Bicycle Crashes

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Bicycle Crashes

As a kid, I was always crashing my bike - into cars. I know that I crashed my bike at least 5 times into just as many cars, which were usually just innocently parked on the street. The sad part of the story is that most of these crashes could probably have been prevented if I had only lost my fascination with my back wheel.

I loved to watch it turn. As an adult, I'm still too preoccupied with the traffic behind me, and the only correction I remember receiving about driving from my Dad was "Stop looking in the rearview mirror.”

For some odd reason, I remember being fascinated with the wheel under and behind me. Maybe I was worried it wasn't working right, or I was looking for the source of a strange noise. But I really think it was just my excitement about the mechanical marvel that is a bicycle.

The saddest part of the story is that I actually looked at the back wheel when I was close to a car, and then suddenly, I was on the ground and wondering what had happened. I don't think I ever stopped to think about the car owners, to tell them about what I had done to their car. I'm sure I slashed tires and dented fenders, but usually I was limping home instead of wondering whose car was the latest victim.

The worst case ever was when I went over the handlebars onto the street. The only bad thing about being male is the dangling dangers which can suddenly meet up with sharp handlebar bolts. I won't bother to explain if you don't already get it, but suffice it to say that I didn't report this accident to my mother. I was too embarrassed, being only eight years old.

The only other serious injury from bicycling came from making the mistake of riding barefooted. You really don't think about how hard the asphalt is until you drag your big toe across a strip of it. I must have dragged my toe for a foot or more, and it was excruciating. It swelled up and turned blue. I had a ridiculously painful throbbing later and the toenail had to be pierced with another hot needle to release the blood behind it. The toenail eventually fell off, and a replacement grew back. It was quite attractive, if I do say so myself.

I wish I could say that my bicycle incidents stopped when I graduated to the hottest thing of its day -- the ten-speed bicycle. Back then, they were incredibly heavy and unstable compared with today's bikes. I even got to repaint my bike after it had been in enough crashes. It was a candy-apple red with sparkles in it that started to peel off almost as soon as it was painted. But that bike saw me through thick and thin.

One way to certainly injure myself was learning to drive this newly acquired machine with no hands. The older guys did it, and based on my accidents when I was younger, I tried to make sure I was always far away from cars when I practiced this precision-balanced insanity. I learned to be able to ride with my arms folded across my chest as I traveled down Redwood Road, one of the highest-traffic roads in my area. Going fast always helped, but when you crashed, it hurt more.

We lived on a pretty steep hill in Bennion, which was great when you were going downhill and not so great going uphill. The first time I went too fast down the hill I also tried to turn on the canal road. The good news was that I was already past the canal as I realized I was going too fast. The gravel on the other side of the road slipped my wheels out from under me as soon as I made the mistake of putting on the brakes. The bike went sideways right into the large ditch. I slid for a while on the road before also being unceremoniously dumped into the ditch, having the unique experience of dragging my palms across two or three feet of gravel before my ignominious landing. I sat at the bottom of a deep ditch with bleeding palms filled with gravel, wondering how long it would take me to limp back up the hill and get bandaged.

Or I could just tough it out, wipe the blood on my pants and get on my way to wherever it was I was hurrying to so fast. I think I must have been going to baseball practice, so I took it like a man. I gingerly rubbed my scraped up hands on my pants until most of the gravel was gone and then went to practice.

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