Road Hazard

We finally found some time for a ride today. It's been several weeks since I've been onboard the Harley. And Bill has only had a few solitary rides since we've been here. It certainly wasn't because the weather was lousy. It's not. It's even warmer today and was begging for one of the motorcycles to be ridden.

So we left Mr. Chuy on his honor in the house (he was a perfect gentleman-dog, thank you) and loaded up and headed to Globe. At first, we were going to ride the Deuce but we discovered the battery was less than full and it wouldn't turn the engine over, so Bill dashed upstairs to get the Road King's keys and we took it. I had time to unzip the liner out of the riding jacket and ended up leaving it half unzipped even up the hill. The air was more humid than usual and in the low Eighties, it felt soft and warm. Traffic was heavy going over the mountain into Miami and we got behind some Yahoo who must have thought he was leading a parade, drooping along about forty all the way down the hill with a great line of traffic behind him. There were ten wheelers and motorhomes along with cars and motorcycles in his parade. He kept up a slow progression and flashed his hazards all the way down the hill into Miami.

Once there, traffic split into two lanes and we found ourselves behind an impatient pickup pulling a trailer. At the second stop light, we found ourselves splashing across a liquid pool of what appeared to be cream colored latex paint. It splashed all over our bike and leathers before we knew what happened. Our first thought was that it was muddy water. It was so big it stretched clear across the double lane of traffic. But it was amazingly resilient.

It took two more miles before we found a car wash and pulled in to hose ourselves off. And once again were more amazed and upset when we found that the pressure hose and hot soapy water failed to budge the stuff! It was strewn up on the King's saddlbags, the undercarriage was practically solidly covered and the chrome exhaust pipes were thoroughly embedded with the stuff. It might as well have been cement for all it was going to get dislodged with a good pressure wash!

Both Bill's and my boots and lower part of our chaps were covered with it and Bill's jacket and helmet were messed up as well. Now, we were not only annoyed but upset as hell by what had happened.

"Isn't it illegal to dump paint?" I asked, plaintively, rubbing futilely at a spot on the seat.

"Not if you're not caught, I guess." Bill was pissed but he was being real good about it. I was raging for both of us! Tomorrow is his birthday and that's not how he wanted to spend it, scraping paint or plaster goo off his bike, one tiny speck at a time!

"I wonder how many other vehicles got plastered with it," I said. "There was a line of them."

"We'll go back and report it to the Miami police," Bill told me. "We probably won't be the only ones. In California, if this had happened, they would have closed the highway for a hazardous waste spill."

"Well, I find it hard to believe nobody knows anything about it! Paint this deep that gets splattered up on us this bad can't be an everyday occurrence!"

"It looks more like plaster the drywall guys use. Maybe a truck carrying a load splashed some out when they went through town. It's the color of thousands of houses down here though. They'll never be able to trace it down."

"The poor bike!" I mourned. Very darned little had been cleaned by the pressure hose. "But we better go report it."

It was almost an hour from the time we got 'splotched' until we returned to Miami to report it to the police. We were surprised to find the location of the 'crime' was only a block away from headquarters. And even more surprised to find that nobody else had reported it. A very obliging policeman walked across the street with us and inspected the bike. We told him in a rush what had happened and he had Bill fill out a property damage report. When Bill was almost finished,he suggested maybe we'd better try washing it off. We reminded him once again, that's what we had done immediately after it had happened and the damned stuff wasn't washing anywhere! He smiled and said he was sorry. Damned if he knew what the stuff was.

Well, it was a far cry from what would have happened in the Environmental Green Empire of California. And I've been touting Arizona these past two months for being such a free place to live, compared to the confines of California. So now, I guess I'll have to amend it a bit. Yes, Arizona is a freer place to live. But we spent the 'free' part of our afternoon trying to scrape paint off our chaps and leathers and cooling pipes of the Road King, and I gotta tell you: we're going to be riding around blending in with ninety per cent of the houses we see. This stuff ain't coming off!