And therein lay my moment of dread. For all the flapping tassels on the handlebar grips and clacking of playing cards on the spokes, I realized at that last micro-second of pre-impact, that none of it was going to change my trajectory, altitude, or speed. Everything after that was a wind-sucking, lung-collapsing swirl of stars in my eyes and the taste of dirt in my mouth. The ramp got chucked over the side of the hill and into the trees, and I never got on a bike again until my parents got me this thing called a ‘ten-speed’ at Christmas. I was a little better at that. Being a mountain boy, I decided that staying attached to the ground in some fashion was God’s way of pre-ordaining my place in the cosmic pecking order.
Hahahaha...that downright made me laugh!
Ah, the inability of many of us as young boys to look more than a nanosecond into the future, and only in retrospect, look back and say “Well, I’m not doing THAT again!”