Housekeeping and the Motorcycle Crash

Here is some interesting info that I came across while snooping through Lance’s emails.  He wrote this one to our friends, Bink and Susan, and I could not have done a better job editorializing our day than this, so here is a summary of our day.

Lance says:

Yesterday was clean up the truck day and boy did I get after it.  In the meantime, Cynthia was in the little house getting it more, and more, organized.  That has bee a real process.  I went down and washed, hand dried and then brought the truck back here.  I waxed the silver/grey part with one kind of polish, the black with a polish just for black auto paint, armorall'ed the tires four times, then did the trim with trim restorer.  

We then took every single thing out of the back of the truck, and it was full of stuff, to get to the golf clubs which we have decided to sell.  Just don't play golf enough to keep them. In the process of doing this little chore, I found that all but one of the nuts had come off the bolts keep the shell on the truck!!  We had wondered why there seemed to be more rattles and road noise lately, and we found out why.  Wow, we could have lost that shell at 65 mph and lots of stuff in the bed of the truck with it.  It is always something isn't it?   By this time it was 90 degrees in the shade and no shade, and I started into putting in new bolts with locking nuts.  I put four in on each side with a box wrench since we no longer have our ratchet set.  Rivers of sweat were pouring off of me into the bed and exiting the back of the downed tailgate.  It was a little like trying to thread a needle in a high wind, due to the lip on the side of the bed wherein it made it difficult to get the box wrench (7/16, I got that one memorized) on the nut and then turn it a quarter of an inch, remove it and then do it all over again.  Anyway, the canopy is tight as a drum now.

Last night we took some more things to Good Will, stuff we had found in going through the back of the truck again.  It was such a pleasant night, we had eaten roast beef and trimmings at "The Elbow Room" for 7 bucks, the night was coming on and cooling off, and we had shared half a cherry fritter--all so wonderful in the beautiful Arizona sunset.  We were just motoring over to leave the shopping center where Good Will is when I saw this big ruckus at the entrance, with immediate cop lights going off and people running like hell.  I said to Cynthia, "I saw something there, someone flew in the air or something.  I think someone just hit a pedestrian!"  We drove over near to the spot and on the way saw a shattered motor cycle wedged under the front end of a Toyota truck, another police car arriving, and a motorcyclist laying out on the side of the road writhing in pain and screaming with the police down beside with first aid kits out.  There was new road construction going on, and lots and lots of signs and barriers, and I think in the confusion of that with lessening light the man in the truck hit the motorcyclist somehow.

We saw him sitting in the notch of a tree there, holding his head in his hands and crying.  It was the truck driver, and he was a neighbor from our "Whispering Palms" court here!!  A policeman approached him and asked for his drivers license and then they talked for a while.  We waited, and waited, and finally a siren with a fire truck approaching but no ambulance.  A woman had gone to the fallen cyclist, looked him over, talked to him serenely and held his hand--a nurse I think?  The police allowed her to stay for quite a while.  Still now ambulance--finally, about 35 to 40 minutes after the initial impact a siren, and then an ambulance.  

They removed the helmet from the fallen man, he was bald, and older, say 60.  He was moaning and writhing still, and they then commenced to cut off almost all his clothes, the medics, to get a closer look at his injuries.  He was then place on a back board, and finally, nearly an hour after the crash, taken to the hospital.  The moral to the story--don't get hit on a motorcycle in Tucson, because you may not make it even if you had a chance right after the crash.