Hang Time

Most commonly used in sports to describe the time a kick remains airborne, or the micro-seconds a basketball player floats above the floor before a dunk, the term has more adequately been co-opted by skateboarders. But none of those activities do the word justice.

If you really want to experience the moments of elation, while lift exceeds drag and frees you from Earth’s gravitational pull, you need a motorcycle. Nothing on this planet compares to those muscle-memory-filled seconds of standing on the pegs and counterbalancing a 400-pound dirtbike while it leaves the mogul and glides through the ether.

If your reactions are automatic and quick enough, you return to the dirt perfectly aligned with your axis of motion and you land both wheels at the same time barely noticing the jolt as you accelerate towards the next rise and the promise of more air.

Addiction
Ninety-nine percent of the time, everything goes according to plan, and you experience what a horse at full gallop must feel when all four hooves are off the ground at the same instant. One percent of the time, you misjudge and earn a trip to the local ER, and maybe six weeks with a plaster cast on your right leg. But the addiction is real and the day the cast comes off, you’re back in the chase.

In the late 60’s, I worked for a man who raised and sold Nightcrawlers to bait shops. Those nasty worms thrived in great bins of horse manure, and I got paid a measly dollar an hour to collect the malodorous compost that formed their habitats.

The single reason I continued working for the fellow was that he rode amateur moto-cross on weekends and he had an extra Yamaha 250 dirt bike which he let me ride. My parents assumed I was just going along to watch, and they never knew about the riding. I learned to love hang time.

The Magic Bus
In 1971, I purchased a 1961 Volkswagen van. It wasn’t a showy muscle car like some of my friends owned, but it got great gas mileage. Occasionally, gasoline prices would dip to twenty-three cents a gallon, and for three dollars’ worth of that cheap gas, my friends and I could drive around all Friday night in that van.

In those days, my hometown’s street department was in their adolescence and saw no reason to collaborate with the two railroad conglomerates crisscrossing our suburban landscape. Consequently, it was not uncommon for a rail crossing to be a foot higher than the street it bisected — a Godsend for teens in search of ramps that could provide hang time.

On one particular stretch of Shiloh Road where the elevation dropped roughly twenty-five feet over a mile, bottoming out as it crossed Walnut Creek, there was a spectacular Santa Fe double-rail crossing. The rail was almost a foot above the street on the Southern upside and nearly two feet higher on the downhill slope towards the creek.

And while the average driver slowed to five miles an hour to spare their automobile’s suspension while crossing that hump, I was convinced my VW could achieve some serious air on the Northern descent.

Action & Consequence
One Friday night, I decided to give it a go. With my friend Rusty in the front passenger seat drinking a large Coca-Cola Slurpee, and my two pals Ray and David occupying the middle seat, and nobody in the far back seat, I calculated that 45 miles per hour would be the optimum speed to cross those rails.

I should probably add here that those were the pre-seatbelt days in Texas. On top of that, the rear-engine VW van provided only a thin sheetmetal body to protect the front seat passengers from the oncoming world. Since I’m being honest, I should also admit that none of us were in a completely unaltered state of mind. But Friday night fun is rarely cautious and boys will be boys.

As my “magic bus” crossed those rails, it seemingly sprouted wings and soared. All four wheels departed Earth, though only for the briefest flight. And the surreal nature of that hang time quickly surrendered to the brutal reality of a messy landing. Although the VW was among the lightest of cars, I had somehow realized too late that four teens could not stand up and counterbalance the weight like a motorcycle rider.

What followed was probably less than five seconds of my life, but it was by far among the most memorable. My front right tire contacted the cement first, followed quickly by the other three tires, all of which were off axis to our trajectory, instigating a massively hard landing followed immediately by a series of violent fishtails.

The human brain, with its ability to effect the release of adrenaline is a marvelous thing. I found myself spontaneously and simultaneously attempting to mitigate the dire consequences of my misjudgment, while laughing hysterically at the more humorous consequences.

At the same time, I was attempting to single-handedly steer into the slues while downshifting with the other hand to slow the back wheels without braking. Did you ever wonder why cars don’t have separate front and rear brakes like motorcycles?

While I was fighting for our lives, nature employed the massive recoil of our hard landing to dislodge the entirety of Rusty’s Slurpee and dash it against the van’s ceiling. And what goes up must come down (wish I’d pondered that earlier). Most of Rusty’s big-ass Slurpee came back down and splattered him, staining his shirt, his pants, and my front seat a deep brown color.

To make matters worse, Rusty spewed the previously ingested Slurpee onto my dashboard. The two guys in the back seat left their own brown stains but not from Slurpees. That was the bad news. The good news was that German engineering prevailed and, less than ten feet before encountering the deadly concrete bridge abutment, that old van skidded to a stop.

With all that adrenaline pumping through my veins, I was ready to party, but every party has a pooper (literally) and my friends were ready to call it a night. Isn’t it amazing that four people can share the identical experience and each come away with a different interpretation? Even as I scrubbed out the interior of my van on Saturday, I remained in awe of those few seconds of hang time.

Afterthought
When our souls live on after the body dies, and we escape this gravity-laden incubator of the five senses, will eternity not be one glorious experience of hang time?

A meeting of great minds who think alike