Impact (Wipeouts)

I remember playing tag with my brother, Gregg, when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I think he had a squirt gun and I was empty. I went bombing for the back door as fast as my little boy legs could propel me, aiming for the open doorway. As my nearly weightless steps reached the edge of the cement patio, I took a look over my shoulder to see how close my brother was. WHAM!!! My body bowled into the middle of the screen Mom had shut to keep the flies out. The nylon screen and aluminum frame absorbed some of the impact, but then threw me backwards onto the patio, flat on my butt! This was one of those cartoon-like moments that surely could win a prize with America’s Funniest Home Videos if it had been caught on tape. The not-so-funny part was that the top and one side of the screen had been ripped out. 

 The scary thing about running your fastest is that your momentum limits your maneuverability. It’s just like driving a car. The faster you go, the harder it is to stop or avoid something placed suddenly in your path. My friend Jon and I were going to a gym night, held in a gym just off our college campus. It was already dark and our friends were waiting for a van. Jon told me he knew how to get there, so we just took off running. We ran out the west side of the campus and into the woods. We were puffing hard by the time we jumped the fence onto a one-lane road. Jon led the way as we trotted over the road and into a parking lot. 

We began passing a couple hanger-like metal buildings, when I spotted the van turning onto the road we had just crossed. “Hey! We gotta beat them and then act like we’ve been here for awhile!” I yelled at Jon. We bolted from a brisk walk to our top sprinting speed. I got that feeling like my feet were barely touching the ground. I was a few feet behind Jon when we hit a water drainage dip in the pavement. 

Now, this is the only way I can describe the physics. The wide dip in the pavement was only a few inches deep, but my body’s forward momentum caused my right foot to miss contact with the ground, which was dropping away. This missed contact of one step, in turn meant that, for that one step, nothing prevented gravity from shifting the velocity of my body mass from forward to forward AND downward. As my body began to drop, still rocketing forward, my left foot dropped into the dip. Alas, my left leg was not fast enough or strong enough to resist the force of my momentum combined with gravity’s pull. It felt as if the pavement flipped up and smacked me as my legs were taken out behind me. My terrific speed hurled me into the pavement and I slid across its surface for about 3 body lengths before I finally stopped. 

 Now a fall like this is hard on clothes. I tore a huge hole in the shin of my pants, another hole in my jacket elbow, and sanded nearly all the brand label off the knife sheath on my belt. Fortunately, I didn’t hit my head and only lost a little skin off my leg and arm. Believe it or not, I was able to pick myself up and hobble to the gym before the van pulled up. There I was, standing casually and trying to control my heavy breathing… with large rips and holes in my clothes. 

 Bicycles are fun to ride, but they usually aren’t very forgiving if you’re going to be an idiot. Even reasonable caution won’t save you from a spill now and then. Think about it: The bike is a top heavy vehicle with two skinny wheels and an easily influenced steering system, and it’s capable of impressive speeds. What could go wrong? When I turned 18, I had my Giant Iguana mountain bike for about a year. After the Wal-mart brand bikes I had growing up, this was a VERY nice bike! It had a chrome-alloy frame, center-pull brakes, aluminum rims, 21 speeds, and clicking thumb shifters. It felt like driving a sports car after getting out of a lumbering SUV. 

 There I was jumping off the sidewalk and rolling down the steep lawn to a parking lot, when a female friend of mine called out from an upstairs window of the building next to me. I turned, saw the wave, and lifted my right hand off the handle bars to wave back. What happened next happened too fast for me to truly understand, but I’m sure that some malicious and mean spirited bump in the lawn took the opportunity to grab my bike tire and yank it and my handle bars sideways. The bike flipped, dumping me hard onto the parking lot. Fortunately, there was no car in the space where I was so brutally thrown. (I try to look at the bright side of these unfortunate events.) The pavement had yet another piece of my jacket for lunch. I recovered enough to push my bike off of me and look up at the window. My friend’s face had changed from a friendly smile to a horrified hand-over-mouth expression. I just shook my head. It doesn’t get much more humiliating than that! “Hey! How’s it goin’…” FWING!!! SPLAT!!!

 Two years later I was bombing down a forest trail on the same bike. Rather than wearing a helmet, like most intelligent bikers, I wore a baseball cap, sunglasses, and my Walkman headphones. My tires rolled smoothly on the packed dirt, and dappled sunlight touched the small branches reaching into the trail as I ducked and dogged them. It was a great day to be alive! 

Then I dug into a hard turn only to find that a stream spanned my immediate path. It took a fraction of a second for me to spot the 2x6 dropped over the 18-inch deep stream. I quickly aimed my front tire for the board. The bad news is: I was going too fast to line up with the board and my front tire dropped into the water, effectively stopping my bike while my body continued to fly forward. The good news is: In an attempt to protect my unprotected head, I tucked my chin hard and hunched my back as I flew over the handle bars, hoping to roll out of the wreck. 

Instead, I did a complete flip and landed on both feet on the opposite side of the 4 foot wide stream. I stood there stunned and processing what had just happened for a second or two. Then I reached for my hat. Still there. My shades? Still in place! My headphones? The music was still playing in my ears! I turned around and saw my bike lying in the swiftly moving water behind me. “Well,” I said to the trees around me, “that could have gone a lot worse!” 

 On another ride that year, I had peddled up a steep hill and was coasting fast down the opposite side. It was so steep I had to ride the brakes to control my speed. Suddenly another stream loomed ahead. This stream was about 8 feet wide and had cut 6 feet into the forest floor. Instead of a simple 2x6, someone had constructed a platform bridge. The first problem for me was that this platform was 2x4s nailed across a 2x4 frame and dropped across the creek. This meant I had to jump at least 5 inches to land on the bridge (instead of it stopping my front tire and sending me flying). The second problem was that I was headed down a steep hillside fast with no time to slow to a safe speed. 

Now we are back to physics. Any vehicle, bike or car, incurs something called weight transfer when brakes are applied. The slowing momentum causes the weight and pressure to shift toward front tires. When more of your weight shifts onto your front bicycle tire, it becomes even harder to jump or wheelie the bike. I was whizzing down a steep hill with the brakes on hard. My 20-year-old brain took all these issues into consideration in the half-second I had to react, and told me to yank on the handle bars and jump with my legs as hard as I possibly could. 

 I obeyed. Not only did I clear the lip of the platform, I cleared the entire bridge and launched, out of control, into the creek itself! My front tire caught on something and flipped the bike over sideways as I fell. A thick growth of blackberry vines softened my landing on the stones in the stream bed, but as the thorns tore into my back and arms, with my bike on top of me and pressing me down, I almost preferred to take my chances on the bare rocks! It was quite a task to extract myself from the sharp, thorny vines and climb out of the deep creek bed, pulling my bike behind. I was a little more cautious for the rest of that ride. Nothing like a combination of going too fast and trying too hard to ruin a good day! 

 The next little accident I’ll share knocked me unconscious for about 45 minutes, so I am filling in some parts my friends who were there told me. I was cleaning leaves from the gutters of our school cafeteria with a friend of mine. It so happened that we’d been instructed to clean the gutters just before our work education supervisor took off for an undisclosed destination. We had no ladder, so we used a tree which grew close to the lowest corner of the two story building, which was on a hillside. 

 It also happened that my friend, Tim, had left his jacket on the railing of the cafeteria entrance near our tree. As we were working, a certain girl who was flirting with Tim came along and grabbed his jacket. As she began to run away, Tim yelled at her to bring it back. Both of us headed for the tree to get down. I thought I had a chance to catch her and get the jacket back. I took a flying leap into the tree, landing on a branch with my feet and grasping another branch with my hands. Then I jumped down and forward to hang by my hands from a lower branch before dropping to the ground. Now, I had grown up playing in the woods, climbing trees, leaping streams, swinging on ropes… But, for all my experience with tree swinging, I was not Tarzan. 

The branch below was more down than forward, and when my hands caught it, my body swung around it so hard that my legs went horizontal on the opposite side of the branch. At this point, my fingers came off the branch and I fell horizontal from about 12 feet in the air to bounce off the sidewalk below. People watching said I twisted in the air and landed face down instead of on my back. 

 I woke up in a doctor’s exam room. My brain was struggling to function. The doctor was talking to me. “Where am I?” I interrupted. 

The doctor looked at me with a slightly puzzled expression. “You’re in the doctor's office.” 

“What am I doing here?” I asked. 

“You fell out of a tree.” 

“What was I doing up there?” I asked. 

The doctor shrugged, “Don’t know. Do you remember walking down here with me?” 

My jarred brain was still struggling. “Uh…. No.” 

The doc’s brow furrowed. “That means you’re still forgetting things as they happen. You walked in here with me without much assistance. What’s your name?” 

My brain struggled again, unsuccessfully. “Uh…” I didn’t know what else to say. 

 Slowly, everything started coming back to me. They had me lie down for a couple hours under observation. But I was alert enough that they let me go to eat supper in the cafeteria. The next day I had some very vivid flashbacks, and I didn’t remember some things I did the day before the accident, according to my friends. It was almost like the impact had erased most of my short term memories. I lost about a day and a half as far as I know. 

Fortunately, there was no permanent physical damage. The inside of my left cheek was shredded by my teeth, and my front ribs were a little sore for a few days, but other than that, I was fine. Again, that could have gone a lot worse. I believe my guardian angel was helping me just enough to keep me alive and still let me know I should be more careful.