Betwixt Two Worlds After The Crash

This week’s essay is for paid subscribers of this project. All free and paid subscribers are what make this whole project spin round. Paid subscriptions go to paying for web hosting, silly stickers, and materials for my weaving. Every other week, a free essay is available. If you want to read all my essays, a paid subscription gets you access to all the essays published as part of this projects. Thanks for caring enough to read and support. Your attention means the world to me.

I have been standing betwixt now for a whole month. It’s always the case that just when I feel like I have arrived in a moment or at an understanding that something jolts me off this fixed position I am mistaking for a refuge. Yeah, it’s one of those essays, another angsty bit of prose channeled from the depths of the aftermath of gettin’ hit by a driver not paying. I thought that rolling off that hood and landing on my own two feet and being able to yell at the driver like a feral gerbil demonstrated that I am fine. I thought that going back to the scene of where I was hit the next day and riding through the intersection proved that I would not be kept from my riding. Yet, circumstances would have it that I just needed to sit here and not feel very fine about how truly unsafe I am on a bike in a car-centric society re-designed in the 50s and 60s to allow distracted people to hurl themselves in steel exoskeletons toward their destinations.

It’s wild how hard I have worked to avoid that deeply humbling truth about riding in America. Sure, it took me 15 years of riding before I got hit, but this is just the truth of living and riding in the United States. You are just one distracted driver or autonomous driving vehicle malfunction away from being killed by the wheels of death. We all know of someone who is mangled or dead just from trying to ride their bike somewhere. Indeed, any day we ride could be the last day we ever get to pedal.

The irony of my situation is that the driver who hit me “really didn’t mean it.” As I was bopping around like a hamster on speed with all the adrenaline in my system the woman who hit me kept saying, “You know I didn’t hit you on purpose.” Ahh, thank you. I am so glad you didn’t hit me on purpose. Well, you still pulled at least 10 feet through a stop sign into a bike lane before stopping to see if you could proceed through oncoming traffic. As we well know, intentions don’t mean shit in such instances when you can’t be bothered to just stop at a stop sign and not t-bone a person riding a bike through a bike lane well behind the stop sign setback.

Their intentions are even less of interest given that they have not called once to check in on me. This person has no cell phone and no answering machine on their land line. I called once to give an update on the process. No one answered the phone and there was no way to leave a message. One would expect then that the onus is on them to call and check in on the process. Nope, no call. They just pummeled my soft body and pushed it right out their mind. They just kept right on living after shattering my sense of safety.

As one would expect, there are a lot of disappointments that getting hit has caused me, but this human failing has to be the one that has been the worst to handle. I have had to deal with a delay to my training for long distance riding. I have waited for a replacement rim to arrive so I can replace my broken wheel. I have had some minimal bodily injury that I have had to treat. Yet, this inability for the driver to just reach out to me and recognize they harmed me is probably the worst part of the whole process. Sigh. This is all nothing compared to the experience of the Gazans who are actively trying to evade, escape, and survive a genocide. I know its an incredible privilege to be even have the space to write an essay about getting hit by a driver while riding a bike. Both experiences, however, are united in that only more heartbreak is caused when people fail to see suffering and do anything to recognize or alleviate it.

So, here I stand somewhere in between getting hit and carrying on with my bike riding in a world on fire and ravaged with multiple active genocides. This place is one I am sure many people know. It’s this place where your resolve to carry forward with these tiny activities you enjoy is tested by a rather unfortunate series of events that pale in comparison to the problems facing other people around the globe. I could rush through these feelings I expressed above, but I would deprive myself of the real feelings of humility and mortality that come with being hit. I also could give up my dreams of riding to far away, pretty places from my front door without burning any dinosaur bones. Yet, I don’t want to do either.

I want to sit betwixt the world I lost and the one I am settling into. I am still coming to grips with the world that I lost where I didn’t have any fear on a bicycle and I would be up to riding nearly 80 miles in a day. As I still sit here on the weekend watching other folx ride brevets and go on pretty, long rides, it hurts to not be able to ride my bike while I wait for a new wheel. I am watching precious time tick by that I will never have back, a feeling only exacerbated by having a routine procedure discussion with my primary car doctor this week. Yet, this is the pain of settling into this new world after being hit by a driver. Even after my new wheel is done early next week, it will take a while to settle into this new world where one look down to my new wheel reminds me that all this could end in the snap of a finger.

I must accept that I will never be riding in the same world again. I won’t even be able to delude myself into not wearing a helmet. I won’t ever think about riding down that road again. Heck, I won’t forget how that driver left me hanging out to dry. Yet, soon enough, likely next weekend, I will be back on my crust lightning bolt on a new wheel with the majority of spring still ahead of me. I will be forever changed in my understanding of my fragility while cycling, but I still will be on a journey to savor the immense joy that comes from cycling to and through beautiful places from my front door. In this mission, I am inspired by the words of Benjamin Piovesan, a 90 - year old French cyclist who was featured in a short film created by his grandson, after he severely crashed decades earlier:

“But that (crash) did not make me stop cycling or slow me down. Cycling is, for me, first and foremost, a pleasure. Forcing it to get a physical or material result, no. Cycling brought me immense joy, because I went on rides I could only dream of doing seeing beautiful places.”

Hear! Hear! Benjamin. Yes, let’s be like Benjamin and carry on for the immense joy of pedaling to and through our dreams.

In all these revelations, I am reminded of the lyrics to Thursday’s song “Understanding in a Car Crash.” I, too, feel some deep understanding was knocked into me from getting hit. It was like I collided into some hard realities while careening across that hood. It’s a reminder of the immediacy of these sorts of small joys, despite all the work still to be done to save ourselves and all our brothers and sisters around the world. Getting hit was a reminder to seize these joys and hold them in my grubby, dirty little fingers with the awe of a toddler. Rickly pleads with the audience in the song, “I don’t want to feel this way forever, a dead letter returned to sender.” Yes, neither do it. I want to burn bright, passionate, and hot, careening off that hood and into that new world I spoke of above. I want to make the most of every single pedal stroke until my heart gives out from caring too deeply and trying too hard. That’s what I owe to the experience of getting hit. I hope you can find it in yourself to live that way too.

Thanks for being here, dear reader. I appreciate you seeing me in this processing work. I know I am always on a two to three week process lag as it relates to bad things that happen to me. This experience is no different. I am still feeling a lot of anxiety and gratitude. Stuff is still bubbling up to the surface. I am just trying to take it all as it comes and keep my heart aimed toward following my passions and dreams. I hope you are too as our college students show as a heartening example of how one can stand up for our Gazan brothers and sisters. Please, oh please, let all genocides end. Give money to people trying to survive starvation or trying to flea. Give your solidarity to encampments in your city. I know I am.

Until next time, dear reader,

James