#kindness

I’d been wanting to get the Speed Triple out for a sunset ride all week. There’s something about that bike and golden hour—the way the light hits the tank, the temperature cooling down just enough to make the ride comfortable, the roads emptying out as people head home from the weekend. I couldn’t decide between Mount Diablo or Grizzly Peak. Diablo has that epic view from the summit, but Grizzly has “the wall”—that section of Grizzly Peak Boulevard that climbs straight up through the trees. I got absorbed in creating blog content, editing photos and writing captions, and completely lost track of time. By the time I looked up, Diablo was out—too far to make it for sunset.

I hopped on the bike and pointed it toward Grizzly Peak. The Speed Triple felt good under me (even with my hips wanting to scream “we’re too tight!!”) after sitting in the garage for the better part of a month. Halfway there, riding through the Berkeley hills, the low fuel light came on. Of course it did. I was already running late and now I had to stop for gas, which was going to eat into my already abritrarily tight timeline. I pulled into a station and attempted to fill up quickly. When I pulled out the nozzle, a small amount of fuel dropped onto the tank. “Crap!” Just what I needed right now. I got back on the road and made it up to the summit area about fifteen minutes before sunset, which meant I had maybe thirty minutes of good light to work with before everything went dark.

I’d brought the SLR camera because I wanted to shoot something better than phone photos. I’d not yet had time with the SLR with the Speed Triple. Now with the tailbag, the SLR can ride pillion. I’d even remembered to bring a memory card and a battery, which is usually where I occasionally mess up. I had the camera but forgot one crucial piece. The battery was dead. Completely dead. I wound up using the new iPhone 17 since I’d just upgraded and hadn’t really gotten a chance to exercise the camera properly. Not ideal, but it would have to do.

There were a handful of people up there, a couple taking selfies, and a few other riders who’d had the same idea I did. I met fun riders, the way you do when everyone’s gathered in the same place for the same reason. A female rider who decided to cage it asked if she could take my picture with my phone. That was flattering—not something that happens often. Usually I’m the one behind the camera, not in front of it. I handed her my phone and stood next to the Speed Triple while she framed up the shot.

I spent the next 45 minutes shooting photos. The bay spread out below us, the water reflecting the last of the day’s light. I got shots of the bike with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, San Francisco rising up in the distance, the East Bay hills rolling away toward the valley. The iPhone 17 is a solid upgrade from my old 13—the colors are better, the dynamic range handles the bright sky and dark ground better, and the 4x zoom actually works well. The 8x zoom is less impressive though—it turns out it’s just a cropped 4x shot, not true optical zoom. Slightly disappointing when you realize you’re not getting any more detail, just bigger pixels. I like the resolution of the new camera, but it’s spotty about when it captures 48MP versus 12MP photos whereas my iPhone 13 always took 12MP ohotos. The iPhone 17 is clearly the better camera and the RAW files give me more to work with in Lightroom, but the pixel quality and depth still don’t match what I get from an SLR. That said, for changing conditions like sunset where the light is shifting every minute, the iPhone gives you more usable photos for less work. With the SLR, I’d be constantly adjusting settings trying to chase the light. The phone just handles it. Given I had no battery for my SLR, the iPhone was good enough for what I was doing.

As we were all getting ready to leave, the sun now completely gone and the light fading fast, the woman who’d taken my photo asked if her car’s rear tire looked flat. I walked around to take a look and could see it immediately—the tire was definitely low, sitting on the rim more than it should be. I confirmed it was flat and you could see it all over her face—”I don’t need this right now.” I’ve been in those shoes before, standing in a parking lot or on the side of a road, staring at a flat tire and running through all the implications. It sucks. It was nearly dark at this point, the kind of dark where you can’t see much without a flashlight, and leaving her on the side of a mountain road to figure it out alone wasn’t the right answer.

The car was parked near the edge of the road and the jack that came with it wouldn’t be secure on the uneven pavement underneath. We needed a professional jack to do this safely. We called AAA and while we waited, we had a great conversation. I learned she’s originally from British Columbia and now lives in San Francisco. We talked about Vancouver, which I’ve visited a few times, and Kitsilano, that neighborhood right on the water with the beach and the pool. We talked about Kits Pool and some other Canadian places we both knew. It was good to connect over the shared geography, even briefly, while we waited for help to arrive.

As I was riding away, now that she was on the road, my phone fell off the mount onto the dark pavement. I said something I won’t repeat here, but it was emphatic. The new Peak Design GNAR case for the iPhone 17 doesn’t seem to grip the mount as well as the standard case did on my old 13—that one was flawless, never had an issue. This new setup feels less secure, and apparently my suspicions were justified.

It was dark by then. Really dark. The kind of dark where you can’t see anything beyond your headlight beam. The phone had bounced somewhere behind me on the road, and I had no idea exactly where. I had to do a tight U-turn in the narrow pullout area—not something I was confident about given how dark it was, the road being on a blind corner, and the Speed Triple being a tall bike. It was pushing on my skillset, especially since I had time working against me. I was praying that no car came screaming up the hill, headlights blinding them to a phone lying in the road, and crushed it into a million pieces. I’ve dropped phones before—we all have—but usually in parking lots or on carpet, not on mountain pavement in complete darkness with cars potentially coming around a blind corner.

Two cars passed while I was positioning the bike to illuminate the phone with my headlight, both of them giving me plenty of room, both drivers probably wondering what this idiot was doing making a U-turn in the dark. I got the bike positioned, saw the phone reflecting in the headlight beam about ten feet behind where I’d been standing, and picked it up. The screen was fine, the case had done its job, and everything still worked. I put it back in the mount—properly this time—and headed down the hill.

At that point I just wanted to get home, and the faster route made more sense. The temperature was surprisingly warm down at lower elevation compared to the cold Pacific wind that had been hitting us on the ridge. I’d been wearing my jacket zipped all the way up at the summit, and now I was unzipping it and enjoying the warm air coming through the vents.

The universe returned the favor. I stopped to help someone with their flat tire, spent time making sure she wasn’t stranded alone in the dark, and then when my phone fell and could have been destroyed, it survived. Two cars passed instead of twenty. The phone landed screen-up instead of screen-down. Small things, but they added up.

It’s easy to keep your head down these days, to mind your own business and keep moving. The world feels tense, divided, like everyone’s picking sides and drawing lines. But standing on the side of that mountain road in the dark, helping a stranger from another country change a tire—none of that other stuff mattered. She needed help. I had time. It was that simple. Tonight was that reminder that we’re all out here dealing with flat tires, dead batteries, phones falling off mounts, days that don’t go according to plan. The small acts of kindness matter more than we think. Stopping for someone. Giving them space on the road. Taking a few extra minutes when you could just as easily keep riding.

What goes around comes around.

Choose #Kindness.