Death in installments. Three payments made.

I nearly died yesterday on my way home from school. I was riding my bike, approaching the Hawthorne bridge behind a "real cyclist", meaning he was wearing spandex, or lycra. . . As we approached the bridge, I looked up ahead and noticed that there was a man and his two sons walking our way. There was a lot of foot traffic in addition to the man and boys. We slowed as we made it up on to the bridge and were cruising along, when I looked past the cyclist to check where the boys were. They were probably 3 and 4 years old, so when I didn't see one of them, I thought to myself, "that's strange I could have sworn there were two kids with that dude." It couldn't have taken a whole second. When I looked back at the cyclist in front of me, he was stopped.

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The Hawthorne bridge is a steel mesh bridge with nice wide concrete bicycle/pedestrian paths on each side. The concrete path is about 12 inches above the surface of the road way. This keeps the cars off the path, but it doesn't keep the people off the road.

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When I realized the cyclist had stopped in front of me, I locked up my back wheel and hit my brake. Unfortunately, I was already too close to him and had to veer slightly to either side to avoid a collision. Worried about the boys, I turned left and ended up on the roadway. It all happened so fast, that I'm amazed so much went through my head. First I was worried that he had hit the kids, which was why he stopped so fast. Then I was concerned about running into his bike because it was much nicer than mine. Third I thought to myself, I'm glad I have a brake, because otherwise, I would be that douche bag on a bike without brakes that can't stop. The funniest part is that the fourth thing I thought, as I was headed into the roadway, was "fuck, I hope it's a small car right there when I land and not a cement truck." I might have thought "dump truck" I know the image in my head was a large vehicle. It wasn't a panicked sort of worry, but more of a resignation to the possibility that I might be in serious trouble.

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The other time I've felt this sense of calm is when I was on tour once, and lost control of my car on a truly treacherous stretch of highway in North Dakota. I ended up looking out the driver side window at the headlights of a semi truck carrying a load of pigs, though it could have been some other livestock. This time like that time, I managed to somehow avoid death or serious injury.

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The cyclist hadn't hit the boys, and just rode away. The kids were being scolded by their father for jumping in front of the him. The cyclists behind me rode away. The woman in the red toyota who had just screeched to a halt just inches from me. Covered her mouth and hyperventilated while I walked back over to the sidewalk. The two teenage boys that had been standing on the bridge right where it all happened looked like they might have shit their pants. The woman started her car, which had stalled from her slamming both feet on the brake and not deploying the clutch, and drove away. I rode home in a state of shock.