Daniel Foster Facebook ad: “A Deer Took Half My Skin In 4 Seconds.”

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A deer killed me on US-219 north of Lewisburg, West Virginia, on the morning of September 14th, 2023. I lived. The skin on my right leg from ankle to mid-thigh did not. Surgeons stapled a stranger's skin onto my own leg. I have spent two and a half years trying to figure out why every piece of riding gear I ever bought was wrong, and why nobody in the motorcycle business ever told me till it was too late. My name is Dan. I am 64 years old. I live in Lewisburg, West Virginia. I am writing this at 4:30 in the morning because my right leg woke me up the way it does most mornings, and Patty is asleep, and I got nothing else to do till the sun comes up. If you ride a cruiser, if you live in a state where deer cross the road every morning at sunrise — Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan — and if you wear jeans on the bike because nothing else has ever fit your life, please read to the end. I lost a layer of my own body to denim that came apart in less than a second. I ain't getting that skin back. The skin I got on my right leg now belonged to a 19-year-old kid who died in a car wreck the same Friday night I went in. You can still keep your skin. The crash. Thursday, September 14th, 2023. 6:47 AM. 52 degrees, light fog, sun about ten minutes from cresting the ridge. I was riding my 2008 Harley Road King on US-219 north out of Lewisburg toward Marlinton. Meeting two buddies for breakfast at the Pretty Penny in Hillsboro. I had rode that exact stretch maybe four hundred times. I was wearing Wrangler 13MWZ jeans, a flannel shirt, my leather chapter vest, brown work boots, and a black DOT half-helmet. Same outfit I'd worn for thirty-eight years. I was 62 years old. Retired long-haul truck driver. Drove for Roadway, then ABF, then Schneider after they bought us out. Three million miles, three and a half decades, retired May 2021 at 60. In all those years driving freight, I hit deer twice. Once in 1991 outside Bowling Green, once in 2007 in northern Pennsylvania. Walked away both times because I was inside an 80,000-pound vehicle. I never hit a deer on the bike. She came out of the tree line on my right at 6:47. A doe, maybe 130 pounds, leading two fawns. Standing in the middle of my lane by the time my brain caught up to her. I had three-quarters of a second. I grabbed brake. I tried to steer around her on the left. I almost made it. She bolted at the last second. Her left flank caught my right leg from the knee up to my hip. The bike went down on its right side. My right leg went under the bike. The bike and me slid together, my leg pinned, into the gravel shoulder and onto the asphalt edge, for what the State Police later said was 137 feet. A hundred and thirty-seven feet. Forty-six yards. Most of a football field, sliding sideways on Appalachian asphalt that ain't been resurfaced since the second Bush administration. When we finally stopped, the bike was on top of my right leg from foot to thigh. I was conscious. I was not in pain yet — your body don't give you pain at first, it gives you adrenaline. I remember thinking: Patty is going to be so goddamn mad at me. A man in a green Ford F-250 had been two hundred yards behind me. Glenn McCarty. 58, HVAC contractor on his way to a job in Marlinton. He couldn't lift the bike off my leg by himself — a Road King is 800 pounds — so he braced his back against it and got it up just enough that I could pull my leg out four inches. Then he sat on the asphalt next to me and held my left hand for the seventeen minutes it took the ambulance to get there. I looked down at my right leg. The denim of my Wranglers was gone. Not torn. Gone. From mid-shin to mid-thigh, the fabric had been ground off by the asphalt. What I was looking at was my own leg with no clothing on it, and the leg itself didn't look like a leg I recognized. The skin was gone in long strips. Underneath was visible — a shiny pinkish-gray layer I later learned was called the fascia — and in some places that was gone too, and what I was looking at was muscle. Wet, red, raw muscle, open to the air, bleeding steady like a slow leak. The pain came in the ambulance about four minutes later. It had its own personality. It introduced itself. Glenn drove behind the ambulance to Charleston. He stayed in the waiting room till Patty got there. I send him a card every September 14th. He is the reason my leg got out from under that bike instead of staying under it. The hospital. CAMC General in Charleston is the only Level 1 trauma center in West Virginia south of Morgantown. Two hours from Lewisburg. The ER attending took one look at my right leg and said two words to the resident: "Plastics. Now." Dr. Aaron Mendelsohn got there sixteen minutes later. 51 years old, originally from Pittsburgh, Cleveland Clinic residency, fellowship at the University of Michigan. Thirteen years at CAMC. He's the man who put me back together. What I had, he told Patty later that afternoon, was a degloving injury. The skin and tissue underneath had been mechanically separated from the muscle by friction. Not cut off. Torn off, in long sheets, the way you'd peel skin off a chicken thigh. About 30 percent of my right leg, mid-shin to mid-thigh. He told Patty I was not going to die. He told her the immediate risk was infection — a degloving creates a wound surface like a third-degree burn, which is why I was being moved to the burn unit even though there'd been no fire. Then he told her something he would not tell me for several weeks. I'm writing this from what Patty told me, because she was in the room and I was sedated: "Patty. The skin he lost is not coming back. We will close the wound with grafts, but he will not have his own skin on most of his right leg ever again. The grafted skin will not have hair, will not sweat normally, will not feel normal sensation. It will look different. It will hurt for years. He will limp. The leg will work, but it will not be the leg he had on Wednesday. I want you to be ready, because he is not going to be ready, and you are going to need to be." Patty told me that conversation six months later, when I was finally ready to hear it. Three operations during eleven days. First was the debridement — taking out dead and contaminated tissue, picking out asphalt chips and denim fibers with forceps. Second was the harvest and the first set of grafts. Third was a touch-up. The skin on the largest section — knee to hip — didn't come from my own body. There wasn't enough of my own skin to graft a wound that big. It came from the donor bank. A cadaver graft. Mendelsohn told me later, when I asked, that the donor was a young man, late teens, who had died in a single-car accident on Interstate 64 the previous Friday night, somewhere in the Huntington area. His family had agreed to organ and tissue donation. I think about that 19-year-old every day. I don't know his name. I don't know what he was driving. I know that on a Friday night in September of 2023 his life ended on I-64, and four days later a piece of him was sewed onto my leg, and now in April of 2026 that piece is still keeping me from infection every time I walk. Coming home. Eleven days at CAMC. Wheelchair seven weeks. Crutches three months. PT for fourteen months. A fourth surgery in February 2024 to release a contracture scar pulling the back of my knee. Walking without a cane in October 2024. I limp now. I will limp for the rest of my life. The grafted skin is darker than my own, shinier, no hair, no normal feeling. Every morning between 4 and 5 AM, the leg wakes me up. Deep ache in the muscle bed. Sharp burning along the graft edges where the donor skin meets my own. I take a low-dose gabapentin and a 200 mg ibuprofen and I sit at the kitchen table with coffee till the pain settles into something I can live with. Total medical cost: $487,000. Insurance covered $392,000. Patty and me had to refinance the house in November 2023 to pay $63,000 of our share. We had paid the house off in 2019. Now we got a 12-year mortgage at 7.4 percent that'll be paid off when I'm 76. Why I did nothing for two years. I came home from a follow-up at CAMC in March of 2024 — Mendelsohn had told me everything I needed to know — and I did nothing. For two years I did nothing. I want to tell you why, because if you're a man who's been through something — a crash, a heart attack, a bypass, a cancer that came back negative — you might recognize this in yourself. I told myself the deer was the problem. The deer was an act of God. There was no preventing the deer. So there was no preventing the wound. The pants didn't matter because the deer was the variable. That story let me sleep. The other thing — and this is the one I'm most ashamed of — admitting the pants were the problem meant admitting I had done this to myself. The deer hit me. But the wound, the 30 percent of my leg that's now somebody else's skin, the 4 AM pain, the limp, the $63,000 mortgage — I had done that part. The pants had been my choice for 38 years. Calling that out meant calling myself the man who chose. I wasn't ready to be that man. So I rode through the summer of 2024 in fresh Wranglers. Through the fall in fresh Wranglers. Through 2025 in fresh Wranglers. Easy roads, daylight only, no deer hours. I was being careful in the only way that didn't require admitting anything. Two years of careful. Thirty-eight years of getting it wrong. Before I tell you about Carl's text, I have to tell you about the pants in my closet. I started riding in 1985. Twenty-four years old, freshly married to Patty. Twice in 38 years, I tried to upgrade my pants. In 2011 my buddy Doc Wilkerson — a chapter friend in Beckley — gave me a pair of Italian leather riding pants for my 50th birthday. $440 from a dealer in Knoxville. I wore them once. June trip down to Pigeon Forge, 87 degrees. By mile 22 I felt like I was being slow-cooked from the legs up. Pulled into a gas station in Newport, drank two bottles of water, sat in the AC for forty minutes. The pants went into a closet in my back bedroom. The price tag is still on them. In 2017 Patty bought me textile adventure-style pants for our anniversary. $340. Huge, gray, with cargo pockets. I wore them three rides. Felt like I was riding in pants designed for a different planet — built for a guy crossing Wyoming on a BMW, not a guy riding to breakfast in Hillsboro on a Road King. Armor at the knees would slide down my shin during the ride. I gave up by end of summer. Patty's pants are in the same closet. In 2021 I was at a motorcycle expo in Charlotte. A vendor was selling Kevlar-lined jeans. $210. Looked like Levi's. I bought a pair. Wore them five times. Never crashed in them, which means I never knew. After September 14, 2023, when Mendelsohn told me my own jeans had failed in less than one second of contact with asphalt, I went home and looked at the Kevlar pants and did some math in my head. Then I cut them up with kitchen scissors over the trash can. Total cost of failed pants: $990. Three pants. Thirty-eight years. None of them on the morning of September 14, 2023. Mendelsohn in the hallway. March 12, 2024. My six-month follow-up at CAMC. After the exam, I asked him a question I had been holding for six months. "Doctor. If I'd been wearing real motorcycle pants. Not jeans. Would I be in this leg right now?" He thought about it. Then he said: "Sit down. I want to give you a real answer." We sat in the chairs in the exam room. Patty was there. He started: "The denim of your jeans had an abrasion resistance time of about 0.6 seconds. That is the number — the European certification standards measure it. Six tenths of a second is the time it takes denim to grind through against asphalt at typical riding speed. After that, the fabric is not protecting anything. The skin underneath is in direct contact with the asphalt, and asphalt removes skin the same way it removed your jeans." "You slid 137 feet. The trooper figured the slide took about four and a quarter seconds. Your jeans gave you 0.6 of those four and a quarter. The other three and a half seconds, you were sliding on your skin. That is what produced the wound I had to close." "If you had been wearing CE Level 2 certified motorcycle fabric — the European standard for fifteen years — you would have had about 7 seconds of abrasion resistance. Your slide ended at four and a quarter. The fabric would have outlasted the slide. You would have had bruising, probably a hairline fracture of the right tibia, almost certainly a dislocated knee from the deer impact. You would not have had a degloving injury. You would not have needed the burn unit. You would not have needed a cadaver graft. You would not be on gabapentin in 2026. You would still have your own skin on your right leg." He paused. Patty's hand was on my left arm. "And I want to say something else, because nobody else is going to say it. The motorcycle business has known about CE Level 2 fabric since about 2011. They do not market it to riders like you. They sell leather to young sportbike riders, adventure-bike textile to BMW tourers, Kevlar jeans to urban commuters. They do not make and they do not sell a real product for a 62-year-old man riding a Road King through Greenbrier County on a Thursday morning to meet his buddies for breakfast. The product exists. It has existed for fifteen years. The American motorcycle dealer does not stock it because the legacy brands do not push it. The demographic of riders who actually need it — riders over 55 on cruisers, the largest segment of the riding population in this country — is being deliberately ignored by a business that would rather sell you a $440 pair of leather pants you wear once than a $150 pair of armored fabric pants that would last you five years." "I am 51 years old. I have been doing reconstructive surgery on motorcycle riders for twenty-one years. I am tired — I am very tired — of putting back together men your age who would not be on my table if anybody in the business had ever told them what I just told you." He stood up. Said: "Find the pants. They are not at your local Harley dealer. They sell direct. Look online. They will not be expensive. Buy them this week." We drove home that afternoon. Patty drove. I sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window for two hours and didn't say a word until we were on the exit ramp at Lewisburg. Then I said: "Patty. I have been a stupid man for thirty-eight years." She said: "You been a man like every other man. The pants ain't a stupid problem. They are a problem the business made. Now you know. Now you fix it." I didn't fix it for two years. Carl's text. February 22, 2026. A Sunday night. 8:43 PM. I was on the couch watching the Daytona 500 replay. Phone buzzed. Carl Yoder is 68. Retired electrician, Beckley HOG chapter, rides a 2015 Heritage Softail. He had been at a regional rally in Roanoke the previous weekend and had talked to a guy at a gas station wearing pants Carl had never seen before — armored, fitted, looked like normal cargo pants, not bulky like the adventure stuff. Carl's text was one line: "Dan. I know what you been through. Look at these. Your wife's gonna want you in 'em." The link went to a brand called EKON. The pants were called RoadArmor. They were $149. I sat on the couch with that link open on my phone for an hour and twelve minutes. I did not click. I closed the phone. I went to bed. The next morning at 4 AM my leg woke me up the way it does. I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee. I opened Patty's laptop. I clicked the link. I read every word. I read the CE Level 2 certification details. I read about the 7-second abrasion resistance — the same number Aaron Mendelsohn had given me in March of 2024. I read about the ventilation, which would have prevented Doc's leather problem in 2011. I read about the fit, which sounded like it would have prevented Patty's adventure-textile problem in 2017. I ordered two pairs. Black, size 38. Visa ending in 9347. February 24, 2026, at 4:47 AM. I did not tell Patty. Pants arrived seven days later. I opened the box at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning while she was at her sister's. I tried them on in the bedroom. They fit the way Mendelsohn had described. When Patty came home that afternoon I was wearing them. Sitting on the couch. She walked into the living room and stopped and looked at my legs and started crying. She said: "Oh thank God, Dan. Oh thank God." I had taken two years to do what Mendelsohn told me to do in March of 2024. Patty had been holding her breath for every one of those two years and I had not understood that till she started crying on our couch. The first ride. I rode in them the next Saturday. 41 miles. Lewisburg to Hillsboro and back. Same route I'd been riding the morning the deer killed me. I had not ridden that exact stretch since September 14, 2023. The crash spot is at the 14-mile marker on US-219. About four miles south of Hillsboro. Tree line on the east side, cow pasture on the west, slight rightward bend in the road just before it. I got to the bend at 7:52 AM. I slowed to 25 mph. The fog was the same fog as 2023. The sun was about ten minutes from cresting the same ridge. I stopped on the gravel shoulder right where the bike had finally come to rest. I turned the engine off. I sat on the bike, both feet down. I sat there for I don't know how long. Maybe four minutes. Maybe ten. What I noticed was that my right leg was not hot. Not cold either. Same temperature as my left leg. For the first time since September 14, 2023, I had ridden a stretch of road and my right leg had felt like a leg, not like a wound covered by denim. The Wranglers I'd ridden in for two years had touched my right leg every single mile. Every morning, the denim against the grafted skin had felt wrong. Like sandpaper, almost. Not painful but not right. I had got used to it the way a man gets used to a bad knee — by not noticing it any more, but it was always there. The RoadArmor fabric was different. The way it sat against the leg, the way the armor at my knee held the fabric just slightly off the skin — I could not feel my right leg through the fabric the way I had felt it through the Wranglers. My leg had a kind of peace I had not known I was missing. I sat there on the bike at the crash spot and I started crying. I had not cried about the crash. I had cried about the donor's family, in private, twice. But I had not cried about the crash itself. I had been too ashamed of my own part in it. I rode on to Hillsboro. Pulled into the Pretty Penny at 8:14 AM. Doc Wilkerson was there waiting. He looked at my legs. Didn't say anything. He just nodded. After breakfast we rode home together. He pulled into my driveway behind me. He said: "Dan. I am ordering a pair tonight." He did. He has been wearing them every ride since. The chapter. Carl Yoder ordered the same Sunday night he sent the text. He didn't even wait for me to order first. Doc Wilkerson, who gave me the $440 leather pants in 2011, ordered after our breakfast. He texted me the next afternoon: "Dan. I gave you those leather pants for your 50th because I loved you. I should have gave you these. I am sorry it took 15 years." Bobby Petrini, 71, retired coal miner, Hinton chapter — Bobby has gout in his right ankle and had stopped riding in 2022 because his old leather boots and pants were too painful. He ordered RoadArmor in March 2026 after I sent him the link. He started riding again three weeks later. He sent me a photo from a roadside pull-out near Pipestem State Park. The caption said: "I forgot what this felt like. Thank you, Dan." Three other men in the West Virginia HOG chapters across Greenbrier and Raleigh counties are wearing RoadArmor now. Four of us are over 60. What Mendelsohn said in April. I drove up to CAMC for a follow-up on April 8, 2026. I told Aaron Mendelsohn what had happened — about Carl's text, about the order at 4:47 AM, about Patty crying on the couch, about Doc's text, about the chapter cascade. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said: "Dan. I want you to do me a favor. I want you to write what happened to you down. Not for the company that makes the pants. For yourself, and for the men in your chapters, and for the men who read it after that. I have been telling people about this gear for fifteen years in exam rooms one at a time. The number of riders out there who need this information is in the millions. You are not a doctor. You are a 64-year-old retired truck driver who lost half the skin on his right leg to a deer and a pair of Wranglers. You are exactly the right person to write this down. People will believe you in a way they will not believe me." I drove home that afternoon. Patty handed me her laptop and a fresh cup of coffee. I started writing this letter that night. Took me seventeen days. I am not a writer. I am a man who has spent thirty-eight years riding motorcycles and two years sitting at a kitchen table at 4 AM trying to understand what happened to my own leg. I need to be very clear about something now. Nobody paid me to write this. I have no relationship with EKON. I bought my first two pairs of RoadArmor on my Visa ending in 9347 on February 24, 2026, for $149 each. I bought a third pair in March for my brother Ron, who lives in Bluefield and rides a Street Glide. I am 64 years old. I'm a retired long-haul truck driver. I drove 3.2 million miles for a living. I rode motorcycles 38 years. On September 14, 2023, a deer that weighed 130 pounds removed the skin from my right leg in four and a quarter seconds because the only thing between my skin and the asphalt was Wrangler 13MWZ denim that gave up after six tenths of a second. I am writing this because I do not have 38 more years of riding ahead of me, and some of you reading this don't either, and the math don't care how careful you are. If you are over 55, if you ride a cruiser through deer country, if you have been wearing jeans for thirty years because nothing else has ever fit your life — you have the same choice I had on a Sunday night in February of 2026 when Carl Yoder sent me a text I had been waiting two years to receive without knowing it. You can keep riding the way you are riding. Or you can buy the pants this week and stop being one deer away from a wound that takes two years and a stranger's skin to close. The simple part. The pants are RoadArmor. The company is EKON. They sell direct because your local Harley dealer don't have them. $149 a pair. 60-day money-back guarantee. ekontravel.com Try them. Wear them on a familiar road on a Saturday morning. If they don't change everything, send them back. The deer is coming. Maybe not this morning. Maybe next September, on a fog-soft road you have ridden a hundred times, at 6:47 AM, when the sun is still ten minutes from cresting the ridge, and a doe is about to lead two fawns out of a tree line with no warning. In 2026, there is no excuse. Aaron Mendelsohn told me there was no excuse two years ago. I did not listen for two years. The cost of those two years is, mercifully, only my own pride. The cost of the 38 years before that is permanently sewn onto my right leg. You know now. Whatever you do next is on you. — Dan Lewisburg, West Virginia April 2026 P.S. The 19-year-old man whose skin is on the lateral side of my right thigh — I do not know his name. Hospital privacy protocols are absolute. Every September 14th, I write a letter to him, addressed to "the family of the donor whose tissue was used in my reconstruction at CAMC General in September 2023." I send it to the donor coordinator. They forward it, blind, to whichever family it goes to. The letters ain't long. They tell him what I rode that day, what my granddaughter's name is, what my plans are for the next year. I have written two letters now. I will write one every September 14th for the rest of my life. Least I can do, for him, is keep using the leg he gave me. P.P.S. If you have a husband, a brother, a father, a riding buddy who is over 55, who rides a cruiser, who has been in jeans his entire riding life — please, send this to him. Not for EKON. Not for me. For him. For the deer that is coming for him on a road he has rode a hundred times. Please. — Dan

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ekontravel.com

A Deer Took Half My Skin In 4 Seconds.

My Jeans Lasted 0.6.