Traumatic events always seem more dramatic with time. Like this one, I swear, I was flying through the air on my bike in slow motion while people sat on their couches, slowly eating buttery popcorn while they watched me on TV.
We were in Snow Mass, Colorado during the summer, which is awesome. Anywhere in Colorado in the summer is a constant state of awesome.
There are these bike trails, the kind anyone can handle. They are paved, and follow along the side of a road, but it's in the middle of these beautiful fields and mountains, and it's mostly straight with a few bends in the road, so if you want, you can go really fast. And I liked to go fast.
I rode these trails everyday on that vacation with my mom. Miles of trails. There were some places where the trail would go up a little bit, or cross a street so you would have to stop and check for cars.
At this point, I should tell you that we were there with another family. The dads were friends, and their daughter was my age. The daughter and I got along, but we weren't, like, super awesome best friends forever with a secret handshake or anything. I don't even remember her name. Maybe it was Amy? Let's call her Amy.
So one day, everyone went for a bike ride. The moms, the dads, me and Amy. Amy was not a very good bike rider, which made her less cool in my mind because when I was 12, I measured a person's coolness by their bike riding and rollerblading ability level.
Amy and I were going fast, and I was in front because Amy was a whiney brat. We came up to an intersection with a small street, which was on the down slope of a large hill. In my mind, it was a mountain. Well, it was a mountain, but the bottom part of the mountain, so like a baby mountain. But it sounds cooler to say "I rode my bike of a mountain" than "I rode my bike off a small hill."
So I was stopping at the intersection, but Amy screamed, "No! Don't stop!" This led me to believe that she was going to run into me if I stopped, because of her poor bike riding abilities. I could see that there were no cars, so... (Disclaimer: I was 12! I didn't know everything there was to know yet.) I kept going.
At the other side of the intersection, the trail immediately went into a downhill slope. And I could see that there was a turn approaching quickly, like in 30 feet. A 90 degree turn, on a downhill slope, and I could see the gravel on the trail. With my bike riding experience, I knew that this was an equation that equaled FALL. A hard sideways fall with scrapes. And maybe gravel pieces stuck in my skin or something. Gross.
But if I skipped the turn, if I just went straight into the grass, I could just ride my bike down the side of the hill and catch everyone at the base. And I would look cool. And it would be fun. It looked easy, like a gentle, smooth slope with soft grass. So I went for it.
Really, it was very tall grass, because right at the edge of the turn, the ground dropped away, like maybe 15 ft. So what I expected to be a smooth ride down a hill was not. It was an air born ride, a fall, down to the ground, through the tall grass and a few tree branches. I landed on a rock. My arm was broken. But when you think about it, it could have been much worse.
So the other dad climbs down there to get me (I guess my dad wasn't with us after all? Maybe he was playing golf?). I jumped on his back, like any damsel in distress would do in any movie ever made in the jungle, which is what this felt like - a jungle rescue. Of course, he fell. He was like, um, I'll help you get back up to the trail, but I can't carry you. MY DAD would have carried me. I guess no one in this other family was as awesome as anyone in my family.
As it turns out, there was a fire station across the street. One thing that adds to the awesomeness of Colorado is the large number of handsome men that live there. Like soap opera handsome. One example would be Ryan, of Trista and Ryan from the bachelor? He was a fireman in Vail, I think. So yeah. And everyone knows that firemen are handsome because in the movies, when male strippers arrive at bachelorette parties, they are sometimes dressed like firemen.
So these soap opera handsome Snow Mass firemen arrive on the scene. And I'm thinking "you're a little late, this subpar daddy couldn't even carry me on his back while he climbed up a mountain." And I was also like "what, this? This is no big deal. It's just a little broken. I know I just rode my bike off a mountain, like ET, but I'm still cool."
But they put me on a stretcher and took me to the hospital in an ambulance. This was embarassing, mostly because they were so handsome.
And because Colorado attracts soap opera handsome men, the doctor was also handsome. Like he looked like Tom Cruise. It might have Ben Tom Cruise method acting, except that Tom Cruise probably couldn't have set my arm and put a cast on it.
Or could he? I hear he does his own stunts.
