The Art of Crashing

There is an old saying, ‘wounds heal, and chicks dig scars’ .Perhaps that alone is enough to convince me that accidents are not all that bad, really.

Accidents. Yeah I’ve had a few.

Mind you, ‘accident’ is a loaded term. It implies absolution of blame for all parties. The term that is currently p.c. is ‘incident’. How about ‘collision event’? or ‘catastrophic interaction’? For convention’s sake I will continue to use ‘accident’.

My most recent accident occurred on the exit lane onto Ann St from the Storey Bridge. Traffic sometimes gets really backed up here, but on this day it wasn’t too bad. There was only one car on front of me. What I didn’t see was the pedestrian on the zebra crossing, nor did I see the car slowing to a stop. I must have been dreaming to have missed that. The collision event involved me braking too late, slamming my front wheel into the rear bumper, flying through the air with the greatest of ease, briefly, and crashing to Earth. Fortunately I escaped any injury save that which was done to my pride. The girl on the crossing blamed herself, the elderly couple in the car looked concerned (I must have been upside down at the point at which I passed the driver’s right ear). But I knew the truth; I wasn’t watching, it was my fault.

Another one that springs to mind was the time I decided, for some reason, to ride from Calgary to Banff and back (about 135km each way). I was on the way back to Calgary. I was out of the mountains, the terrain could only be described as ‘featureless’, there was a persistent headwind. I was about 55km out of town, and I had shifted into a kind of dream state that only long hours in the saddle can induce.(I actually almost fell asleep whilst riding once).

Anyway, there were some stout fellows working on a fence. As they were the only thing to look at, I looked at them. In my dreamlike state I was hypnotised by them, drawn by them off my line and into the gravel, upon which I promptly fell over, cut my knee, cracked my helmet, and somehow managed to jam the shift lever halfway under my right thumb nail. Battered and bruised, again a shattered ego, I picked myself up, and determined to continue. Whilst untangling the gears and looking at the rear derailleur I then proceeded to run into the car of the nice lady who saw me fall and had stopped to help, and fell over onto the same knee. The most embarrassing part was that I knew the truth; I wasn’t watching, it was my fault.

Looking back on all those painful collisions of the body with the pavement (if I was lucky), I know the truth; I wasn’t watching, it was my fault.

This can be a useful thing to know. Recognising this is the first step in acting to change it. I tend to work on the assumption that no-one, given a choice between having and not having an accident, would choose the former. By extrapolation, this means that people will tend to act in a way that permits that choice, eg. by driving safely in consideration of all road users. In general this is indeed the case. In all the hundreds of thousands of cars I see every year, a remarkably small percentage of them have harassed, let alone injured me. To be fair, there is also a small percentage of drivers and pedestrians who go out of their way to be courteous.

Riding on the road is actually pretty safe, and an accident can teach you an important lesson. The trick is to learn the lesson, not ignore it. Most times the lesson is simply ‘Wake Up!’.