So, I have two good bike crash stories, am going to tell them in reverse order just because I told this one the other day so its fresh in my mind.
It was 1991,the summer before Junior Year in High School. I was a lifeguard at the local pool and had a pretty nice tan going. I went to visit Nick, who worked at Ace Hardware at the time. I spent about 15 minutes in the store, I think I was dropping off a spare inner tube, or something like that. Before I go too much further, let me describe my bike. It was a beautiful Cannondale, white with Shimano Integra components and look clip pedals. I loved it, it was super fast and light. So light that I was able to ‘bunny hop’ just about any obstacle – up curbs, over trash, sticks, rocks etc…
So I come out of Ace and get ready to go home. I had just parked the bike out front, and it was still there, a few people had stopped to look at it, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a hot day, so I take my shirt off and put it in my seat bag. I get on and start riding, my hometown was very hilly, and it just so happens it was pretty much all downhill on the way home for me, so I really cranked it to try to get home as fast as possible.
In the middle of the big hill on the way home, there was one set of railroad tracks. Those super thin tires and railroad tracks typically don’t get along too well, but that doesn’t matter to me, because I have my bunny hopping trick, it works on railroad tracks too! So, I go to bunny hop, and take off perfectly, except for….oh crap! My front tire!! As soon as I take off, the front tire keeps rolling. I definitely had a ‘life stops, oh shit’ moment. (Ricky Bobby: “Yep, I’m flyin’ thru the air, this is not good”) As you could imagine, my fork comes down and hits the pavement hard, I go flying over the handlebars, directly onto my left shoulder, I roll a few times on the pavement and finally come to a stop. Of course I was in instant shock, which was good, because I was pretty banged up. Taking a survey of myself, I saw no skin from my left elbow to the top of my shoulder blade, my nose was bleeding like crazy, I had gravel embedded in my chin and I had scrapes all over my back and chest. Luckily I was wearing my bicycle gloves, and those work awesome, so my hands were fine.
Bleeding all over and dazed, I limp over to the hair salon across the street. I attempt to enter when the shop owner/manager meets me at the door. I ask if I can come in and clean up. She says ‘no, sorry, you’re too bloody, but here, here’s a towel’.
Could I come in to clean up?
I should have really given her the business, but, was not really in the state to do that, so I said okay, thanks. By this time a driver from a car that saw me crash had pulled over and approached me, she was offering to take me to the hospital as I was standing with the shop owner, I was resisting. As I was still trying to stop my nose bleeding, gently dabbing it upwards, the towel caught a cut on the right side of my nostril. Only, it wasn’t a cut, it was a tear, and the towel lifted my nose up and flapped it all the way over to the left side. The shop owner nearly fainted- that’s what you get! Anyway, that’s when I finally consented that the hospital was prolly a good idea. She directed me to sit in her car, which just happened to be a BMW with white leather, while she loads my bike in her car. Really?? This lady is too nice! So she drives me to the hospital, when I get there, I call my parents and the doctors start working on me right away.
The hospital experience was crazy, I was awake the whole time, but really felt no pain at all. They first started on my nose, it seems that I had bent my septum and it now goes straight for little bit, then takes a 45 degree angle to the right. They also have to stitch it up. So they shoot pain meds right into my nose with a needle, but miss some, and it goes down into the back of my throat. I’m not sure about you, but whenever I have pain meds, it feels like that area is puffed up, and well, when the back of your throat feels like its puffed up, you freak out cuz you can’t breathe. I, however, seem to be the only one concerned about this. This being the 1990’s, you think there was a lot of superior medical equipment to help get wounds clean, right? Well, not so much. When looking at my chin, I had 5 people give their opinion on what best to do to clean it and get all the rocks out of it. This was a bit disconcerting, shouldn’t there just be one answer? Well, they came up with a wire brush, yep, like the ones you get at Menards to scrape paint off of your house. They numbed the heck out of it and just went to town with that wire brush. It was very surreal seeing someone take a wire brush to my face and not really feel a thing. They thought the wire brush was such a good idea that they used it on my shoulder too.
It took me about a month and a half for me to grow all my skin back. So I got to sit in the locker room at the pool, let me tell you, fun stuff there! The lady who picked me up also contacted my parents, her husband was a biker as well, and she stopped b/c she would want someone to stop for him. Apparently he also fixed bikes as well, and my fork was bent all to heck and he fixed that for me. I went to their house and gave her $100 for stopping, probably not even enough to cover the repair and the car cleaning, but it was all I could muster at the time.
So what I’m guessing happened is that some of the people who were ‘looking’ at my bike when I was in Ace, actually flipped the quick release on the front tire, and, as I rode, it became looser, when it was finally time for me to do my bunny hop, it was so loose that it came right off. Bastages! I have more scars from that crash than all of the others combined. It goes without saying that I am one lucky S.O.B. for having survived with just a few cuts. I had scrapes on my left eye and my Adam’s apple. If I had bounced one way or the other, my life would have been changed forever. I thank God for giving me the natural instincts to avoid any major injury!
Thankfully, this was my last major bike crash.
