Part 2: I Found A Pit Bull Lying In The Middle Of A Mountain Road At 1 A.M. Last March — When I Went Back To That Same Stretch Of Highway Two Weeks Later In Daylight, I Sat Down In The Dirt And Cried

I want to tell this slow. Slower than I have told it before. Out loud, to a couple of brothers in my chapter, I have told it in about three minutes. Once, on a podcast a sober biker friend of mine runs out of Knoxville, I told it in about eleven. To my therapist I have been telling it for a year, and I am still finding new pieces of it.

Here is the slow version.

I lifted Crash off the road at one-oh-six in the morning. I know the time because the next morning I went into the photos on my phone and found the picture I took of him on my gas tank before I started the engine. Time stamp: 1:06:47 a.m.

He weighed exactly what I thought he weighed. Seventy pounds. Maybe sixty-eight after the blood loss.

I sat him sideways across my fuel tank with his head facing my left. His good legs were tucked under him. I held his bad leg up against my chest with my left forearm so it would not bang against the tank. I started the bike with my right hand. I shifted to first with my left foot, kept my left arm clamped tight around the dog, and pulled away at about ten miles an hour.

I want to tell you that ride was peaceful. It was not.

He whimpered every time I shifted gears. He shook against my body. I could feel his heart hammering in his chest through my jacket. I rode twenty-eight miles down a mountain road at thirty miles an hour with one arm holding a stranger I was not sure was going to make it.

I talked to him the entire way.

I told him my name. I told him my brother’s name. I told him the names of my sponsor and my therapist and the welder who had taught me my trade in 1991 and a girl I had loved in 1989. I told him about the last time my mother had hugged me. I told him things I had not told anybody in thirty-five years.

I told him because I did not want him to die thinking he was alone.

I am a fifty-three-year-old biker who looks like he eats ten-penny nails for breakfast and I am telling you, on the internet, that I told a stranger dog the worst thing I have ever done — which I will not tell you — at thirty-five miles an hour on a downhill grade in the Blue Ridge Mountains at one-fifteen in the morning on March 15th of this year, because I was afraid he was going to bleed out before we got to the vet and I did not want him to be alone for the part where he died.

He did not die.

We got to the 24-hour emergency animal hospital in Hendersonville at one-forty-two a.m. The vet — Dr. Linnea Chen, a small no-nonsense woman in her late thirties with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead — was waiting in the parking lot when I rolled in. She had two techs with her. They had a stretcher.

They lifted him off the gas tank. They got him inside.

I sat in the waiting room in my leather cut and my engineer boots covered in dog blood and I did not move for the next four hours.

At five-fifty a.m., Dr. Chen came out.

She said, “He’s going to make it. The leg is going to take surgery and he’s going to be in a cast for ten to twelve weeks, but he’s young, he’s strong, and he came in faster than ninety percent of these dogs ever come in. You did good.”

I asked her how he had broken his leg.

She said, “Hit by a car. Almost certainly. Looks like maybe twelve hours ago. The clotting is consistent with that timeline. Whoever hit him left him on the road.”

I asked her about the blood trail.

She said, “What blood trail?”

I said, “There was a blood trail behind him. On the road. A long one.”

She got a strange look on her face.

She said, “How long?”

I said, “Honestly? I didn’t measure it. I was focused on him. But it ran out behind him a long way. More than a couple feet. It looked — it looked like he had been moving.”

She was quiet for a second.

Then she said, “Mr. — Wade. Dogs with this kind of fracture do not usually move. The break is non-weight-bearing. He should not have been able to get up at all, much less crawl. If he was moving, he was moving by sheer will.”

She paused.

She said, “Do you know where he came from?”

I said, “No, ma’am. He was just lying in the road.”

She said, “You might want to go back and look. Sometimes there are answers up there.”

I did not understand what she meant at the time. I do now.

I named him Crash that morning, in the waiting room of the vet, before the surgery. The vet’s billing tech needed a name for the intake form. I said the first word that came into my head, which was the word I had been thinking, on and off, the entire ride down the mountain.

He had not crashed. I almost had.

The bill for the surgery and the overnight stay and the cast and the follow-up was four thousand seven hundred dollars. I did not have it. I put it on a credit card. The chapter held a fundraiser two weeks later at the clubhouse and covered most of it. A couple of brothers I had ridden with for ten years showed up for that fundraiser with envelopes of cash they would not let me thank them for.

I brought Crash home from the vet five days later.

I had never owned a dog. I had no setup. I bought a crate and a bed and a slow-feeder bowl and a stuffed gator from the pet store on Tunnel Road on the way to pick him up. I carried him into my apartment. I set him down on the bed. He looked around. He sniffed the gator. He fell asleep with his cast resting against my thigh and stayed asleep for fourteen hours.

That was March 19th, 2024.

A year and a half ago.

I went back to that stretch of US-74 on a Saturday afternoon in late March. I rode up there alone. The cast on Crash’s leg was still on; he was at home in his crate with my neighbor Mrs. Tovar, an eighty-year-old widow who had volunteered to sit with him.

I rode up the grade the same way I had ridden up the night I picked him up. I crested the top. I came down the long downhill.

In the daylight, I saw what I had not seen at one in the morning.

About a half-mile down from the top of the grade, the road takes a sharp left bend. At the bottom of the downhill. No guardrail at the bend. No shoulder. The road just turns.

On the right side of the bend — on the outside, where a rider going too fast or too distracted or too tired would go off — is a slope of loose dirt and shale that drops, in a slope that gets steeper as you go, two hundred feet straight down into a creek bed.

I stood at the edge of that drop in the daylight on a Saturday in March and I saw it for what it was.

A blind curve. A two-hundred-foot drop. No barrier. No light. At one in the morning, on high beams, you would not see the curve until you were inside it. You would not see the drop at all.

I had ridden that road a hundred times in the dark. Most of those times I had ridden it sober, slow, careful. That night, on March 14th, I had not been sober — I had nine years sober, that was not the issue — I had been grieving. I had been three weeks past my brother’s funeral. I had been riding to chase the noise of the engine because the noise of my own kitchen was worse. I had not been paying attention the way you have to pay attention on that road.

I would not have seen that curve until I was inside it. I had been doing fifty when I came down that grade.

I would have gone over.

I parked my bike at the side of the road, on the gravel shoulder that started about fifty feet past the bend, and I walked back up the road on foot.

I found the spot where I had picked Crash up. There was a faded brown stain on the centerline. About forty feet before the curve.

I stood at the stain. I looked at the curve.

Forty feet.

A man on a bike doing fifty miles an hour covers forty feet in about half a second. The brakes on a 2014 Heritage Softail will get you slowed down significantly in a half-second only if you have already been on them. I had not been on them. I had been coasting in fourth gear thinking about Doug.

If Crash had not been in the road forty feet before the curve, I would have entered the curve at fifty miles an hour with no warning, on the outside line, in the dark, and the loose shale on the outside of that curve would have done the rest.

I have done the math a hundred times since. I know the numbers. The math always says the same thing.

I would have gone over.

I walked backwards up the road from the brown stain on the centerline.

There was a blood trail.

It was hard to see in the daylight after two weeks of weather, but it was there. Faint brown smudges in a steady line up the road. I followed it.

It went a hundred feet. Then two hundred. Then a quarter mile.

It went a full mile.

I stood at a Forest Service pull-out a mile up the road and I looked down at a patch of disturbed gravel where a lot of blood had pooled and where the trail started. Tire tracks ran off into the gravel and back out — somebody had pulled in there, hit Crash, and pulled away.

I stood at that pull-out and I looked back down the road toward the curve I could not see from where I was, and I started to understand what had happened.

A driver had hit a 70-pound Pit Bull at a Forest Service pull-out on US-74 east of Asheville on the night of March 14th, 2024. Maybe twelve hours before I rolled past. The driver had not stopped, or had stopped and panicked and left. The dog had been left at that pull-out with a broken back leg and a body in shock and no human in sight.

He had not stayed at the pull-out.

He had crawled.

He had crawled — on a compound fracture — for one mile down a mountain road. Pulling himself with his front legs. Dragging his hindquarters. Bleeding the entire way, in a steady line that stayed roughly on the centerline of the road.

He had stopped at exactly the spot where the centerline of the road was forty feet from a blind curve with a two-hundred-foot drop.

He had lain down there.

He had waited.

I am not going to tell you he did it on purpose. I do not know that. The vet does not know that. Nobody knows that.

The vet, Dr. Chen, when I went in for Crash’s six-week checkup and told her what I had found, said exactly this: “Wade. I cannot tell you whether he chose that spot or he just collapsed there. I cannot tell you that. I want to be honest with you. He could have collapsed exactly there because he physically could not go another step. The fact that the place he could not go another step happened to be the place that saved your life is something I cannot tell you was intent. I am a vet. I am not a chaplain.”

I said, “Doc. I am not asking you to be a chaplain. I am asking you what is possible.”

She said, “What is possible is this. A dog in his condition would not normally have moved more than a few feet. He moved a mile. Whatever made him do that, I have not seen often in my career. I am not going to call it a coincidence. I am not going to call it a miracle either. I am going to call it a thing that happened that I do not have a clean explanation for. You can take the rest however you want.”

I have taken the rest as a gift.

I do not need it explained. I do not need to know if Crash crawled a mile in the dark on a broken leg because his body was on autopilot and survival instinct put him on the centerline of the road, or if there was something inside that animal that pointed him toward the spot where a stranger biker was going to come down the grade fifteen minutes later and would die without him there.

I do not need to know.

I sat down in the dirt at the Forest Service pull-out on a Saturday afternoon in late March of last year, with the wind coming through the trees and the sound of a creek a long way down the slope, and I cried for forty minutes.

I cried for Crash, who had crawled a mile.

I cried for my brother Doug, who had not made it to fifty-seven.

I cried for myself, because I had been planning, in the bottom of my mind in the bottom of those three weeks, to let something happen to me on the road that I would not have called a plan but would not have stopped.

I cried because a dog I had never met before March 14th, 2024, had decided — instinct or otherwise — to lie down in front of me at one a.m. in a place that meant I had to stop. And in stopping, I had not gone over the cliff.

I had also, by stopping, found a reason to ride home.

I had a reason in my arms.

Crash is two and a half years old now. The vet thinks. He had no chip and no history. The pull-out we figured out he must have been hit at — there was nothing there. No collar in the gravel. No anything.

He was nobody’s dog before he was mine.

He is mine now.

He is fully recovered. The leg healed clean. He has a small limp when he is tired and a metal pin you can feel under the skin if you are scratching the right spot on his thigh. He sleeps on the foot of my bed every night. He rides in a custom sidecar I had built for the Heritage Softail last summer — he wears doggy goggles and stares forward through them like a man on a mission. He has been to twenty-three states with me in the last fifteen months.

He is the only dog I have ever owned.

He is going to be the only dog I will ever own.

I want to write down one more thing.

I have not been religious in thirty-five years. I went to church as a kid because my mother made me. I dropped it in my late teens. I have not, in any meaningful sense, believed in anything bigger than me for most of my adult life.

I do now.

I do not know what to call it. I do not call it God. I do not call it anything specific. I call it the thing that puts a dog in your road forty feet before the cliff you did not know was there.

I do not pretend to understand what that thing is.

I just understand that something happened.

Some nights, riding home from a meeting in the cold dark on a winding mountain road, with Crash in his sidecar and his goggles down over his eyes and his nose into the wind, I will look over at him and I will say, out loud, into a wind that takes the words and throws them back behind us, “Brother. I see you. I see you.”

He thumps his tail against the side of the sidecar.

One time. Always one time.

That is all I need.

If this story moved you, follow the page — there are more like Crash and Wade I haven’t told yet.