Heading home

I'm heading home.


It sounds strange to say that, and anyone looking over my shoulder at the moment would think I've finally left my senses.  Fresh snow blankets the yard deeply enough that not only is the grass concealed, but the driveway and even the street have blended into its homogenous whiteness.   No tire tracks mark it, and the weather report suggests that we should all get comfortable.


More to the point, I haven't left the house, even for the mailbox, in twelve days; and most of those twelve have been spent perched in my Lazy-Boy and swaddled in oxycodone.  The swirling snowstorm outside is matched by another in my head.  But it's okay.  I'm heading home.


Back in 2006 or so, I headed out for an early morning ride one Sunday, to an abandoned golf course near my house.  The smart money in Atlanta has been migrating north for years now, and the country club community where the ball playing heroes lived in the 80s has withered.  The big houses are mostly still occupied, but the golf links turned yellow and weedy and they boarded up the clubhouse.


But the cart paths!  The perfect combination of road and off road, not five miles from home.  The architect laid them out with a nod to forest elves and low speed buggies.  They wind, they twist, they fill up with dirt at the low spots, and all the bridges have black timbers and humped backs.  The perfect spot for an hour of full tilt boogie, without the hassle of loading a bike in the truck.


The crash came so suddenly I didn't realize I was falling until I'd already hit the ground.  I'd spun the pedals up fast on the approach to a short bridge, caught air off the back side...and found myself on the ground, with the wind knocked out in a way that I'd never felt before.  Figured I'd lay there for a while, til I got to feeling better, then I'd ride home and get an ice pack.


But I kept not feeling better.  I'd close my eyes for a second, and when I opened them the shadows had moved.  I closed them once, and when I opened them again, a deer, a big ten point buck, was sniffing around my head.  Shit, I'm getting shocky.  It's 25 degrees, and my phone is on the charger at home.  It's move or die.


My left leg was strangely unresponsive.  My toes wiggled just fine, my ankle rolled, but I couldn't weight it or raise my knee.  When I used the bike like a fence gate to pull myself up on, that leg didn't quite reach the ground.


I lowered the seatpost until the saddle touched the top tube, and standing fully on my right leg, pulled the bike back under me.  Lifted my left foot and dropped it on the pedal until the cleat clicked in.  Pushed off hard with the right, clicked in, and pedaled.   Pain?  Plentiful, but it seemed a long way away, like someone was telling me about it.


I rode home, just a couple of miles on empty roads, up my front steps that I'd ramped the year before, and through the front door that didn't lock, and made the call.   Five titanium screws put the doorknob back on top of my femur.  A year with a walker and a wheelchair got me moving again.  But I never got back to full speed.


Muscle and fat and brains live off a network of arteries and veins, little rubbery tubes that blood runs through.  They stretch and move and occasionally get pinched shut, like when you cross your legs wrong and your foot goes to sleep. 


Bone's not so forgiving.  The blood runs through vessels in it too, but they're carved in the bone itself, like caverns in limestone.  When it gets broken, no matter how carefully the doctor lines the pieces back up, a lot of the vessels aren't going to line up. 


My hip eventually healed, and with the screws still in place, actually became stronger than it had been before the fracture.  But the blood supply withered gradually, as the vessels that only half matched became blocked by clots, and the doorknob went from living bone to calcified stone.


You could pick a worse material than stone, if you wanted to build something to last.  For the first five years or so, the CAT scans and PET scans and x-rays showed an inert mass of bone, bearing up to the physically vigorous lifestyle of a construction worker and cyclist.  But in 2012, standing up and walking started taking longer and making more noise than before.  Sometimes a pop, occasionally the sharp crack of a gunshot.  More pain, too:  a dull ache in the morning, that sharpened with exertion.  Enough that rolling over in bed woke me up every time.


Anyway, the doc who reduced the fracture the first time took new films and when he put them up on the light box, stood back and whistle.  Stone may be long wearing, but it's not immortal and it doesn't grow back.  The weight bearing part of the door knob had worn all the way through and shards had split off it.  There was a hole the size of my thumbnail going all the way through.   Time for a new hip.


Which brings us to the present day.  This is actually my second artificial hip, after the first one got installed wrong, and gave me a leg 30mm too short.  One scar is a hand's length, purple, and stands proud of the flesh like a pinky.  The new one runs from waistline halfway to my knee, and has 45 gleaming staples that look like an upholsterer's tool. 


But I can walk.  The pain never goes away, but it never gets too close either, a dull thudding ache that physical therapy blames on post-op swelling.  Both feet are equally far from my nose too, and my ankle bones bump together in bed just like I'm used to.  My walker, an old friend festooned with Dirt Rag stickers and a bicycle bell, carries me from bed to chair to bathroom as fast as you could walk.


So what's all this talk about Home?


Bicycles form the one constant in my life.  I got serious about my riding in 1980, as a tenth-grader, and even though I've never gotten good at it, have never quit trying.  I raced NORBA and USCF, trials, time trials, criteriums and road races.  Never won anything more valuable than a bottle of chain oil, and never valued anything more than that bottle of chain oil.  I've been spit out the back of some pretty good packs, and led them briefly when they lapped me.


When I wasn't riding bikes, I wrote about them.  In between construction jobs, I scribbled articles for Dirt Rag and Bicycle Times, covering shows for handbuilt bicycles, and project bikes and a few new products.  I belonged to news groups, and web forums, and cycling clubs.  I owned thirty-odd bikes, not counting the cadavers under the deck.  I've got shelves of cycling books, a complete set of Dirt Rag back issues, and most cycling magazines going back to the early 1990s.  It was a snug, happy way to live, where most of my reading for pleasure could construe as research for an article, where every weekend trip became tax-deductible because it would sell a magazine piece, and pleasure led to pleasure led to pleasure.


Unfortunately, when you can't ride a bike, it's hard to write about a bike.  Hell, it's hard to look one in the face.  And the more I rode, the less able I became.  Training isn't supposed to work that way.  It was all pain, no gain.


When the doc scheduled my surgery, I celebrated by sending a double sawbucks to Randonneurs USA, and a C-note to Compass Bicycles, for, respectively, a year's membership, and brake shoes, taillight bulbs, and tires.  I bought a pair of string backed gloves from Bicycle South, and squeeze tube for GU from REI.  I started reassembling my long miles bike, a project that hadn't seemed worth it a year ago.


Thomas Wolfe famously said that you can't go home again; that home changes while you're away and you probably change too.  Bikes have always been the home for my soul, a comfortably familiar place, a place where I felt competent.  I couldn't go there for a long time.  I'm going there again.  I'm going home.