A Serious Error In Judgment

(Thanks to Dr. Greg Frazier, who used this phrase in an email to dryly describe an especially difficult cold weather experience he once had, which inspired me to respond accordingly, as you’ll see here. We sell a couple of Dr. Frazier’s books and if you order more than $100 in Aerostich merchandise this week, we’ll send you one as a gift for a limited time only.)

My late father was a lifelong recreational boating enthusiast and an active member of two boating organizations: (1) the Great Lakes Cruising Club and (2) the United States Power Squadron.  One of the latter organization’s stated purposes is to provide small boat safety classes. They offer a curriculum of courses starting with basic introductory Safe Boating classes and culminating with classes on things like celestial navigation. (I’m not sure if they still offer that one in today’s GPS-enabled era.) These classes are scheduled during the winter months, and for years my father taught a popular one-night class titled “River Piloting”.  For several years during my youth, I went along, at his request, “to keep me (him) company”.

Dad didn’t know anything about river piloting, but he was a good public speaker who believed in education and safe boating, so he’d stand behind a lectern, smile broadly at usually around two dozen newer boaters in the classroom, and begin something like this:  “I don’t know that much about river piloting, but I have been a boater for many years so tonight I’m going to teach a subject called ‘Accidents I Have Had’."

This always got a nice laugh. He’d then proceed from an outline covering the time he was a new boater launching his first (22’) boat but forgetting to first install the hull drain plug (which was still inside a manila envelope along with the owner’s manual, on a counter in the small cabin), to later episodes of rocky groundings in remote anchorage coves on the northernmost shore of the Lake Superior, which opened good sized holes in the bottom, letting both daylight and garden-hose streams of water in, to a few onboard galley, engine and minor electrical fires. At the end of his lecture, the overall message seemed to be that when things go sideways having good luck + not panicking will always be more important than knowing exactly what the correct thing to do might be.

Taking after my old man, the rest of this story is about one of my worst motorcycle riding decisions and experiences.  My coldest-ever ride was also my hardest: Eighteen hundred miles across two 900-ish mile days back-to-back in mid-March, from Daytona Beach, Florida after ‘Bike Week’, to Duluth Minnesota. By the time I was halfway through Alabama or Georgia, temperatures were down in the forties, and by the time I reached an overnight stop at a motel somewhere on the Mason-Dixon line, it was around freezing. My bike was unfaired and windshield-less and the next day was a lot worse. Roads were dry the entire way, but as I was northbound on I-94 out of Chicago there were large snowbanks on the sides of the road and deep white snow to the horizon in all directions.

Eau Claire Wisconsin is where one goes either straight west to the Twin Cities or turns due north for another 2.5 hours to Duluth. The ambient temp when I got there was in the mid-twenties. To warm and prepare for the final pull I stopped at a Perkins restaurant for some calories and to steel myself for the ordeal I knew was ahead.  I ordered and ate enough hot food for two people: A large bowl of burn-your-tongue-hot chili, a double cheeseburger and fries, a ‘bottomless’ cup of coffee, and a chaser mug of hot cocoa.

Forty-five minutes later I’d peed (which had required both patience and care due to overlapping non-aligning base layers) and was fully bundled up with multiple electrics*. My over-tired body was vibrating from the food and double-shot of caffeine because I never drink coffee or any beverage containing caffeine – I’m hypersensitive to it.

Fortunately, a couple of hours later I rolled into the driveway of the little duplex apartment where I lived. There was a foot of snow. The bike went immediately onto its sidestand and great clouds of steam came up from the hot engine melting itself into the snow. Still wearing my helmet and gloves I slowly and stiffly staggered inside and began shedding clothing the way a two-year-old does and collapsed into sleep for maybe ten or eleven hours, too tired to even consider taking a hot shower.

After that long sleep, I woke still exhausted but alive.

From start to finish this entire experience was the result of “a serious error in judgment”.  Six months earlier I’d left my bike in Arizona and then just before Bike Week had flown there to ride across the sunbelt to Daytona. This part of the trip went fine but I sure didn’t luck out with the weather for getting back home to northern Minnesota.  One moment especially stands out. At some gas stop on day two at around 3 PM (it was still light, so probably I was in northern Indiana), I’d stepped off the bike, unplugged the electric mid layers, and with my helmet still on my head because it was so cold, rotated it slightly downward and immediately heard and observed a bunch of pencil diameter curlicued breath-caused icicles break off the helmet’s chin bar and tinkle to the ground around my boots. Cool! I thought, and I had to see if there were more, so I stiffly bent down and looked at my helmeted and balaclava’d face in the bike's left rearview mirror. What looked back resembled more an Antarctic explorer or a Himalayan mountaineer on the last pitch of Everest than any motorcyclist I’d ever seen. Huge hoarfrost was thick across my upper chest and there were several remaining icicles curlicuing from the helmet’s chinbar in wind-twisted shapes. I wished I’d had a camera and someone to take a photo of this, but it was years before smartphones and selfies, and I was freezing, so no such images exist. The image remains crystal clear in memory, though.

A serious error in judgment for sure, but somehow I lived to ride another day.

Here’s an even worse story of a Canadian rider who routinely rides in the far far north, in far colder weather than I, who made an even greater error in judgment. It’s right out of Jack London.**

Almost every long-time rider has at least a few stories like this. I have several others, both summer and winter, but none are more frozen-extreme.

What are your “serious error in judgment” stories?

-- Mr. Subjective, February 2024

PS - You know how fishing stories tend to exaggerate the size of “the one that got away” and how over time the lost fish gets larger? In this story, the more I think about it now, the lower the ambient temperatures were then. I’m thinking that by mid-Alabama it was probably already down around 32ºf, by the time I stopped that night it was maybe 25-29ºf, by the time I passed through Chicago it was around 22ºf, and by the time I finally got home it was somewhere in the teens, maybe 16-18ºf. It was really cold. I also now clearly remember eating a slice of hot apple pie at that Perkins in Eau Claire.

* Electric grips (BMW), gloves (Widder), vest (Widder), sleeves (Widder), and chaps (Widder).  All over a base layer or two, and in combination with mid-layers of thick fleece. For you youngsters, Mr. Widder was a USAF WW2 bomber crew member who wore a USAF-issue 110v heated flight suit inside the unpressurized, unheated frozen fuselages of those warplanes.  After he came home from the war he pioneered heated rider’s gear, and by the time I came along his son was running the business from a large two-car garage directly behind his Los Angeles-area home. We met a few times at trade shows and once when I’d ridden out to LA for some other business, I’d met him at his home there. A few years later Aerostich acquired a couple of huge old well-used fusing presses which are a type of equipment necessary to make heated gear. These presses heat and fuse together a non-woven fabric layer holding the special resistance heating wires in place. Then we began making Aerostich’s range of Kanetsu heated gear.

**And here’s a link to that classic Jack London story, ‘To Build a Fire’.