Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

There are some places you just never want your motorcycle to stop. Here is an example: on northbound 280, in the median, about one and a half feet from traffic hurtling towards San Francsico.

Does anybody notice anything a little bit odd about the rear of my motorcycle? You know, like the pieces missing? The tail light for example? And the licence plate?

Here are the remnants of my licence plate and tail light.

Yes, that mangled piece of metal is my licence plate.

But wait! There’s more!

Notice the deep gouge in my rear tire:

Here is where a passenger footpeg used to be:

I was supposed to be meeting two very long-time web friends, one from Sweden and the other from Ohio, today. That was fine until I got to the outskirts of Millbrae. There was a very sharp jolt with accompanying loud bang, my bike’s back wheel started behaving oddly, and a large cloud of smoke exploded from the rear. Any rider tunes in to her bike, and knows at once when it’s normal and when it’s not. This was a definite “not.”

Then there was another jolt. What I was actually experiencing was my rear wheel locking up solidly at what we shall tactfully call freeway speed.

You betcha I pulled off the freeway. Unfortunately, I was in the fast lane and thus I found myself in the median, on a narrow “shoulder” with a steep downhill ditch on the left. Since after parking I was utterly unable to move the bike even a single inch, I figured that I’d ridden over something and that my tire had gone flat.

In a manner of speaking, I had ridden over something. You see, my licence plate was affixed to a solid piece of metal, and the rear light (brake light) is threaded through it. This piece of metal decided that now was a really great time to break off, causing the licence plate to swing down the side of my bike, gouge a deep hole round the entire circumferance of my tire, then wedge itself solidly between the swing arm, fender and wheel. It took my rear light with it. Just for grins, it decided to shear off a rear footpeg, too.

All this happened within the space of, I would guess, less than sixty seconds.

The smoke was from the tire’s rubber being scraped off and the weird handling was from the wheel suddenly stopping being able to rotate.

I was close enough to the traffic that I was afraid to look more closely and got myself deeper into the median where it was “safe.” Called Don, and he said he’d come over to help. By now it was 11:30 and I’d been there an hour. Nobody stopped. Don figured it out in a second–and an hour later gave up in disgust, saying that he needed a screwdriver to act as a lever. We rode two-up on his bike and went questing for said screwdriver (and some food, too).

At one-thirty we were back at the bike, and he hacked and hacked and hacked at the thing. The remains of what used to be a perfectly nice tail light came out a little bit at a time.

It took nearly another two hours to get the mangled remains of everything out, flatten out the plate, and affix it using duct tape and bungees.

I never did make it to San Francisco, but I’m glad that I made it safely home.

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