CWSS#1

This is the first of a series which tries to define the reasons why to this day I cannot figure out exactly when I suffered severe back injuries. No brain, no pain.

The day lived on June. Grade nine lived in the mirrors. Brand new set of pants. Measures British Standard since the metric system hadn't been invented by Pierre Trudeau yet. Riding a relatively new bike but very fast that had recently undergone my masterful tuneups the day before.

This location was about 40 metres west of the Royal Canadian Legion on Howe Street. The road dips down about in a direction heading for the cobbled shores of Lake Superior. The road then makes a 90 degree right turn and goes for another one hundred metres to the Shell Oil Storage Tank Yard.

The gasoline tanks are no longer there making for a fenced vacant lot. The road featured corner banking proudly installed by my civil engineer father. Indeed, he was quite proud of the paved banking which enabled the truck drivers to negotiate the corner easily.

Due to the innovative new approach to education the high school officials had let me do my school day broken with a two hour noon hour and still get off at three in the afternoon. So after ingesting lunch, I began like taking a quick noon hour ride. Anything was better than school.

Today I came roaring down Yawkey Ave. at flank speed. I turned right without loosing too much momentum west onto Howe. I headed for the lakeshore. Down the legion drops picking up speed.

The day before I had done much the same thing, it should be stated. The pavement was relatively new having been laid only three years before. I had made the corner. But there was a freshly graded gravel driveway onto an outlook on the sandy cliffs overlooking Lake Superior and its Pebble Beach.

At the point I began leaning to make the apex. But the grader had left some gravel on the corner. As formula one drivers say, I hit the marbles. The bike crashed or laid out trapping my right leg under it. My hip and body had landed very hard. The leg became a toboggan runner.

I slid right across the corner on my hip right up father's shallow banking and into the air ten feet down range and three feet into the air again. The bank was also a jump ramp in the right circumstances. These were the right circumstances.

Again I landed heavily again. I pained my eyes into the blueness. No one had witnessed the crash. My leg hung naked from the freshing torn pants blood rakes from the gravelling claws of the road surface. Surprisingly my bike had survived, and why not it rode out the accident on my hips and legs.

I had badly scaped my right arm in the short sleeve shirt. I remounted my bike and made it back home.

Mother cursed me over the pants. “But mom, it was an accident.”

Mother was a nurse. Quick as a flash the wounds were washed unmercifully. Some scrapes were coated with tincture of extreme pain and torture to counteract infection. Another pair of pants were put on as mother pointed out that the new pants could not be repaired.

Painfully I crawled onto the bicycle and still made it to class. Education was a waste of time because the waves of pain made even the lowest level of concentration impossible. It was a Friday. I would have the weekend to rest and recuperate.

This was one incident in which I could have fractured my back. The wounded side is the same side that spasms the most through time. This event mundane was only one possible candidate for the broken vertabrate since the impact force of the crash was straight up the spine.