There is a kind of cold the valley keeps for the tail of winter, a thin and borrowed cold
that knows its days are numbered, and it lay over San Timoteo that morning late in March of
2018 like a hand laid lightly on the land before the long heat of the year came up to take
it away. It was six o’clock. The sky held no sun yet and no color either, only a pale
and even light, and against that paleness the San Bernardino Mountains stood up in the north
still wearing the dark, the snow on the high shoulders of San Gorgonio gone the gray of ash
and waiting on the dawn to set it burning. Below the house the orange groves ran partway up
the hill. Their blossom came to me on the still air, sweet and heavy, faintly sorrowful, the
way a sweetness always is when you know it cannot last.
A man’s life, if he is honest about it, is mostly the mornings he does not remember.
This was not going to be one of those. I did not know that yet. We never do. The day comes
up the same gray color as all the others, and gives no sign of what it is carrying, and a
man locks his door and goes out to meet it as though it owed him nothing.
I crossed to the motorcycle, my breath going up white in the cold. The helmet I carried was
a costly thing, full-faced and sound, and on the side of it I had paid a man to paint a
small black picture of a truck’s tire. It was an ugly little emblem, and I had wanted
it there. Once, on a road not unlike Barton, a truck had run over my foot and broken it, and
the foot had healed clean and given me back to my tennis and my skiing without a word of
complaint — but it had taught me the lesson the road teaches every man who rides long
enough. The road is patient. The road keeps its accounts. The road collects. Every rider
goes down. The ones who forget it go down soonest, and hardest, and some of them for keeps.
I swung onto the bike and felt the cold of the seat come up through my slacks. I was dressed
that morning like a man bound for a banquet and not a laboratory — pressed slacks, good
shoes, a bowtie — so that the helmet was the only honest thing about me. There are men
who ride to feel free, and men who ride only to feel something at all, and I have never been
certain which of the two I am. The danger was not a thing I rode in spite of. It was the
thing I rode for, and a man who will tell you the truth about that about himself will tell
you the truth about most things.
The trouble began at the foot of my own driveway, where the road fell away down a slope
steep as a canyon wall and near as narrow. On the right an orange grove leaned out over the
path, the new leaves of spring wet and ticking in the cold. On the left the ground dropped
clean away into nothing. There was no room on that slope for a mistake of any size.
I went down it slow. The grove crowded in on the one hand and the cold came up off the drop
on the other, and then at the very bottom the trap sprang. Two cars came to the foot of the
slope in the same breath, one from the left and one from the right, and stopped there nose
to nose and sealed the only way out. It was a thing that could not happen. It happened
anyway. I have noticed that the things which cannot happen are the ones a man had best be
ready for.
My mouth went dry. I held the grips till my forearms burned and leaned my weight forward to
keep the bike from going over on the grade. There was no flat ground anywhere under me to
set it down on. I could feel my heart up high in my throat. I measured the gap behind the
nearest car and measured it wrong — it was smaller than I had read it. I let the brake
off a slow inch at a time and stopped with the front wheel trembling a hand’s width
from the bumper. One inch more and the bike and I both would have gone down together.
Then the car ahead of me moved. A space opened no wider than a doorway, and I did not stop
to think on it. I turned the throttle and the engine came up under me like something glad to
be asked, and I put the bike through the eye of that needle and out the other side, and then
I was through, upright in the road with all of it behind me, and the breath went out of me
in a rush.
I am a scientist by trade, and I distrust what I cannot measure. But I am also a
Seventh-day Adventist, and I know the difference between luck and grace, and riding down out
of that morning I knew which of the two had just been spent on my account.
