Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 1:00 AM | Comments (1)

I sometimes get a little flack from my neighbors when I strap on a helmet to ride with my son, Henry, down to the park.

I suppose I may look a bit silly wearing it and riding down the sidewalk in the middle of the neighborhood, but I don’t do it to look cool. I gave up that battle long ago.

There’re a few reasons I do it, but it is mostly because I want him to wear one and I wouldn’t feel right forcing him to do something that I won’t do.

Besides, there’s a good reason I want him to wear a helmet—it’s safer.

It’d be easy for me to argue that nothing is going to happen in the middle of the sidewalk and that they boy knows enough to stop at corners and look both ways before crossing the street. I could tell myself it’s an unnecessary step, but for an experience I had a few years ago.

I’ve long been fond of mountain biking and, between here and the Pacific Northwest, I’ve been on a few hair-raising trails. The worst spill I ever took, though, wasn’t coming down some rocky slope and overshooting a tight s-curve; it was on a paved path that cut across a wind-swept Oregon meadow.

To this day I don’t know exactly how it happened. One moment I was pedaling along between my apartment in Springfield, OR and classes at the University of Oregon in Eugene. It was a nice day—for once—windy, of course, and I was looking at the mighty Mackenzie River bellowing in a class three rapids by the path.

The next I was flat on my back, my bike wrapped bizarrely around my arm, looking up at a crystal blue sky. Somehow, my front brakes had locked up and I had flipped over the handlebars, bouncing my head off the path.

“Are you OK, man?” A homeless guy asked me in a voice hushed with concern. (The population of homeless people along the river was one of the reasons I learned to ride fast and keep my head down on the path).

“Uh, I think so,” I answered. Nothing felt broken. I took off my helmet and stared in disbelief.

There was a quarter-sized dent in it, about half an inch deep. Not only had I landed on my head, I must’ve chipped the helmet on some kind of rock.

“That could’ve been your skull,” the homeless guy said. “You should take it easy.”

I assured him that I was all right and he rode back off to his camp in the woods.

That incident changed my mind about two things: the necessity for a bike helmet and my overall attitude about homeless people—at least in Oregon. Out of all of the people who rode by that day, he was the only one who stopped.

So I will probably go to the First Baptist Church in Wayne on Saturday, when the Wayne Police host a bike safety rodeo there. It’s not because Henry needs the lesson or the free helmets they’re handing out. I want to set an example. Even in a quiet neighborhood, it’s sometimes better to be safe than sorry.

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