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Motorcyclists should use their own judgment as to whether or not a helmet should be worn, just like bicyclists, skateboarders, skiers, snowboarders, mountain climbers, water skiers(?!) - O.K., well, maybe not water skiers. Anybody who would leave a perfectly safe boat to get yanked across choppy water while standing on a pair of toothpicks ought to have their head examined. In that regard, Yours Truly is a certifiable nut-job.

Soldiers don't always wear helmets: even in combat, that skid-lid might come off and the immediacy of fighting to survive, when every second counts, might overcome the instinctive urge to find and replace that brain-bucket. Soldiers don't wear helmets on leave, while sleeping in their barracks, etc. Lest the reader think I'm belaboring a point, read on.

One of my brothers was riding on the back seat of a motorcycle being driven by a close friend of ours. Neither of them were wearing helmets. A quarter-of-a-century later, it still gives rise to a sharp pang of mourning when I recall that, to this day, none of us know what caused the accident which took our friend's life. The Doctors told my bro that, had he been wearing a helmet, he probably wouldn't have survived. As it was, he suffered a rather unique fracture that literally ringed his entire skull. His Doctors, I'm told, wrote and published a paper on this exquisitely one-of-a-kind injury.

I have always felt that this accident pointed up both the need for helmet use, and the existence of potential circumstances where helmet use would actually defeat it's intended purpose! The question of whether or not to always wear a helmet thus becomes a conundrum.

Who has a crystal ball, the ability to foresee the future and every possible outcome? None of us has that, yet none of us should give up on trying to prevent life-changing, or life-ending, injury.

The very nature of the question before us is agonizing, because of the stakes involved in the gamble to be made, and tantalizing because of the odds pertaining to this gamble. Should I wear a helmet on a motorcycle? For starters, motorcycles offer no "crash-cage", no safety zone of impact-absorbing metal and plastic. That makes me tend to think in favor of a helmet and some thick leather clothing. To go on, though, I can easily foresee an instance in which my helmet may snag on something that protrudes, and at the speed involved might just snap my neck and kill me instantly.

Death and injury are the crux of the matter. Statistically, a helmet makes sense in more instances than not, but when considering statistics a reasonable person will include the entire range of possibilities. Again, the issue seems to come down to stakes vs. odds. The stakes are high, the odds are good, the decision is a tough one.

To state baldly that motorcyclists should always wear helmets is to guarantee that some riders will die needlessly because wearing a helmet was the sole factor in determining fatality. That such instances are more the exception than the rule does not militate for a hard-and-fast, all-encompassing dictum.

Motorcyclists should not always wear a helmet, but in most cases where something goes wrong, it ends better for everyone if the rider is helmeted.

Besides, where else would a biker fly an ostrich plume?

Learn more about this author, Robert Crouch.
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