Crux

This is some truly rough writing about a scary bike crash and if that might be something that isn’t what you want to read, there you go. Or: further proof I’m bad with a leitmotif. Also I’m trying the Longreads trick - 15 min read (3100 words).

My friend Emmett, who is one of the people to rescue me down from Memorial Park in Red Wing, MN, used to race mountain bikes in North Carolina in college. He’s tall and strong and I have known him, in various iterations, for quite a long time. His racing pedigree includes downhill. Once we went together to bushwack through the park after a big storm, trying to ride, and I was so impressed at his quickness. My friend Cella, his wife, told me to keep an eye on him. Farming all day, small child, slick conditions.

The Wednesday he comes to my aid it is not slick, but dusty as hell, and about 84 degrees and a little humid, sunny. The rain comes down later when I am being driven across the river to the Cities.

What am I gonna do? I asked him.

He smiled. Maybe think about a full-face helmet.

-

At night after I finally get to the cities, to my best friend, to another best friend, to a sweet child, where I try and tell stories and stay awake and prove there is no TBI, I squint out one good eye on my phone and type in solo MTB crash alone reddit. I scroll down all the threads, read stories about ruptured spleens and crunched vertebrae and walking out to the trailhead and no 911 just calling the wife. I think they’re all men. They end with you just gotta get back on the horse.

Other things I look up:

when can you drink after a concussion

face fracture bike crash

alone bike crash what do

etc.

-

I know this reads as scattered and it is. I feel like I’ve regressed or become thin-skinned, literally a critter with a soft membrane and my shell has been gone. Which is funny because if you saw me, there’s not a scratch on me, other than my face. Bruises, yes. As for the shell, I lost the visor from my helmet. I think the EMT might still have it.

-

At some point I tell my friend Robbi, my friends’ mom who picked me up, It’s so ironic, isn’t it? Last night we talked about falls and trips and all that you can’t control.

I stopped at the farm before going into the Cities to spend time with my friend and her kiddo and all the East Lake sours I could drink and maybe some cheese curds and splash pads. From there it was supposed to be up Nort, Duluth or Cable maybe, then onto Houghton and my dear artist friend and her mural. Given a reason to visit The Farm, I always will. I longed to spend time talking and listening to music and working Pizza Tuesday and feeling the sun. 

We were walking back in from the field and Robbi started crying, thinking about it. Mostly what I said was, I know, I’m so sorry, it’s so fucking hard. But what can be done? we said. All life was meant ever-present dangers, even stepping from a step, or cutting a hand. I try and be careful, I said, out there. And anything could still happen.

Anything meaning not a fall or a deep cut or a flat tire in the woods. Anything meaning there is still something I cannot, or maybe never will, understand about my mind, or brain trapped in a skull, or things that have happened, and where they coil in a cold darkness. Where lately I would like to imagine that undulation of self-made possibilities has quietly shed itself out of some internal cavern, lost it’s firm lock on my present and future, and where I more simply could float through where I have gone like Proserpine into an underworld, and where I have come out. Because Proserpine always comes out. That is the story. That happens.

-

I get back to Chicago and ask B., You’ve had the bad crashes, right? What do you think I should do?

Oh yes, he laughs. I have fucked myself up. Watch out for the mood swings. If you have a minor concussion, you can go from so angry to just totally sad really quickly.

I want it to be mood swings. I want enough of those brain coils to have dissolved out and I will just swing back up to the point I was at earlier in the summer, slowly making it back out and finding a better way to be in the world. I want to be a person who has mood swings, instead of a person who when I get a sharp shock of happiness, I fear I will burn my life to the ground.

-

I have read people who go through stuff like I have bend towards risk, danger, thrills, things that touch livewires to each other somewhere inside. This could be true. With one of his Air Force paychecks, my pa bought an MG, a gun metal grey paint job, and then blasted over the West on roads without cops, 80 or 90 MPH.

And my grandad loved cars. When he died we found a speeding ticket given to my uncle in his desk drawer, the cop who caught him writing GOING 110!!! and my cousin and I laughed because whatever happened, my grandad must’ve been impressed. He kept cars curved with danger in and around, attaining, selling: Corvettes and Camaros and the perfect 68 Mustang.  My uncles did dumb shit: they made pill bottle bombs and lit the Oklahoma grass on fire, cruised around shining spotlights into cars on two lane roads. When my mom went to her high school reunion, she said there were only about 1/3rd of her class left. It is incredible they’re still alive.

But my grandad and uncle gave me taking aim at Dr. Peppers cans in the yard, or getting ice cream in the back of the truck, or riding top down in car after car. One summer he’d acquired a pair of dirtbikes and we took them out in the yard. Each of us went around after my grandad and uncle took a turn. They pointed out the shift and the clutch and let us go.

There was a slope at the end of the yard where I did not remember to slow and instead pushed faster, slid out with the bike on top of me. They bolted across the yard and checked to see I hadn’t burned my calves off from the exhaust. All I wanted was to get back on. Instead I went inside and had my grandma check me out. Don’t tell your mom.

Which was stupid because my mom crashed a minibike once, and a Ford Mustang once (booking it to band practice, of all things) and flew off to a fascist dictatorship for a Fulbright at 22. My sib used to jump off buildings, and flies through the air as a dancer.

I wrote something once about the close feelings of risk and chemistry, a theme on crush, about the summer I got my first fixie and how good it felt. I got the bike the summer before I lost my mind, but I try not to think about that. I sold the bike three years later to a girl training for a triathalon. By then I’d put it back to its road status. I’d started trying to mountain bike.

-

I have learned to fall, or to crash, many times, from horses, from climbing walls, and yes, from bikes. I think the goal is to push yourself away from whatever is dooming you and try as best you can to land. It’s not necessarily intuitive unless you’ve crashed and crashed and crashed, and fallen again and again, and even then, what makes the landing, not stuck at all, but then stuck, again, just stuck, what makes that better?

-

There are some things that are factual about the week I lost my mind and there are some things that only I will see and try and figure out their realness. I did cry for help, though.

I sat prostrate in the bathtub because the landlord turned off the water and I couldn’t find a shower to calm me down. I sang to myself some old songs and I tried to breathe and I called out something like a prayer or a for better angels, the best angel, to make something different.

I know this happened. And there’s no way to prove it other than finding the weird landlord brothers who renovated the house, turning off the water. Or there’s reaching out to find where my asks went. Some people believe in that, in asking your angels, or calling across a distance like what is beyond. I have always turned that offer down.

It is not that I would be broken hearted that my need for help had been abandoned, just that I do not wish for her to be in a between where I am speaking to her. If we are bestowed better angels, I want her to be in the beyond she deserved. When I tumbled into the house after the dirtbike tumble, she looked me over knew I’d be fine.

-

What’s a cry for help? This is the age of publicized small tragedies, of It’s Okay To Not Be Okay, of take a moment in your day to check in with someone, because the battles, because how to know. I’ve always thought Stoics and Spartans were pretty stupid. I am well aware that people born female seem to bear pain better than the alternative. 

The last time I got hit by a car on my bike (car vs. bike #4) I both spent most of my energy screaming at the shuttle bus driver who ran the stop sign into me. YOU COULD’VE KILLED SOMEBODY! YOU WOULD’VE KILLED A FUCKING KID! Because he could have as a small bus would’ve thrown a kid onto Shakopee.

Then I walked the last quarter mile to my stupid job at the stupid bike company. I should not have been surprised nobody cared. I got in my car (in the lot, because bike company commuting idiocy) and made a report at the police station. After the shock wore off I remembered crying because I was terrified I couldn’t go on a bike trip out West. That weekend I decided to do a bandit cross race with an open shirt, ate shit down a gravel hill, sprained my wrist.

In “Middlesex” the narrator writes, I live my own life and I nurse my own wounds. It’s not the best way to live. But it’s the way I am.

-

It is far better to land amongst those who can tend to wounds, like Emmett, and his mom Robbi, and my best friend Franny, and my dear friend Julia, all of us woven through work and blood and home. Among children who apparently do not care about how messed up your face is, because they will climb up onto the couch where you are quietly hoping arnica and calendula are working, and show you sticker books and tell you about their life. Robbi drove me back to Emmett’s farm as I cried quietly, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and she said, It’s an accident. The herbs worked and eventually I walked outside to look at my kid friend’s bike as he raced it around the dairy, out of my sight.

It also turned out one of the EMTs who appeared on the scene got his CSA (farm veggie box) from Emmett. In the ambulance he smiled and examined my helmet, suggested a warranty. The EMTs mountain biked themselves, they said. It was a trail that could sneak up on you, they reminded me. They’d been up there plenty in the ambulance, and eaten shit plenty themselves.

It happens. Where were you?

Southern Cross, I said.

When the EMT came to pick up his veggies from the farm he was surprised to see my car parked there. Carmen’s okay, Emmett told him. I shouldn’t talk about it, the EMT said, satisfied.

-

I wish I could keep up a leitmotif and make a broken thing more beautiful. As is you cannot see the Southern Cross in Minnesota. Once upon a time known to Dante, and Homer, and who else knows, but not visible to us here, now, a a small and bright set. Crux, what is is called, is visible throughout the southern hemisphere, for nomads and gauchos and sailors and anyone to orient themselves. You can look for help and there it will be. 

The night before the crash I am standing in the dark of the farm, after the dog goes walking down the road, after the dishes are done and the floor scrubbed, the people going home, the dishes done, the pizza eaten. I stare up into a waning moon, and there’s Polaris, and when my eyes adjust, some of the Perseids, and Via Lactea. So many long lost lighthouses or heroes blinking their aid, all around.

Nothing broke, probably. Two weeks out and my iris swirls out of blue and black and pink, but the yellow and green is gone.

-

I am trying to talk a lot when I get to the Cities, so if I start to slur or forget details, someone will take my skull to a hospital. It’s hard to see out of one eye, but turns out a 18-month old does not care. We play blocks on the ground, a game I enjoy. I build them up as fast as I can, and he shoves them down, laughing.

My friend takes my phone. I realized I’d been filming when I crashed because like all dumb bike people I wanted to capture if I had gotten a little air on the bike, going over a tiny hill, looking cool. It might show what actually happened, we think. I don’t think I can watch it.

Stay here and she disappears into another room. Up goes the blocks, down they go, laughing. She comes back out, frowning, not shaken but like something very sad.

You should not watch that, she says seriously. You should just delete it. I do.

-

What I think happened:

A trail I’ve ridden many times, a public park, a bike with a dropper post and big tires. I almost don’t go because I should get into town, but the bike calls, and I miss that park. I don’t eat anything- a piece of breakfast pizza with peaches, a donut from KwikTrip, some coffee, not enough water. I’m about 2/3rds of the way there. I get over the last section of doubletrack where the trail curves around, then down onto three little hills (“rollers”). I know this part well - I’ve used it for practicing pumping or trying to do little jumps. I put my phone on a stump, spin back up, then take back off around the corner to get speed.

The first one I am going fast, and the second one I’m going too fast and then I’m going in the wrong direction and the tree is right there and I can feel myself about to go over the bars and whatever instinct in me says do not slam your spine into a tree so I veer as hard as I can down to the right, down to the ground, instead.

I hit the dirt so hard my head spins and the handlebars slam up into my cheek and I can’t find my breath. I’m squeezing my eyes closed and then I’m sobbing and screaming and convinced there’s blood pouring down my face but it’s just sweat and I cannot get up, no matter how hard I try. I lay there for ten or fifteen minutes. There’s a whistle on my hydration pack that is on the ground but I don’t blow it. I am screaming help help help help. Eventually a runner and her dog make it down the trail and look ashen, asking if I need help. By this time I’m slowly drinking water and trying to eat a granola bar and have kicked the bike off. She doesn’t have her phone but she offers to go to her car and I say I’m fine thank you so much I’m ok I’m just really scared and tired and hungry. I get up and move so slowly up the trail because I’m dizzy and hot and I am so sad I will not get to see my friends and I need to stop crying because my eye is swelling shut and it’s so fucking hot. I run into two other runners I’d seen earlier and they, too, look concerned and ask about calling for help but I just ask if I’m going the right way to the parking lot and they say just follow us, it’s about a half mile. I push to the parking lot and open the door to my car and sit in the air conditioning. I call my friends to tell them what happened. Some park workers spot me and lean in, asking if I am okay, if I need an ambulance, and I say no, I just need to sit. Then the ambulance comes and my friends come and I start crying again.

You were so upset, my friend said after the video. Why did you keep saying you were so stupid?

-

I still feel stupid, despite telling the crash story over and over and having very smart people tell me it happens all the time. Despite looking up horror stories of poked spleens and busted ribs, I still feel like something is different.

Most things on a bike I do by myself these days. I think of taking my rigid basket bike around Tilden, bumping around the roots. I think of being alone in the Lolo National forest in Montana in 2020, completely alone, quietly moving through a burnt forest. Tuscon, the Ouachita Belle Star Trail, Colville. What could have happened.

It didn’t, I guess. But I’m not a big white guy in a truck or Forester, and I am not resentfully following along a partner or a group of people I don’t know. I live my own life, I nurse my own wounds.

I am stupid because I resent that I am facing the barrier to doing what I want. I am starting middle-age. I am alone, and I wouldn’t do it differently, but I probably can’t anymore. Or I have to figure out some other way. It could’ve happened anywhere, people say. But it happened where I could find help, out in the world. And there are many places I go where the help I am seeking is being alone.

Anne Sexton said, Oh, alright. I guess I’ll save myself. For there is no best way to live, no one way to find help. We all just have to keep calling, over and over again, and be ready to answer.