Awhile back Fiamme Red posted a link to
this story about a horrible crash in Southeast Florida. El Cheapo posted that he'd grown up a few miles from there, back when Florida
State Road 84 was a main highway, but which has since become a side road to I-595.
Now I also spent some time growing up in that area, back before Weston existed, when the only things between Davie and the Everglades were cow pasture and citrus groves, when Markham Park was a motocross track in the absolute middle of nowhere. We spent a lot of time on our bikes, occasionally riding on SR 84, which at the time was a typically narrow, rural Florida two-lane with a 50 MPH speed limit. I recall it was the only route between Lauderdale and Alligator Alley and Naples. Full of trucks, including tractor-trailers full of oranges, with no shoulder. Terrifying, basically. Why anyone would ride that road unless they absolutely had to seemed crazy to me.
After the unexpected death of a family member in late 1974, I moved, very abruptly, to the Northeast, leaving my teenage besties and most of my stuff behind.
El Cheapo's post stuck in my mind for reasons I couldn't understand, so after a day or two I sent him a PM:
He wrote back:
OMG. Turns out El Cheapo was one of my best friends at the time, a time when I
really needed best friends. We'd done a lot of crazy stuff together as kids. I think I last saw him in 1974, when we were sophomores in high school, and I don't think we'd had any contact since then. While we haven't yet seen one another, we've spent considerable time writing back and forth, swapping tales of the intervening 45 years. Our lives have been very different, and it was absolutely incredible to reconnect in this random way.
I'm looking forward to riding with him again some day.
