2001-09-19 - 1:31 a.m.

About a week and a half ago, a Friday night, or technically, a Saturday morning, I got on my bike to head home from work. As I rode along the parking lot I noticed an odd buzzing sound and a rhythmic shaking to my bike. *thump…thump…thump* it would go in time with the turning of the tires.

It didn't take me long to stop and check it. I was parked just across the street (the street being Route One), checking my bike over. I discovered my back tire was completely flat. I tried pumping it up, hoping if there was a hole in it, it wouldn't be big enough to keep the tire from being at least semi-inflated on the way back. No luck. I rode it back on the rims. It was that or walk my bike the two miles after two in the morning, and at the time, I just wanted to be home.

I avoided riding it for a while, because I didn't have a new tire for it or a tire repair kit. And the only way to get a tire repair kit involved going down town, which takes too long without a bike. So, stuck in that bit of logic/laziness, I walked for a while. But one day last week I *had* to ride it, or I'd have been about a half hour late for work. And so I did, and hated to do it. But I had to get there.

Later that day, the two night janitors came up to me. I'd been talking to the older one of them a few days earlier, and told him about my tire. Turns out the younger one fixes stuff like that, and they offered to take it for me and have it fixed by the next day. I agreed wholeheartedly, and with that, my problem was solved.

Or so I thought. The next day my bike was back, and he informed me he had to take the back tire off to fix it, so the back brake was loosened. He hadn't fixed it yet, but he told me how to. And I fully planned to. I really did! I kept remembering it for the next few days, but always when I was halfway between destinations, never when I was stopped somewhere so I could fix it.

At about four o'clock on Monday, I was riding the bike back to work from my lunch break. As I did, I was thinking to myself (as nearly everything I write comes out in monologues in my head long before they're ever on the page) that I have a tendency to make really simple mistakes with really catastrophic results very often. As I was thinking this, I was heading down a hill in Rockport at what can best be described as the Space Shuttle's escape velocity. At the bottom of the hill, after a long turn right is a rather sharp turn left onto a bridge. On the edges of that bridge are tall green guardrails about five feet high. Under that bridge is a fairly long drop onto many rocks at low tide or onto many rocks with a little bit of water on them at high tide. At four o' clock Monday, it was in the vicinity of low tide.

So, I sped my way down the hill, banked to the right and headed toward the bridge. As I approached it, I started to realize just how fast I was really going. Knowing I couldn't do what I normally do there and just slow down a bit with my back brakes, I eased onto my front brakes. I knew if I hit them too hard, I would go over the handlebars in the middle of the road. Very bad idea. And so I eased them. And eased them. And apparently eased a bit too much, because I was still going very fast as I need to start turning.

And so I attempted to turn. To help keep my balance, I put my left foot out. But I couldn't turn sharply enough. If I tried to turn any more sharply, I had two choices. One was to pull my foot in, and just await the inevitable balance loss and meet the ground with my face and bare left arm, or keep my foot out, catch it on the ground, twist my ankle around, and probably break it and much more of myself as I tried to twist *through* my bike. And so I kept trying to slow myself, knowing it wasn't going to happen.

I got confirmation that this wasn't going to happen when my front tire hit the curb and jumped. Not rolled over, jumped. That was when I saw how close the main part of my body was going to be to the top of that guardrail when I finally would hit it, if I did, and realized just how fast I was still going.

And so, I then had three choices and a split-second to choose one before my front tire hit the ground.

#1, Grab onto the front brake as tightly as possible, stop the tire dead, and guarantee that I would go over the handlebars.

#2, Hit the guardrail very hard, and quite possibly break my leg slamming it between the guardrail and my fast-moving bike.

#3, Hit the guardrail front tire first, have the bike launch me up, similarly to what it was going to do if I chose option one, but this time be thrown over the guardrail to my death.

I chose option #1. I grabbed onto my front brake as tightly as I could. When the front tire hit the ground it stopped dead where it was. That is *not* to say, however, that the back tire stopped with it. Oh, no. That's the wonder of inertia. The back tire had to go somewhere. It chose up and to the right.

You know, even if you know, and have known for at least seconds, that you are about to have something happen like being thrown completely off your bike, it is still incredibly surprising when it actually happens.

The other thing that's surprising is when a very short lesson in an acting class about how to fall comes rushing back to you when it's actually important. My hands went out, as would be expected, attempting to catch myself. But as I hit, my hands and body contracted into a ball and I rolled, spreading the impact some and staying as slack as possible, never letting any one part of me get jarred too badly. I bounced a bit when the roll brought my back to the ground, and so I bruised my ass when I hit again. I got a little bit of road rash on my hand, a very shallow four inch cut on my right arm, and some scrapes on my left elbow and knee.

And that's it.

An accident that, handled incorrectly, could have killed me, and I walked, or rather, rode away from it. After rolling around in pain for a bit (hey, I knew how to stop myself from getting severely injured, not still hurt), I stood up, gathered my senses, and walked to my bike. The bike was standing straight up on its front tire, propped against the guardrail where it had twisted to after throwing me off. I saw that the seat was above the top of the guardrail, which confirmed my fear that I could have easily gone over, shook my head, and turned it and stood it back on the ground.

I picked the shattered pieces of my headlight which, casing, light, metal reflector thing, all of it, was in sharp little pieces on the ground where my bike had hit. I put them in the pocket of my jacket to throw away when I got to work and biked, a bit of blood coming from my otherwise all right arms, the rest of the way back to work.

I guess it was an all right excuse for being fifteen minutes late coming back from work. Sharon just laughed to herself, and went to get the Neosporin and Band-Aids. We made some makeshift bandages for the longer cut on my arm out of fresh lint-free machine wipes and the Band-Aids, cleaned me up, and I was back to work.

And that night…

I had the janitor guy fix my brakes.