Crash

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Ten miles into my bike ride on Saturday, on a narrow slip of path between a northbound highway and the steep drop to its southbound complement, a bump in the asphalt jarred my hands from their grip around the brake hoods, leaving me unable to stop or steer. I careened off the path, into some grass, and tumbled at speed onto my back, breaking my wrist in two places and completely severing the front wheel of the bike.

The bike was a 2013 Cervélo S2. If humans could fly under their own power, they’d do it on a Cervélo: a cogent, furious, exuberant dream, stiff as a slide rule, its teardrop-shaped down tube teasing the wind like a jet wing. Mine was immaculate from years of idling in a corner because of a similar crash weeks after I bought it. But recently we’d found ourselves again.

My bike, which took the brunt of things.

I stood up—good—and walked around—good—and called 911 and then my boyfriend, whose house I’d been riding to, 90 miles yet north. A runner stopped to wait with me for the ambulance, which took a while on the tiered and knotted roads of that little tuck of Manhattan, just past the George Washington Bridge. Two handsome paramedics—it was a jubilee of medical handsomeness on Saturday, my regards to casting—got me to the nearest trauma center, and I entered what has for me always been the core state of injury: waiting.

Waiting on the ceremonies of intake, the swarming of a staff whose attention at that morning hour was fresh and uniform; waiting for intravenous opiates to douse the pain; waiting for James to make his way down the Taconic State Parkway and then, more formidably, past the front desk of the Harlem Hospital emergency department. Waiting for x-rays, a CT scan, more x-rays, a nerve block injection, a haphazard attempt to reduce the fracture, miles of paperwork. We cleared the hospital and started an Easter-egg hunt for a pharmacy open the night before Easter. (The city that never sleeps expired right around Easter of 2020.) I only had to wait a day to see an orthopedist. Now I’m waiting a week for surgery, and then I’ll be waiting another week for the sutures to heal and six for the bones to mend and the removable cast to go in the trash. I’ll be waiting on an insurance check for the bike, which has great coverage because I always assumed it’d get stolen, and a bill from the hospital.

In the past, when I’ve crashed and been badly hurt, I’ve felt an immediate and tactical upwelling of regret: If I’d done a differently, then b. (A can be anything, by definition. B is always the same: I’d still be riding.)

But more than a decade has passed since the last time, and I am not the same. As I stood up and walked around in that grass overlooking the Hudson, I didn’t think about what might have been. All I could see was what was now, a new reality stretching out ahead with its revised allocations of softness and sharpness, its lack of apology. “I’m alive,” I said to myself, “and I can walk.” Any finish line—any starting line—I ever cross will follow from these two priors; any word I ever write about it.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.