Veloquacity

It had a couple of weeks since I’ve ridden my bicycle – shocking, I know – and Sunday I finally went for my first ride since my overly eventful one on August 14th. Let me start with a rather lengthy rundown of what happened.

As previously stated, when my girlfriend and I moved to Somerville, we purchased a pair of bicycles: she a blue Trek 7.3 FX, and I a Bianchi Pista in chrome. After putting on a front brake and upgrading the tires and pedals, I started commuting from the Davis Square area to the Financial District daily. All was well for about three weeks, and I was very happy. Then, on that fateful Thursday evening, I decided to go out and practice trackstands in the private parking lot behind the Davis Square CVS.

According to the Cambridge Police CAD sheet, I was found near the corner of Mass. Ave. and Day Street (a CAD, or Computer-Aided Dispatch, sheet is a computer printout of automatically logged radio data including date, time, and sender of each call). I wouldn’t know. I remember looking behind me and thinking that Mass. Ave. was particularly devoid of traffic that evening; the next thing I remember was that I was in an ER. If I hadn’t been wearing ankle reflectors, I wouldn’t have even known why I was there, but that clued me in pretty quickly. My dorkiness has its limits.

I received a hairline fracture to my right elbow, a concussion and a broken sinus from where my face hit the road, one stitch to the outside of my eyebrow, and some pretty impressive bruising up and down my right side. The excellent staff at Cambridge Hospital kept me there for almost 24 hours, mainly because no one knew quite why I went down, and they wanted to make sure that I didn’t have epilepsy or some other condition that would cause me to just fall. The results showed nothing of that sort, though I did get to see my larger-than-average heart beating on an echocardiogram, which was pretty cool. In the end, my best guess is that I either hit something that caused my front wheel to stop or I was taking a turn and low-sided. I’ll probably never know.

They put me in a sling, gave me some antibiotics and Flonase for my sinus, and sent me home. Two weeks later, I was out of the sling, though still sore. By the end of last week, I was feeling right as rain, and I was itching to get back on the bike.

Speaking of which, my bicycle fared pretty well. I was told in the ER that the Cambridge Police had taken custody of it, and a quick call confirmed that. The property room at the station has odd hours, but I was finally able to get down there and claim my bike and u-lock. My lights were still attached, and someone had even been considerate enough to turn them off. The only damage was chewed up cork tape and a bent saddle. It’s about $15 dollars for the former and I had been wanting to upgrade the latter, so I really don’t mind.

Handlebar tape and saddle notwithstanding, the beautiful weather on Sunday was the final straw; I couldn’t stand to be cooped up for yet another weekend. So I went for a ride – admittedly, against doctor’s orders to rest for another couple of weeks. Not wanting to injure myself further, I took it easy, rode on the less busy streets, and didn’t try to tackle any large hills.

It was glorious.

It would be hard to explain to a non-cyclist the delights of riding a bike. There’s something about gliding smoothly over the road, feeling the wind in your face, leaning with the bike as you go through turns, and taking in all the sights and sounds you miss with most forms of transport that just makes you feel wonderful. I think the problem is that the feeling is more than the sum of its parts. One can describe most of the sensations of riding, but there’s another, one that transcends the others, that eludes proper description. I’ll just call it joy.

As I tooled around Somerville and Cambridge, I felt only that joy. Well, that and a light aching in my right arm. So maybe I’m not 100%, but I’m getting better. The road to recovery looks to be short, and the road beneath my tires has no end in sight.