She noticed the blood. She was changing the sheets, and she said to me, “Where are you bleeding from?” And I said, “What?” because I was unaware that I had been bleeding at all. A reddish-brown stain, the size of a silver dollar suggested otherwise, a dark spot on a broad pale surface.
One might estimate from this evidence the rough location of the injury, nearly two-thirds of the distance south of the headboard and about 10 inches inboard. Somewhere on the lower leg then. The person who sleeps there, in this case me, is primarily a back sleeper, which implies the possibility of a wound on the upper calf of the right leg, or in the rare but unable to be ruled out alternative, perhaps a small but prolific cut on the left knee.
Cursory inspection of the areas in question provided no clear clues, or to be more explicit, too many clues, there being multiple possible egress points, i.e. scabs, on both right calf and left knee, the former quite possibly the result of a spiky pedal finding purchase in the soft flesh there during an unexpected dismount, the latter attributable to any number of traumas inflicted by the handlebars, the top tube, any of a variety of trees, or indeed surface rocks encountered while the subject, again me, found himself no longer able to remain in situ on his bicycle.
When a rider clips a rock with a pedal, especially a modern, flat, mountain biking pedal, you will see bright white scrape marks there. I have, on occasion, used those marks to understand where the best line is not. I have also observed those same signs of impact in researching the causes of my own various failures to “hold the line” or “clean the trail.”
Conscientious full-suspension riders will know there is a narrow, black O-ring that measures the travel of the bicycle’s shocks, front and rear. Less savvy riders pay little attention to the movement of the O-ring, sometimes even absent-mindedly sliding it back to the zero position, as if putting a pair of dirty socks back in the drawer. Of late, I have chided myself for allowing the air in my rear shock to dissipate, such that the O-ring makes its home all the way at the end of the shock’s natural travel path, a situation I promise myself I will correct before riding again, only to discover myself back out in the world with an under-aired rear shock.
The evidence accrues.
If one follows the primary suspect in this affair, still me, at any close distance, an obvious pattern of behavior will emerge. At the beginning of any ride, the riding is light and sharp, the rider consistently in a ready position, with pedals level, elbows and knees bent. As the ride unfolds however, a certain laziness creeps in. There is more time in the saddle, presumably due to fatigue, and the left-hand pedal, which this rider clearly favors, can be seen to drop, dangling as it glides along through space, in the “danger zone” Kenny Loggins has been good to warn us about.
It’s at this stage that the whole thing begins to come together, whether you are able to hold all the details in your mind at once or need to resort to one of those classic bulletin board and yarn scenarios. The overwhelming likelihood is that this injury was sustained towards the end of a ride, as the subject’s left pedal dropped, and the added sag of a poorly adjusted shock made a pedal-to-rock impact highly probable.
In my mind (and now yours), after taping off the search area and dispatching a crew of roughly a dozen technicians in plain, black windbreakers and government issue, mirrored aviators, a striated stone is identified, bearing the telltale signs of struggle. There is attendant also a dark swoosh of soil suggesting a knobbed tire sliding sideways, displacing the dry leaves and needles of the surface. The position of the skid mark and its relation to the stone tell us that this was a rear tire event. The direction of the swoosh and its widening outwards say the rider clipped that left-hand pedal and immediately lost control of the rear tire, which moved to the right, suddenly and violently, causing handlebars to move in the same direction, counter-steering and then snapping back.
In moments like this, riders are wont to grab two fistfuls of brakes, and the examiners surmise that in so doing, this poor bastard had wrenched the bars backward into his own left knee.
I looked down and saw the scab there, still glinting wetly, and knew it was true.
She said, “It’s fine. Just throw them in the hamper.”