you need anything.”
“Keep the rubber side down!”
I had about two hours before my wife would be home. This was not going to be easy. I got myself upstairs and swallowed three left-over Vicodin from an old out-of-date prescription. I took the garden hose and did a better job of cleaning out the burns and dropped my pants to do what I could with my ass. It was not only difficult to reach back there, but the stretching really aggravated the burns on my leg. I knocked down 1,000 mgs of Ibuprofen and found some of that Bactine kind of spray to act as a topical anesthetic for the burned area. It didn’t seem to do much. With my limited knowledge, I sat out in the backyard with the hose on a slow trickle just keeping the wounds irrigated.
The pain was beginning to muster its forces. Pain is a chemical thing. It’s all in your head, just chemicals sending messages to your brain. That’s all. You have to hold on to that thought. Another thought crept in there that said, “Maybe I should get to the doctor and get an updated prescription of Vicodin or something.”
Two hours later, my life’s partner breezed in from shopping with the girls.
“How was your trip?”
“Great, really great. Mexico is something else.”
“Why are you watering your leg? What the hell is that? What did you do?”
It was clear that I was all right. That was the most important thing. She had to see that I was all right and able to chat, and it was just one of those little things that seem to happen to me. Not to worry.
“What the hell happened to your leg? Are you crazy? We need to get you to the hospital!”
“Calm down. It’s just a burn. It’ll be okay. I’ve done this a million times before. It will heal.”
“You’ve never done that before. I can see the muscle. Are you crazy? Look at your thigh! You have a hole in it! We need to go to the doctor. Right now!”
“Honey, I’m fine. Go in the house. Just let me sit out here and relax for a while. It’s Sunday. The doctor isn’t there anyway. Just go inside. Please.”
She did. It was about 3 AM before I realized that I would definitely be going to the doctor some time very soon. I used up all the old Vicodin and chased it with an Ibuprofen and Zantac cocktail. I did that every two to three hours and managed to hold off passing out. I lay in bed on my left side and really had trouble getting up, so I had to bother my poor bride to keep getting me damp face cloths and ice wraps. She didn’t get much sleep either, but she’s a gem. She didn’t say one more thing about doctors or hospitals. I guess she knew I knew.
At 7 AM, she got me into the car and over to the doctor’s office. They took me right into a treatment room. The doctor looked at it and explained the difference between first-degree burns, second degree, and third degree. I had a good selection of all three. The good news was that second-degree burns have already burned through the nerve endings, so the pain is nonexistent. It’s only the first-degree burns at the edges that hurt. They really hurt. He said I had to go over to the Anaheim Burn Center to see a specialist, but that’s another story.
He gave me a new prescription for the pain and special dressings and a tub of silver nitrate. Great stuff that silver nitrate. He left shaking his head, and one of his nurses came in to dress the wound. She was young and pretty and made an audible “ugh” sound when she saw it. There was just a tinge of fear in her eyes, and a greenish hue appeared under her eyes. She swayed a bit on her crepe-soled white nurse shoes. I told her I would be happy to do the job, just hand me the materials and scissors and stuff and I could handle it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ve done this hundreds of times.”
In fact, I had, just not on myself. I did need her assistance with my ass. But we handled that last, and she was getting more comfortable and secure. I didn’t hurt her a bit. She smiled and thanked me and kind of suggested that it would be nice if I didn’t tell anybody that she assisted instead of doing it. She was young and cute, with long auburn hair and a great smile.
I said, “Sure.”
Getting up and on my feet was quite a chore and would be for the next four to six weeks. Skin has a lot of important functions. One of them is to kind of hold you all together in a nice envelope. When you tear a large portion of that envelope, two things happen. The rest of the envelope gets pulled in unusual ways that are actually quite painful all by themselves. Second, your skin is a major source of insulation for your body. When you lose a large part of that, you get very cold. It was over eighty degrees outside. It was the summer, but I was freezing with constant chills for most of the next month.
The recuperation was fairly uneventful. The great and wonderful doctors at the Anaheim Burn Center insisted on surgery because so much of the underlying skin had been burned away. They told me without it I would be looking at a six-month recovery period and have major scarring and disfigurement. I chose not to listen to them and was back on my Scooter in six weeks with only modest scarring that is now all but invisible. Silver nitrate is a remarkable substance that promotes healing in a magical way. Keeping yourself clean, changing the dressings every four to six hours, and keeping somewhat flexible, as painful as that is, seemed to be the right formula. I knew what I was doing, and it was my body anyway. The last thing I wanted to do was get into a California operating room.
By the way, I never did beat the crap out of that guy in the pickup. I should have. I really should have. But the truth is I just stood there glaring at him while he shot his mouth off. Then he kind of looked down at the dirt for a minute, looked up, and apologized.
But I wish I had.