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jinianLet me start off as I started off with Wim: I am okay. By my saying that, you know that I'm not badly hurt and that something has happened. On a less concrete level, you also know that I'm able to type, because if something just happened I probably don't have a voice transciption program all set up.
The bike's rear brakes had given out some time ago, leaving only the front set, and last night I decided to go to City Greens after picking up the new Girl Genius (it's finally out!) and Hopeless Savages at the comic store. There's a downhill slope between them that has never seemed so big before.
It was raining. The brakes were thoroughly wet, which I'd expected, so I started braking early and only became worried when the brakes didn't seem to be catching at all. I was going pretty fast by the bottom of the one-block downslope. I chose to zip through the intersection rather than deliberately wipe out, because the walk signal was on.
The brakes still failed once I was on the flat. At some point I gave up on gripping them and chose to focus on steering. I thought I could go into the Asean parking lot and turn to bleed off speed, but they had curbs in there that I'd never noticed and taking flight didn't seem too appealing. I aimed for the alley instead. I was just about out of options; I don't know what I thought I was going to do in the alley, but the next intersection was full of cars and there was nowhere else to go.
The alley was narrow. As it turned out, it was rather too narrow for someone going like a bat out of hell to turn into adequately. I realized that I was going to hit the wall and maybe be knocked off the bike after all. The cost/benefit analysis apparently came out in favor of assuming a guard position rather than taking heroic measures to avoid the wall.
This is where the thwack comes in.
I heard a loud noise as my helmet hit the wall. I felt the impact through the right side of my body; I hadn't completed the turn, but I'd hit at about a 60-degree angle. One thing I didn't do was go limp on impact. I had tensed up a lot when I finally noticed just how quickly that wall was coming toward me.
Jumping to my feet is just what I do when I've been in an accident. I don't know if it's to convince others that I'm all right, or if I'm trying to convince myself, or if it's just some automatic body self-check. All of those have their points, and I've thought about it a bit since last night. Nothing says it only has one cause, I suppose. At any rate, the next thing I remember after the impact is jumping to my feet. I didn't have to disentangle myself from the bike, so I must have been knocked free, but it was right at my feet, so I didn't go far. The handlebars had been wrenched sideways in an impressive but repairable-looking fashion.
My head felt a pain like one note from the pain I feel when I get hit in the nose. The airy, ringing, strangely insulated pain, if that makes sense to anyone but me. That went away very quickly. I felt no disorientation. I had scrapes on knees and right arm, and my palms hadn't lost any skin but they felt raw and had a couple of tiny punctures.
So I wheeled the bike across the street to City Greens, managing to amuse myself along the way by trying to balance the bike against my leg so I could pull up my sleeve to examine my arm owies. It just wasn't happening with the handlebars pointed almost parallel to the front wheel. I left the bike and helmet on the rack behind the store.
I went shopping. I only needed one thing, and I was right there. I still wanted it. When I was done, I walked back to University to catch a bus home. Lucky me. I barely missed one. I felt a lot better by the time I reached University, though, so I set out to walk home. And I ran the rest of my errands on the way.
When I got home, I became shocky and freaked out. I'd locked it down fine while in public, but it was time to react. I called Wim and blathered at him for a while, then he came over. There was processing -- I now think I did about as well with the incident as I could have, which is a fair way to come from beating myself up about it. We read comics and ate food from Mandarin Chef, where the staff are apparently agreed that two years is long enough for us to date before getting married. I stayed under blankets and turned on the heat, and by the time I went to sleep I was a lot less cold and shaky.
This morning I'm fine. I've got some low-level stress and one of my bruises is extremely painful, but I'm at work and all is cool.
Sympathy and alarm are really not necessary. I know people care about me and that's why I'm teling the story. Criticism is actively unwelcome, so please don't post any of it. I'm leaving responses open for the moment.
The bike's rear brakes had given out some time ago, leaving only the front set, and last night I decided to go to City Greens after picking up the new Girl Genius (it's finally out!) and Hopeless Savages at the comic store. There's a downhill slope between them that has never seemed so big before.
It was raining. The brakes were thoroughly wet, which I'd expected, so I started braking early and only became worried when the brakes didn't seem to be catching at all. I was going pretty fast by the bottom of the one-block downslope. I chose to zip through the intersection rather than deliberately wipe out, because the walk signal was on.
The brakes still failed once I was on the flat. At some point I gave up on gripping them and chose to focus on steering. I thought I could go into the Asean parking lot and turn to bleed off speed, but they had curbs in there that I'd never noticed and taking flight didn't seem too appealing. I aimed for the alley instead. I was just about out of options; I don't know what I thought I was going to do in the alley, but the next intersection was full of cars and there was nowhere else to go.
The alley was narrow. As it turned out, it was rather too narrow for someone going like a bat out of hell to turn into adequately. I realized that I was going to hit the wall and maybe be knocked off the bike after all. The cost/benefit analysis apparently came out in favor of assuming a guard position rather than taking heroic measures to avoid the wall.
This is where the thwack comes in.
I heard a loud noise as my helmet hit the wall. I felt the impact through the right side of my body; I hadn't completed the turn, but I'd hit at about a 60-degree angle. One thing I didn't do was go limp on impact. I had tensed up a lot when I finally noticed just how quickly that wall was coming toward me.
Jumping to my feet is just what I do when I've been in an accident. I don't know if it's to convince others that I'm all right, or if I'm trying to convince myself, or if it's just some automatic body self-check. All of those have their points, and I've thought about it a bit since last night. Nothing says it only has one cause, I suppose. At any rate, the next thing I remember after the impact is jumping to my feet. I didn't have to disentangle myself from the bike, so I must have been knocked free, but it was right at my feet, so I didn't go far. The handlebars had been wrenched sideways in an impressive but repairable-looking fashion.
My head felt a pain like one note from the pain I feel when I get hit in the nose. The airy, ringing, strangely insulated pain, if that makes sense to anyone but me. That went away very quickly. I felt no disorientation. I had scrapes on knees and right arm, and my palms hadn't lost any skin but they felt raw and had a couple of tiny punctures.
So I wheeled the bike across the street to City Greens, managing to amuse myself along the way by trying to balance the bike against my leg so I could pull up my sleeve to examine my arm owies. It just wasn't happening with the handlebars pointed almost parallel to the front wheel. I left the bike and helmet on the rack behind the store.
I went shopping. I only needed one thing, and I was right there. I still wanted it. When I was done, I walked back to University to catch a bus home. Lucky me. I barely missed one. I felt a lot better by the time I reached University, though, so I set out to walk home. And I ran the rest of my errands on the way.
When I got home, I became shocky and freaked out. I'd locked it down fine while in public, but it was time to react. I called Wim and blathered at him for a while, then he came over. There was processing -- I now think I did about as well with the incident as I could have, which is a fair way to come from beating myself up about it. We read comics and ate food from Mandarin Chef, where the staff are apparently agreed that two years is long enough for us to date before getting married. I stayed under blankets and turned on the heat, and by the time I went to sleep I was a lot less cold and shaky.
This morning I'm fine. I've got some low-level stress and one of my bruises is extremely painful, but I'm at work and all is cool.
Sympathy and alarm are really not necessary. I know people care about me and that's why I'm teling the story. Criticism is actively unwelcome, so please don't post any of it. I'm leaving responses open for the moment.
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no subject
Date: 2001-12-14 01:47 am (UTC)No sympathy, no alarm, no criticism (I wouldn't, anyway; it sounds like you handled the situation in a very good way given the circumstances) ... but I will tell MY big bike-crash story, in case it helps out somehow.
This was back in college, when I was earning my B.A. at UC Santa Barbara. UCSB is coastal, but 10 miles inland (northward) are the Santa Ynez mountains, a coastal range topping out at around 4,000 feet. I and some suitemates used to take weekend day trips up to the mountain -- bike up to the crest of the ridge just north of campus, eat lunch, and bike back home. On one of those return trips, I very nearly had the worst bicycle accident of my life.
We were on one of those deserted mountain backroads -- you know the type -- where you can't go fifteen seconds without going around a switchback. This was our fifth or sixth trip, and the road was getting pretty familiar; conditions were good; and we'd just hit the section where the road straightens out for a while, so the three of us had started cruising. It's exhilarating to speed down a twisty road, the wind whipping past your face, at speeds unachievable by unaided man, and we were making the most of it. We whipped through some corners at over 30 mph, and started approaching the final hairpin turn before the road crossed the major highway that went up into the mountains. I started leaning into the turn and realized that I was going too fast.
... Continued momentarily, because I don't want to risk the wrath of LJ's post length limit.
no subject
Date: 2001-12-14 02:01 am (UTC)Now, as any good motorcyclist can tell you, it's a big no-no to both brake and turn at the same time. Your tires only get a certain amount of traction, and turning takes traction (because you're trying to modify your velocity -- specifically, the direction of your momentum), and braking takes traction (ditto -- specifically, your speed); dividing your traction between the two leads to bad things, as either your tire slips (and you get a bad case of road rash) or you can't quite succeed at either action, going off the road at half speed.
I've done my share of motorcycling, and this actually did fly through my mind in the second or two I had before hitting the turn. The best course of action, I decided in a flash, was to stay on the road, and control speed later, in the straightaway leading up to the stop sign. It was either that, or try to crash gracefully. I elected the former.
As I leaned into the turn, I did my utmost to keep the bike up -- too tight of a turn and the wheel would slip. On the other hand, too loose and I'd be eating hill. (Fortunately, at least the outside of the curve went uphill, so I wasn't going to be flying off into space.) The curve whizzed by -- I was still on the road, although drifting to the outside shoulder at a dangerous pace -- the road started to straighten out -- I leaned a little further -- and it wasn't quite enough. I had guided the bike through the curve, but I had drifted too far out, and the bike plunged over the shoulder, wheels hugging the steep slope of a drainage culvert on the far side of the road. I kept control as I rode into the concrete channel, straightened the bike up, and started braking for all I was worth.
Then my eyes locked onto a huge rock that had detached from the loose hill wall and fallen into the culvert. It came halfway up to my knee, blocked the whole channel, and I knew there was no swerving around it. I was still struggling to get the bike straightened out, and had too much momentum to ride back up the slope onto the road. So ...
(cont'd in part 3)
no subject
Date: 2001-12-14 02:24 am (UTC)Somehow or another, I managed not to overshoot the narrow lip, and I found myself in the logic-defying position of steering along a concrete strip nearly as narrow as my mountain bike's tires, with any deviation to the left meaning a swerve back into the three-foot-deep culvert (and a practically guaranteed loss of balance, and crash) and a swerve to the right putting my wheels in loose, rocky dirt (and, at the speeds I was going, an instant slip and crash). What about ditching the bike and trying for a safe crash? To my left was the culvert -- and if I bailed out that way, I'd face a six-foot fall -- and to my right was a steeply sloping hill, more or less a wall; if I bailed out that way, I'd instantly eat dirt.
Naturally, I balanced for all I was worth, and clamped down on the brakes as I hurtled downhill.
Did I mention that the culvert ended about 40 feet away?
As I noticed this and panicked, I must have held the brakes a little too hard, because I suddenly felt myself pitching forward. The front wheel had locked, and I was still travelling at a good 10 miles per hour -- soon to be ten mph through empty space, over the front handlebars. Training that I didn't know I had kicked in, and I released the front brake when I was at about a 30-degree angle. The bike wavered, then something shoved the back end down, and both wheels were back on the ground.
That was pretty much it for my ability to balance, but I'd managed to slow down to a walking pace. I wrestled with the bike for another few feet, brought it to a nearly complete stop, then overbalanced and threw myself to the right. The bike angled into the hill, and I grabbed the first thing my hands hit and held on for dear life until I could detach my legs from the machinery.
I'd managed to ride that entire damn culvert -- most of it at speed -- and dismount into a half-crash that left me AND my bike unharmed. (An edge of the left-hand pedal drew blood on the back of my leg, and I scraped my hands up, but those weren't worth complaining about, after all the injuries I COULD have suffered.)
That's the story, really, and all I have to add is that that particular bike must have had some sort of symbiotic relationship with me. There was also the time I was riding on campus, holding some books in one hand and trying to shift with the other, when I lost control and the bike went down -- but I very literally walked off the bike as it slipped out from underneath me, and came to a stop on my feet.
I'm good with bikes. They like me. Skateboards, on the other hand, are another matter entirely ...
Dream well,
-- Bax
no subject
Date: 2001-12-14 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2001-12-15 12:49 am (UTC)Good thing I had a denim jacket on, or my arm would have been hamburger. My elbow and my fingers lost a lot of skin (I still have scars, if I look for them). And my arm was broken, about an inch below the shoulder. No cast for that kind of break; I had to wear a sling and sleep sitting up for a few weeks, so gravity would keep the bones in line.
no subject
Date: 2001-12-15 10:30 am (UTC)