Accidental Staycation

It was my first ever paid vacation. Day one started with a list of my grandparents’ house plants, garden tasks, and poodle related chores.  Sparkle snuffled her encouragement as my grandmother highlighted the items she deemed most important. Care of their home and Sparkle would be punctuated by short day trips to local parks and hiking trails. Unbeknownst to me, my plans for the remainder of the week would be derailed in a few short hours.

After wishing my grandparents a safe trip, I reminded myself that my vacations would someday involve friends, resorts, and exotic locations. However, until my student loans were paid off and my new-to-me car was paid for, southern Ontario would be my playground. I had grown up on the east coast, gone to school on the west coast, and landed my first career job in London, Ontario. Aside from the opportunity to explore a new province, Ontario permitted me to be close to my extended family, whom I knew only through pictures. I was at the bottom of the seniority list at work, and lucky to have gotten a week off in August. For now, cycling and camping worked well with my budget, and this first vacation – house-sitting for my dad’s parents – made my bank account happy. Moving and setting up an apartment had depleted my savings.

It was nearing noon. After an early lunch for me and a little cuddling for Sparkle, I took her for a walk. She was no longer a young dog and after her exercise, would be quite content to nap for much of the afternoon. I checked her food and water, locked the house, and set out on my first day trip. I pedaled my old 10-speed through the garage past my Ford Probe and headed out of town. Although I was not yet accustomed to the humidity that was normal for this part of the country, the sky was blue and cloudless, the air was still, and the remainder of the day still full of potential.

After the rolling hills and forests of New Brunswick, and the coastal mountains of the greater Vancouver area, the flat fields of Middlesex County were a novelty. Traveling down the concession roads, with farms all around, felt both familiar and foreign, for the farm I had grown up on looked nothing like these farms. Here, small clusters of trees and homesteads appeared to be carved out of cornfields. There were no rock piles at the edges of the fields, and no wet spots that rendered small areas unusable. Not to mention the ability to see a field in its entirety, from one vantage point, was unheard of, in my experience.

Before I had gone my first kilometer, my hair was plastered to my head beneath my helmet, and my tank top was soaked with sweat. After a couple of hours, I stopped for a drink of water and a banana and thought that the still air, pleasant a short while ago, now seemed lifeless and oppressive. I wished for even a small breeze. As though Mother Nature had read my mind, a gust of hot air blew past me. Disappointed that it had not felt as refreshing as I’d hoped, I looked up at the sky. On my left it looked much as it had when I started my ride, but on the right, I could see in the distance that bad weather was coming – and quickly! Towering black clouds were suspended above a grey wall. It took me a moment to realize that was a wall of water. As I watched, chain lightning arced though the clouds, closely followed by a loud crack of thunder. If I didn’t turn around, I would be caught in a deluge.

While my ride out of town had been relaxed, my ride back was frantic. The rainclouds were moving far faster than I. The air was no longer still. Hot air assailed me from different directions as the wind changed radically from one moment to the next. More than once, I had to return to the edge of the pavement after a particularly strong gust of wind had moved me and my 10-speed closer to the center of the road. The irony of the situation was not lost on me each time I lamented the loss of the still air I had failed to appreciate just moments ago. When the first raindrops hit me, I was surprised by their force – they weren’t cold, but they stung. A glance over my shoulder told me the wall of water would hit me any second. Very soon my visibility would be almost nil, and I was moving too fast for that. Already the dark clouds had generated a premature duskiness. I turned on my bike’s lights and my feet paused as they caught up with my brain. As I applied my brakes, a sheet of water passed over me, and I was cast into darkness.

Had I been paying closer attention to the road; I might have avoided what happened next. My front tire hit a pothole and came to a sudden stop. While I was no longer going so fast that I flew over my handlebars, I did lose control of the bike. The tires slid left, towards the yellow line, and I fell onto the paved shoulder, skidding over the rough asphalt and loose gravel. The right side of my body was on fire. I moved everything gingerly, grateful to discover nothing was broken. Hopefully the lights on my bike were still working. I stood up carefully and looked around. My bike was in the middle of the road. I limped over to it, stood it up, and checked the tires and chain. Everything seemed okay. I resumed my journey home, slowly and carefully, thunder and lightning punctuating the steady pounding of the rain.

Even through the rain, I could feel the hot blood trickling down my arm and leg – not far, because the rain diluted it, but it was enough to tell me I was bleeding. I could only imagine the road rash. As I approached the first houses on Cedar Street, lightning flooded the sky and thunder boomed somewhere very close by. I had hoped the streetlights and the warm glow spilling out of windows would augment my sadly inadequate headlight, but it was not to be. For when the stark lightning vanished, the town was shrouded in the absolute darkness of a power outage.

It was still raining hard as I pedaled toward a shortcut that would shave about five minutes – at the rate I was going – off my travel time. I wasn’t familiar with the narrow alley, but I was certain that it would take me to Charles Street, about two blocks from my destination – home and Sparkle. By my estimation, I was about halfway along my shortcut when lightning flashed, and thunder boomed again. Burned into my retinas was the image of a power line draped across the alley at just the perfect height to clothesline me, about three feet ahead. I slammed on my brakes and lost control of my bike a second time.

This time the bike slid right, and I fell on my left side, skidding along asphalt and gravel. Both my bike and I cleared the hanging power line. Again, I was grateful to discover that nothing was broken. However, I was certain that my arms and legs were now matching sets. The fiery pain that coursed along the left side of my body was now balancing perfectly the pain I had been experiencing on the right side of my body. After all, it had been so much fun the first time. I sat up and looked around. Ahead of me and to my right I could see some sparks through the rain. If I strained my ears, I could hear them sputtering quietly. They were generating enough light to reveal the silhouette of a nearby handlebar – my bike.

I approached the sparking power line – apparently the other part of the wire that had caused my second helping of road rash – to happily discover that my bike was not dangerously close and could be picked up safely. I walked it back to a spot that was equidistant between the downed power lines and checked it. The chain was off the gears and dangling from the frame. I felt like I was vibrating. My adrenaline-fueled pulse was keeping time with the pounding rhythm of the pouring rain. I needed to slow my breathing and calm down. Fixing my chain was the kind of mundane task that might help facilitate that. So, I did. I kept a flashlight on my bike because my dad had insisted – thanks, Dad. My wet fingers fumbled with the chain in the pale beam of the flashlight. After a couple of failed attempts, I had the chain back in place. I decided to walk my bike the rest of the way home.  My legs, I knew, would get me there safely.

As I used my flashlight to find the safest place to move past the sparking power line, I noticed three things: I was feeling much calmer, the rain had abated considerably, and Charles Street was much closer than I had realized. Given my situation, I was ecstatic! To buoy my spirits even more, I discovered that Charles Street still had power. The break in the line that I had discovered must have been the cause of the outage I had seen.

I propped my bike up in the garage and closed the garage’s large car door. There was no need for the neighbours, some of whom had watched my sorry return home, to see me strip down to my underwear and trash my ruined clothing. Sparkle greeted me at the door, happy to see me and oblivious to my pain. After a long and painful shower to rid my body of every speck of gravel I’d collected, I failed to find a first aid kit. I had a late supper and an early night, sleeping on old towels to avoid ruining my grandmother’s sheets.

In the morning, after carefully and painfully peeling the towels away from the places where they’d dried onto my road rash, I made a few phone calls and found a clinic that would give me a tetanus shot on short notice. A trip to the ER would not be necessary – thank goodness! Hopefully the weather would stay warm. Tank tops and shorts were all I was going to be comfortable in. I suffered the inquisitive stares of patients at the clinic, customers at the pharmacy, and patrons at the library. Back at home, Sparkle greeted me with her usual enthusiasm. She cared not one iota that my arms and legs looked like a hunk of donair meat, waiting to be shaved for the next hungry customer.

I had planned day trips to parks and hiking trails. They would still be there next month, or even next summer. Instead of exploring the region I now called home, I would be hanging out with Sparkle and enjoying the air conditioning. I had a whole new set of plans for my week. I was going to start with finding out who murdered Roger Ackroyd, why someone would kill a mockingbird, and what all the fuss about Rebecca was.