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[QUOTE="JMD, post: 176280, member: 24087"] Here's my worst crash: I was fourteen, and riding a Greeves 250, which was ancient even then. It had an unmuffled expansion chamber with a long stinger sticking out the back. Used to be Rex Staten's motocross bike before my Dad bought it for me. Not fast by today's standards, but lots faster than the Honda CL 90 I had been riding. It was in the Mojave Desert, mid-July, and it was about 115 degrees. My father and his partner ran a tiny airport on Soggy Dry Lake, selling glider rides and beers to visiting pilots. There was a scattering of motorcyclists every weekend, and sometimes there were desert races. I was eager to start racing, and my father had told me, "If you're going to race, you better get used to the idea that you're going to get hurt." I said sure, I knew that, but in my mind, of course, I knew I was invincible, unbreakable, one of the lucky few. It was Monday, and my father had gone back into L.A. to work and I stayed out at the trailer on the dry lake with his partner, an old crop-duster and tow-plane driver named Bill. I told Bill I was going riding, and he said to stay around the lake. I said okay, but naturally the first thing I did was to go exploring. A couple of riders had stopped by the trailer the prior weekend and had told us about flying along a trail south of the lake, when suddenly there was a washout right ahead. They were going about 60, they said, so they just gassed it, pulled back on the bars, and jumped the ditch. I wanted to see that ditch, so I headed out in that direction. I had gone about a mile south of the lake, and I was in top gear, going pretty fast, when I saw a dip in the road ahead. Behind the dip appeared the washout I was looking for. It came up way too fast to stop, so I did what those guys said they did: hit the gas and jumped it. I almost made it, too. But my rear wheel hit the lip of the other side, about fifteen feet across, and the bike flipped. I still remember flying through the air upside down, thinking that this was going to be bad. When I hit, I felt a big impact, and it knocked the breath out of me. Bill always had a lot of funny expressions, and one of them was, "It hurts all over more than anyplace else." That's how I felt then. I got up, took off my helmet, threw it down, and kid of checked myself over. Because it was so hot, I had been riding without a shirt on, just my leathers. Big mistake. I was missing hide from a huge patch on my left side; later I would learn my back was scraped badly, too. I could hear myself breathing, and there was a funny gurgling sound from my chest. I reached up and felt near my neck, and there was a hole in my chest, near my collarbone. The bike had landed on me, and the open stinger had punched a neat little hole in my lung, and the lung was collapsing fast. I knew I was hurt badly, and needed help. I began walking to the nearest house, a little concrete-block cabin about half a mile away out in the sagebrush. I didn't realize that I was dragging a broken foot all the way and left a trail like a slug. I was in shock. When I got to the house, nobody was home. I looked through the back door window and saw a telephone, but it never ocurred to me to break the window and use the phone. Like I said, I was in shock, and I was only 14. I just sat down and figured I was going to die. A minute later, I saw Bill's old green Chevy pickup racing down the road. He said that he had been working around the trailer when something told him, "Jimmy's in trouble. Go get him." He headed around the lake, and when he didn't find me there, he headed straight out the road with the washout. He found my bike in a heap, along with my helmet, my gloves, and my wristwatch, which had come off when I flung my helmet to the ground. I knew that, but I hadn't cared enough to pick it up. Bill got me in the truck, and he looked so scared it scared me. too. He drove like Parnelli Jones all the way into Lucerne Valley, where we stopped at a gas station to fill up. He came out with something in a paper cup and told me to drink it. I smelled it and said, "I can't drink that; it's whiskey. My father promised me a thousand dollars if I didn't smoke or drink until I was 21." Bill said that this wouldn't count against me, and I had my first drink of hard liquor. Then we continued on to the hospital in Apple Valley, driving like a maniac. I said, "Bill, slow down. I'd like to live until I get to the hospital." I spent five days in the hospital. I had a punctured lung, of course. The doctor said that if it had gone in two inches in either direction, or at any different angle, it would have struck my heart or my aorta, and I wouldn't have lived to get to the cabin where Bill found me. I also had a broken shoulderblade, a broken foot, and about two square feet of hide ripped off. I had to sleep on a sheep's hide because my wounds would stick to the sheets. When I got home, I made my sister wait on me hand and foot, making me 7-up and cranberry juice cocktails, and if there was too much cranberry juice in it I'd make her take it back and fix it. She still remembers that week. Because of the wound on my left side, I had to sleep on my right side, with the right arm under the pillow and my left arm on a second pillow. To this day, that's the only way I can get to sleep. By the way, when my father went out to get my bike, which had landed fifty feet from the washout, he saw the tracks those other guys had left when they "jumped" the ditch. Their tracks went right up to the edge, crept down the side, across the bottom, and up the other side. [/QUOTE]
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