The Year of the Goose saga came to a somewhat abrupt halt last year with nothing in the way of explanation. To be honest, I?ve had a lot of trouble trying to write about motorcycles. After riding about 25,000 miles since I got my license?including an 8000-mile trip to Michigan a year ago?I was on my way to a CVS two miles from my house when I was hit from behind by a 19-year-old woman more concerned with her mobile phone than her fellow motorists. She clipped my rear wheel from behind at about a 30-mph speed differential as I was turning in to the drugstore’s parking lot. My left leg and foot were broken, and the Moto Guzzi V7 Stone was totaled, but had she hit me a split second sooner, the hit easily could have been fatal. The whole experience left me with a lot of words but no form in which to place them. Then a U-2 went down yesterday in the Sutter Buttes, about an hour north of my home outside Sacramento. One pilot survived, one didn?t. My own personal floodgates opened.
I don?t know exactly what happened to the plane, or why it affected me in just such a way. It?s not the first time a Dragon Lady out of Beale Air Force Base has gone down in the area, and if the program continues as it has for the past 60-odd years, it might not be the last. The high-flying jet is a notoriously fickle beast to pilot. My dear friend and riding buddy, former C/D contributor Sam Smith, wrote a wonderful piece on the complicated process of landing a U-2 a few years back for Popula...