Years ago I was riding home from a Triumph motorcycle rally in Western Canada and was taking a secondary road that was far from everything but usually much prettier than the main highway.
It started with rain, which was no big deal, even when it was coming down hard enough to be starting to sheet on the road. It’s a big, heavy bike and I’ve been riding for decades so I’m used to pushing through that. But then it turned into hail, which feels like getting peppered by shots from bb guns at highway speed.
At the point that the hail got big enough that I was starting to genuinely worry about damage (to us and the bike), we caught up to a station wagon pulling a sailboat. It was a fixed-keel boat, so it sat about 7-8 feet up on its trailer. They weren’t going very fast, so taking the risk, I tucked up close to the rear of the boat to get into its shadow from the hail. I signaled to the driver that I was looking for cover and got a thumbs up back, and we stayed like that for 10-15 minutes until we were passing an isolated hunting lodge with the lights on.
I flashed the driver and gave him a thank-you wave, then made for the lodge. As we pulled up, someone came out on the covered patio and quickly waved my wife inside to warm up and directed me to tuck the bike into a small garage with the other vehicles where it could be protected. They gave us some hot coffee and then walked us through what to listen for and what to do in case of a tornado (a red alert had just been issued).
Thankfully, the storm passed about 30 minutes later, and then we had to wait another hour or so for the plows to get by to clear about half a foot of hail from the roads before we could head out.
Maybe 15 minutes past the lodge, we saw the boat, along with emergency vehicles including a crane, which was just starting to lift off the 18 wheeler that had blown over onto the car and flattened it completely.
Police waved us by, so (thankfully) I didn’t get much of a look at it, but I don’t see any way anyone in the car could have survived, nor would we if we’d still been tucked behind the boat.
I don’t take that road any more.
This is why I live in fear of sitting next to tractor trailers on the highway. Truckers will tell you that complaints about semi visibility are largely overblown, and that they can see you fine when you’re alongside, but 18-wheelers are still huge. Anything could happen.
