Tales From The Road
by Rob Blue on June 13th, 2007
Serious cyclists spend a lot of time riding their bikes. You spend those countless hours riding because you love it or you just “have to” get in the training miles. Most likely it’s a combination of both of these reasons. You see a lot of different things when you spend that much time on a bike. Some of these things are good, some are bad. I, like most mountain bikers, also have a road bike and spend at least half of my riding time on the pavement. You cover a lot more miles on your road bike versus your mountain bike which is great for endurance training and collecting road stories.
I saw a local news story a couple of weeks ago about a missing Agoura Hills man. I ride through Agoura Hills pretty much every week so news of the area always gets my attention. I really didn’t think twice about this story until a couple of days later when the body of this missing man was found right along the side of a road that I ride frequently. This really got my attention. As it turns out, this man went missing very early Sunday morning and they didn’t find him until Tuesday night. It just so happens that I rode right by him on Monday morning and didn’t even know it. I was probably 50 feet away from his wrecked car and had no idea it was there.
I rode by his roadside memorial at the scene of the accident the other day and stopped to see how I could have missed it. I felt sort of like an accident investigator looking around the area trying to put the pieces together of the last seconds of this young man’s life. It was easy to see how hundreds of people, including myself, passed this spot for 3 days before finding him. From the road there were next to no indications that there was an accident. There were absolutely no tire marks on the pavement at all where his car left the road. No skid marks from braking or sliding. I think I would have noticed any broken bits of a car when I rode by Monday morning so there must have been no roadside debris either.
This guy seems to have driven right off the road by driving straight through the swooping curve of the road without even noticing what he was doing. From the nearest intersection going in the direction that he was heading, it is a long and fairly straight road until you hit this turn which is a long sweeping right hander that heads uphill. With a speed limit of 55 due to the lack of any significant developement in the area, you can really hit this turn wide open without braking which is really a blast on a motorcycle.
I can only guess that this guy was distracted, incapacitated or asleep at the wheel. It is amazing that he missed the utility pole and large trees that were right on the side of the road. His fate would still have been the same but at least they would have found him immediately and saved his family and friends 3 days of worry.
Is there a lesson to be learned from his death? Of course there is. Most of us take for granted the privilege of driving. Instead of focusing on the task at hand we are distracted by our car’s gadgets or entertainment systems or worse yet, we are engaged in a attention consuming conversation on our cell phones. The even greater offense is to be behind the wheel when you are not all there due to lack of sleep or drug and alcohol altered states. With more and more drivers on the road and more and more distractions competing for their attention we are faced with daily tragedies. Yes, cars are much safer and many accidents are survivable nowadays unless you are a cyclists or other user of the road who is not protected by a steel fortress of solitude and ambivalence. We need to approach driving as a skill to be mastered and constantly improved and not as an afterthought. Serious cyclists will understand what I am saying here. Everyday we push ourselves to be a little bit better on the bike. If we applied this thinkinng to our driving as well there would be far fewer tragedies like the one I rode right by and didn’t even know it.
June 13th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Stories like that really open my eyes to life as a whole. It really makes me think how lucky I am to have what I have.