Table of Contents: The Big Bike Accident - September 1, 2004

On Saturday, I rode my mountain bike out to the scene of the accident. Before I inspected the scene, I stopped at a few houses, hoping to locate the dentist who'd found me. My best bet seemed to be a dentist who was out of town. Some people were dog-sitting, so I left my number with them. Ironically, the woman recognized me from my orthodontist's office. I showed her my new snaggle teeth, and we both agreed that what had happened was a shame.

Back at the scene, I poked around for quite a long time. I thought very hard about what I could remember. I had originally decided that the accident had happened at the end of the bridge, after I'd already jumped the bump at the beginning of the bridge. But then I thought about where the canoeist I'd nodded at could have been sitting, because I'd remembered nodding to him, and then preparing for the jump, at which point my memory went blank.

The canoeist could not possibly have been sitting in the middle of the bridge (on the berm). He'd been sitting in some grass. I realized that this meant I'd taken my spill at the beginning of the bridge. This also meant that I'd wiped out on my first and only jump of the ride. I'd been thinking I'd jumped once or twice before jumping the frame right off of the wheel.

I also realized, looking at the bridge, that I would have been laying, unconscious, right in the path of traffic. There is a right-hand turning lane, which I never ride in because I never turn right at that intersection. Instead I stay in the normal lane, which means when I jumped I would have flown over the handlebars in that lane. This was a sobering thought. I was glad it hadn't been dusk, and that bikers had found me before a car had run me over. I didn't think that a car would have run me over because a driver would probably have seen me and stopped in time. But there were no guarantees.

For some reason, I found it difficult to leave the scene, and kept poking around and gazing at it. I tried to envision how my departure from the bike might have unfolded. I looked closely at the bump I would have jumped. I walked out into the road, and looked at the pavement. I'd been assuming that I would have hit the pavement pretty close to the bump. But then I noticed a medium-sized stain one third of the way across the bridge. I began to wonder whether that could have been where I landed. I stepped back, and eyeballing the distance, it seemed improbable. But I couldn't let go of that thought.

I decided to measure the distance from the bump to the stain. I paced it off - it was an even 30 paces. I figured I'd been going at least 18 mph. Eyeballing it, it still seemed hard to believe, but I thought that maybe at that speed, I could have landed that far from the bump. I had some math to do when I got home. I knew it wouldn't be a trivial problem, that there would be some physics of trajectory involved (me arcing towards the ground). But I did not need a precise answer. I was looking for a "no way", or a "yeah, could have been".

Just as I was preparing to leave the scene, I saw a biker in the distance. He'd be passing me, so I decided to wait for him to pass. Strangely enough, he executed a perfect jump over the bump I'd jumped. It was just beautiful. He was obviously an experienced and athletic rider. He went by pretty fast. Seeing how quickly he left and returned to the ground, and how quickly he crossed the bridge made me think that there was an even greater possibility that the stain was mine. I wished later that I'd tried to stop him and ask him to repeat his jump so I could watch it once more.

Later that night, our friend Jason came by, and he, Ian, and I walked towards town to get some grub. I had already started scribbling calculations on the back of an envelope. I took these, and a calculator, along with me and calculated and scribbled as we walked. My calculations, minus any physics, indicated that my speed at the time of the jump was 26.4 feet per second. The distance between the bump and the stain was 28.75 feet. I was beginning to think that the stain really could have been from my face.

I asked Ian and Jason what they thought, and they threw around conjectures about trajectories, and my possible height off the ground at the time I departed from the bicycle, and Ian agreed that it was possible I'd hit the ground at the point of the stain. I resolved to send the physics problem to one of our friends who might be able to give a more definitive answer. The stain seemed kind of large given what had happened to me, but I thought it would have been pretty cool if it were my very own stain!

I later joked with the guys that we should reconstruct my position on the bridge, draw a chalk outline, and photograph it, minus me, and plus the stain. That would have made one cool photo.

Here's a little extra bit that doesn't have anything to do with my accident, but which I wrote about today's bike ride: Saturday September 11th

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Table of Contents: The Big Bike Accident - September 1, 2004