The Ride Report

I was lanesplitting my way up the 101 freeway yesterday through unusually heavy traffic when I caught up to a tow truck angling over to the inside lane where there was a car stopped. That explained the back-up — I figured it was either broken down or an accident. Then I did a double-take when I saw a motorcycle down and a guy sitting on the ground next to it. Accident.

I flipped my helmet up as I went by and yelled “Are you okay? Need some help?” to the biker. No response, he just looked at me, looking kind of out of it. So I followed Rule #1 of Biker Code: stop for fellow bikers. The tow truck, car, and downed bike were blocking two lanes of traffic, so I did a U-turn and rode back against traffic and parked my bike in the fast lane in front of the stopped car.

The cager was standing next to his car and looking pretty freaked out when I approached. Maybe he was afraid I was going to thump him — and the thought did cross my mind, because he had obviously clipped the bike and put him down — but I think it was more his adrenaline pumping from the accident. I asked him what happened. “I never saw him. I was changing lanes and he came out of nowhere!” The usual. Because, you know, motorcycles are invisible.

The biker was squatting against the center divider behind the car and looked a little loopy. He was pretty much intact; nothing appeared broken and he looked okay for the most part, but he did have a nasty gash on one forearm and he was bleeding pretty good. I asked him what had happened and he had no idea. He didn’t remember the accident and he wasn’t very oriented as to where he was at that moment. One glance at the scuffs and scratches on his helmet lying on the ground explained why.

The motorcycle — I think it was an old Honda, maybe a Nighthawk or a CB750 — was lying on its side at the end of a trail of assorted bits of broken turn signals and plastics. The seat had somehow come off and was lying on the ground, so I kicked it over to the center divider and told the downed biker to sit on it and relax while I got the other driver’s info for him.

At about this point a guy in a pickup stopped and said he was a fellow rider too. He had a First Aid kit and medic training, so he took care of the biker while I talked to the cager and wrote down his insurance information, then I decided to be fair about it and got the biker’s info for the cager too.

The ambulance and the CHP showed up at about the same time and things moved pretty fast from there. Both the EMTs and the cops came to me first asking “Are you okay?” and I kept pointing to the bloody guy sitting on the ground and saying “Not me. Him.” They got the biker on a gurney and threw him in the back of the ambulance, and the cops got everyone’s information and story on what happened — which wasn’t much: me and the other guy who stopped hadn’t seen a thing, so the only witnesses were the people involved. Once the biker was in the ambulance it was all over but the shouting, so I jumped on my bike and took off.

I don’t know that I really helped all that much other than giving moral support to a fellow rider, but I know I would have appreciated someone stopping for me. It is part of the code, after all.