waiting for life to start again By: Beemer Dan Anyone who has ever lost their motorcycle in an accident knows that there is really no replacement. It's like someone has killed your best friend and gotten away clean. In May of this year a moron in a really large American made truck ran a red light and smashed me and my bike. My last true memory of my 850 roadster is seeing it wedged under that truck: gasoline, smoke, oil, fire and sparks bursting from it. My bike slowed the truck down, preventing it from hitting me again. After that it was a blur of pain and ambulances and emergency rooms and CT scans and anesthetics and surgery and everyone looking down at me like I was broken in half......I basically was......and then there were the nightmares.

After an experience like that, nothing can really make you feel complete until you're back on your feet, back at your job and back on two wheels. Even then, you'll always miss that bike you had and were so brutally removed from. it's all the worse when you know that even when you do get a new bike, you'll still be in the doghouse from slow knitting broken bones or an addiction to pain killers. The injustices of the world become very clear, and your helplessness to do anything about it becomes the clearest of all.

I've spent the last few months trying to distract myself from the unsavory reality that not only could I not walk, but my bike was a totaled heap, sitting in an auction house waiting to go up on the block. Even worse was the fact that my insurance company wouldn't let me buy back the remains of my Roadster to attempt to resurrect it. I feel like I owe that bike something, it deserves to be fixed and returned to it's former self. It deserves so many more rides, more twisty romps through the canyons, more midnight blasts through the rain, more years on the road. Three and a half years, 15,000 miles, and it has become parts,it deserves more.

It was a 1996 BMW R850R Roadster, Ascot green, with clubman race bars and the type of disposition that always asked to ride. I wasn't used to having a bike that never broke down, and always let me push the envelope of it's capabilities without bursting into a thousand oily bits all over the road. My Roadster so rarely gave me problems I forgot I had plans to do some more custom stuff to it. The only flaw the bike had was that when the engine flooded it took some time for it to dry out. It had quite a list of attributes tho: 0-60 in under 3 seconds, a perfectly smooth ride no matter what the road was like (even when the road went corduroy before repaving), triple disk brakes that stopped the bike in seconds flat, Fuel injection, monoshock front and rear, an 850cc boxer twin motor that ran perfect and consistent, heated grips, even the wide seat that fit my fat ass like no other bike has.

I still have my toolbag from the front forks, a brake pedal my sweetheart got off the wreck for me, the license plate, some good photos(thank you Kellen) and many wonderful memories. Sometimes I liked just sitting and looking a the lines of the bike thinking about where we were going to ride to next, or what little custom parts would make it that much better. We went through a few snowstorms, spent some afternoons up in the twisties and went up to Sturgis in 98. It was how I got to work and why I went out at night. I spent many days sitting on it down at The Market drinking coffee and reading books. It was also the bike I rode to Nebraska with the rest of the 667 when we went to lay Spike to rest.

For some reason most cagers don't look at their metal boxes as anything more than a tool to get from one place to another. Somehow I doubt that most truck or car owners could understand the bond we have with our bikes. If they did maybe they'd try to pay a little more attention and stop running us over. Maybe if they had some kind of emotional attachment to their car they would pay attention to traffic and the road to prevent running into things. Maybe they would even see their car as a friend and try to make sure no harm came to it. I saw my bike as a friend, and losing it is something most people will never understand. It's always said that a friend will make the ultimate sacrifice for another. My Roadster did, by wedging itself under the truck it prevented it from hitting me a second time as I lay broken and confused in the middle of the street, it saved my life. My 850 Roadster was a friend, one that I have been very sad to lose.