My Allegorical Bike Ride That Actually Happened — narrative nonfiction with author audio
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I can see on my cycling app exactly where the wreck happened.
There’s a red line on a map that memorializes my movements, recorded by my phone’s GPS, and I can see clearly at the intersection of a neighborhood street and Kings Row the mostly perpendicular turn I made on my way out, but a drastically cut corner at the same spot on the way back — when I had the bike hard-over at speed.
I can see how far I had to pedal home with a separated shoulder after the wreck also.
But it’s not my wounded effort I’m impressed with as my eye follows the red line through a series of streets and parks. It’s something else — something that makes me wince in remembered pain and grave embarrassment that’s traced out by the app’s dispassionate rendering of what happened that day.
I can see by the timestamp that it was a Tuesday, at 10:30 in the morning. Not a normal time for an adult to be out riding for exercise. You’re supposed be at work, and there’s a hollow vibe to the world that lets you know you’re outside its expected rhythm.
I couldn’t even claim it was my lunch break at that hour, in reply to an imagined questioner my anxiety had summoned as I prepared to go — leaning out his car window to ask what exactly I was doing on a bicycle at that time.
But a Tuesday mid-morning’s sense of otherness fits perfectly into the strange-feeling events of that day — a sequence of encounters with five very different individuals so surreal and perfectly representational as to have walked out from the wilderness of some forgotten culture’s folktale and into a modern-day allegory.
But they weren’t talking foxes, or mystical elders. These were real people, living their own sacred lives. And all five episodes actually happened.
I woke up late that day, but decided I needed to get a ride in anyway — desperately hoping it’d overwhelm my chronic insomnia later that night.
Not sleeping is so ruinous to every other part of life that if I can exercise, I really must. Besides, they say aerobic workouts are as effective as anti-depressants, and serotonin reuptake inhibitors make my heart palpitate anyway.
But instead of congratulating myself for showing up and getting out there in the name of my well-being, I legged my left cycling shoe over the invisible safety laser as the garage door rumbled closed just above me, threw my right leg over the bike, and pressed the “Start” button on my GPS cycling app with a sense of barely met obligation.
“If you don’t ride your bike for your insomnia, for your depression — to lose some damn weight for that matter,” a voice inside me said, “ — you’ve failed. Failed to do even one useful thing with this day.”
It’s a shame because I really enjoy riding the bike. That self-critical voice born out of survival sullies things that are good for me, and that I like to do.
I pedaled through the neighborhood. Watched 1960’s Brady Bunch home stock with old growth trees, yield to acres of new construction — set behind small saplings supported by stakes since they can’t hold their heads up yet — the decades-old oaks and elms having been cleared away for the sake of efficiency.
This is the northern frontier of metro Dallas’s suburban consumption of farm and ranch land in the name of everyone having a media room.
It’s gone on for so long now, and reached so far north, that Dallas isn’t even a thought very often up here.
But I’m headed just past the boundary of where the new wilderness of urban sprawl meets the old one — unspoiled land. And into the trafficless country roads of the previous era that are a cyclist’s dream.
Paved, but quiet. Fields of sunflowers for miles down one side — the littler sunflowers, that grow in clumps, but still. Mostly woods on the other side.
Within those woods, at a certain spot, there’s a hidden herd of cattle in among the trees. I’ve stopped down a couple times to take some pictures, such is their beauty glimpsed between the leaves and bushes. And peering through twin rusted rows of barbed wire, gotten a sense also of their impressive size and quiet mistrust of proximate strangers.
There’s an abandoned rail-yard after a turn, and a huge obsolete radio tower in a field also.
It’s a particular kind of the poetry of Texas that’s found on Hartlee Field Road.
But to reach it, I have to pedal a couple of treacherous minutes on Kings Row, a busy one-lane-each-way shoulderless street where drivers often go double the speed limit without a thought.
And beyond that, make the final crossing at Loop 288, a six-lane beast that’s murdered several vulnerable road users in recent years.
All out of neighborhood streets, I wait patiently ’til there are no cars in sight and turn hard right out onto Kings Row.
I climb with everything I have up and around a short, steep, blind-turning ascent.
Clicking through my front and rear gears with both hands, I now pedal down a curving drop toward a waiting red light at the intersection.
I stand looking out at the hybrid monster — Loop 288. Head of a surface street, with turn lanes and traffic signals, but with the thrashing tail and reckless speeds of a modern highway.
It is the last, vast obstacle between me and cycling bliss. A river of harried, cell-phone-gazing, furious-with-the-fact-that-they’re-driving carnivores who I’d otherwise know as my neighbors.
I’ve picked up a car behind me at the light, but still wait a few seconds once it goes green because vehicles regularly bomb down through the lights way after they glow red — accelerating from already intense speeds to keep from having their bodies controlled by some automated authority.
No cars bombing, and I mash the pedals hard. There’s no walk/don’t walk illuminated pedestrian signal on the other side. No thought in the brief timing of the green light of anything other than 200 horse power cruising through with ease.
It’s a race for my life and when I glance down into the discreet mirror that’s mounted to the bottom of my drop bars, I see the car behind me start to close down the buffer it’d been affording for the first half of the crossing.
Made it! and Loop 288’s now safely confined within that same small mirror, but the tailing driver roars past me impatiently in an outburst of frustration at having been held back and physically controlled by the slowness of my legs pushing the gears that turn the wheels of my bike.
Thirty-one hundred pounds of steel rip past me in a clear expression of, “You’re not the boss of me!”
Cruising easily now past the empty lot of the Nazarene church on my right. Around a bend, a small grade school passes on the left. And then, into clear cycling.
There are some bumps in the road to be avoided — a spot where the paver that made this street burped out extra asphalt, leaving a relief map of the Himalayas in the right third of the right side of the road. The little mountain-range reliefs are big enough to be a problem if you hit them, and I always notice them at the last second, and always manage to avoid them, and it always gives me a little thrill.
Up gentle rises and around corners and now down, picking up speed and pedaling hard when I do, because the GPS app on my phone, mounted to the bike’s head tube will tell me later what my fastest speed was, and I love seeing it up around 30.
And my bike feels like an ice skate, as it has recently. I’ve been opening up to its possibilities.
It’s a nice bike, and I’ve been learning how far over on its side I can get it — beginning to trust it, and to embrace my refound sense of counterbalance.
And my legs have gained real fitness recently, and it rained a day or two ago, but that’s pretty much gone now, and the curves are gentle enough that I’m not much over on my side like when I used to be good at skiing.
But the bike is not a ski. It’s an ice skate. A single skate, like when an olympian has one leg off the ground, carving vectors through the ice with all their weight balanced beautifully on the one blade.
I glide down the long straight-away of Hartlee Field Road, the woods passing on my left.
I catch only a glimpse of large black-and-white patches of cowhide through the thicket. No other indication of the herd of great beasts secreted only a few yards away.
No cars. No people. No sounds those things make. And I approach Cooper Creek Road and wonder if this is where I turn off.
I’ve ridden this circuit enough times to know, but I tend to dissociate on the bike — zone out, and directions by street names instead of landmarks become difficult for me.
I take my chances and turn down Cooper Creek.
A long straight section through cultivated fields I’ve never seen anyone cultivating and then into some playful zigzag turns.
Still an absence of cars. Or anyone. Just the crops and me and my bike and some birds scattered in the sky. How long would it be before someone noticed if I were incapacitated somehow? There’s the sound only of the wind and of my tires rolling over the pavement.
There’s no shoulder on Cooper Creek Road. Just a steep drop-off into a ditch.
Around a bend, and now I see a barbed-wire fence running the ridge atop a steep slope along the left side that I do recognize.
“I’m definitely on the right road,” I think, and that ill ease of being vaguely lost that’s my frequent companion abates.
I see the spot where I once threw a half-eaten banana from my bike, with the justification that it would biodegrade. I couldn’t have believed that excuse, though, because I head-checked right and left to make sure no one would spot me littering.
I glare down into the light-gobbling ditch to check if the banana’s still there, but find nothing as I pass. It’s clearly dissolved back into the Earth already, just as I’d thought.
Around the corner and onto a short straight stretch, I can see a bicycle up ahead. It’s an older mountain-bike. A big box-store kind of bike, with a thoughtless paint-job and overly knobby tires.
It’s lying in the grass on the steep slope up the left side of the road, below the barbed wire. But what is it doing here?
The turns through which I entered this stretch, and the ones just ahead, isolate this little chunk of Cooper Creek Road — cut it off from its already lonesome run away from Hartlee Field.
The bike’s owner comes into view now. Stretched out on the sloping ground in a careless way, just like his ride, he seems unaware of my entry into this roadway glade.
The wind blows and I stop pedaling, just gliding now. The trees lining the ditch on my right rustle with the breeze, as does the tall grass beyond the barbed wire to my left.
The freehub on my rear wheel clicks away with the cessation of me pedaling, and the cyclist is up at the waist now, alerted.
Early 30’s maybe, he’s wearing an old baseball hat, distressed jeans and a t-shirt.
He’s responding to my arrival, but he makes no eye-contact. Looks up the hill instead, somewhat nervously, past his own forehead along the steep slope and out over the barbed wire.
I don’t ask if he’s okay, because the whole situation has an odd feel to it. Suddenly I don’t want to be here — am overwhelmed with a disturbed feeling of wanting to be anywhere else.
I fire the afterburners through the series of turns that take me out the other side of the glade and into a gently undulating stretch of road.
What was he doing there? Resting after a crash? No. Definitely not.
When I came around the turn, there was the feeling that he’d been caught out. That I’d discovered him in the middle of something distinctly prurient. He was ashamed.
He’d pushed his eyes up the hill rather than make even glancing contact with another human being. Yet the gesture wasn’t aimed at me, but at himself. Like he was un-personing himself.
I turn the next bend to the right, pushing my weight down through my left pedal.
The little world of that straight spot clearing is behind me, but its strangeness is dissipating only in half-lives. I can’t shake that I should have at least offered help, and didn’t, despite the awful vibe. Did I fail to render aid based on the cycling castes?
There are luxury cyclists, like me, who own a car, but who choose to ride a bike because they enjoy it, it’s good exercise, or they want to cut down on carbon emissions or something. But there are also necessity cyclists, who rely on a bike as their primary mode of transportation.
I regularly see folks out on the road with plastic grocery bags hanging by the loops from their handle bars. These are necessity cyclists. Luxury cyclists would have panniers, or an adorable mounted basket. The guy lying on the slope seemed to be beside his primary transport.
But I also didn’t stop to ask because I’ve been agoraphobic in the time leading up to this ride. I am all the time now, really. It’s become harder and harder to reach out to others, the more authentic my reality becomes.
I know — how agoraphobic could I be, out riding a bike in the world?
It’s not haven’t-left-the-apartment-or-bathed-in-weeks, (I’ve been there) but it isn’t fun either. There’s a veil over everything for a while now. A tamping down of me.
I convince myself that it would be the right thing to do to circle back and check on the young man. It’s a gesture cyclists do for one another all the time. I was on the receiving end a few weeks ago, in fact, right on Hartlee Field, when a couple of skin-suiters kindly asked if I was okay while I was stopped.
“Just fueling,” I said, holding up a bar I was eating. They smiled and pedaled away. But, as in that example, it’s a courtesy usually offered between luxury cyclists.
So I decide to break the castes. I turn quickly and head back through the bends.
“You alright?” I ask, thinking I’m being super-magnanimous, but as I cruise past, the guy scrambles to collect his bike, eyes to the ground, and I can confirm now that my presence is unwelcome.
He throws himself onto his bike with a kind of scurrying shame that, as a man, I instantly recognize.
Oh crap. This dude was masturbating — or something.
Whatever it was, it was sexualized. I’d be tempted to say he has nowhere else to be, but I can feel that the chance of being caught was part of it for him.
I know it from my own life, but even more from growing up the son of a predator.
The young man pedals away down Cooper Creek Road in his jeans and makes a right on Silver Dome, which eventually rejoins Kings Row at the grade school.
And that sucks, because I’m headed back in that direction now, and it’s my route too. And I can already see that my pace on the bike will overtake his fairly quickly.
I decide to get it over with, and push down on the pedals and pull up also with the clips that connect my feet to the bike.
Alongside now, I turn my head just slightly toward the guy, who rides upright while I’m hunched over the hoods protruding from my drop bars.
But before my gaze comes anywhere near the outer edge of his peripheral vision, he’s dead ahead with his eyes, in fully zoned-out I-want-no-human-contact zombie mode. He’s feigning annoyed somewhere in the deep background, but the sides of his eyes are trembling red.
And it’s fine that he’s pushing out my existence and negating me by force, because I’m certain of my earlier impression now — and I think that the contact would stain me in just this moment of where he’s at.
I push up the little hills on Silver Dome that work the front part of my thighs to a burn and turn out back out onto Kings Row. The grade school goes by on my right and the Nazarene church on my left this time.
I am rejoining the world of traffic.
I descend quickly toward the great intersection with Loop 288, and I check my mirror and see that I’ve picked up a tail.
The car behind me is an SUV and it’s giving a decent cushion.
If drivers had a true understanding of the speeds that feel “slow” to them — how blinding fast 40 mph is on a bike; how impossibly fast 40 mph would feel running; how fast 40 mph actually is — and of the real possibility of maiming or murdering one of their neighbors, they’d give cyclists an extra couple car lengths.
This SUV isn’t true-understanding-of-40-mph back, but I give them credit as they’ve left a gap, because an American driver is never more frustrated than when they’re impeded from speeding up to a red light they know they’ll have to wait at anyway.
I slow a little and unclip my right shoe from its pedal so I’ll have something to land on when I stop, then click into an easy gear so I’ll be ready to start from zero at the light.
Waiting at the red now, and the cars and trucks in the distant lanes, on the other side of the divide, are bombing down the hill so fast that their tires make the tie fighter sound from Star Wars.
A clump of cars in the near lanes are off in the distance to my left.
Closer, and I can make out a driver with both hands on the wheel, half-squinting through her glasses and speeding up as she climbs the hill. Her companions in the other lanes and behind match her increase, arrayed like a disorganized formation of poorly-conceived fighter jets.
I realize we’ve been stopped for a while at the perpendicular and I sense that there’s a greater buildup of vehicles behind me than normal, so I consider turning on my heels and twisting my body across the bike in an athletically confident way that announces to all the drivers behind me that a middle-aged, semi-serious cyclist is ahead of them, so give deference, but the light could change at any moment, and this intersection is a sprint for your life, and the only thing that frustrates an American driver more than being impeded from speeding up to a red light they know they’ll have to stop at anyway is being impeded from getting quick off the line after an annoyingly long one — which is guaranteed because I’m on a bicycle — so I keep my eyes and torso forward.
Green, and I’m out into the Loop 288 crossing with a less-than-adequate check of red-light-runners on a road that’s been serial killing vulnerable users lately, but I get lucky.
I put everything I have into my get-off because, given my age, lack of skin suit, and lack of Tour-de-France-physique, I’ve noticed that drivers often respond to my compensatory good push with, “Okay, this isn’t as bad as I thought. This dude’s a semi-serious, middle-aged cyclist. I should give some deference.”
Halfway across 288, a wall of cars is held back to my right and left by nothing more than a few lightbulbs, like the Israelites miraculously walking the floor of the Red Sea.
Only, I’m crossing back into Egypt for some reason — and I look around for a millisecond and think, “My God. This is its width? It’s so much larger than it looks.”
I can feel a vehicle behind me, but I don’t look down into the mirror, because I’m head-up pedaling and I can’t afford the loss of power and balance that’d take, and I sense that maybe it’s turned off — made a left — anyway.
Just like that I’m across, and the divided-lane, Red-Sea-plied-by-tie-fighters with squinting spectacled drivers releases back to death-speeds behind me.
But I’m on the Kings Row steep climb now, trying to crest as quick as possible — the reverse of the controlled descent I made on the way in.
Two or three cars are behind me, but I can’t clear because there’s no shoulder and a blind turn at the top of the hill.
Even if I went to the edge, any passers would need to take part of the oncoming lane, so I stay in the middle.
I make the top and round the turn, then nose over into the downhill at a good clip.
The little neighborhood street at a perpendicular left is only a few hundred yards away, but the driver immediately behind me’s become dangerously aggressive.
This guy’s tailgating like I was in a car.
He’s inches off my back tire and revving to get there. This is scary.
I can feel that it’s like a truck, or maybe a van, by the sound of the engine and the sense of a short nose. This is the angriest driver I’ve encountered on the bike, and I understand very well the source of his rage.
In his mind, I’m telling him to go much slower than he’d like to be going. No, I’m forcing him to go slower — in his mind. This, for him, is having his body controlled by someone else against his will. It’s like being put in handcuffs, or tied up — or pinned to the ground. He’s being violated — in a certain part of his mind.
And I’m doing it to him on purpose — because I’m on a bicycle.
But just now I’m not concerned with what’s going on in his mind. I’m fully focused on keeping the bike upright and getting off of Kings Row and away from the most threatening road rage I’ll likely ever face.
I think to look in my mirror, but there’s no way. I can feel the heat of the engine, the van is so close. If I slow down at all it’ll make contact and knock me off the bike. It won’t have time to stop and I’ll be run over and likely killed.
I need my ice skate to do its thing.
A hundred-and-fifty yards to the turnoff and safety. There’s no one coming the other way — and if I had time to think I’d just zip into the oncoming lane and stop the bike calmly where no tailing car can credibly go.
But it’s just not in my mind to go the wrong way on a two-lane street, and I’ve been hard turning so well on my ice skate that I’m not real worried about making it, though doing so at 30 mph is a bit hectic for me.
But anything is better than getting knocked to the ground by this van, then rolling around its undercarriage.
Hard over and I’m turning. The van roars pent-up frustration the second I’m a centimeter clear. I hear it — and the cars trailing — accelerate through my perpendicular as I lean the bike.
Over on my side — like a skater on the blade’s edge — I’m zipping through a puddle left over from the rain that I pay no mind because my tires have handled deeper ones no problem. But not this time.
I contact the puddle and the bike is out from under me. It’s gone. There’s no instant of attempted recovery, no panicked wobble before losing control. It’s on its way immediately. Off on a vector different than mine, once my shoes unclip from the pedals automatically at impact.
The bike skids away at something less than 30 miles per hour. And before the full weight of my body at the full force of my speed hits the ground, the thought glides easily through my mind in a millisecond that I’m glad I wrecked on the left side of the bicycle — the non-drive-train side.
It’s an absurd thought, but the derailleur, cassette, and chainrings won’t be damaged this way, and I love my bike. It centers me when I’m dissociated. It is my yoga mat and my anti-depressant. It’s my Ambien and one of the only really nice things I’ve ever bought that I felt okay about owning.
It means a lot that I don’t disqualify myself from having this beautiful bike. It cost about $1,500 and we couldn’t really afford it, but we bought it the way we would’ve figured out how to pay for me to go to therapy, or to the doctor.
We still gnash our teeth sometimes about the expense though. Maybe because a bike can be thought of as a toy. Maybe because bicycles are a child’s way of moving through the world. Maybe we’re uncomfortable putting that child part of ourselves out on the streets for anyone to see.
The weight of my body lands hard on my left shoulder and my helmet hits the ground and crunches across the small rocks and tar that make up the pavement.
From my side, I can see the bike over by the curb, viewed across the same plane of existence — of the wounded.
I’m nearly in the middle of the street, a little to the right, and am immediately preoccupied with this.
If a car turns off of King’s Row, it might not see me down here.
I wince and think, “Oh boy. I can’t do it. I can’t get to my feet right now.” It’s obvious that I can’t.
The shoulder pain swells in volume as my awareness just starts coming back online. I’m pretty amazed at how much it hurts.
Ahh! I turn onto my right side to get my weight off it, and to face any car that might come at me from Kings Row.
My left glove is shredded, though I don’t remember getting my hand out at all.
And now I hear a vehicle approaching. Down the right lane of Kings Row and slowing to turn.
I can’t get up yet. It’s not gonna happen. I’m helpless.
But there’s an audible hesitation in the vehicle’s approach. This person knows I’m there before they see me. They witnessed the crash. It has the same character of sound that a wrecker has when it pulls up to a scene it’s been called to.
As its tires grind against the tarmac to turn, I have no doubt that this is the van that pushed me into the wreck. And I can also sense that its driver is angry still.
White and commercial, it’s a telecom van.
I used to drive 15 passenger vans for work all the time, and there’s a way of handling a snub-nosed vehicle that’s aware of how little clearance they need.
This guy uses that knowledge to lurch to a stop just in front of me, under the pretext of cordoning me off from traffic. The thing heaves to a halt within about a foot of my head.
His shoes hit the pavement. The motor’s still running. I feel the heat coming off it and smell the engine for the second time today. The pain in my shoulder’s still debilitating for the next several minutes.
“Need any help?” he asks.
And it’d be a fine thing to ask. The “right” thing, we can all agree. But it’s said in an aggressive tone. Restrained, but said with the same unspoken frustration he drives with.
Curt and percussive. No mention of seeing me wreck. No mention of having been immediately behind me. But the timing it’d take to swing back around is just right.
This is the van. This is the guy. And he’s come to accuse me.
He’s come knowing he should be his brother’s keeper, but searching for a way to express that what happened was my fault.
That I shouldn’t have taken the whole lane and impeded his day by 25 seconds, and fuck fucking cyclists anyway, holier-than-thou motherfuckers, and I’m sick of fucking taking it from you fucking assholes.
He cannot wait to say these things. They’re pent up behind his last remaining pretensions to civility.
“No thanks,” I say, not making much eye contact. But not, not making any. Not provoking. I want this man to leave.
“Want me to call somebody?” he asks in an obligatory way. Teeth still clinched.
“I have a phone,” I say, clearly in pain. I’m up at the waist now, sitting, thank God.
He can see that I’m seriously injured. I look over to my bike wincing. Everything about how I’m behaving is getting on with the initial moments of recovery — not calling him out for what he did, not threatening to sue, simply someone in the middle of something, non-personally rejecting his presence, which is a genuine source of concern. Less immediately violent, but much more dangerous than when we were in anonymous motion on the road.
I’ve absorbed a lot of rage in my life in the worst kinds of ways, and it’s made me focus on ending such encounters as quickly as I can, if that’s possible.
The driver’s antsy now. Expected me to lash out, so he could fire back.
But that isn’t here, so his guilt at not being his brother’s keeper when it would have mattered — when he was the vehicle behind me for those 25 seconds when he was raging at me — creeps in. And he quickly snuffs it out like fingers on a match.
“O.K.” he says. And there it is fully. It’s a short, sharp “O.K.” full of frustration and rage. Said with the bite of when we say, “O.K., fine. I’ll go!” before we storm out and slam the door behind us.
He scrambles into the van in a mix of anger and emerging awareness that there will be medical bills, and that he hasn’t admitted to anything at all and I haven’t called him out, or written down a plate, or asked for his insurance, and that for the next couple minutes I flat won’t be able to.
And in awareness also that he only turned back, against his own interests of getting away with it, because deep down somewhere we all know that we are our siblings’ keepers and any nascent acknowledgement of his culpability that way infuriates him, so his victim must be raged at once more for having been victimized and embodying his guilt now, or why would he have turned back at all?
The van executes a quick k-turn within a few feet of my body, leaving me sitting in the road, the shoulder pain vibrating through my entire left side now, my face pinching down on it now that I’m free to, and thank God he’s gone.
I lift the back wheel and push one of the pedals. It spins.
One of the hoods is crunched, but the bike’s working fine. Man, that thing got away from me in a hurry and saved itself.
I unclip the phone from its mount and call my best friend. I get her voicemail and immediately call again, because two missed calls means call back right away.
Pedaling now and wow, I hadn’t felt the full sensation specific to the shoulder. Holy cow that is some serious pain.
“You have to go to a doctor this time, Jim. You might have broken something,” I tell myself.
“I know we’ve got to see a doctor this time, there’s no getting out of that,” I respond.
I cross Windsor Street without a headcheck or even a glance into my mirror because I only really care about getting home, because I can’t tolerate the thought of going to an urgent care in these clothes, because even though I’m not in a skinsuit, they still cling way too close to my body and I can’t stand the idea of being in them anywhere except when they’re disguised by being hunched over on the bike.
I turn into the first of two small, connected parks, with a nice bike path running through, that’ll get me closer to the house.
Past a basketball court on my right, then some tennis courts on my left. Tree-lined and peaceful.
The bike’s as quiet as it ever was. Its only sound the soft “whoosh” of the tires contacting the path. It’s an ice-skate, on a pond in the woods from a scene on a greeting card.
A pretty wooden foot-bridge on my right arches over a little creek as the ice skate curves gently along the path.
I hear some birds and they’re soft, calming.
The hectic world has faded. The only sounds are natural sounds. The only sensations are gentle ones.
Up ahead, I can see the park’s boundary. Through an interrupting street a little zebra crossing connects the end of the bike path in this park to the beginning of it in the next one. A link. The stripes in the crossing are faded, but they’re there.
Before that, though, I’m surprised to see that the very last piece of the path I’m on is missing. Torn away. Fifty feet or so of clumpy, rough dirt in its place. The kind of difficult terrain the Mars Rover was built to handle.
Some manner of construction has been going on here for a while, but I’d assumed it’d be done by now.
Earth movers are parked either side of the little street that runs between the parks, though they appear abandoned — no workers around at all.
Three enormous circular sections of concrete drainage pipe lay strewn near the end of the path like a Donald Judd installation was being put in.
But my attention doesn’t stay with any of these things.
It’s focused instead on a figure where the passable part of the bike path ends — the spot where the smooth concrete gives way to mid-construction chaos.
A young woman is standing there — motionless. Looking out ahead in the opposite direction of my approach. Almost like she was frozen.
She’s perfectly quiet. Not looking at a phone. No earbuds in. Just staring out, stock-still, straight up and down. And she’s standing over a bicycle. As though she can go not an inch further without the path.
She takes no notice of my arrival at all. How long has she been here like this?
Her bike has a dropped top tube — in the step-through style. It’s good-looking. Hip, retro. Sea-foam green paint with a wide tan leather saddle and matching bar ends. Its fenders enhance the look of the whole thing.
Both of the young woman’s feet are on the ground, either side of this attractive bicycle. The lower half of her body a triangle, bisected by the bike.
I slow gradually and notice she’s wearing a POC helmet. A brand with deep-socket vents that has a solid look, nearly like a skate helmet, with stylish colors — this one a very cool shade of blue. But the head in the helmet still hasn’t budged.
If I weren’t preoccupied with my injury, and the encounter weren’t so very unusual, maybe I’d have recognized this kind of waking catatonia. I’ve spent enough of my life in it. But, as things are, I don’t.
My bike is so quiet that she hasn’t heard me, so I click my break handles loudly as I come to a stop a safe distance from her, to gently let her know that I’m here without hollering.
I dismount — throw my leg over and give my frame a little rattle because the brake clicks didn’t get it done.
Still no motion though. Just looking out. Like someone’s put some spell on her. Her body position saying only “Huh, the path stopped,” in perpetuity.
“Chu-hu,” I clear my throat just a little, trying not to be jarring, and her trance breaks and she spins around, quickly pulling her leg through the shallow frame, steadying the bike by its saddle.
And now there are eyes beneath the brim of the blue POC helmet and she’s a good-looking woman, younger than me, but in an instant I can see that she’s frightened.
She takes a couple quick audible breaths. Yes, she’s really scared here.
“Hi,” I say, addressing my bike and getting into position to walk it through the Martian surface to the zebra crossing.
“Hu — Hi,” she says in don’t-kill-me voice, and really don’t-do-something-worse-than-kill-me, addressing me through some deep, internal quivering, knowing it’s too late to stop whatever’s going to happen to her.
She’s holding a see-through orange plastic water bottle that’s a bit less than half-full.
“Still under construction, I guess,” I say through the pain in my shoulder, which is reasserting itself now — trying my best to normalize things.
“Y — Yeuss,” and this reply is said with so much fear and apprehension, and accompanied by a quick involuntary lethality-assessment scan of me, which apparently comes back positive, that I start to resent it a little bit.
But before even the word “yes” fully leaves her mouth, she drops the orange water bottle, she’s so afraid, grasping at it on its way down in jangled-nerve muscle-spasm futility — and it crashes to the ground.
She looks down after it, hopeless of the precious thing’s recovery in the face of whatever’s about to befall her, then back up at me with big, attractive eyes that say, ‘Oh no. It’s happening!’
I’ve experienced versions of this response from women before, non-verbally — when I lived in New York.
A glance over the shoulder from a woman ahead of me walking down Sixth Avenue, and then another a few seconds later, and I snap to wondering — Have I been walking behind this person for a while? Am I pacing her? This is literally just where I’m going! Then I take a moment to think about how much awful shit women have to put up with from men this way, and the very real threats they face that I just don’t, and that I’m way more touchy about my version of such things without having to go through any of that crap. But my shoulder hurts like hell and I have to walk my bike, so I’m not at my most sensitive.
Without even a thought of the implications of exactly what I’ve just been through myself, I allow my resentment of being thought of that way to start rising to the fore.
But as I cross the Martian surface and all my body language is toward the next park on the trail, it becomes clear to her that I truly will be leaving her peaceably.
Still jittery, she at last goes to retrieve her orange see-through water bottle, and feeling like she’s calmed from imminent threat level, I decide to address her.
I want to tell her that I’ve just been in a wreck and all that, but thinking I’ve got only a few words before it’s awkward and frightening, the only thing that comes out is my resentment in as palatable a form as I can muster.
“I’m not a murderer,” I say, in the tone-of-voice of a joke between two office workers, and by now she takes it that way, recognizing that anyone would’ve noticed she was beyond ill-at-ease, and she says in a voice that shakes residually and is a little self-conscious and apologetic and still a little scared, but also truthfully — “You never know.”
But my resentment isn’t satisfied, so as I resume my progress away from her I don’t leave it at that. And I say a terrible thing that’ll make me cringe for years to come.
“Murderers don’t ride Soma’s,” I say in parting, in a tone that implies the notion of me being a murderer is absurd.
But I’ve been using the word ‘murder’ when she and I both know what I’m really talking about is rape. Because murder is less horrific than rape, so in this one case, it can actually be employed as a euphemism.
It’s one of the most ridiculous, awful things I’ve ever said — full of invalidation — because Soma is the make of my bike, a boutique kind of a brand — and it’s printed on my downtube in four big white letters, and of course rapists could ride one, or any other kind, and I’m immediately ashamed of myself and now I’m sick inside, so I pedal away from my disgrace at having increased the discomfort of a fellow-sufferer, rather than going out of my way to be as minimally threatening toward her as possible.
I don’t look back as I round a corner and disappear into the foliage of the second park.
But a memory-image of the young woman looking to me in the moment I began my disgraceful utterance lights in my mind like a detailed photograph, and I notice that she still remains at the edge of the path, looking at me with some kind of sorrow, and kindness toward herself in her eyes.
There’s an element of relaxation to her posture in that final image-memory. Just a small amount.
Her breathing is soothed. And both her hands are wrapped around her clear plastic orange water bottle, swaddling it like it was a thing that had been through a trauma, that she’s now instinctually reassuring, and it’s a good thing that I’m gone.
Home alone, but my best friend’s on her way to take me to an urgent care.
I try to take off my too-clingy shirt, but Holy Cow! that is not going to happen as my shoulder lights up at the merest attempt to raise my left arm over my head.
At the urgent care the doctor says my x-ray is consistent with a shoulder separation, but thankfully there’s no fracture.
She tells me to take the image to an orthopedist to see if it’s bad enough to need surgery, but most likely my body’ll just compensate for the torn ligament by growing new muscle.
“I figured it was separated with how much you’re protecting the shoulder,” she says, nodding to where I’ve got my head tilted hard over to the left, in a voice that conveys “Ahh, sorry this happened,” and is also comforting.
I notice for the first time that my shoulder’s been pinned to my ear since the crash. I can’t relax it even a millimeter now, the muscles are so locked.
But it’s not the injured ligament that I’m protecting. It’s my neck.
My neck is a sensitivity I’ve carried since I was small. I’ve spent countless hours pinching down to cover that soft spot against attack — while those attacks were happening, and in everyday life since.
When it’s active, the pain in that tender place where my shoulder meets my neck wraps itself around the hopelessness of not being able to stop the awful thing from happening again — and radiates along pathways to the other parts of my body that were specifically targeted also.
My head is tilted to the left in lots of photos and I notice it on video calls. But the wreck’s got it to defcon one, and now, with the doctor’s observation bringing it to awareness, I can feel the bright pain caused just by the clinching.
I thank the doctor and start to head out, but, to my surprise, she stops me. Interjects with the hesitation of someone breaking protocol in order to blow the whistle.
“If you can wait for just a minute,” she says, indicating the oversized manilla envelope with the x-ray inside that I’m holding, “I’d — like to show you something.”
“Of course,” I say, and despite three strange encounters already today, this feels every bit as unusual. A kind of exchange that’s never had with a physician.
My best friend’s with me an hour later in a large, empty-feeling surgical room with green tile walls. The lights are down.
We’re standing in front of a glowing box mounted to the wall that reveals the contents of the x-ray — and of my body.
The doctor’s in front, looking up at it also.
“There’s where the separation occurs,” she says, indicating. But still in a mostly not-clinical way. More like someone who’s concerned for another — in the face of some kind of darkness.
My best friend’s presence fades from my consciousness as I look up at my bleach-white bones against negative space.
“But there’s one other thing …” she continues. And her compassion’s now fully emerged from behind the veil of her profession.
“It’s your collarbone.” Her eyes pinch down as she points up to the long, slender bone that gives structure to the soft area below my neck.
She’s disturbed. Can’t quite find the words for what she wants to tell me.
“The .. The radiologist and I agree ..” she says, retreating just a little back to clinical, and now I know for sure this has nothing to do with the wreck or the injury — whatever strange thing they needed to discuss.
She’s South Asian American, and I’m tempted for a moment to think she’s halting out of some cultural deference to anything personal, or outside of normal bounds.
But that’s just a reassurance I’m trying to find for myself. She hasn’t brought any culture-gap into the room. Just the x-ray.
“The morphology of the collarbone is very unusual — See?” she asks me. And she’s fully committed now. Just wanting to walk me through it out of pure care.
The meant-to-be-straight left collar bone bends down to a hard angle and back up the other way in the middle, like a shallow V.
“It looks as if it were broken ..” she pauses. And then, “… when you were a child,” she says.
I stand here, looking up at the light shining through my body.
“And it healed in a very awkward way,” she adds, disturbed. Knowing she’s informing me.
I stand looking another several seconds. The doctor, the radiologist — they can see a developmental fracture. Left untreated before it ever had a chance to grow normally — when the bone was still small. When I was also.
“Do you remember such a thing?”
She asks with her eyes full of sympathy. In the gently coaxing voice of someone guiding a child through something difficult.
And I have a sense that I’m borrowing someone else’s mother — back into my past. A capable, caring mother — a good one. But most of all, brave.
With the courage to figure out how to say with words what no one cares to ever look at, but what even a simple x-ray reveals in plain and troubling ways:
This is not normal, she’s telling me, best as she can. It’s extreme. And it’s wrong.
And we both know that the harm that’s lit up on the wall, still isn’t the worst thing that they did to me.
I’ll think later about how the doctor didn’t let me walk out at the last second, when it mattered, but chose to be her sibling’s keeper. But right now, I know that as a mother, she’s only on loan for these few moments — to 34 years ago.
“I mean — ,” I manage to finally respond. “I don’t know,” I say, wobbling toward numbness inside, but I can never fully get there.
“No.” I say, and at last come down from the image to meet her eyes. “I don’t remember anything.”
And my encounter with the doctor-mother is at an end.
The Orthopedist’s office is very much what the Dallas-area medical consumer expects. That is to say, it’s new construction.
Granite, or something resembling granite, dominates the usable surfaces. The carpets adhere to the floor under the strict and total control of an industrial, toxic epoxy. Its odor hasn’t fully off-gassed. Every wall decoration is vaguely textured.
After a long wait, still in my too-clingy shirt, a perfunctory invite at last calls me from the reception area back into the clinical world of the office.
The doctor knocks and enters the small room where I’m perched on an exam table awaiting appraisal — removed from the plane of human interaction.
Head down, looking at my chart he’s a central-casting specialist type, somewhere in his 50’s. He speaks percussively, without ever glancing up.
“Another one bites the dust, huh?” And rather than reassuring me that shoulder separations happen all the time, a pit bores in my stomach like being told I shouldn’t be making such a big deal out of this.
He glances at the screen displaying the x-ray I brought — his indifference to my physical presence meant to seem impressive.
“Probably a type two separation” he says. Then looks one more time, bringing his total study of it up to about twelve seconds.
“Either way,” he says in a what’s-it-matter tone. “We don’t operate.”
He gives me two brochures about shoulder separations, tells me they’ll see me at check-out, and is gone.
Back at the faux granite surface to pay one of his all-female support staff, and the doctor cruises by in the background at some point, and I blurt out that I’d like to ask him something.
“Yeah?” he says, pausing his momentum.
I’ve been reeling the last couple of hours from what I was told about my collarbone much more than from the still-searing pain of the shoulder injury.
The reality of what I went through when I was little is sinking in now. The fact that someone else could see it is sinking in. And the world of things its severity represents is just dripping in and it has me spinning.
I need to hear that it’s real a thousand more times over many more years. I need to hear it now. I wish I could go back a few hours and just hear it again.
“The doctor at the Urgent Care — and the radiologist also,” I credential it. “ — told me that my collar bone looked odd.”
His eyes snap pinched and his head jerks in a doubtful look of what’re-you-trying-to-say?
“Like it’d been broken in childhood and healed badly,” I conclude.
In a flash, his eyes are gone from me — leading him swiftly away to his next customer.
He shakes his head in a little disgust as he walks off.
“No. You’d remember that,” he says definitively — dismissively. With the brand of surety that’s particular to medical doctors.
Not an expert in the nature of traumatic memory, or the impact of practiced dissociation on the chronically harmed in childhood, nevertheless his voice is unmistakably full of disdain.
Months have passed, and I stand looking in the mirror at the bump sticking up prominently from my left shoulder since the wreck.
But the “bump” was always there — it just seems new now that the shoulder’s hanging lower because of the torn ligaments.
The pain is gone. Nearby muscles have grown to compensate for the injury in ways invisible — and impossible for me to understand.
I wrestle with the meaning of the five strange encounters of that Tuesday mid-morning’s bike ride, because their allegorical significance seems too obvious:
The young man on the hillside was my shame. And it would be easy to condemn myself by saying that my shame cuts me off from connection with others.
The van driver was my anger. The obvious lesson would be that my anger harms, then seeks to justify itself, which harms still more.
The young woman on the bike path was my fear. And her arrested progress suggests that my fear keeps me from moving forward and experiencing life.
The doctor-mother at the urgent care is my urgently needed compassion, though its availability is limited by the world.
And the orthopedist is denial. And how the world meets any complex form of suffering by condemning and dismissing it for being abstract.
But when I think more deeply about these meanings, it’s clear that their roots — all but the last — meet in self-condemnation, which keeps me from contemplating the harder thing. And the interpretations feel false.
I stepped over the safety-laser as the garage door lowered over me that morning and took hold of my bike — to try to deal with depression. And really — with the world of ongoing impacts of the terrible things I lived through when I was a child, and all the bad things that’ve happened since because of them.
I threw my leg over and straddled the bike’s top tube because I’m desperate to be tired enough to fall asleep at night. Because the defenselessness of sleep terrifies me.
Sometimes the bike can get me past the startle responses, the hypervigilance, and the body memories that keep me from sleep. But a lot of times it can’t.
And I ride anyway — in no condition to operate a video game, much less a bicycle, the sleep-deprivation’s so bad.
Or, I don’t ride. And I blast myself for not doing anything that day — even though I can’t see straight today because many years ago I was taken from my bed when I was still learning animals’ names.
The five people I met that day were real people, living their own sacred lives — not talking foxes or woodland spirits in a folktale. And the facile meanings we assign to their complex emotions reduce and dismiss them in just that way. And offer an attractive delusion.
My experiences of meeting my five siblings that day had the specificity of allegory, but the strangeness of memory.
Because memories are re-livings at the level of atmosphere and sense, and so are more mystical than dreams. But they are real. Present forms, actually happening in the now, of things we went through in the past.
When I lie down to sleep at night — or am gripped by fear during the day — when I’m covered in shame at noontime, or raging against an offense whose harm is way less severe than I’m conditioned to assume — I am plagued by the presentness of past experiences.
But it isn’t the concreteness of the x-ray I saw that faithfully guides me back to the truth of the past. It’s the emotions my siblings gave me access to.
Their responses — my reactions and emotions that are like theirs — are the objective red line that traces out the truth of my experiences like the route I took that day captured on my GPS cycling map.
I am so scared today, because what I went through then was that frightening. Experiences that will shake you to dropping what’s valuable right out of your hands for a lifetime.
I would not be so very scared if what happened weren’t so very frightening.
I am angry, because what I endured was galling. Disempowering, unjust, and outrageous.
I am ashamed to this day, because what was done to me was a lifetime’s worth of shameful. What they did to a helpless child, who needed to be cared for, was disgraceful.
And I took on that shame — misplaced, then adopted in my own way. It’s the hardest one to think about because I became a man and made my own shame, and that confuses me.
But the intense guilt I feel today, is really for the degraded things that were done to me when I was still a boy. Just because I was there — participated.
My shame thinks of it that way, even though I was a small child carried off into that terrible darkness, because it’s easier to put it all on me than to trace out the unbearable truth of what I lived through. But that I also still experience — because memory’s varied expressions dissolve our attempts to box up the past by claiming it has ceased to be.
Things that happened yesterday and years ago are alive and active — in our emotions and responses and perceptions. In our bodies, but also in our minds and spirit.
And no matter how much we try to shut tight that box, label it in marker, “the past is the past,” and tuck it away in a closet, it goes right on being present, because it is utterly part of us.
We claim it’s a virtue to move forward and get on with things, when really we are running — frightened, angry and ashamed — from the past.
That overwhelming sense of shame I feel — that I encountered in my brother cyclist — is what faithfully guides me to the truth of how shameful it all was back then — like the red line on the map on my phone. Just as objective and honestly. And validates what’s been hidden and suppressed. Denied away by all the orthopedists and rarely approached by the doctor-mother in me and others who seek to comfort, best as we can.
It is good to pursue purity over shame. Gentleness over anger. And peace over fear.
But life is not an allegory. And there isn’t any quick fix or facile way of thinking about these things that resolves them instantly.
The harm’s come down the generations, and its healing will take effort.
There is a lot of suffering yet to come in this fallen world, I’m afraid. But there is joy in the midst of it. There’s opportunity to try to extend ourselves just a little further than we did last time when we recognize the struggles of another — even at the level of thought.
There are others who care and who know what you’re going through. Even if they don’t understand it all either.
And there are beautiful bicycles to ride when we can. And rows of those littler sunflowers smiling at us as we pass.
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