Bought with my blood

 

1987 Koflach Ultra double boots

On August 10, 1987, I was riding my bike southward into North Conway, NH on Route 16. There was a wide shoulder marked as a bike lane, but that abruptly narrowed where some railroad tracks crossed the road. I edged to my left, closer to the line of stopped traffic in the travel lane. The Mount Washington Valley traffic jam was a standard feature. Because of it, I would typically drive from Tamworth to the Kanc, park my car wherever I could, and proceed by bike to do whatever I needed or wanted to do in Conway or North Conway. So I was miles from my car when a passenger in a stopped vehicle shot a door open into the narrow shoulder just as I arrived.

The impact drove the edge of the car door into my left thigh a couple of inches deep. I crashed to my right. From long experience, I swung the bike up above me so I could undo the toe straps and release my feet from the pedals. The ugly, flapped gash in my leg welled with blood. I pressed it shut with my gloved hand and asked the instant gathering of bystanders if anyone had a clean handkerchief. They kept asking if I was okay and offering things I didn't need. Eventually, a nurse on her day off showed up and did a nice first aid job to hold me over until the ambulance arrived. A police officer who had been tending to the impatient motoring public took information from the occupants of the car that nailed me, and took my bike to International Mountain Equipment, where I had made a couple of acquaintances in my short time as a new resident of the area.

The gash in my leg was deeper than anything I had suffered in a fairly full career of getting lacerated. I had to take the ambulance ride, complete with back board, because that's what they have to do when they scrape somebody off the road. I suppose in more desperate circumstances I would just have bound the whole mess up tightly and stayed off of it as best I could for a few weeks, but why not go for the posh treatment when someone else is most likely paying? The funny thing was, we were practically across the street from Memorial Hospital. The ambulance barely got one "whoop" out of the siren before they were pulling into the driveway.

As the doctor was finishing the long job of stitching up first the muscle and then the skin, I asked him if I would be able to walk.

"Could you walk before?" he asked. I knew the joke.

"I meant today," I said. "I have to get myself around."

He said I was cleared to walk as much as I found comfortable. 

The motorists' insurance company agreed to a settlement. The money paid for my medical bills, bike repairs, mountaineering boots, a sturdy tent, and a deposit on a rental house. I had just started a new job with a new outdoor magazine, and needed to upgrade my gear for the things I expected to write about. That endeavor didn't pan out, but the long process of its failure still managed to throw me into some adventures. The boots got a lot more use than the tent.

The picture above was taken today, January 15, 2024. I wasn't even thinking about 2024 when I got those boots and started finding trouble to get into with them. But I never got rid of them, even when I was temporarily doing other things for almost 30 years. I still might, which is why I scraped thick dust and fuzz off of them and put them on today to see if they're in usable condition. They are. Remains to be seen if I am.

I've paid with my life for my dreams and decisions. I mean I'm still alive, but the time has been spent on something other than what our consumerist society calls success. As much as it was startling and painful, I owe that lady in the car a debt of gratitude for unintentionally providing me with needed funds. Within a few months, the outdoor magazine started writing me rubber paychecks and I had to get by on unemployment for a while until I got a copy editing job with a newspaper, and supplemented that with a job at an outdoor sports shop. Life always hinges on accidents. Some of them are more obvious crashes than others.