August 4th, 2006

On my motorcycle ride to work a few days ago, I was met with a nasty bit of road rage by a chowder-head pickup truck driver. This is not the first pickup I have encountered which has taken a personal dislike to me and my motorcycle. It's a perceived threat/testosterone-charged/male anxiety thing, I think. So I posted a description of the incident on my motorcycle forum:

On my ride to work, I had a pretty awful experience.

It started with me in the right lane, and a mid-1980s F250 in the left lane. The car in front was moving slowly, and Mr. Truck was falling behind (moving even slower), so I put on my signal and did a shoulder check to move into the lane in front of him.

As soon as he saw this, he floored it and moved up to block off my move into "his" lane. But he didn't move ahead (I would have just pulled in behind him if he had), he stayed right beside me, boxing me in with the slow car in front and him to my left.

So I slowed right down, and he slowed right down to keep me in the right lane. I could tell by his body language that he felt I didn't deserve to be in that lane, ahead or behind him. I slowed down a little more, he again matched me, then I dropped a gear and flew ahead of him. [Bikes can do that; the slowest bike can out-accelerate all but the very fastest of cars.]

I got a few cars ahead of him, and drove for another 5 minutes before I turned right onto a smaller road. Two more minutes passed.

Then that truck came roaring past me (over a double yellow line) and cut me off, stopped at a 45-degree angle blocking the entire lane (it was one lane each way). I had to emergency-stop my bike.

He got out of his truck and started walking towards me yelling at how I "came within two feet" of his truck and some other unintelligible verbiage about motorbikes in general. (I'd like to point out that cars were lining up behind me, since he'd blocked off the road.) I just wanted to avoid this chowder-head, and with him out of his truck, the opportunity was ripe, so I scooted around him and his truck into the (empty) oncoming lane.

As I passed him, though, he gave me a two-handed shove. Even at 10 or 15 Km/H, with some good gyroscopic force going to keep me up, I damn near lost it and almost went down. But I recovered my balance without crashing, and got the f**k out of there.

At the time, I just wanted to avoid that guy. Of course, now I'm feeling the fury ... ("I shoulda done this ... I shoulda done that ...") but I'm glad I didn't stick around to even shout back at him.

And after I wrote that, I calmed down and stopped creating revenge fantasies in my mind.

What interested me was the response by my friends on the motorcycle forum. A few people offered helpful suggestions:

These were all good bits of advice to remember, and if there is a next time, I will try to remember them.

But there were people who started citing this incident as why they carry weapons (guns, most notably) with them ... or at least want to start carrying them when they ride their motorcycles. It really is a bit unsettling to see the forum thread evolve (devolve?) into a discussion of the best way to conceal a firearm, and shoot people who get out of their trucks. They, of course, are also discussing what to do if the truck drivers are carrying concealed weapons as well.

There is also a contingent of people on my motorcycle forum who assured me, making me feel a lot better, that just trying to get away from Mr. Truck and his road rage was the right thing to do. They say that I was right to get out of there without even saying a word to him.

Well, considering the discussion of appropriate firearms, and the right weapon to strap on when riding a motorcycle ... I agree that just getting the hell out of there really was the right thing to do!

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