THE IMPOSSIBLE RIDE by Jim Reynolds
It’s September 18, 2021 in Bartow, Florida. It’s a brilliant sunny day, so hot and muggy you could work up a sweat without thinking about it. On a remote farm outside town, about fifty trail bikes are lined in the sugar sand waiting for the blast of the starting horn. When it blows, riders jump on their bikes, feet slam down on kick starters, engines roar, a cloud of black dirt fills the air as bikes scream away to take on the seven-mile dirt track. But a few have been left behind. Their engines won’t cooperate and they are still back at the starting line. Mark Ames is on one of them. In a frenzy he stomps down on the starting lever time and time again. About the sixth try his engine comes to life, he rolls on the throttle, his bike flashes by and he disappears in the first turn. But the engine that had performed flawlessly in the practice run is now giving him fits. As he heads down the trail it stalls when he hits the brakes. It takes about ten kicks to get it going. Then he roars off, weaving and turning on the narrow trail dodging low branches where it cuts through the trees, going airborne over the jumps and slamming back down on the dirt. After five or six miles and six or seven restarts, he is
drenched in sweat, and his body aches. He waits for a break in traffic and rides off the track. He looks like just another rider having a really, really bad day. But you and I would be wrong. We have just seen something approaching a miracle. Mark has no left arm below the elbow…no left hand. How can he ride like this? It sounds impossible. A while back Mark would have agreed with that. NO PEDDLING Mark’s love affair with trail bike riding began long before the accident that would take half of his left arm. He grew up in South Florida. As a youngster he watched races on TV and some of his friends had bikes. “I loved the sound of the engine and the speed…the idea of turning a throttle instead of peddling.” When he was old enough, he bought a motorbike and raced at tracks close to home. He won a few first and second places. After high school Mark began working on cars and would become a master mechanic at a Ford dealership. In 1993 he would marry Dawn, his high school sweetheart. They would have two healthy children, Amanda and Jake. Life was good. That brings us to 2012.
LIKE A RUBBER BAND Mark had left Ford to go to work at a private shop because he wanted to work on all types of cars and trucks. He is standing below a car that is on a lift above his head and is about to finish replacing the transmission. He hears tires peel out but he doesn’t give it much thought. “I worked with a lot of young people so that was kind of a normal sound…I heard somebody yell and I saw an Expedition heading in my direction. I took just two steps to make it out of the way and I just didn’t make it in time.” The Expedition charging straight towards him has handicapped controls and somehow as another mechanic tries to manipulate them, they have gone to full throttle, in reverse gear. The Expedition slams into the lift, and the car tumbles onto Mark. He remembers, “It spun me around like a rubber band.” But the nightmare is still not over. The accelerator in the Expedition is still jammed and with Mark under the car that had fallen on him, he is pushed with it, through the shop wall part way onto the grass outside the shop. His left arm is gone two inches below the elbow and some of the muscles in the upper arm are gone too. The workers in the shop Photo by Amber Trapnell
FLORIDA TRAIL RIDERS
