Thursday, November 24, 2005 8:56 AM
by
plitwin
On Not Cutting Corners
So I am bicycling this past Sunday on the Burke-Gilman trail in Seattle. Trying to get my exercise in on a cool crisp day. In Fremont (a Seattle neighborhood) the trail is detoured because of work on the Fremont bridge (the trail normally goes under the approach to the bridge). However, on Sundays, the Freemon Sunday Market occupies a good stretch of the detour route, making life interesting for the runner/biker trying to use the trail. Anyway, I successfully detoured the detour route on the way out but on the way back it looked like the market was breaking down so I decided to navigate through the market until I could get back on the trail. Bad idea.
So I basically had to weave between the narrow stretch of street in the middle of the market and the sidewalk. At one point the sidewalk was clogged so I veered left towards the street but there was a van coming towards me. And rather than stopping and waiting for it to go by, I decided to cut through the corner of an empty vendor tent. CRASH! Unbeknownst to me, the vendor was starting to disassemble the tent and a hard-to-see cross bar was now at my face level. So I crashed right into the cross-bar. Fortunately, I was going slow enough so that I did not fall off my bike (just to my feet) but it was quite a shock and it smarted!
The vendor rushed over to apologize (thank you) but it wasn't his fault. It was all my own damn fault (as the Jimmy Buffet song goes). I got back on my bike and started to ride home. I reached up and rubbed the wounded area of my forehead and found some blood. Anyway, I did give myself a rather nice wound between my eyes and a dark wound (a black eye) below my right eye. All because I was in too much of a hurry to slow down or stop. In retrospect I learned that I had missed a sign that detoured from the detour route on Sundays from 6AM to 6PM.
And now I have to tell everyone at work, family gatherings, etc that I wasn't in a fight. My wife didn't beat me up. It was my own stupidity. So the moral of the story: don't cut corners. Slow down already.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Paul