A Childhood Experience





	I have always considered myself a clumsy person.  In my youth,
this accident-prone nature was compounded by the natural lack of
wisdom and foresight common to all naive youngsters.  This
caused me to get myself into some situations that seemed pretty
scary at the time, but which I can now look back upon and laugh
at.



	One such incident occurred during a summer when I was 14 years
old.  My father, who enjoyed riding dirt bikes as a hobby,
decided that I was old enough to have one of my own.  He managed
to buy me a second-hand motorcycle through a friend-of-a-friend.
It was not just A motorcycle, mind you, but a 1975 Honda
four-stroke motorcycle.  A huge, silver and black behemoth of a
bike that looked as though it were the offspring of the mating
of a Harley Davidson and a Sherman tank.  It was just a bit
bigger than I was, and at least two and a half times heavier
than my diminutive stature.



	After about two months, I had pretty well mastered the basics
of riding, but found that by virtue of its advantage in size and
weight, the machine had more control over ME than I had over IT
in many situations.  I had also begun learning how to
mechanically maintain my bike.  During the week before a ride,
I'd tear my bike down, clean all the major parts, then put it
back together so it'd be in top running shape for that weekend's
ride.



	Finally the weekend arrived, and I found myself once again,
tagging along with my father and his riding buddies through the
pineapple fields near Wahiawa.  As usual, my dad and the rest of
the guys in our group (my dad's brother, and my dad's two
friends from the neighborhood) turned into maniacs as soon as
their bike tires hit dirt.  I remember seeing them all take off
across the expanse of crisscrossing dirt roads in a great cloud
of red dust, the engines of their two-stroke motorcycles buzzing
like a mammoth swarm of bees, racing each other at top speed to
nowhere in particular.  Not wanting to get lost, I revved up my
bike and took off after them.  Even though I was still pretty
inexperienced, I cycled my bike rapidly through its gears and
soon had it up to full throttle.  The surrounding pineapples
became a green and orange blur whizzing by on both sides.  Tiny
bumps and changes in ground level turned the road into a
high-speed roller coaster ride, as each one sought to launch my
bike into the air.  In fact the great speed created the illusion
that I was actually floating on air, and the bumps were my sole
contact with the ground.  My heart began pounding as adrenaline
coursed through me.  I squinted hard against the wind.  Tears
began streaming from the corners of my eyes, leaving streaks of
clean skin as they were whipped horizontally across the sides of
my dirt-caked face.  My mouth began to feel dry as the gritty
red dirt I was riding through began collecting on my teeth,
because, as I suddenly realized, I was grinning ear-to-ear.  I
was elated with the sensation of speed.  Ahead, all I could see
was the telltale dustcloud my company had left, stretching out
for perhaps a quarter of a mile in front of me, leading to a
valley at the border of the pineapple field.  I finally caught
up to the group as they were slowing to begin their descent into
the valley.  I had been here a few times before, and knew that
they were heading for a motorcycle racetrack at the bottom.



	The lush, green valley was a popular riding area for the local
dirt bike community.  This was evidenced by a network of dirt
trails zig-zagging up and down the valley walls.  These trails
had been forged by seasoned riders who were in complete control
of their machines.  Riders who thought nothing of riding 200
yards downhill over terrain as rugged as the moon.  While the
particular trail that we chose to go down was not very steep
(angling down at a mere 45 degrees as it snaked back and forth
along the valley wall), it was very narrow (about 5 feet wide). 
It was also studded with car-sized boulders, filled with
switchback turns, and pockmarked with motorcycle-eating
"washouts" -- where rainwater run-off had carved four-foot deep
trenches across the path.  These hazards, which were tricky
enough for experienced riders in the group, spelled DISASTER to
me.  On every occasion that I had ridden the trail, I'd lost
control of my bike at least twice after hitting washouts at the
wrong speed, or careening off of boulders or dirt embankments
that seemed to spring up out of nowhere while I was
concentrating on slowing my bike down.  I paused for a second at
the top.  My father yelled over the roar of the engines;



"You gonna be okay?"



	I swallowed hard.



	"Uh, yeah, I'll be alright..."  I replied half-heartedly.  I
felt my stomach go up to my throat as I began to get painful
flashbacks of previous tumbles I took on this trail.  My dad
gave me an approving nod and started down.  I gave him a few
seconds lead time (so as not to end up crashing into him) before
cautiously venturing down the incline myself.



	Prior experience had taught me well.  Though the vicious
washouts tried to wrench the handlebars from my grasp, and the
boulders loomed terribly close at times, I managed to make it
past all of the dangerous sections without parting company with
my bike.  I breathed a sigh of relief as I neared the ending of
the trail.  I eased off the throttle, bringing the motor down to
almost an idle, and concentrated on my braking.  There were no
treacherous hazards on this last 30 feet, only a short, smooth
downhill grade, but I knew that even on this "easy" section, I'd
have to be wary.  If I hit the brakes too hard, I'd lost control
on the powdery dirt and end up falling down.  If I didn't brake
hard enough, I'd build up too much speed and miss the U-turn I
needed to make as the trail emptied onto a 20 foot wide military
jeep road cut into the side of the valley.



	When I reached the bottom of the hill, I began executing my
U-turn.  Suddenly, my idling motorcycle screamed to full
throttle, jumped up on its rear wheel and shot at warp speed,
straight for the other side of  the jeep road.  Now, as I said
before, the jeep road was cut into the SIDE of the valley wall,
and not at the bottom of the valley.  I had ridden along that
jeep road a few times before, and I had looked over the side
sometimes, wondering just how much further down the bottom of
the valley was, but the heavy forestation and dense undergrowth
always kept me from seeing the bottom, and now here I was,
rocketing towards it, out of control.  My eyes became as wide as
golf balls as I saw a large bush looming at the edge of the road
directly in front of me.  At that moment, I remember a
crystal-clear vision pictured in my mind, of me falling off a
300-foot cliff.  With my teeth clenched, and my face contorted
by fear, I flashed through the bush and over the edge of
oblivion at a frightening rate of speed.



	I found myself holding onto the handlebars of my bike with a
white-knuckle grip as blurred trees streaked by.  During the
fraction of a second that I was airborne, alarms went off inside
my head and my survival instinct told me to bail out, jump off
my bike, but before I could move, the bike came to an
instantaneous halt, effectively ejecting me from the riding
seat.  I somersaulted over the handlebars like some motocross
gymnast.  My survival instincts switched from "Jump off!" to
"HOLD ON!" so I clenched my hands into a death grip, to no
avail.  The inertia of my body was too great, and I felt my
hands ripped away from the handlebars as I tumbled end-over-end
through space, arms still outstretched.  My immediate
environment became a kaleidoscope, as a rapid succession of
earth-sky-earth-sky-earth-sky views spun before my eyes, and
then suddenly, WHAM!  I felt, more than heard, a sickening,
scraping CRUNCH as the lower (separate) halves of my ribcage
were compressed enough to scrape together.  I had come to a
jarring, painful halt on my right side atop a tree stump at the
bottom of the slope.



	Multicolored stars popped in front of my eyes as I fought to
stand.  I turned and saw that my hasty descent had taken me down
a slope at least 15 feet high, angling down at approximately 60
degrees.  My bike -- wheels still spinning -- was suspended in
the tops of a few trees growing straight up out of the hillside.



	"Benjamiiin!  Benjamiiiin!"  I heard my dad calling for me on
the road above.  I detected a hint of fear in his voice as he
rode back and forth looking for the spot where I vanished.  I
tried to answer, but could only make a pathetic croaking sound. 
My lungs had stopped working after the impact of my landing, and
I couldn't get enough air in them to make any other sound.  My
eyes bulged as I clutched at my chest.  "Oh shit!  This is it! 
My ribs have punctured my lungs and I'm going to die here!" were
my immediate thoughts as panic seized me once again.  Tears came
to my eyes as I stumbled forward, ripped off my helmet, and
began waving it, desperately trying to attract my father's
attention.  My mind was racing, I kept thinking "I don't want to
die!  Please don't let me die!  I'm too young  to die!"  I
staggered dizzily up the side of the gully and began coughing
and making wheezing sounds as my temporarily crushed lungs once
again managed to inflate themselves.  My dad spotted me
clambering through the bushes at the roadside and helped me up. 
"You okay?" he asked as he helped check to make sure I still had
all my major parts attached.  "You were taking a while to come
down the hill, so I turned around to see if you were okay, and
when I got here, I saw some trees on the side of the road
shaking, and there was this big hole in this bush other here, I
though the worst!"



	I managed a wan smile and muttered;



	"Yeah, I went over the edge here, I thought I was gonna die!"



	Just then my uncle came riding up, and he and my father
wrestled for about 10 minutes to get my bike out of the trees
and back up the slope, onto the road.  A quick check by my dad
revealed the culprit to be a misrouted throttle cable that got
stretched when I turned the handlebars at a certain angle to the
right.



	After a few minutes of rest, it was evident that nothing was
seriously wrong with me.  I had simply gotten the wind knocked
out of me, and my young, soft bones had miraculously handled the
stress without breaking.



	I explained in detail to my dad and uncle what exactly had
happened, much to their amusement.  After much laughing, we all
decided to get back on our bikes and finish the day's ride.  My
uncle, always the joker, leaned over to me as he was starting up
his bike and said;



	"Hey brah, do it again!  I missed it the first time!"