Labor Day, 2020. Perfect weather and a couple of free mornings meant it was lining up to be a great weekend for cycling. Two days before, on Saturday, I had done a 125 mile ride on flatter roads (as flat as roads can get in the upstate of South Carolina) down towards Anderson. After a rest day on Sunday, it was time to do some climbing on Monday.
I love climbing hills on my bike. I’m nowhere close to setting any King of the Mountain records on Strava, but for whatever reason, I just love getting on a steep incline that stretches out for a few miles in front of me and just grinding it out. 9/7/20 was the day to finally go tackle the climb up to Sassafras Mountain, the highest point in South Carolina. The first section of road getting out there isn’t bad - a pretty gentle 7 mile uphill section on Hwy 178 - but then it turns into a much steeper uphill for 5 miles to reach the summit of Sassafras. Some sections on that climb were an absolutely brutal 15-20% gradient that forced me to squeeze every ounce of power out of my legs to keep the bike upright and moving forward. But slowly and surely, I knocked out each section and finally reached the top. Hands down it was the hardest piece of cycling I’ve ever done, and boy was it a fantastic feeling of achievement knowing that I had conquered that climb and now the rest of the ride was alllll downhill.
I’m not one to bomb the descents when I’m cycling. I’m actually not that much of a daredevil, and I tend to ride the brakes pretty hard. They don’t freak me out, but I have a healthy respect for the fact that no matter how good your tires or your handling/cornering skills are, there’s only ever a few square inches of rubber tire connecting you and the road at any moment, and there’s a lot that can happen to upset that precarious connection.
So, downhill we went. A short ways down the descent I turned onto a side road that would lead me up into NC and around a long circuitous route that would eventually meander back towards home. Gladys Fork Road. I actually only knew about and was riding this road because a friend of mine had done a similar route a few days before and I had noticed he used this connector road leading from Sassafras.
Less than two miles down Gladys Fork, a curve approached. I saw it coming clearly - the road leading up to it was downhill but straight. It was a pretty sharp curve, no other cars were coming, so I made sure I was on a good line at a reasonable speed and prepared to take the corner just like I had on a hundred other downhill descents.
And then I felt the skid.
I can think of few other heart-pounding, hair raising moments on a bike than when you feel your tires skid. I’ve never crashed before, but I’ve had a few times where on a (straight) downhill section I’ve squeezed the brakes a little too hard or hit some loose gravel and felt that wobbly, loss of control for a few microseconds before the tires found their grip again. The only thing I can reasonably compare it to is that feeling in the tiniest of intervals between when you know the car you’re in is about to hit / be hit by something, and the moment of actual impact. Adrenaline surges, time seems to dilate, and your vision and focus narrow on this singular moment of time in which nothing else but survival matters.
As best I can tell, a patch of loose gravel or sand was the culprit. My front tire went into a skid and I instantly lost the ability to steer with any traction. I remember everything, moment-by-moment, with perfect clarity (a positive? side effect of not blacking out or getting a concussion through the process) - not able to steer into the rest of the curve, my momentum carried me straight forward and off the edge of the road. There was no guardrail, and thick enough tree/foliage cover where I couldn’t see anything about where I was headed. But it happened so quickly that soon there wasn’t time to feel anything.
The primary memory I have of the moment of impact itself, oddly enough, is colors. Black and Green. My eyes must have closed involuntarily at some point. And the last thing I must have seen was the trees and brush I was hurtling towards - so I remember colors. Black and Green. And the sensation of flipping, of tumbling - not rolling or falling - but of sort of somersaulting forwards and down. I was shouting something incomprehensible (does adrenaline take over your vocal cords in such a moment as well?) I’m sure it happened in the flash of an eye, in my memory it stretches for a few seconds, before finally realizing I was motionless. But the key part - I realized I was motionless. I could still sense something. This must mean I was alive.
It was just like booting a computer up from a powered off state - or maybe just hitting the “restart” command. As best as I can tell I never lost consciousness, as there are no gaps in my memory, but there was a definite moment where, as I lay without moving, my brain started into a “boot-up and diagnostic mode”. First things first - I was alive. I was conscious, I was breathing, I was present. A quick prayer of thanks flashed through my mind. Then I opened my eyes to try to get my bearings.
The edge of the road dropped off sharply into about a ten foot deep ravine, leading down from the road to a small creek at the bottom. I had apparently flipped end over end at least once, perhaps a couple times, and come to rest at the bottom of the ravine - sitting in an almost upright position - with my feet resting in the creek. “What an absurdly comfortable position to come to rest in”, I recall thinking briefly. As I opened my eyes, my first thought was to notice my right arm draped over my stomach - while simultaneously noting that I could feel nothing in that arm from my shoulder down. “Broken arm”, I thought instantly. “I can’t feel my right arm at all - I must have broken it when I landed. Maybe my shoulder?”. Apart from a few immediate bumps and scrapes, I wasn’t gushing blood from anywhere that I could see - okay, that’s good - I didn’t impale myself on a tree branch or anything. I sat there for a few - seconds, minutes? Time was hazy at this point - but soon I realized I was starting to regain feeling in my right arm. A few moments later, I realized I could move it and that it didn’t appear to be in any severe pain - “Okay, so perhaps not a broken arm - maybe I just landed on it oddly and did something to lose feeling in it”. Another minute or so and it was feeling just as good as my left - as good as could be after a plunge into a ravine off a bike at speed, I suppose.
My helmet was still on - slightly askew, but still fully buckled. I found the clasp and managed to unbuckle and remove it. I could tell it was cracked, but it wouldn’t be til much later when I would see just how solidly through the helmet had cracked, split - and undoubtedly saved my life.
It was somewhere around this point when I first made a full body move by sitting up and looking around - and instantly felt a bolt of pain in my neck. “Ahhhh hmmm okay there’s something definitely wrong there”, I thought. As I slowly gathered myself to stand up and widen the scope of my bearings, I felt that pain return a couple times - along with a couple moments of a clicking, grinding sensation in my neck. “Alright then, let’s just do everything we can to not move the neck,” was my thought, and so I began to stiffly move around to see what my next steps were.
My bike was halfway down the ravine a few feet above me. It looked intact, but I only momentarily considered trying to get it out of the brush it was lodged in - too much movement for that. The slope was steep enough where from my vantage point, I could actually hear a couple cars going by, but could only barely see the very tops of them passing by - no one would be able to see me or my bike where we currently were. Getting out, and back up to the road, was the only next logical step.
My phone - where was my phone? I carry my phone in one of the back pockets of my cycling jersey, but as I reached back around, I realized it was no longer there. This cued a stiffly frantic couple minutes or so of searching to try and find it - and what a relief to discover it had been thrown free of my pocket but was clearly visible sitting on a rock halfway up to the road.
I calculated my path back up. There were some large rocks/boulders in a sort of a giant step down pattern up from the bottom of the ravine where I was, so moving as cautiously and carefully as possible, I half climbed/half crawled from one rock to the next moving upwards - grabbing my phone as I passed by, and using small branches and brush to try to brace myself as I moved upward - all while trying to move my neck and head as little as possible.
I crested the edge and made it back onto the road. I realized I had left my helmet back down at the bottom, along with my bike - but sure enough, unless you really knew where to look, there was no way anyone was going to stumble on this accident site. I pulled out my phone - naturally, I had no service on this road in the Middle of The Edge of Nowhere, NC. “But remember,” I told myself, recalling hiking/camping trips with no cell service in the foothills of the Carolinas, “your phone GPS works even when you don’t have cell service”. I pulled up Google Maps, waited for GPS to lock onto my location, and dropped a pin where I was standing - that way I’d be able to find my way back here someday. That done - and with no cell service still - I started trudging down the road.
I knew I wasn’t that far from civilization - and I had heard at least 2 cars go by while I was in the ditch - so I wasn’t terribly concerned about being stranded out in the middle of nowhere. While my neck was certainly jacked up, and I could feel the general soreness of having taken such a tumble setting in, I was still fully mobile, so I was reasonably confident that if I had to walk a bit to find cell service or hitch a ride I could do so. Sure enough - it wasn’t more than a couple minutes but a car came down the road towards me.
At that moment, I needed a Good Samaritan. As it turns out, I got a Good Better Best Samaritan. Kaegan rolled up, the chillest dude I could have imagined, who seemed remarkably unphased at finding a bedraggled, bleeding, stiffly-moving, cycle-less cyclist in the middle of the road, forlornly waving an arm in an attempt to appear pathetic (and harmless) enough to earn a ride into town. He cleared off his passenger seat for me, chucking his bag into the backseat where his dog Gracie resided, and I folded myself gently into the car, explaining what happened. He said it was no problem to take me into the nearest town while I figured out the best course of action.
Look, in hindsight, yes, I probably should have called an ambulance. But that’s 20/20 in the rearview mirror - at the time I didn’t KNOW my neck was broken. All I knew is that something back there was a mess, I had full feeling and mobility in the rest of my body, and I had some nice cuts and scrapes. Who knows exactly where my threshold for calling for professional help was - if I’d had another broken bone or two? If I didn’t have feeling in one or more of my extremities? I felt at the time - and still do now - that I was thinking clearly - if I had survived ten minutes of climbing out of the ditch, surely I was fine to get a ride back to home turf and a local hospital. It made sense at the time. It still does. But yes, okay, next time I break my neck, I will call an ambulance on site. Promise.
Kaegan let me call my wife, Lindsay, from his cell phone, which had service, and we drove gently into the nearby town of Rosman. Very, very gently - I found pretty quick that going around curves or any rapid acceleration or braking overrode my ability to keep a totally still neck - any shift in movement was causing bolts of pain to fire up into my skull. We rolled into town and pulled up to a gas station where Kaegan ran inside to get me some water and ibuprofen. It took a little over an hour for Lindsay to make the drive up to Rosman to get me, and Kaegan volunteered to sit there in the car with me and wait for her. Like I said - the Best Samaritan. Sitting perfectly still in a motionless car felt pretty good actually, so we sat for an hour and swapped the Sparks Notes of our life stories with each other. He let slip that he was a minor star on TikTok - I promised to try to give him all the free advertising I could in return for his good deed - so if TikTok is still around when you’re reading this, make sure to go check out his profile @kaegandalton.
Having broken most land speed records between our house and Rosman, NC, Lindsay finally rolled into the parking lot where we were waiting. The stiffness and soreness had definitely begun to set in by this point, but we were able to very gingerly get me transferred from Kaegan’s car over to Lindsay’s. We thanked Kaegan again, profusely, and then started the drive back down the mountain. That was, to put it mildly, a long, long drive. We had to take it super slow so I could try to brace myself and not cause too much pain, but after an only mildly agonizing hour and a half or so, we had finally made it back to our hometown, and made a beeline for Greer Memorial Hospital.
This whole time we drove, although I was bracing against the pain, my natural optimism kicked in and my spirits were still pretty high. I detailed everything that had happened to Lindsay, we gave profuse thanks that I was still alive, and we pondered what the next steps would be. I knew we’d be in good hands at the hospital, and so can honestly say that there was little to no panic, fear, or worry in my head or heart as we got near. We pulled up to the front door at the Emergency Entrance of the hospital, and a nurse and a security guy came out to meet us. I had rolled down the window, and one of them asked me what was wrong.
“Well, I had a bit of a cycling accident and I seem to have jacked up my neck pretty good!”, I said, rather cheerily.
As the word “neck” left my mouth, the nurse’s demeanor instantly changed.
“DON’T. MOVE.” she shouted, as she sprinted back inside and came back moments later with a neck brace. “We need to get this on you before anything else happens”, she said with a piercing intensity that cut through my optimistic sheen.
It was at that moment I began to suspect that perhaps my injury was slightly more severe than I had previously thought.
 |
| The ditch where I ended up. The road is offscreen to the upper right. The creek where I came to rest along the let side |
 |
| My helmet undoubtedly saved the day and my life |
No comments:
Post a Comment