Three Days on the Katy Trail

I could barely move. Every muscle in my body seized up, screamed at me to hold still. But lying there hurt just as much. And I only had two days to get home.

I have never not wrecked riding a bicycle.

My first attempts at riding without training wheels are embarrassingly preserved forever on Super 8 film, converted to tape, converted to digital and now uploaded to the internet by my surprisingly technically adept mother. It’s a series of me falling over on our driveway. She set it to the Benny Hill theme. Thanks for sharing that with the world, mom.

After months of filmed falls, I finally was up and going. 

Two trips around the block without falling and my first thought, with the reasoning of most six-year-olds: I’ve got this. Let’s try a jump ramp. 

The rest of the neighborhood kids were doing it. I could too. It looked great. Flying off the ramp. Flying over each other as we took turns lying at the back of it. Bucky Martin could clear three of us.

On my first try, I completely missed the ramp and plowed out of control into Red McCarthy’s Ford parked on the street. It left a dent. In me and the Ford. I had to pick up sticks in Red’s yard and perform other free labor for the summer to atone for it.

Undeterred, I tried again. Lumbering up the sidewalk, handlebar shaking back-and-forth, my aim was better. My speed was not.

I got up the ramp just enough for the front tire to drop over the top. I flipped forward, over the handlebars, face first onto the sidewalk, the bike crashing down on top of me. It took the skin off my nose and left a bump the size of a goose egg on my forehead for the better part of July. My grandmother’s words of comfort were, “It’s good that you’re so hard headed.”

Days later, the kids jumping over each other again, I slipped in line behind four others doing a fast series of jumps over two of our friends. When they saw me coming, the two lying there scattered like a rabid pitbull was loose.

I hit the ramp. The two nails holding it together gave way. The ramp collapsed. My bike bounced forward, me flailing to keep in my seat. But I stayed up. It was really more of a fall than a jump, but I stayed up. And everyone said it counted. My first and only successful jump off a ramp.

Years later, approaching age twelve, my jumping days behind me, I was headed home from my friend Lloyd’s house, another successful Saturday of adventures that, in those days, we were turned loose to do without supervision so long as we were home in time for dinner.

Somewhere in the three blocks between Lloyd’s and my house, my bike began making a clicking noise around the chain. I searched for what it was, of course without stopping. Just peddling and looking down.

Something in my brain yelled at me. Hey, wasn’t there a truck parked up the street?

I looked up just in time to see the metal pipes jutting out from the plumber’s truck right before I ran head first into them. Time enough to swerve. Time enough for the pipe to just rip my ear in half rather than impale my forehead.

The blood rushed from my mother’s face when she saw me. That was okay, I had enough blood all over me for the both of us. Three hours in the emergency room and twenty-eight stitches later, I was mostly good as new. My right ear is still shaped differently today. I used to be able to hide it under my hair, but hereditary hair loss has made that impossible now.

Thanks for sharing that with me, Dad.

By adulthood, I’d had other crashes. Through high school. A race with a buddy to my driveway from either end of the street led to a spectacular crash when neither of us would concede, me ending up virtually unscathed in the lawn. My friend shredded in my mother’s rose bushes on the other side of the drive. In college, racing back to the dorm to quickly shower before final exams after an all-nighter at the library. In the rain. And in the haze, weather and brain, I lost the path and then suddenly there was my dorm. Ten feet away. I bailed just in time. The bike was a complete loss.

Years passed. Married. Employed. Bikeless. Happy. 

The Katy Trail is a converted railway through the Missouri farm country. It’s well-maintained. It’s scenic. It’s flat. We’d hiked it plenty. We were young, just approaching thirty. Neither of us had been on a bike in years. It seemed like a perfect place to try again.

What could go wrong?

Day 1. We rented our bikes from a post on the trail and headed for Marthasville, twenty-five miles away.

Day 2. We couldn’t move.

I woke up with aches in muscles in places I wasn’t even aware I had. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get dressed let alone bike the twenty-five miles back along the traiI. I shuffled towards the shower like a saddle worn sidekick from an old Western. Somehow, by sheer will, we made it down to breakfast at the inn, where the innkeeper smiled at us knowingly. She’d seen this before. Her advice, take it slower and easier heading back.

Kinda figured that out myself, lady, I thought, but just smiled and said thank you, instead.

The second day was ten miles only. It was torture. Painful. Our legs screamed at us to stop. The weather was scorchingly hot. The only thing that made it bearable was stopping at one of the wineries on the trail along the way. Owned by Germans. A whole alpine theme to the buildings and furniture and signage, most of which were posts of things that were “Verboten”, which made it feel even more authentically German.

One of the many things you could not do was just purchase a single glass of wine. We had to buy a bottle. We settled on a cold bottle of Seyval, Missouri’s attempted answer to Sauvignon Blanc. It was cool and refreshing and surprisingly good. Just what we needed. But one glass was all we were going to do with miles still ahead of us. 

We stubbornly refused to abandon the rest, though. 

In a moment of inspiration, I poured out one of my two water bottles hanging from my bike seat, and filled it with the rest of the wine. And promptly forgot I’d done it.

An hour later, hot, sweating, aching our way up the trail, I reached for the water bottle to cool myself off, grabbed the wrong one and squirted wine into both eyes.

My wife turned back at my shouts just in time to see me careen off the trail into the cornfield bordering it just below. I wound up coated in dirt and wine, my forehead, both knees and the palms of both hands, scraped and bleeding. And a corn stalk fully up the back of my shirt.

Twenty years later I am still grateful that we didn’t yet have cell phones. 

We do now, however. And my wife is ready with it. Because we just bought bikes again, too.

Cue the Benny Hill theme.