ride of silence

tonight katie and I are taking place in the Ride of Silence: an international bike ride to remember those who have been injured or killed while cycling on public roads. I've been pretty fortunate in my cycling career, with a few near misses but no serious accidents. When I think of what can happen, though, I remember an incident I saw back in April 2005.

On my standard bike ride out Hines Drive, a long winding ride frequented by cyclists, I saw a whole gaggle of cop cars and ambulences with their lights on. As I passed all the police tape, I saw some broken motorcycles down on the road, an SUV that was missing a front wheel, and a severely mangled bicycle. I was seriously shaken by this. Here's the story as told by our local bike shop.

"Small pieces of jagged plastic and metal were flung for hundreds of feet around the pavement. The road was closed. Yellow accident tape wiggled in the breeze. To the left, a motorcycle, or the largest fragment of a motorcycle, was lodged nearly upright in what remained of a wooden fence. A pile of wreckage lay in the center of the road surrounded by a gruesome stain on the pavement. The remnants of hasty medical aid blew in the wind. As we rode closer and jumped across the grass to the bike path we saw the pile of wreckage was roughly half of a motorcycle. The back half. The front had disintegrated. On the shoulder was the contorted, tortured cadaver of a road bicycle, completely mangled, one wheel entirely gone with tattered spokes hanging from the hub in a mangled rear triangle, the other wheel still clamped to the broken fork and bent at wild angles. In a field a hundred yards away was a black Jeep Liberty. The front left tire was gone, the floor board of the driver’s side was exploded inward and upward, both axles were broken and the remaining wheels tilted at random cambers. The vehicle appeared to be deposited randomly in the field, as though the explosion had lifted it up and set it down in the field."

Through some physics-defying miracle, the cyclist survived. One of the motorcyclists did not.

So, next time you're driving,* Whenever I'm out riding I want to mentally project to all the drivers around me: you're driving a two-ton battering ram. Share The Road.


*(this sounded too preachy and, to the few people who read this, I know you're not the problem! So I modified.)