Goodbye for Now, Brother Charlie

Sunday morning, I found out that my brother Charlie died in a motorcycle accident.

He would have been 63 on October 16th, which is when we will be having a celebration of his life where he lived in Texas. We were five siblings and now we are four.

This has little to do with Orcas Island, but you will soon learn why I am posting it here.

Charlie was young-hearted. He loved speed, adrenaline, motorcycles, fast cars, building drones to fly as fast as he could on courses around his property, and enjoying fires outside in his firepit alongside his well-loved dogs in the evening.

Growing up, Charlie could fix anything. He used to work in a clean room fixing semi-conductors and I’m sure he will be sorely missed at Texas Instruments, where he happily worked the night shift in a clean room as a mechanical engineer on a machine that lays down silicon wafers. The machine has thousands of parts, any of which could break in a moment. His job was to be ready to fix any one of them at any time. The knowledge he had was deep and fascinating, as long as it didn’t veer into topics like politics, taxes, and QAnon.

Always a learner, Charlie was interested in technology, how things work, conspiracy theories, doing things differently from society, and living his way. He made his own colloidal silver (The Lazy Dentist) that he swore would keep anyone out of dentist’s and doctor’s offices, and I don’t think he had stepped into either one for decades. He loved action movies and would have been a great stunt man, professional race car driver, or astronaut.

Motorcycles were a particular passion of his, and accidents weren’t uncommon for him. In high school, his girlfriend was riding on the back of his motorcycle before they got to a hairpin curve. He asked if she knew how to lean into a curve. She said yes. He leaned into it, she leaned out, and instead of rounding the curve, the bike went careening with all its speed into a metal bike rack in front of them. She spent the next year with a halo around her skull. Charlie was in motorcycle accidents two Mother’s Days in a row. Another time, he was going down the highway in the left lane when a semi started moving into his lane, not realizing Charlie was there. With a concrete divider to his left and nowhere else to go, Charlie had to lay the bike down under the semi and skid to the other side of the highway. He hit the concrete on the other side, stood up from the bike, and collapsed due to a crushed pelvis.

That’s not all. He totalled two or three of our Dad’s cars and dropped almost to his death when a parachute that he packed didn’t open. Thankfully his back-up chute opened moments before he hit the ground. I think that was another hospital visit. There were more.

Charlie was strong as an ox and stubborn as one too, intelligent yet so dumb about certain things that were common sense. Like wearing a helmet. And staying away from moving vehicles after drinking.

My brother died the other night after hopping on his motorcycle after drinking. He was most likely speeding down the road (170 was the fastest he’d gone on his motorcycle, but we don’t know his speed at the time of the accident), and he collided with a Jeep that made a slightly wide turn crossing a bit into his lane. He skimmed along the left side of the Jeep, then launched forward, tumblng with his motorcycle 400 feet until coming to a stop. That’s longer than the length of a football field! (This is based on the report we received by the accident investigator.)

When officers came to his side, he had a significant head wound but still had a pulse. I can’t even imagine what he looked like after such a long tumble with no helmet. He made it to the hospital but died in the ER soon after due to blunt force injuries.

I had the best life growing up – I was hugged and loved a lot by the six people above me in the house, all very loving people. I was a surprise 11 years after my siblings, so I spent my young years watching four teenagers and all of their activities and choices, all to a musical backdrop of Yes, Rush, Jethro Tull, Supertramp, the Doobie Brothers, and so on. I also saw a lot based on those choices. Oh, the stories.

I’ve never known why Charlie always drank a lot. He and I weren’t as close as I am with my other siblings. Even when I wanted to know more about what made him tick, sometimes he didn’t answer deeper questions that got to the heart of things. Did drinking soften the world? Did he need an escape for some reason? Did he just like how it made him feel? Charlie also had an estranged wife and child, Kelvin, who left early on due to his choices, and I’m not sure he ever communicated the deeper things about himself to them either.

At Charlie’s core was gentleness and sweetness. My mom called him her Charlie Bear. Even though he was an adrenaline junkie, sometimes I wonder if the world just felt a little too harsh to him. I have no idea.

Charlie was a felon due to having already had many DWIs and public intoxication incidents. He had served two prison sentences, one for a year and the other for two, and we learned that if he had survived the accident, which the authorities believe he could have if he’d worn a helmet (!!!), he may have gotten a 40-year prison sentence!!

I write this not to solicit condolences but to be in your face. If you know of anyone like Charlie, please make them lay low after drinking. Watching my siblings kept me away from drugs and alcohol, but a friend of mine saved my life on a very rare evening that I had some Long Island ice teas and thought I was okay enough to drive two hours from Los Angeles back to Santa Barbara from an outrigger meet (Caroline, that’s you). She gently talked me into staying where we originally planned to stay. I laid my head down on my sleeping bag a few minutes later and was out. Please strap a helmet on someone’s bare head, even if they think you’re annoying. And please thwart them from doing something similarly stupid that could kill themself or anyone else.

My brother lived how he wanted to live. I don’t know if he died the way he wanted to die – I don’t always buy the idea that people are okay about dying if they were doing something they loved. Maybe. We sure would have enjoyed him for another 20 years or so, and unless he was feeling especially heavy about some of the things he allowed himself to indulge in politically, I think he would have enjoyed more years on earth too. Then again, with the alternative of a 40-year prison sentence and the possibility of taking out other innocent people with his choices on the road, this may have been a strange blessing.

When I found out he died on Sunday, I walked around town a lot, just thinking. I went down to Eastsound beach and laid on the rocks by the shore, listening to his laugh in my mind, picturing his fun smile, and letting my heart process in peace and serenity.

We built a fire in our firepit to honor him, and I had our older son bring out his speaker to play Classic Rock, which Charlie listened to a lot.

The first song that came on was Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd, and since then I have played it another ten or so times. It feels so fitting.

Then we went to West Beach and happened to sit down on a bench where, ten minutes later, the most beautiful bonfire was started. We couldn’t have planned something so perfect in every way.

This is all still so surreal. Charlie’s dogs are probably wondering where he went. And his companion of 20 years, Karon, is now surrounded with all of the inanimate things that cannot console.

We love you, Charlie. You are the first of us siblings to have the big cosmic mysteries of life revealed…

Family, feel free to correct me if any of the facts in this post are wrong.