The next morning, we hung around the hotel trying to decide which way to go, and finally took off on 43 going south. The weather was fairly cool when we left, but the forecast promised heat. It wasn’t long before we got to a landslide on one of the steep, winding roads, half the road now resting down the hillside. I’m glad not to have been the first person to come across this. Arkansas has gotten a tremendous amount of rain this spring, with severe flooding in some places and damage like this in others. We would come upon two more landslides that day.
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| The hotel we stayed at in Harrison. |
And it wasn’t just rain. Like the storms that rolled through Joplin, this part of Arkansas has also seen several tornadoes, and a couple days before our visit, one destroyed the town of Denning. We rolled by several areas where downed trees and powerlines, and in a few places, roofs and entire homes, showed the consequences of these powerful storms. It would be scary enough to see one come across the relatively flat plains, but to have one touch down in one of the many deep valleys of the Ozark Mountains would be really frightening.
We made our way slowly south, taking a break at the Fallsville One Stop, which is nearly an accurate description of both the town, and the store. The proprietor of the store counts homemade sandwiches and fruit smoothies among his offerings, but I wasn’t brave enough to try either. Due to the tornadoes and severe weather, they had been living without power for a week, and didn’t seem phased in the least. They described some of the areas that had been hit by tornadoes recently, along our intended route.
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| Dude, it's a nice touch, but you're going to need more flowers. Way, way more flowers. I think the toilet paper in the beef jerky canister is a pretty wise idea. This place doesn't strike me as waterproof. |
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| The facilities |
Looking past the cliche hound dog (Lila) lying next to the highway, there was an old building that looked uninhabitable, yet was clearly habited by a couple of people sitting on the front “porch”. I asked what it was, and he told me it had been a cannery, a boarding house, and a milking barn. Apparently now it was a residence. One-Stop-guy put the age of the place at around 90 years.
We left there, and went south through the Ozark National Forest, encountering more tornado damage along the way. We got to the outskirts of Denning, and decided to swing by, but the highway patrol had closed off entrance to the town for obvious reasons. We headed on to Mount Magazine, a state park that at 2,700 feet (approx) is the highest point in Arkansas. We stopped at the lodge on top and had lunch, overlooking the hazy valley below. By the time we finished lunch, it was nearly 3:30, and we had a long way to go to our planned stop for the night, Gaston’s Resort, on the White River just down from Bull Shoals Dam.
Motorcycle time is unlike car time, especially in a group. No matter how hard you try, the going always seems to be slower. You stop to stretch, to see something, to get gas, check the map, etc. At one point, I got out ahead of Keith and Jeff, and enjoyed the solitude of the winding, virtually traffic-free roads for awhile. I stopped briefly at a river-rafting outfitter (Wild Bill’s), and tried to text them where I was. After 15 minutes of waiting, I took off again for Yellville, hoping to get on into Mountain Home, and then to Gaston’s.
Just outside of Yellville the road was closed due to a fatality accident, and after waiting about half an hour with no assurances it would be open any time soon, I studied the map to find an alternate route and turned around. I passed Jeff and Keith on the way back to town, and after a brief discussion, we all agreed to take it. We’d been 350 miles that day, and were 20 miles from our destination. It was nearly 8:30, getting dusky, and past the time we usually like to ride. Keith noticed Jeff pull off to the side of the road, which wasn’t that unusual (we all stop to adjust things, get a drink, etc, but he always catches up), so we kept going another 4-5 miles to the turnoff to where we were headed next. We waited for him for a few minutes longer than normal, when he called to tell us he had been hit by a deer.
After we rolled up, we found out that a deer hit Jeff broadside on his motorcycle, breaking his left tibia, and causing his left leg to be sucked under the motorcycle, where the passenger footpeg tore a hole in his foot. It was a freak accident, and he said he only noticed the deer when it was right beside him. The deer hit hit his leg square on, and he felt it break immediately.
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| Not the one that hit him. This is a picture of a picture of an elk. |
He somehow managed to stop the bike on the side of the road without crashing, but couldn't put the kickstand down because his left leg was broken. He was hunched over the tank, in pain and trying to figure out how to get off the bike without it falling over on his broken leg, or breaking his good leg. After a couple of minutes, another biker - the pastor of a local Assembly of God church - and his wife pulled over to check on him, thinking he was having a heart attack on the side of the road and helped him off.
Fortunately, he got hit only a mile or so from the Summit volunteer EMS/fire department and they, along with the Sheriff’s department and the ambulance, were already on the scene by the time we got back. They got his pants cut off and the blood stopped, while everyone was asking what seemed like a million questions about him, his bike, insurance, and what happened. It wasn’t a funny situation, but I laughed when we were discussing how to get the bike back to Missouri when Jeff, still lying on the ground, said, “I think I can ride it back once they set the leg.”
He was finally taken to Baxter Regional Hospital in Mountain Home. Keith rode his bike to the Summit fire station, where they let us park his bike behind some 1950's-era fire truck until it could be retrieved. I dropped Keith back off at his bike, and we rode on to Mountain Home, extra cautiously, where we hung out with Jeff in the ER until they got his x-rays back and a temporary splint on. We finally went back to the hotel around midnight, and Jeff got a permanent room about four hours later. The doctor told him they had three deer/auto strikes a day down in that area, but this was the first they’d heard of a deer/motorcycle strike without the rider crashing the bike.
The next morning, Jeff nonchalantly called to say he was going into surgery in about five minutes, so Keith and I rode up to Bull Shoals while we waited for him to get out. With all the rainfall, it had peaked at its highest level ever only two days before, and they had opened the floodgates on the dam for only the third time since it was built in 1951.
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| You don't say... |
We rode back to the hospital, waited for Jeff to get out of recovery, and talked to him for a while once he did. He was the proud owner of a bionic leg, with a titanium rod from knee to ankle. I doubt he remembered anything from that day. I decided to head back to Kansas City, while Keith stayed behind with Jeff until his wife got there the following day.
I left around 2:30, and took some great roads back. I was surprised to find very little traffic on the route I took through the Ozark National Forest. It was a peaceful ride, and I kept up a pretty steady pace, stopping once for gas, and once in some town I can’t recall whose entire population seemed to be playing in the river that ran through it.
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| Water's a little high |
I stopped for a break in Clinton, and decided that given the lack of sleep from the night before, this was enough for the night. I called Mandy from the hotel, and told her I would be home the next morning and fell asleep shortly afterwards. I woke up very late, especially for me. When I finally got back to KC, I went straight to the park where Mandy and the boys were playing, and managed to play a game of tag in my boots and jeans, in the hot, humid morning.
