Painless deer hit (kind of) - Motorcycle-Journal Forums

BttrThnWrk · 01-01-2008, 10:50 PM

Today I discovered that tumbleweeds can be as malevolently dumb as everybody back East says deer are as far as bike riders are concerned.

I was headed up the Frontage road beside I-10 north from Tucson with a pretty good crosswind blowing from my right (maybe 20 mph or so). I was doing 60-ish (mph). I'd seen a few tumbleweeds blow across the road ahead of me, but didn't think too much about it. Then the big one began to move from my right ahead of me. It's as big as some of the smaller palo verde trees along that stretch of road - maybe 6 or so feet in diameter. It looks like it wants to cross the space where I'm going to be when I get there. So I speed up and move to the middle of the road - I'd been tooling down the right side of the lane up to now.

The tumbleweed speeds up. It still looks like it wants to hit me. I speed up some more and move to the extreme left side of the other lane. No traffic to contend with on that road.

Except for the tumbleweed, which speeds up again, still trying to hit me. I chop speed and swing back to the right hand side of the right lane - back where I started from.

The wind dies out with the tumbleweed dead ahead of me, about 3 feet away.

POW! Instant tumbleweed explosion. Fortunately, tumbleweeds are considerably less dense than deer are. Mostly they seem to consist of about a couple million tiny little barbs that fly everywhere. I had to pull over and shake out my coat, gloves, sweater, and shirt. I was kind of shimmying in my jeans trying to get the barbs out where they stuck in my long johns between my jeans and my boots. I had to brush them out of my full face helmet (the visor was closed, too!). I even had to brush them out of my hair. Later I found that some of the barbs even went in through the vents in the helmet and were lodged between the padding and the foam. That explained why it still itched up there after I thought I'd gotten all of the barbs out.

After that, I think that if I ever ride back East and come across a deer, I'll just stop until it moves away. Far away. Actually, I even saw a deer south of Tucson on one of the reservations last weekend as I was riding south towards Nogales. Fortunately, it was headed away from the road at the time. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.