COSTA: Epic ride
It was a call I’ll never forget. Editor Mark and I had ridden dirt bikes on the 2014 Fundy Adventure Rally and were about to set off on a three-day tour of the Gaspé peninsula. It was a balmy, sunny September Sunday in southern New Brunswick, and Mark and I were riding BMW K1600GT tourers.
The call came through my Schuberth modular helmet at around noon; it was equipped with a Bluetooth communicator that connected me to my cell phone. When I answered the call, the first thing my long-time girlfriend, Roxanne, asked me to do was to pull over. The unusual request alone was enough to worry me, but it was the tone of her frail, shaky voice that caused me to immediately ride onto the shoulder and stop.
“I had an accident with my bike,” she said in a low, quivering voice. “I’m in the hospital.”
The initial conversation was brief, as Roxanne was about to be rolled away for X-rays and tests. All I knew was that she had broken her nose, possibly her ankle, and she had pain in her wrist and chest. While her Suzuki SV650S got away with minimal damage after leaving the road in a left-hand curve, and dropping two metres into a forest, she hit a tree face first. It was only her Arai full-face helmet that prevented further facial damage.
I’ve built my entire life around motorcycles. They’ve given me pleasure and pain, they’ve given me focus, and they’ve led me to two careers. In that one moment, however, I felt a disdain for motorcycles that I’ve never felt before.
Mark had been riding ahead but turned around to come find me. I told him that Roxanne had crashed her bike, that she was in the hospital, and that I needed to get there as soon as possible. We parted ways near Moncton; Mark continued toward the Gaspé with a new plan, and I turned back toward Montreal, 1,000 km away.
With minimal information to go on, and uncertain of the outcome of the tests, I was overtaken by an urgency that caused me to unwittingly twist the right grip more than I should have. The smoothness of the K1600GT masked my actual speed, and it was only a quick glance at the speedometer that revealed I was travelling at 160 km/h. Fortunately, the BMW tourer is equipped with cruise control, which I set to 120 km/h. I didn’t need a speeding ticket to slow me down.
Now, I usually keep Bluetooth-enabled helmet conversations to a minimum, but this time, every minute spent talking with Roxanne was another minute of relief for me, and for her. She’d call me when she needed a voice for solace, and the relief worked both ways as the distance blurred past.
The tests hadn’t yet returned, but X-rays confirmed she had a broken nose and a broken ankle. In fact, we found out six months later from an MRI that she had also broken her wrist, which had caused constant pain and needed surgery.
But I digress. Those conversations I had with Roxanne while I rode northbound on Highway 2 toward Rivière-du-Loup, before turning east toward my destination, relieved both of us of angst. They connected us in real time, and made my solemn journey and her solemn hospital stay, less solemn.
Unfortunately, there was no way the battery of the Cardo communication system would last the entire nine-hour journey, and during one of our conversations it went silent. It’s then that I discovered it would not work while plugged in and charging. I plugged it into the bike for a 30-minute charge, then called Roxanne to let her know the reason for the break in communication. In the meantime, she had called our long-time friend, Jean-Pascal Schroeder, who went to pick her up from the hospital later that night, and brought her home.
I arrived home at around 11 PM, to find a swollen, bruised and bloody, yet good-humoured girlfriend. Unfortunately, she never quite gelled with her SV650 after the crash, and last summer she sold it. However, the story has a happy ending: she’s since recovered from her injuries, and still rides with enthusiasm. We have a date at the Montreal Motorcycle Show in a couple of weeks, where she will try a Triumph Street Twin on for size. If it fits, it’ll be her next ride.