From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXI

Introduction

This is the twenty-first installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, and Volume XX is here. The different volumes are unrelated, though the real tales related are all real late and do all relate to me. You can read them in alphabetical order, numerical order, chronological order (note that these are all the same thing), check or money order, in some semblance of order, and/or because you’re “just following orders.”

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs? Well, imagine you’re making homemade pasta. When you cut the noodles, you get these stray shorter bits from the ragged edges of the dough sheets that fall on the floor or—if you’re smart—into a large bowl placed to catch them. You can totally use those fallen bits by gathering them up, pressing them together in a ball, rerolling them, and re-cutting them. That’s kind of what I do when I’m writing letters to friends and some extra words fall out of my word processor. The only difference is, I don’t reroll them, so what you are about to read is a big ball of scraps. Serve them with a nice Bolognese Ragu or Alfredo, or your favorite literary equivalent. (And if a presenting a big wad of literary scraps sounds half-assed to you, consider all the effort I put into that extended metaphor you’ve just enjoyed.) This week’s selections of Bits & Bobs are from letters I wrote during college.

[If you’re wondering whose portrait that is in the background, it’s the playwright Antonin Artaud, best known for his “theatre of cruelty.” I happen to remember this from 1990. Neither ChatGPT nor Copilot was able to identify him from the photo, by the way, thought Google nailed it instantly. To its credit, ChatGPT had a pithy comment: “Honestly, it might be the most fitting photo of someone who’s read Artaud and survived.”]

October 30, 1989

I had the weirdest dream last night. I’m at this party and dancing with this totally fly girl. I’ve never danced so well (and as you know full well, in real life I cannot dance at all) and we’re really hitting it off, and then the song ends and the girl collapses into my arms. First I think she’s trying to be funny but then I realize she can’t even stand up. Her legs drop out from under her, so I have to pick her up into my arms as though I’m going to carry her off. Then she whispers, “I have to tell you: I’m going to die. I’ve been poisoned.” I’m totally freaked out, looking at this girl’s face, and then she dies right then and there. I start to wonder if I’ve been poisoned too. I guess the Freudian analysis kind of conducts itself here…

March 1, 1990

I hope March goes better than February; that was out of hand. First off, I was sick all month. Then last weekend I finally started [collegiate bicycle road] racing [for the season]. The time trial sucked because I’m not fit and still not totally healthy after that virus. The criterium was one of these bullshit parking lot jobs that’s roped and coned off so they could make it twist around as much as they wanted. Half mile laps. Oil everywhere—in addition to all these big puddles of oil, the whole surface of the road had this kind of film on it. It was in Irvine, pollution capital of the universe, which gave me a gnarly sore throat. I figured on riding the crit mellow, for fitness etc. Well, the only guy on our team who was riding well was the new tri-guy, Eric, who hasn’t really perfected his sprint, so I went for the primes myself. I won one, and took third in another, and was actually kind of digging the technical course. I got in this breakaway of five halfway through, and T— and Eric were surely blocking for me, so I pretty much had to stick with it, but I almost didn’t want to because I felt like shit. On the other hand, Tony Palmer [a notoriously fast Colorado racer I’d admired as a junior, who raced in the Olympics in 1988], was in the break with me so I was excited about that.

Well, T— was sick and dropped out, and a then few riders bridged up including Eric, who of course would give the break a giant boost, almost guaranteeing our chances of staying off. So things were looking really good when suddenly I stacked in the hairpin for no apparent reason. I think I slipped on some oil. Ripped a big hole in my new Aussie bib shorts, and got this oily asphalt smear on my helmet—really sucked. Road rash on the hip, both arms, and the left leg, but not too bad. I ran over to the pit, and the asshole race officials wouldn’t give me a free lap because I didn’t go all the way around the course. So the Mavic neutral support guy just straightened my bars and sent me off. It took me like five laps to regain my composure, and I was dry-heaving and really wanted to drop out, but I was still in eighth or ninth or so, on my own between the peloton and the breakaway, so I chased hard and eventually got within about fifty feet of the break.

[Zoom in on that photo and you can see the oil smear on my helmet. Note also my teammate, T—, watching from the sidelines.]

I thought I was about to latch on when Eric attacked and blew the break apart (temporarily, anyway). So much for closing that gap. I thought maybe I could solo in ahead of the main pack but about ten laps later I got swallowed up. Towards the end of the race the break lapped the field and I was trying to get Eric off the front, since I knew that was his best chance at winning. Well, Tony Palmer was having none of that, and started cussing at me and yelling, “Don’t even try it!” Somehow, in the moment, feeling as crappy as I did, I accepted his authority, sat up, and just waited for the sprint. Damn, the tricks your mind plays on you when you’re miserable…

March 16, 1990

I was going to hit the sack but I forgot I did my laundry this afternoon and left everything festering in the washer so I just went and put it in the dryer and now I have to kill some time while it dries and I don’t really feel like studying even though I really should because finals start next Monday and I hardly even have a clue what’s going on in any of my classes, especially this boring as hell history class which is so lame that the best I could do for notes are statements like “1629: some emperor on verge of something with his edict of restitution which means something is restored to church; things after this began to go downhill for the Hapsbergs while Wollenstein is an example of why whatever war this was was the way it was, however that was” (that’s an actual quote from my notebook) which doesn’t really put me in a very good way as far as the final exam goes.

May 28, 1991

My dickhead roommate—the one with the Rolex and the $15,000 stereo—had a birthday recently. His mom called and asked for him, and when I said he wasn’t home, she said, “Just tell him happy birthday, and that his present is in the bank.” Nice. Meanwhile his girlfriend got him a Nintendo and he plays it 24x7. At first I couldn’t figure out why she bought him this thing, and then I realized, duh, she’s sick of him, and this will get him out of her hair. Easy enough for her … she doesn’t have to live with the guy. First thing in the morning, he’s playing “Contra,” and actually, he never stops, except to go to the bathroom or grab a snack. Same game, day in and day out. My other two roommates and I keep telling him to get a life and his answer is the same as when we tell him to do his dishes: “I’ll do it later.” What really sucks is that every time his guy is killed, he cusses like a sailor. Like it really matters. What’s he supposed to say if, one day, the television—my giant 26” Sony Trinitron Color Console in the giant cabinet—falls on him and pins him to the floor? Nobody will answer his call for help because we’ll assume his little Nintendo guy just got shot again. I keep hoping he’ll finally lose his temper and smash my TV so I can make him buy me a new one that isn’t all blurry.

November 25, 1991

So I’m in the school library restroom and this guy comes in, heads to the next urinal over, and before even doing his business flushes it. I wouldn’t have noticed except he used his foot, so for a second it looked like he was trying to kick me in the head. I have no problem with him flushing with his foot since the handle is presumably gross, but why the pre-flush? I guess he doesn’t want his good, clean urine mixing with the bad, dirty urine in the bowl. That would be terrible, even if he’s not planning to use that urine again. Just the very sight of his elite urine mixing with the vulgar, common urine is too harrowing for him to witness. What a knob.

April 20, 1992

My mom and [her husband] the Landlo’ left their car here while vacationing in Morocco and I’m using it as much as possible to date this girl. So far that’s only been twice, so I better hurry things up while I still have the car. I don’t expect you’ll chastise me for refusing to have a really deep introspective contemplative period following the death of my last romance; as you well know, I am not some sort of Love Guru. But I can hold my own with the women: which is good, because that’s what they usually want me to do.

July 29, 1992

[To Giro Sport Design, Inc. who had given me a free helmet about six weeks before.] Dear Giro people: A month ago, my Giro Air Attack acted as liaison between my head and the ground. I was mountain biking in nearby Tilden Park, and that’s about all I remember because for several hours after my accident I alternated between being unconscious and incoherent. I was flown by helicopter to the nearest trauma center, where I underwent a CAT scan and was stitched up. Twenty or so sutures were put in my forehead beginning, notably, just below where the helmet left off covering my forehead. I have suffered no permanent damage to my head and for this I thank you.

October 8, 1992

I called my dad the other day and said, “Dad, I need twenty dollars.” He said, “Fifteen dollars?! What do you need ten dollars for?! Okay, I’ll mail you the damn five dollars.” But he didn’t.

But seriously, my medical bills are starting to catch up with me after that mountain bike crash. I wrote letters to the ambulance and helicopter companies, saying basically, “I have no money. Please dismiss my account. Thank you.” The helicopter company was cool about it, but the ambulance company ($550 to drive me one block, to where the helicopter had landed) wrote back threatening to slash my credit rating if I didn’t pay up the balance. (My crappy school insurance had only paid $100.) So now I’m on the installment plan, sending $50 a month through next June for a five minute trip I don’t remember going on. I plan to write in the “memo” section of each check, “You thieving bastards!” or at least “You teething hamsters!”

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Old Yarn - Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge

Introduction

This is the second “old yarn” installment on albertnet (inspired by my pioneering effort “The Cinelli Jumpsuit”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Bike crash on Golden Gate Bridge

During the late ‘90s—I remember because I was still living in San Francisco—I had a catastrophic ride on one of my favorite bicycles of all time, Bomb Pop. I named this bike after the popsicle that had the same red, white, and blue coloration, one color fading into the next. It was a Guerciotti, the team issue for an old pro team. When I was still in college I’d bought it from one of their guys, who’d never even built it up.

Just a couple weeks before this ill-fated ride, I’d replaced almost all of the components on Bomb Pop with the newest Shimano Dura-Ace, and even put new wheels on it. I had seriously considered just replacing the whole bike because this was the longest I’d ever owned a racing frame, and couldn’t be sure how sound it still was. (Steel rusts, after all, and I lived near the ocean.) So, before mounting all the new parts, I stripped the frame all the way down and had a framebuilder inspect it. He scrutinized it, even took it outside into the sun to see better, and summed up his inspection with the simple statement, “I’d ride it.”

Back then, all my bike rides started with a trip through the old, defunct Presidio army base and then over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. It was almost always windy on the bridge, and a bit tricky because even though they segregated traffic, with pedestrians directed to the walkway on the east side of the bridge and bicycles on the west side (each protected from car traffic by a tall barrier), you tended to encounter confused tourists who either couldn’t read the signs, didn’t notice them, or felt some need to defy them. Meanwhile, it was a bit tricky getting around the bridge stanchions because it was narrow through there and the wind buffeted around and you had to keep an eye out for those rogue pedestrians. On top of that, around the stanchions there were giant steel plates over the concrete which were slick as snot on rainy days or even when there was just a lot of fog (which wasn’t rare).

And, there were the other cyclists to deal with. As described here, I often fell in with this or that random rider to take turns drafting, especially when it was windy. A lot of these riders were as seasoned as I, but then you also had to contend with tourists on rented bikes (wobbling all over the place, usually), and then the aggressive quasi-cyclists who took it as a personal affront when you passed them, and would sometimes put up a fight. I remember on one cold, damp day I passed some dude (non-Lycra, cheap road bike) who subsequently charged past me and stormed off ahead. I thought, oh dear, this guy is gonna try to keep too much speed around the next stanchion, and that steel plate is gonna be wet, and he’s gonna totally stack. Sure enough, when I got to the next stanchion he was on the ground. Steel plate is way harder than pavement and I’ll bet that really hurt. I helped the guy up and got him back on his bike—fortunately, he wasn’t seriously injured—and he seemed really ticked at me, like it was somehow my fault he crashed.

But that was a different day. On the day in question, the beginning of the end of Bomb Pop’s useful life, the road was dry but it was very windy and I was out of the saddle, just past a stanchion, sprinting back up to speed, when suddenly (to quote some Euro pro from a post-race interview), “I was going, and going, and then I was not good.” Out of nowhere, I found myself crashing face-first into the steel plate.

It’s peculiar to crash face-first. A more typical crash would involve sliding out sideways (which is preferable because your head usually doesn’t even touch the ground) or hitting something with the front wheel and flipping over the bars. In this latter crash the entire bike rotates around the front hub, so it’s not really a face-first crash; it usually results in a head-first crash which of course is not good, but there’s always the chance that your tuck-and-roll turns the whole thing into an acrobatic stunt, so you come all the way around like a gymnast and can come through miraculously unscathed. One time, in the UC Santa Barbara community of Isla Vista, I rode my commuter bike down a steep boat ramp at low tide to attempt a gnarly jump off the end, which I executed almost perfectly except that my front wheel landed first and was stopped dead in the deep sand, and I was launched over the bars. This could have been bad—I wasn’t even wearing a helmet, this having been biking home from class, not on a training ride—but I somersaulted in the sand and came up on my feet, arms outstretched in a victory salute, celebrating, I guess, how totally fine I was. To my astonishment, when I looked back (presumably at some pal who was with me), I saw some guy with a camcorder who’d filmed the entire thing. Damn, what I’d give for that footage!

I’ve only crashed face-first twice in my life. The first time was on the Broadway bike path in Boulder, which runs parallel to the road with a nice median in between. Alas, at the spot where I crashed the median was a rock garden rather than the grass featured in other sections, so that’s what my face landed in. I couldn’t figure out why the hell I’d crashed, and my forensic investigation (which began immediately) turned up, before anything else, a bunch of ball bearings. WTF!? Then I noticed that the steerer tube of my fork—this is the tube that extends from the fork crown up to where the top of the headset is, where the handlebar stem is inserted—had snapped.

This is not a known phenomenon in cycling. I mean, it really never happens. In this case it turned out that too little of the stem was inserted into the steerer tube, so there was too much leverage applied to too small an area of metal. Now, before you chide me for getting what I deserved, since the minimum insertion of every stem is clearly marked, I’ll tell you exactly how this happened. I’d bought the stem used from a colleague at the bike shop, and this absolute fuckwit had cut off part of the stem where it goes into the steerer tube (to save weight, the stupid douchebag) and somehow neglected to mention this to me. What’s more, he’d needlessly polished the new end of the stem where he’d cut it, almost as if to hide his handiwork. So he basically set me up to have this crash. (Since you may be wondering: no, his body was never found.)

So, this being only the second time I’d ever crashed face-first, I was just as befuddled as the first time. Right away I noticed that my front wheel was farther away from the rest of the bicycle than it’s ever supposed to get. The second thing I noticed was that my chin was gushing blood like an open water main. (Okay, fine, I exaggerate—which is easy to do when you’re bleeding.) The third thing I noticed was—and this was eerily familiar—ball bearings! WTF?! Again? 

(Wait—stop! I just fact-checked myself. I vividly remember watching little headset bearings rolling across the steel plate, but as the astute reader would be quick to note, the 7700-issue Dura-Ace headset used cartridge bearings. So this particular detail is the embroidery of memory. It makes a better story, but simply isn’t true. I could go revise the previous paragraph but I shall let it stand as a reminder that memory can be flaky. But don’t worry, the main facts of this tale are accurate because frequent oral retelling of the story keeps them alive in memory ... it’s only when I go to flesh out the details “on paper” that I run the risk of fabrication.)

No, the failure wasn’t a used handlebar stem this time. Again, the steerer tube failed, but this time it sheared off right at the fork crown. Probably sweat from riding the stationary trainer had accumulated and caused it to rust.

As I got to my feet and hauled my bifurcated bicycle out of the path of biking traffic, the words “I’d ride it” echoed in my head. So much for the framebuilder’s inspection! Now I faced the problem of how to get home when my bloody bike—literally bloody, as my chin was still dripping—wasn’t even walkable. If I’d brought the tools necessary to disconnect the brake and gear cables I could have carried most of the bike over one shoulder and the rest under my other arm, but as it was this was really awkward, especially clack-clack-clacking along in my cycling shoes. My chin was hemorrhaging the whole way, leaving blood droplets on the ground like a trail of breadcrumbs. Finally I made it to the San Francisco end of the bridge where there was a pay phone. (Cell phones were pretty widespread by this time but I was not an early adopter.) I tried to call my wife but it just rang and rang … she was out for a run.

At this point I was noticed by a group of grade-school aged Asian girls. I couldn’t figure out where they came from—this was in the evening, past the hours for a field trip—and there wasn’t a single adult among them. They looked very freaked out by the blood running off my chin. One of them came forward. She was wearing a very smart outfit, like a private school uniform, adorned incongruously with a fanny pack which she proceeded to root through. She produced a travel pack of Kleenex and pulled some out. Trembling slightly—equal parts fear and concern—she held them out to me. I suspect she spoke no English, or perhaps just didn’t know what to say. I thanked her profusely and began applying pressure to my chin. At that moment I heard a siren. Some fool had called an ambulance!

Last time I’d been taken in an ambulance was after a mountain bike crash in Tilden Park. For $600 I was driven the equivalent of two blocks, to where a helicopter could land. My insurance (through the university) covered only $100 of it. That expense gave me a lifelong antipathy toward ambulances, and I sure didn’t need one now. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely could have used a proper rag to stanch my chin with, instead of the rapidly disintegrating Kleenex, but I didn’t require a stretcher, a neck brace, a sirens-and-flashing-lights trip though a big city, and an outrageous co-pay. So I did the obvious thing: I hid. Fortunately I was obscured from view (behind the pay phone and the pillar it was attached to, if memory serves) and the paramedics never spotted me. I peeked a couple of times and they were just wandering around looking for some guy who’d crashed his bike. For some reason the Asian girls decided I was hiding for good reason and didn’t rat me out. Eventually the ambulance drove off.

I got back on the phone, failed again to reach my wife, and was stumped. Who else did I know who could come get me? I was in that phase of life where I’d moved to a new city after college and spent most of my time working; beyond that, I passed my time cycling and taking walks with my wife, so I didn’t have much of a social group yet. But, there was always the help desk.

The company I worked for offered computer network services to large corporations, with 24x7 tech support, including escalation to network engineers for thorny problems. Thus, there was a pager rotation among us, such that each week somebody was on-call around the clock. So I called the Network Operations Center and asked the tech to page the engineer on-call. The tech asked for the company name. I explained there was no company, I just needed the on-call to come pick me up after a bike accident. The guy was plenty perplexed and finally opened a trouble ticket,  being as vague in the report as possible. Eventually he bridged in the on-call who, after a good laugh, agreed to come fetch me. He arrived before long and drove me home. Surprisingly, my wife still wasn’t back from her run.

I had time to shower, clean up my road rash, and take a seat in the living room with a book and a good thick washcloth to continue the pressure on my chin. The bleeding hadn’t stopped but the pressure helped. When my wife finally arrived, I assumed a pensive pose, hand on chin (obscuring the cloth), while we had a brief conversation. The point of this (as described in this handy accident reporting guide) was to ease her into the news of my accident, while showcasing how okay I was, so she wouldn’t be excessively alarmed. After a couple minutes I casually remarked, “I took a bit of a spill on my ride today. I should probably head to the ER and get looked at.” Only then did I let her see my chin, and she agreed we should head over right away.

This being San Francisco, parking would have been tricky at the hospital. Our car was parked at least five or ten minutes from our apartment, and as the World’s Cheapest Man I refused, especially in those days, to ever pay for a parking garage. Plus, it was only a 20-minute walk to the Saint Francis hospital. It was surprisingly non-crowded and they had me stitched up in no time. Two nurses got in an argument over whether I should cover the wound or leave it open to the air. The doctor didn’t take sides, but did ask me if I had a general practitioner. This got me a glare from my wife—sore subject—and I confessed I did not. “Good,” the ER doc said. “Stay away from hospitals … they’re full of sick people.” My wife and I walked home and got on with our evening.

(In case you’re wondering, I was able to get Bomb Pop back on the road pretty quickly using an ugly green replacement fork, just barely visible in the photo above, which  I got from a friend. This was a stopgap, of course, now that I couldn’t trust the rest of the frame anymore. My next frameset was Full  Slab, which you can read about here.)

My little stunt with calling the NOC and paging the on-call earned me some notoriety at work in the days following the accident. I already had a reputation as a thrill-seeker after some of us got in trouble for goofing off during a snowmobile ride at a company offsite (turns out if you over-steer and goose the throttle you can do a sweet fishtail, sending up a dramatic spray of snow, but that the rental people frown on this sort of thing), and for a high-speed jet-ski crash at another work offsite. Several colleagues gave the stitches in my chin a good, close look. I got to tell the story of the concerned but frightened Asian tourist girls and the proffered Kleenex. On Friday afternoon our manager held his weekly team meeting, and as it wound down, he said, “Okay, one more thing. Who’s taking the on-call this weekend? Because Dana’s riding!”

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

I’ll Drink to COVID - the Pandemic Beck'sts

Introduction

I feel like we’re finally far enough along in our nationwide recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic that we can start reflecting on it instead of just reacting to it. Of course the virus is still raging, and morphing, but hospitals haven’t been overwhelmed in a long time, and most of us are out and about in the world again. Throughout the ordeal, I drank a lot of beer and sent a lot of Beck’sts, but it seemed “too soon,” until now, to blog about it. I think now it’s finally okay to look back and that strange, shut-in, deeply isolated period, through the lens of what beers my friends and I were drinking, in what environments, and how we attempted to safely share that experience.

(What? You haven’t heard of Beck’sting? What rock have you been sheltering-in-place under? Get thee to a brewery! Or, click here.)

Note: as with previous posts about Beck’sts, I’ve grouped these thematically. I’ve included captions and commentary, and the initials of the Beck’ster. Where you see one letter only (e.g., “E—”) that’s generally somebody’s spouse. These are arranged chronologically, oldest at the top, spanning the period from late March through late July, 2020.

Newbie Beck’st

JH: Aaaahhh. [This was a Beck’st snapped during our first Virtual Pub Night (VPN) the previous week.]

MC: Nice one! Let’s do another session very soon!

JH: Agree. I’m free every night forever.

DA: JH, I think that’s your very first Beck’st, innit? And it’s a great one ... interesting beer, we get to see the color, it’s good lighting, and the Clorox wipe for context. A solid debut! As for our next VPN, I’d be up for tonight! I don’t have a lot of variety in the beer department but I just stocked the fridge so quantity-wise I can totally outlast this coronavirus... Should we do Hangouts or does someone have a Zoom?

JH: I’ll set up a Zoom. Otherwise my carefully selected wallpapers will go to waste.

Temperance Beck’st

DA: Since I did Virtual Pub Night (VPN) last night I figured I better go easy on the booze tonight, so E— and I are splitting this watery lager. (As watery lagers go, Stella is hard to beat.) DW, please pardon the unsightly stemware ... these little etched glasses, which we got from somebody’s driveway “FREE” box, are the perfect size for this. It’s weird going for walks because Albany is like a ghost town, and shelter-in-place seems to be awakening people to how overcrowded their homes are with stuff, because every other driveway seems to have a box of unwanted treasures. It’s like a garage sale except nobody wants any money.

JL: I went alcohol-free for eight weeks [to lose weight for cycling] but couldn’t take it anymore about two weeks ago when things started to get “real” with the ‘Rona. But even without any pandemic anxiety, I can’t imagine ever drinking just half a Stella and being satisfied! I admire your fortitude in these uncertain times…

Shelter-in-place Beck’st

DA: It’s tempting to complain about being stuck at home and about work being overly busy, but then I think of Dr. S manning up and caring for the sick and I stop myself. Nevertheless I do turn to beer in these trying times, such as this very good Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA. Would you fellers be up for a Virtual Pub Night (VPN) soon, maybe Friday? PCS, can you make that work?

DW: I’d be down for that sometime. I have a standing “Book Club” @ 4pm on Fridays with my [school] staff via Webex and I think we have another one with some friends going this Saturday. Geesh...sounds like we drink a lot. This pilsner from Terminal Gravity is outstanding. Tiny little brewery in Enterprise, Oregon, which is pretty much far away from everything.

DW (continued): Looking forward to it - now on to my day of public school Distance Learning administration!

Tall, fluty Beck’st

DA: DW, where do you come down on the question of tall, narrow beer glasses? Are such fluty vessels as offensive as stemware? Frankly, l like how full this is from a mere 12-oz bottle. The empty space at the top of a pint glass always irritates me. Anyway, this Racer 5 is really taking the edge off my shelter-in-place.

DA (continued): In other news, JL, I took the liberty of including your full name in my latest blog post. I hope that’s okay. You’re famous now! In other news, how does Saturday night work for a VPN?

JL: Aw yeah, more free press for me! That public relations firm I hired is really earning their keep! Are you charging them pay-per-click or something? I can’t wait to parlay this notoriety into a popular podcast — maybe something like, Homeschooling for Dummies! Or, How to Gain 15 Pounds and Keep it On! Or, Takes One To Know One: A Podcast About Bipedal Hominids! I’ll make a million. Oh, and yeah, I’d be up for a VPN on Saturday.

Cooped-up, stir-crazy Beck’st

DA: After a couple weeks of grey and cold we got some lovely weather today. When’s our next VPN!?

BA: I’m sorry I missed the last VPN! I didn’t open my email in time, you know, what with the virus and all. Let me know about when the next one is and I’ll try to get over to the store to buy some beers. I’ve been out of beer for a week now … I haven’t been in a store since I hear they put face shields up for the clerks, so that we can’t cough on them as easily. I don’t get out much...

DA: PCS, since you’re the one out there saving lives and can’t work from home, why don’t you suggest a few times? I’ll text BA this time since he clearly can’t stay on top of his email. Maybe he’s trying to be cool like our teenage children...

DW: I’m going to bring some serious, that is Orygun, IPA to the next VPN. No more of this Pilsner nonsense. Boneyard RPMs are available in cans now. Just happened. So there’s that.

DA: OMG, Boneyard RPM ... I love that beer! Alas, E— has us on this crazy pandemic lockdown where we can only shop like every two weeks, so my beer variety is almost nil. Not that we can get Boneyard here anyway…

Free Beck’st

DA: So, we haven’t had restaurant food since March 15 when we picked up Alexa from college for the lockdown. E— just isn’t comfortable. So I said what if we get a slightly underdone Zach’s pizza and put it in our oven for a while? She’s fine with that so I ordered it uncut so it wouldn’t slop over on the pizza stone. But when I went to pick it up, they’d screwed up and cut it. So they had to make me a whole new pizza, meaning I had to hang around for over half an hour, risking my life in their (albeit entirely deserted) restaurant. In recompense they offered me a free beer so I picked this giant Racer 5!

DA (continued): So, it turns out E— wants to bake the crap out of this pizza, long past the agreed upon five minutes. With the delay I already incurred, the family will be eating without me at this point, since I have virtual book club, but at least I have plenty of good beer to drown my sorrows in. Family and pizza (especially overcooked pizza) are overrated ... am I right?

PCS: Look at that MASSIVE brew, how many ounces are in that? Damn, no sorrow for you. So, was the pizza good or no??

DA: 22 ounces, baybee! The pizza was delish. I’m not sure it was worth the hassle but I’m sure my kids were stoked and that their stokage was unalloyed. Maybe they’ll look kindly on me one day.

JL: That beer looks epic! We’ve been getting restaurant food delivered about once a week. We usually stick it in the oven for a few minutes once it gets here, but none of us are convinced it’s doing anything... it’s just a matter of how much risk is acceptable and from whence that risk comes!

Dura-Ace Beck’st

DA: Do I look like I’m f***ing around?! (Hint: I am not. Not with this Double IPA, and not with my new Dura-Ace wheels...)

JL: That’s a nice looking Beck’st. I counter it with this not f***ing around Beck’st. Nothing in my photo is in focus because I’m already drunk — with power!

Anger management Beck’st

DA: If the anger is not too pronounced, beer can actually help. So what am I angry about? Two things: 1) the sad fact that this beer, the highlight of my day after ten hours of teleworking, will soon be gone; 2) the lack of Beck’sts I have lately received (or, more to the point, not received); 3) the dearth of VPNs lately; and 4) my evident inability to predict how many items will be included in my lists. You bitches are on the hook for items 2 and 3. I have taken care of item 1. Item 4 is hopeless. Item 5 is pending. So how about a 5pm PDT VPN on Sunday, 5/24!? DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT. RSVP ASAP.

PCS: Angry white man....BAM!

DW: I could potentially make a Sunday PM VPN. However, I have a Herd Immunity Get-Together at a pub at 4pm with my anti-vaxxer group. Those tend to go on for while… Also, I will only attend the VPN if we can dedicate some portion of the discussion to my wheel dilemma, without bringing up the fact that they are not Dura-Ace.

JL: Yeah, 6 pm PDT works for me. And I am happy to discuss at this VPN all subjects, as long as they are about Dura Ace wheels or wheels that are not Dura-Ace (but secretly wish they were Dura-Ace).

Broken hero Beck’st

DA: I bought this Kick-Ass fieldwork IPA crowler for our VPN that never happened. Since these crowlers have a shelf life, and I’m not allowed to drink until late next week at the earliest (due to my upcoming surgery), I have to give this away to a nearby friend. Alas, ye broken hero, I never got to drink ya...

DW: Alas...what the heck happened? Are you OK? Are you having surgery because of a bike accident? Not sure I can wait for our next VPN.

JL: Yeah, what DW said — what’s up? Upcoming surgery?? This was not discussed during the Dura-Ace wheel VPN.

DA: Dudes, here is what I had originally written about it before I decided to get an x-ray.

I’m resorting to this fallible voice recognition software instead of just typing, since I can’t type right now. That’s because I took a little spill on my bike the other day. I was descending after a bit of rain, but it had rained all night so the oil should have been rinsed off the road, but I came around a curve and my tires slid right out. I got up and got off the road and was putting my chain back on, and another guy came around the curve and stacked exactly as I had, and then a few seconds later a third guy came through, and he hit the tarmac exactly as we did, as though we had all rehearsed this together beforehand. Another guy came riding back up the road who had come through right behind me and almost crashed. He said his tires were sliding all over the place. The road was slicker than snot as they say, really almost like a bunch of soap or oil. So it was just kind of a freak thing, maybe something spilled in the road, I don’t know. I’ve done that descent many hundreds of times and my line was perfect. Anyway, my hand is all scraped up and swollen so I can’t really type, and I think I cracked some ribs because it hurts to breathe, and my shoulder seems pretty wrecked up. But, I was able to ride home, and I don’t think I’ll need to go to the ER or anything, which is good because they’re pretty packed lately, because of all the riots and so forth. Well, I suppose they’re pretty packed, I’m actually just guessing, but I don’t imagine I want to take valuable medical resources away from the agitators and so on.

Update: I went to Urgent Care for an X-ray and my collarbone turns out to be broke as f***. So I have a surgery scheduled on Tuesday. Happy happy joy joy.

DW: Damn, DanaDrive! No way that shoulder is going to grow back together. You’ll finally be riding some titanium with that break! Sorry that happened. What a bummer. The Fieldwork would be pretty handy at the moment.

DA: I donated the beer to JH and he Beck’sted it. Looks delish, eh? <sniff>

JL (a few days later): This is such a bummer of a story. Not the broken bone — the giving away of perfectly good beer! But seriously, the surgery should have happened by now … how did it go? I could VPN tonight I think.

DA: It apparently went well. I am typing with just one thumb which is really tedious so I am going to paste in a big block of recycled text now, which I’d dictated to my phone:

I have the sling that seems like it was made in shop class by a junior High kid, combining his father’s sling with a shoebox. The shoe Box presses against my belly making me feel like the Buddha, if the Buddha were an obsessed consumerist American who loves to carry around a box of treasures, if only his shoe box had a lid. I had a nerve block in my arm, which makes it feel like I fell asleep on it so my hand is all tingly, but instead of whacking the hand to wake it up because that’s annoying, I’m just leaving it because the tingling, as it spreads up my shoulder, will gradually be replaced with pain. I think it is going to be a very boring 6 weeks, followed by some very boring physical therapy, but I guess we were all destined to be bored anyway now that our library DVDs are all spent, and we realize that Netflix and Kanopy and Hoopla and YouTube are still all tools of man, and man is essentially boring. But I’ll take boring over zombie apocalypse, in the final analysis, though the way things are going I guess I wouldn’t be all that surprised if a zombie apocalypse did come to pass. I guess the silver lining there would be that all of their staggering around and flesh eating would be diverting.

I can give you more detail if we ever get the next VPN pinned down. That’s right, I’m off the pain meds and can have booze again! BA, are you back from your road trip yet?

BA: I am indeed back from the road trip and [our late] Dad’s teardrop camper trailer [which BA inherited] is now parked in front of the house. I don’t believe I contracted COVID-19 along the way, only time will tell on that (or not, depending, I guess). I had to figure out why T—’s van (a newer and shorter version of our 15 passenger van) wouldn’t drive the running lights on the trailer, and I managed that. I ended up pulling a relay from the fuse box in the engine room and installing a jumper instead, and lo and behold, it worked. It’s kind of surreal seeing the trailer there, like I expect to see Dad cooking out of the back of it when I look out. I don’t even know what to do with the thing, I don’t even have a vehicle that can tow a trailer.

DA: So BA, I’m glad your road trip went well and the teardrop came through okay. I’m quite impressed that you thought to pull a relay from the fuse box and replace it with a jumper to get the taillights working … that’s an ingenious trick the likes of which English majors don’t generally learn until grad school (though we did mess around a bit with jumpers during my honors post-modernism seminar). So here’s what to do with the trailer: you need to start a celebrity blog/vlog called “Teardrop Life” or something and drive around to scenic places in the US taking glamorous photos and shooting tantalizing video footage. You and J— are getting pretty old, so to stay “current” and “vital” you’ll need to attract a steady stream of groupies to help “fill the frame.” I think you still have the star power to make good money with that. Just be sure to wear your masks around those groupies. Don’t worry, the masks add an air of mystery and emphasize your eyes, one of your strong points. Well, two of them I guess, technically.

Controversial Beck’st

DA: Just because.

PCS: Wait....is it legit to Beck’st Heineken?

DA: Oh, so since you’re a big fancy doctor, you’re too good for Heineken?

PCS: I just don’t know why you would Beck’st a bottle of water! But please, feel free to send pictures of the next LaCroix you’re having. I know you love those.

DA: Now you look here, Mr. Big Shot, if I happen to like my water to have a golden glow to it, and its green bottle to cast a lovely green shadow, and if I’m secure enough in my masculinity to admit I like flowers, and nice arrangements, I think maybe you should just honor that and remember that some of us have feelings, and we don’t need to be pushed around by the big Associate Professor of Medicine with the American car, the big bully who always took the top spot on the podium. Sometimes our wives try to tease out our sensitive side by refusing to buy the IPAs we like, and so tonight it was either this Heineken or another 11.2 ounce 4.2% ABV Spanish thing. Oh, sure, you can stand in judgment, all high and mighty with your Deschutes Juicy Haze IPAs and your dual suspension mountain bike. Just kick a man when he’s down, would you? All injured and everything? Really? Does that make you feel powerful? I have to go. I think I’m starting to cry.

JL: I’m torn here. Because on the one hand I agree with PCS (as an aside, I decided against “Beck’st’ing” my white wine spritzer with a lime garnish tonight because I thought it was similarly against the rules). But on the other hand, denying a guy his Beck’st — especially when he’s injured and hurting [we assume] — seems cruel. In the end, however, I think this is a fair Beck’st, if only for the cute flower arrangement and the lovely table cloth, both of which (along with the dappled sunlight) evoke the ineffable redolence of a quaint European café — the sort of place where when you ordered, “une biere, s’il vous plait?”, they would bring you this pathetic ersatz ale, while sneering at you with that European contempt and superiority that only sweaty men from the continent, with their crisp white shirts and their glossy black hair, can muster. And even though the beer is lame and the service is perfunctory at best, it is served very cold (as evidenced by the drops of condensation languidly forming rivulets descending the emerald glass) and it is, at that moment, the best thing that you have ever tasted.

Epilogue

Did you notice that the last Beck’st in this chronological sequence made no reference to the pandemic? No inquiry about the next VPN? This was during that honeymoon period, post-vaccine but pre-Delta-variant. Alas, as we all know, that taste of unsheltered freedom was too good to last, so watch these pages for another post about Beck’sting through the pandemic…

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Portrait of the Young Cyclist: Part 4

Introduction

This post continues the tale, from my archives, of how I became a bike racer. In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, I described how my early infatuation with the sport led to actually participating; the disastrous results of that doomed effort; and, how even learning how to train failed to vault me to glory, with all my friends easily passing me by. In this post I describe my third season and how my minor triumphs were offset by more salt in the wounds (figurative and actual).

Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man – Part Four: Insult to Injury (written in February 2003)

As I described in my last post on this topic, after the 1982 Red Zinger Mini Classic I tried my hand at some USCF races and didn’t really get anywhere. The next year I decided it made sense to race the Mini Zinger again, even if my friends N— and J— had moved on to racing USCF all year. (To refresh your memory, they’d finished first and third, respectively, in the ’82 Mini Zinger, and cleaned up in USCF races for the rest of the season.) Frankly, their absence was part of the appeal: they wouldn’t be around to crush me again and rub my nose in it. (To be fair, I was pretty good at rubbing my own nose in it.) Besides, the Mini Zinger races seemed a bit better organized than the USCF ones. An added bonus is that in the less elite field I could learn some tactics. The 1982 races taught me that strength wasn’t enough and I had a lot to learn. It’s hard to do that when you’re off the back, so why would I want to race USCF all year?

Over the winter I borrowed $750 from my dad and bought N—’s “old” bike, a Mercian Colorado with full Campy. (He’d gotten the pro deal on a fancier Mercian, that matched his teammates’ bikes, and didn’t need this one anymore.) The color of my “new” bike was light brown, which they called “champagne pearl.” It was, more precisely, the color of a perfect young fawn. It was the prettiest bike I’ve ever had. I rode it for a few weeks and then (riding at night without a light) crashed it into a curb, ruining the frame. The down tube got rumpled, the head tube steepened, the top tube creased slightly. Even the fork was bent. I was inconsolable.

My brothers were really sympathetic and rallied around me in my despair. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Of course that’s not true. In fact they gave me endless crap, insisting that the frame was defective and I was a moron to have bought it in the first place. They contended that because the framebuilder had used pins to hold the tubes in place while brazing the frame, instead of using a jig for this purpose, that he’d introduced horrible strains into the structure that caused it to be inherently weak. (For some reason, we were all steeped in this kind of lore and knew for a fact that Mercians were pinned.)

My brothers teased me so much I finally wrote to Frank Berto, the technical guru at Bicycling magazine. I described the scenario in detail, mentioning my weight and size and the approximate speed of the impact, and how I hit the curb in a “perpendicular fashion” (I remember this phrase because I had to look up the spelling on “perpendicular”). Frank, or somebody on his staff, wrote me back directly, assuring me that the frame was not defective, that the pins are a widely accepted way of building a frame, and that any impact of that kind would bend any frame made of such lightweight tubing. The letter went on to praise my writing ability. “Sign that boy up!” he’d written.

Naturally this didn’t satisfy my brothers, who shifted their mockery to my letter, making up quotes like, “As I hit the curb, in an exactly perpendicularly fashion, my lightly muscled body slightly tense, a grimace on my perspiring face….” I guess they were paying me back for buying that Mercian in the first place. I had broken some unwritten rule by having a better bike than any of them did. In any case, I couldn’t borrow any more money from my dad to buy a new frame, so Geoff gave me a loan on the condition that he choose the make. He chose Miyata.

So in 1983 I had a Pro Miyata, which should have thrilled me except it was clearly inferior to the Mercian and I now owed money on two bikes. Still, I had to live up to such a cool bike, so I trained harder than ever, still riding with N— and J— much of the time. That year I made a couple of new friends, Spencer Crouch and Aaron Pickett-Heaps, and put together a Mini Zinger team with the two of them along with John Lynch, the good racer (and good friend) from my first year.

Here’s a photo of Spencer and me. I can’t recall what race this was. Look how great his jersey is. That thing I’m wearing? Not even a jersey. I think it may have been a pajama top. Also, note how suavely Spencer is posing for the camera. That didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I was still unaware that, as a teenager, I was supposed to look cool. Emotionally I think I was still like ten. I was just happy to be around. What an idiot.

Before the Red Zinger proper, the promoters held qualifying races to determine who’d be in Division 2 (the slower group) and who made Division 1. The first qualifier was the Kittredge Criterium, on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. I went into the race with high hopes, and for the first time ever, things seemed to fall into place. I got into a four-man breakaway and felt like I was the strongest guy in it. In fact, I started to believe I could actually win the race! Then, with just a few laps remaining, I suddenly didn’t feel so well and totally puked. The barf was bright red and went everywhere, scaring the crap out of my breakaway companions. You can see a smear of it on my lip in this photo. (That’s Spencer behind me.)

John and I had eaten a whole bunch of spaghetti for lunch, at his house, right before the race. The sauce was made with ground beef, which I never got at home, and I totally overate. We lost track of time and had to haul ass over to the race. At least we were warmed up, but it would have been great to have digested our food.

So … surprise, surprise, I did not win the race. You may be tempted to infer causality between the vomit and me losing, but there was none, or little. Granted, barfing was distracting, but I felt better afterward. To be honest, the winner, Allen Copeland if I recall correctly, beat me for no good reason. I think when it came down to it I just didn’t have the nerve to win. For someone stooped in failure, with an upbringing based on the cult of inadequacy, victory would have seemed like overreaching. All the same, I was thrilled with my first podium finish (even though, this being a prelim, they didn’t actually bring out the podium).

After that promising start, things got tough again. The more I rode with Aaron, the stronger he got. Same with Spencer, actually, and in fact he bet me $5 he’d beat me in the Mini Zinger. That seemed pretty cheeky because he’d just taken up the sport. But then, this was all par for the course.

So, on to the Mini Zinger. I don’t actually remember that much, other than the podium continued to elude me. Aaron had become super fast and was trading the race leader’s jersey back and forth with this kid named Kevin Smith. Going into the last stage, Aaron trailed by a few points (points being the basis for the Mini Zinger’s general classification, perhaps so a kid could crash out during a stage and start back up again the next day). This final stage was the National Bureau of Standards criterium, an 8-shaped course on a bit of a hill. Thrillingly, I got into a three-man breakaway with Kevin and Aaron, and we seemed destined to stay off. (Kids tended to give up pretty easily in those days, I’d noticed. Until this day, I’d always noticed this from the perspective of the one giving up.)

It started to rain, first soft and then hard. This didn’t bother us a bit, though it’d have bothered me if I’d known better. I’d punctured right before the race and borrowed a wheel from my brothers’ friend Dave Towle. Little did I he realize, he’d glued a track tire to it. That tire surely got great traction on a track, in a velodrome. In the wet? Not so much. Bombing a 90-degree turn on the descent I totally slid out. Game over, man!

I had the good sense to get out of the road before 50 guys ran me over, but then I foolishly slumped on my back on a wet lawn. Somebody summoned the race medics, who went straight to work assessing my injuries. A small crowd gathered, including my brothers, a course marshal, and (I seem to recall) my poor terrified mother, along with a few random spectators with a yen for schadenfreude. The medics seemed to overreact a bit, either because they’d been bored, or because they mistook my shivering for going into shock. Actually, I was just cold, because I was lying in wet grass and had about 2% body fat.

The medics cut my shorts open, which I came to learn is standard procedure for some reason, and as I lay on my back, with all these people looking down at me, I felt my unit fall out from under its flap of lycra so it was in plain view of everybody. I poked it back under there, and for some reason this seemed to my brothers to be damning evidence of my obviously faked injury. They figured that if I had the presence of mind to cover Raulo, I should have been able to get right back up on my bike and finish the race. I suppose a more heroic racer would have done just that, but frankly I was not that heroic racer. I was a thirteen-year-old kid, and it hurt to crash, and when the adults took control of the situation it didn’t occur to me to shrug anything off and get back in the race. I suppose I could have at least told everybody I was okay, but maybe it didn’t occur to me I was okay, at least not at the time.

I was ambulanced to the hospital, and at some point my dad materialized and sat next to my gurney in the ER, helping to fill out the insurance paperwork. He was remarkably cheerful, and he didn’t even take the opportunity to remind me that he’d warned us of this, that the chickens had come home to roost, that my own stupidity had done me in. [If you don’t recall it from Part 1, my brothers and I took up bike racing despite our father having forbidden it on the grounds that, as he put it, “You boys are too stupid to be bike racers. You’ll get yourselves killed.”]

Dad made light fun of the redundant and poorly conceived questions on the insurance form. The form could have simply given a place for the patient or his guardian to write a brief description of what happened, but instead tried to shoehorn him into shaping a narrative out of multiple-choice or short-answer questions. The one I remember best was something like, “Did you/patient encounter an impact with any object?” My dad asked whether I thought “the ground” was an appropriate response. I did. He wrote it down.

Then a doctor or nurse (heck, maybe it was an orderly) came and scrubbed my road rash with a toothbrush. Somewhere there is a photo of this, which would be very handy now because I remember the road-rash as having been the size of an orange. Perhaps I inflated it in the telling so that it became a grapefruit; in any case in my brothers’ telling it started out a tennis ball and in successive retellings became a plum, then a cherry, then a raisin. Ask them today and they’ll probably say I didn’t have any road rash at all. You should totally ask them … they’d love to tell you this story in their own words, especially the part about how I was obviously unscathed because I’d had the presence of mind to cover my male member when it flopped out in front of the hoards of disgusted spectators. I’d be delighted to learn what new, shocking details they’d add to the story now.

So, on the basis of that crash, I dropped from 4th or 5th overall in the Mini Zinger to 7th. I was pretty disappointed, having really thought the podium would be in reach. At least I did beat Spencer, who as you’ll recall had bet me $5 he’d beat me in the general classification. I spent the rest of the summer trying to get him to pay up. Eventually I had to settle for $2 and a little sunglasses leash. (He had an extra.)

But there’s a silver lining! The day after crashing out of that criterium, as I spent the day in bed convalescing, I decided to have lunch brought to me. One of my prizes for the Mini Zinger was a gift certificate at Quizno’s, good for lunch-for-two. I offered J— a free meal if he’d go fetch it. He borrowed my 3-speed and headed out. Well, he was gone a lot longer than I expected, and when he finally returned, he had road rash of his own; the Cokes were pretty much empty; our sandwiches were soaked. On the ride back, going pretty fast despite balancing our lunch (in its cardboard tray) on the handlebars, he’d run over a squirrel and totally stacked. While he was lying there in the bike path, the wind knocked out of him, some typically pro-animal Boulderite stopped to bawl him out for having maimed the squirrel. Shoot, did I say my cloudy Mini Zinger tale had a silver lining? More like pewter or even lead.

To be continued

Check back in a month or so for the thrilling finale: my brave return to the USCF circuit and how my ongoing mediocrity undermined my closest friendships.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—

E-mail me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

How To Report Your Bicycle Accident

Introduction

This post describes best practices for reporting your bicycle crash to your family. (This is not an emergency response protocol; that’s another matter entirely.)

Before we begin

In no way do I seek to mock, trivialize, or brush off the potential seriousness of bicycle accidents. Of course they can be pretty bad, as I know from painful experience. This guide concerns those crashes (the majority) where serious injury does not result.

(Levity aside, don’t mess around with head impacts. If your helmet touches the ground, somebody else needs to evaluate you, period. I have seen a concussed cyclist in complete denial, which isn’t a surprise given the fuzziness that can accompany head injury.)

One more thing. This post will make it seem like I crash my bike a lot. I don’t. I’ve been at this sport for almost 40 years, and have logged over 200,000 cycling miles, including more than 200 races. Of course I’ve had my share of accidents but in the words of the venerable Marshall Mathers, I’m “still alive and bitching.”

Okay, all that being out of the way, let’s continue.

Do you really need medical intervention?

First of all, if the medical establishment gets involved in your crash, you will have a lot harder time “controlling the narrative” (to quote a legendary cyclist/doper). So the issue of medical attention becomes something to manage as part of your notification protocol.

Sometimes a bike crash is frightening to an onlooker who naturally fears the worst, and summons more help than is necessary. I wiped out in a criterium back in 1983 and got some nasty road rash, but nothing more. Alas, it was raining, I was soaked, my body fat was minimal, and post-crash I was lying on a wet lawn, so I was shivering. Somebody took this for me going into shock. The race medic flew into action, cutting up my cycling shorts with those razor-like shears they carry. My johnson dangled out, and—looking up at all these spectators, two of my brothers included—I reached down and discreetly covered up. (My brothers teased me about this for years. Had I not made that adjustment, of course, I’d have been teased for being an exhibitionist.) I was carted away in an ambulance, which caused quite a sensation. At the awards banquet that evening (this having been the final day of a stage race), everyone seemed surprised to see me back on my feet already. The race director said, “I thought you’d broken your hip!”

Other than the johnson part, I confess I wasn’t much bothered by all the attention. That’s because I was only 14 and didn’t understand the emotional duress this episode caused my mom. (When my brother crashed in a race later that season and broke his wrist, she resolved never to attend a bike race again—and she never did.) My dad, of course, seemed to take my crash in stride. He was the one who accompanied me to the hospital, which I didn’t wonder at back then, but now realize is probably because my mom was too freaked to take part. My dad had to fill out this form explaining how the crash happened, and to the question, “List any object the bicyclist came into contact with,” he drolly wrote, “Pavement.”

Of course my brothers gave me no end of flack about the outrageous drama queen behavior I had employed just so I could ride in the ambulance. They chided me for the unnecessary financial burden I had inflicted upon the family just to gratify my narcissistic thirst for attention. They way they went on, you’d think I had Munchausen Syndrome. But they did have a point: if it’s possible, you should decide for yourself whether medical intervention is truly necessary. Any one of my brothers would have loved to clean out that road rash with a toothbrush at home, which would have been only slightly less efficient than the nylon brush used in the ER. One rule of thumb: without a head impact, and in the absence of any obvious sign that you need an X-ray, maybe you should just limp on home.

How to get home

Even if you do need medical attention, this does not always warrant an ambulance. Back in the late ’90s, I had a fairly dramatic crash on the Golden Gate Bridge. I was able to get a ride home from a work colleague (details are here), which was a lot better than having to call my wife. If you can possibly manage it, avoid phoning your spouse/other to ask for a ride home. Engaging him or her causes several problems. First, this non-trivial inconvenience doesn’t put you on the best footing for the other inconveniences your crash may cause later (e.g., extra laundry, excessive groaning or whining). Also, if your spouse/other comes to get you, he or she will have the entire drive to fear the worst, even if you’ve assured him or her that everything is fine. (As I’ll get to, that assurance is not always 100% accurate.) And, if your spouse/other has to leave work to fetch you, his or her colleagues will wonder and worry. It’s all so inefficient! By contrast, the colleague who picked me up got a good laugh out of it because my well-being had no bearing on his.

The idea here is to forestall your spouse/other’s knowledge of your crash as long as possible, so that she can see for herself that you’re fine before even knowing you crashed. After the Golden Gate Bridge incident, I needed stitches, but I waited for my wife to get home so we could go to the ER (on foot) together. I hid the gauze on my (seriously bleeding) chin by assuming a pensive pose, like I was stroking a goatee, while we had a 5-minute conversation. Only after this did I say, as if suddenly remembering, “Oh, hey—I took a little spill on my bike this evening and need to get a few stitches. You wanna come with me to the ER?”

After another crash, when my bike suffered a broken crankarm, I got a ride in a Samaritan’s pickup truck to the nearest train station. While riding home one-footed from the station near my house, I stopped at a bakery for pastries, so that by the time my wife realized I’d crashed, she’d already know I was well enough to run a gratuitous errand. In fact, I wasn’t totally fine—I’d cracked some ribs, though I didn’t learn this until later. Though it was a pretty high-speed crash, it left very few marks on me.

In another case, I crashed on a descent near Oakland and hitched a ride home in a a friendly motorist’s van, my bike being again unrideable. I came into the house through the garage, announced to my wife that I was home, and then on the way to the bathroom whispered to my young daughter, “Bring me the first-aid kit from the kitchen cabinet.” I managed not to howl in the shower while scrubbing out my road rash, but it was all for naught because my daughter, halfway down the stairs, yelled out, “Hey Dad, why do you need the first-aid kit?” I should have explained the tactic better.

In general I don’t mind hitching a ride with a motorist, as their willingness to help is generally a good indicator of trustworthiness. That said, if somebody hits you with his or her car and then offers you a ride, you might think twice. After all, if he or she could be drunk, stoned, crazy, or some combination of these.

Now, the rules are a bit different if you’re not yet an adult. The best case here is that you have a friend with a car who can drive you to the hospital and/or home. In 1986 I crashed in a criterium in Denver, and the race medic directed me to the nearest ER for a few chin stitches. (Actually, since I wasn’t yet 18, he recommended the local children’s hospital, which had a much shorter wait. Good call, that!) My friend Bill drove me in his Volvo wagon. Unfortunately, he was in such a hurry to get going, he started to drive before I was all the way in the car, and managed to run over my foot. D’oh!

If you’re not yet an adult and don’t have a friend with a car, your parents are pretty much the only option (unless you have a local aunt or uncle). In this case you’re bound to scare the crap out of your parent(s) if you don’t play it just right. So do not have somebody else call if you can possibly avoid it; that implies that you’re out cold or otherwise can’t talk. Make the call yourself but do not say, “Oh my God! I’ve  just been in a terrible bike wreck!” (I have heard this said, by a young rider who was plenty frightened but wasn’t actually injured.) If you’re conscious and able to talk, chances are you can manage some composure for the duration of a phone call. An ideal explanation, given in as calm a voice as possible, would be, “Hi [Mom/Dad]. How’s it going? [Wait for answer.] Cool. Well, hey, um, I’ve got a bit of a problem with my bike. Could you possibly give me a ride home? [Wait for inevitable questions.] Well, yeah, I took a bit of a spill on it. I’m totally fine … it’s just that my [wheel/whatever] is all out of whack. [Wait for more questions.] Oh, yeah, I’m perfectly fine. Maybe a bit of road rash. Nothing to worry about.”

My own daughter called me last Sunday and said, “Hi Dad. Is there any way you can come get me? I had a crash on the bike path and I can’t get my handlebars straightened out.” On the way to fetching her I was only mildly worried. (Her bars, I’d like to point out, were perfectly straight, at least by the time I got there.) I give my daughter a B+ for this performance. She’d have earned an A, except there was a bit of a quaver to her voice. (Don’t worry, she’s fine.)

If you do need an ambulance…

The hardest call you’d ever have to make would be, of course, the notification that you’re about to be hauled off in an ambulance and need your spouse/other to meet you at the hospital. All I can recommend here is to accentuate the positive. Try to sound as chipper as possible, and lead off with whatever good news you can. For example: “I’m pretty sure nothing is broken but somebody called an ambulance, so I guess I’ll go get checked out.” If something is broken, you might say something like, “I’ve taken a spill on my bike but you don’t need to worry—my head is totally fine. It looks like I might have a fracture of some kind, though, so they’re taking me in an ambulance for some X-rays.” Do whatever you can to insinuate that the medical industrial complex is overreacting (“as usual”). Of course this will still be alarming but it’s a fair bit better than, “Oh my God! I’ve just been in a terrible bike wreck!”

Reporting your kid’s accident

Reporting your kid’s accident to your spouse/other is, needless to say, especially delicate, particularly if (like me) you’re the reason your kid rides bikes so much. If you take your kid to a bike race, ensure in advance that the folks in the medical tent have your cell phone number on file as primary, not your spouse/other’s. This isn’t just more practical, but it avoids undue stress in the case of an accident. It’s a lot easier not to worry when you’re onsite and can evaluate your kid for yourself.

After my daughter’s recent bike path crash, I wasn’t sure what to say to my wife, and in the end I said nothing. My daughter and I just waited until my wife noticed the Tegaderm dressings on her daughter’s forearms. By this point, we’d all been home together for at least half an hour so our daughter was obviously fine. “What happened?” my wife asked. “Oh, I crashed on the Ohlone Greenway,” our daughter shrugged. “That’s too bad,” replied her mom.

That’s about your best case scenario right there … other than not crashing at all, of course.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--
For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.