As the car’s front bumper hit my rear wheel, the sound of it wasn’t but absorbed. The front wheel popped out, and the tire ripped off as the violence of energy went from car to bike and human being. I came down on a naked fork going roughly 25 miles per hour.

And so this is how it happens. This is how you die.
……
People are everywhere, and the traffic of presence is jammed in my head. Cars stopped; a deputy from the sheriff’s office arrived; a firefighter was pressing my wrist and along my vertebrae; I watched the road rash on my lower right leg, at first blush the only real injury, begin to weep. The general consensus was that I was on some nine-lives stuff, flanked by angels, lucky beyond reason. I never even heard the car before it hit me. The driver wrote her speed down on the police report as “35?”

We were all thankful and happy under the circumstances; I had been obliterated from behind at a decent clip speed and was standing up, talking. We were happy as we could be, given the fact that I could be dead.

Until the Colorado Highway Patrol showed up.

Walking toward me as I sat on the side of the road shivering under a heavy coat, one of them asked, without any precursor, if we were riding two across. If we were riding in the middle of the road.

The ponds at Huffhines Park along my bike commute route. This is my old, long gone, Yokota mountain bike converted into a commuter.

Commuter Bike with Dallas skyline in the background

My Commute Home From Work

Downtown Dallas at sunset.

Dallas Skyline from the Soda Bar on the roof of the NYLO Southside hotel.