Crash and Burn
this very day as The Day I Woke Up. From that moment on I was a man possessed, a man on a mission. Others seemed to sense it in me and responded accordingly, and soon I began to feel like I was almost fitting in. By the time I was ready to ride out of town on a bitter cold December morning, I felt sad at leaving several good friends behind. On the other hand, I was glad at being sad. Something good was beginning to happen to me.
There is a stretch of the Route 101 Coastal Highway in Marin County north of San Francisco that has probably washed into the Pacific by now. Yes, I had found California.
I leaned my bike into the curves of the road, first one way, then the other, testing my Jedi reflexes to the limit, delighting in the roller coaster, speeding up on the straightaways and gearing down on the hairpins perched high above the Pacific, my ears ringing with the roar of the waves crashing against the rocks below.
I was just leaning in for another sharp turn when I came upon some rocks that had worked their way loose from the hills above. There was no time to think. I swerved to avoid the obstacle, then gently hit the brakes to avoid spinning out and methodically geared down and leaned on the bike harder than I would like to, trusting I would stop before I found myself with nothing between me and the ocean but several hundred feet of air.
I brought the bike around 180 degrees, but it was going backward toward the ocean on its own momentum. I felt the sickening sensation of the back wheel leaving the shoulder and losing traction in the soft earth behind. For a brief fleeting instant I had the sensation of being suspended in midair, rather like Wile E Coyote in those Roadrunner cartoons. Then the bike found purchase, jerked foward, and stalled on the shoulder.
I turned off the ignition, wheeled my bike to a safe place, and took stock. Something had shifted in me in those two or three seconds. Whatever had been holding me back before was holding me back no longer.
Not long after, I met the woman who would be my wife. We moved first to Vancouver, then to New Zealand where she is from, where we both enrolled in law school (law
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