A Pre-Halloween Scare

Yesterday I took a different bike route to work. From Carmen to Ashland to Lincoln to the all too familiar Clark. The wind blew against me making it feel like a low grade incline for over 6 miles. But nothing extraordinary happened until Clark and Kinzie.

I saw them in advance: long tire tracks of some slick bluish material. "Slow down, and signal longer," I thought. My right hand gripped the brakes gently while my left hand signaled. With both hands back on the brake levers, I cautiously steered into the turn.

Phoom! The bike slid forward, my left hand and hip hit the greasy ground, and my helmet tapped the pavement like a stone over water. Stunned, I stood up quickly and surveyed the scene. A pedestrian on the sidelines. A bike in the street with a loose chain. Compact SUV waiting patiently to turn left.

The pedestrian picked up my bike and asked, "Are you okay?" I touched my left eyebrow -- no blood. I looked down at my hands -- no tears in the leather. I surveyed my jeans -- soaked with slime but intact.

"I'm fine, just a little shaken. Thank you." I took the bike from him and walked the remaining one block to my office. "Keep it together, just keep it together until you get inside."

Upstairs, I asked my boss, who had just returned from vacation, how she was. "Good, how are you doing?" she responded. That's all it took.

I had to adjust the chain before riding home later that day, but the bike doesn't seem any worse for wear. Today my neck hurts, but no worse than when I sleep on it funny. And I'll be replacing the helmet this weekend because it now has a slit in the styrofoam where the edge hit. So in the end, it was just a pre-Halloween scare.