In Korea, where I’m living and working at the moment, dreaming of pigs is considered a lucky omen. It’s not working out that way for me. Due to the hot muggy days, and my heavy work schedule, I do most of my riding at night. Most everybody lives in the city, so the country roads are pretty safe at night and I can often go for up to 3 hours and see maybe 10 cars total – it’s nice – kind of like having your own private road.
A couple of weeks ago, I was hauling pretty good down the road going maybe 25 mph (a slight incline – I’m not usually quite that fast), when out of the corner of my left eye I see this streak come out in the road. During these kinds of moments your brain does some automatic calculations (kind of like when someone throws something at your head and somehow you move in the right direction to avoid getting clobbered) and I’m thinking it’s OK; you are going to miss it. But suddenly the initial rate changes and it stops, or nearly so, and adrenalin is introduced into my system as a step function and there is a sudden realization that I will indeed hit this animal. I have a FIRM grasp on the drops and I hit this thing dead-center, and I’m talking T-bone, and that’s with those skinny (24 mm) road tires! What happened next is a bit blurry – even in sped-up ‘crash-time’ it went by faster than could be processed; only reconstructing the event through forensic analysis of the bike and the injury patterns on my carcass could the event be understood. And after I get up with the intent on using my bike as a shield if I have to, I have to replay it in my mind to figure out what had happened. As I went up and over the handle bars, the front end went to the left. There was at least one summersault, and I think a half-twist – if it were a U-tube video, it would have gone viral.
It was big – 80-100 pounds of solid muscle – couldn’t have been a dog – too solid for that, and it was low to the ground and solidly built – not a deer (which I have seen while riding here). It was brown too, I think, kind of darker brown, but odd, there was no noise when I thumped it – it was bigger than a badger. It had to have been a pig, but couldn’t have been a domestic variety – those rascals are pink. I think I just smacked a wild hog! Well, I don’t see him, and I’m not hunting in the bushes in the dark for no wild pig! I check out me; the collar bone seems OK, ooh that elbow is going to hurt later… knee scrape, hip scrape, and that back seems a little stiff, shoulder scrape … crap. This is, by the way, why one should wear a helmet. I check the bike – the wheels spin with no rubbing – check. I feel the shifters have been scratched, dang. It’s really dark though, and I can’t see much else. I decide to ride back – it’s only 10-11 miles back, and I hate to get my sweetie out of her jammies!
As I start riding I realize that I can’t shift the front derailleur to high, and the rear derailleur starts whacking spokes if I shift to too low of a gear… ugh, that’s bent, but it seems like other than that, it’s rolling OK and the brakes work, so I ‘gently’ hobble back home.
In the end I realize that I cracked two ribs, removed some skin from my elbow and other afore mentioned body parts and, evidently, chipped a little bone in my forearm. The rear derailleur hanger was bent, the cable to the front derailleur stretched, and there was some other road rash on the bike – I got all of that fixed and straightened out. The road rash is mostly gone – the bone chip still hurts but with judicious amounts of ibuprofen, the ribs aren’t slowing me down too much. Lesson learned. It could have been worse, and I’m doing my best not to dream of pigs!