I haven't used this blog in a very long time. I wonder what will happen if I start writing here again. It is on a little-used google account, but it also says 36 people have looked at my posts in the last month. I need to start writing again. Do I want to do it in a semi-public way?
On October 21st, 2021 I was riding my bike up the trail in Provo Canyon when a kid from Arkansas came down the other way on a rented E-bike. He was going way too fast for his skill level, and he was on the wrong side of the trail. I came around a corner onto the bridge at canyon glenn park, looked up just in time to see him come barreling through me. I remember the collision, but I do not remember impacting the ground. There was not a single scratch on my helmet, but when I looked at my left arm, I knew right away that it was broken. The radius snapped, and my wrist was forced into an awkward position by the dislocation of the bones. I rolled over on the ground and looked at the teen-aged kid and yelled, “what the hell were you doing?” and then the pain really kicked in. The thing is, I have vivid memories of some of what happened, but not of other things. I have created and retold the story countless times and I KNOW that is how it happened. But I wonder if it really did happen that way. I remember seeing blood on the ground from the scrape in my knee. I remember trying to pick up my phone so I could call for help, but I don’t remember if my phone was on the ground or still in my backpack. As I grasped the phone and felt the pain in my right thumb and I knew then that it was broken too. (When the nurse at the ER saw that both arms were out of commission, he said “You broke them both? Oh, man, I am so sorry. This is going to really suck.”–He was right, but the sinking feeling that gave me at the time was the first real clue as to how bad it was going to be.) Like I said, with the memory, I keep wondering if I have it right. Did I maybe swing a little wide into the oncoming biker’s path? Do I bear any responsibility? My fitness tracker–Strava–says I was doing about 10 mph just before the crash. That fits well with what would be normal for me at that point in the trail. I had just come around the rockfall, and I was just getting ready to make my final acceleration up the straightaway past the bridge–the same straightaway the kid had just come down–a good half-mile of downhill where you can finally get up to full speed if you want. All the damage on my bike (and my body) was on the left side. My wheel was taco-ed in that direction, with clear impact signs on the left side of the rim. So clearly my impulse was to move further right in the last split second before impact. Doesn’t that mean I was on the right and trying to move further to that side? A week or two ago, when I could finally drive agin, I went to the site of the accident. I couldn’t make the scene fit that moment. The fence was too far from where it had to be. The curve was too far back the other way. The kid had to have seen me coming for a while. I should have been able to see him. I had a split second. It felt so much longer. Long enough to have complex thoughts. I remember thinking-‘well I’ve not had an accident in 20 years. It is about time I got it over with now.’ Did I think that all in the split second, or did that thought come later? Did I also think ‘what is he doing on my side of the trail?’ I thought ‘there is no way for me to avoid this.’ I felt his soft, overweight, dough-like body impact with me, go through my location and send me –what? Flying over his head? Sideways into the fence? Just over my own handlebars? The fact that I don’t remember hitting the ground bothers me. That hole in my recollection calls the rest of it into question. The titanium plate in my arm and the six screws and the two scars all testify that to the reality–but in a way it all seems still unreal. Handke writes several scenes that all happen in an Augenblick in the moment of the jetzt. It is the only moment that exists for sure, and the fact that I cannot access that one ‘now’ among the several ‘nows’ that still feel present every time I look at my scars undermines the whole of the experience. I don’t know where to go with this. I don’t know that what I am writing right now is how I feel about it. November was a dark and horrible month of helplessness and frustration and anger. December was nearly as bad. In that moment right before impact–and this sounds so cliche to me–but time slowed way down and I remember so many things. I remember the state of my legs and my feet in the pedals. I remember his feet leaving the pedals. I remember the smell of the autumn air and the gold of the sunlight about an hour from setting. I remember the time–4:45 exactly–time to turn and head home. Just another 100 yards to the end of the park and then homeward and dinner and then an evening finishing the turning of a wood bowl on the lathe. All of it in that threshold instant. And then I’m on the ground wondering ‘what the hell!’ I want to remember the kid in overalls because he was from Arkansas, and certainly a redneck who should never be on a bike. But I don’t remember that. I want to trust my memories, but I can’t remember hitting the ground. Fortsetzung folgt.