Vol. 24, No. 7

Dear Family,

I have now ridden in an ambulance. So we can check that one off.

My trip to the hospital, as you might have guessed, was occasioned by an incident involving my bicycle and a car. Inasmuch as the road rash on my left shoulder, left forearm, left hip and right hand has mostly healed and the last of the bruising has almost entirely faded away, I am (sadly) running out of opportunities to respond to “How did that happen?” inquiries from anyone fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of my swimsuit-clad, middle-aged physique.

And so I’m going to tell the story one final time for posterity. Let’s call this the “authoritative” version. If the details differ from anything I may have told you previously, bear in mind that not all of Joseph Smith’s recorded tellings of the First Vision are perfectly consistent with the Church’s officially canonized account. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

The incident occurred near the small town of Perryville in northeastern Maryland where the mouth of the Susquehanna River funnels Pennsylvania’s pollution into the top of the Chesapeake Bay. Perryville (pop. 4,400) is best known (to the extent it is known at all, which it isn’t) for its outlet mall and Hollywood Casino, as well as for the eight-dollar toll¹ levied on northbound Interstate 95 travelers for no apparent reason as they drive by it.

I was in Perryville for its annual “Diamond In the Rough” triathlon. It’s important that I work the triathlon into each telling of the story (or any story). Even if the accident had occurred a week after the triathlon, I still would have found a way to mention it. It’s part of the triathlete code, which mandates that we share unsolicited details about our latest race with anyone not smart enough to run away when they see us coming. Deep down we know you’re only nodding and smiling to be polite and don’t really care. But we have no choice. It’s the code.

The swim portion of the triathlon was in the Chesapeake. It went poorly for me. A rogue fishing boat plowed through the center of the course as the race was beginning, the water was pure chop, and I swam in constant fear of being run over by other drunk fishermen (apologies for the redundancy). You’d think my fear would have pushed me to swim faster. It did not.

After emerging from the bay, we raced up what must have been 100 stairs to the bikes. The first several miles of the ride were technical — sharp turns and short, steep climbs. I overtook several faster swimmers on the bike (which is usually how it works) and was passed by literally no one (which is not usually how it works).

A note about triathlon bikes is in order here. I know you don’t care but it might help you appreciate what happened next:

The one and only benefit of triathlon bikes is that they are fast. They are fast because they are ridiculously aerodynamic. The principal drawback of triathlon bikes is that many of the features that make them aerodynamic also make them unwieldy. They don’t handle as well as conventional road racing bikes. They don’t corner as effortlessly or gracefully. They are, in my experience, less comfortable and less fun to ride. Triathletes knowingly and willfully accept these drawbacks in exchange for speed on the open road.²

Because the first several miles were so technical, I (probably along with everyone else) was feeling the frustration of experiencing all the tri bike drawbacks with none of the benefits. And so when I finally reached a stretch of straight-ish, flat-ish road, I was beyond ready to open the throttle. I contorted my not-especially-limber, 49-year-old frame into the most aerodynamic position I could manage and started stomping on the pedals.

I forgot to mention one other downside of tri bikes: When your hands are on the aero bars, they are nowhere near the brakes.

This is the position I found myself in — full speed, head down, with limited steering or stopping capabilities — as I pedaled north on Craigtown Road (a two-lane country road) toward Jacob Tome Highway (a four-lane country road).

I had the stop sign, but police were controlling the intersection, stopping cross-traffic on the highway to allow the cyclists to blow through. This is how many drivers (incorrectly) believe cyclists treat all stop signs anyway, but it’s fun to do during a race with police assistance.

As I approached the intersection, I recall feeling a distinct impression that I should sit up and move my hands off the aero bars and onto the handlebars with the brakes. At church, this sort of feeling would be attributed to the still, small voice of the Holy Ghost. Maybe that’s what this was. I often struggle to know for certain. But whatever it was, I overruled it. I stayed in my tuck and accelerated into the intersection, placing my faith in the arm of flesh (in this case the Cecil County Police) to protect me.

In retrospect I obviously should have heeded the prompting. A car coming from the opposite direction ignored the police, entered the intersection, and proceeded to make a left turn across my intended path. With my hands in no position to stop (or even effectively steer) the bike, all I could do was lurch violently to the left. I somehow managed to miss the car — I’m not sure how — but was not able to keep the bike upright. I hit the asphalt, slid a short distance on my left shoulder and hip, and came to rest in the center of the intersection underneath my bike.

“So you basically pulled a Captain America,” one of the Forest Knolls lifeguards observed as I was telling him the story on Friday. That’s definitely the coolest possible way of describing what happened. But Captain America wears protective clothing. I was wearing basically nothing.

An authoritative police officer on the scene angrily assembled an impressive string of profanity and ordered the offending motorist pulled over. He then stood over me and shut down traffic in all four directions (except the bikes) for what seemed like 15 minutes until the ambulance arrived.

Painful road rash and cosmetic damage to my bike notwithstanding, nothing seemed broken. I retained full use of all my limbs and probably would have remounted my bike and continued on had the cop not been there. I felt guilty about the worsening traffic jam I was now causing and offered more than once to remove myself from the center of the intersection. But the cop was having none of it. I was kind of a bloody mess and he wouldn’t even let me stand up until the EMTs got there.

I was loaded into the ambulance and driven back across the Susquehanna to the University of Maryland’s Harford Memorial Hospital in the historic town of Havre de Grace (est. 1785, pop. 14,000). I was able to find Stage 14 of the Tour de France on the TV in the ER and someone asked if that was the race I had just crashed out of. It was all I could do not to lie and say it was.

The trip to the hospital was probably overkill given the nature of my injuries, but the nurses there certainly did a better job separating all the bits of road from my various wounds and cleaning things up than I would have done. One of them asked whether I’d had a tetanus shot in the past five years. “Yes!” I proudly replied. “I got one in 2019 — the last time I got hit by a car on my bike.” Bicycling is associated with any number of health benefits. Who’d’ve thought that keeping your tetanus shots up to date would be among them?

I was discharged from the hospital after a couple of hours and took a cab back across the Susquehanna to the race venue in Perryville. I collected my bike and other belongings, had a nice chat with the race organizers (they gave me a whole pizza!), loaded everything into the car, and then, after crossing the Susquehanna River for a fourth and final time, endured an uncomfortable 70-minute drive home.

The next two days were miserable as I tried everything I could think of (and ultimately failed) to keep bedding and clothing from sticking to my torn-up shoulder and hip. The solution ultimately involved parading around the house mostly naked for a couple days, which I’m sure everyone appreciated. Things got a little awkward on Sunday when the mother of a boy in the priests quorum to whom I teach organ lessons brought over some cookies he’d made for me along with a kind get-well note he’d written. And again on Monday when the bishop brought me two pints of Ben & Jerry’s. But by Tuesday I was wearing clothes again and more or less back to normal. I resumed running on Wednesday.

The road rash had fully scabbed over nine days later when I embarked on four days of what, in the Church’s post-Scouting era, is now technically termed “Aaronic Priesthood Quorum Camp” (though no one actually calls it that) at Rocky Gap State Park in western Maryland. The girls in our ward had been deprived of a camping experience this year (our stake’s Young Women “Camp” in June was a virtual affair) and so we invited them to come with us.

The Handbook does not provide for Church-sponsored, mixed-gender, overnight activities before age 14. We did not want to exclude our 12 and 13 year olds and so what we technically held was a ward Aaronic Priesthood Quorum Camp and a ward Young Women Camp functionally independent of one another. We just happened to eat all our meals and do all of our activities in the same place at the same time. If you’re familiar with the youth camp loop at Rocky Gap, we camped in site 2 while the girls and their leaders camped a couple hundred meters up the hill in site 3. (Oddly, there did not appear to be a “site 1.”) Our youth are a reasonably compliant bunch and I do not believe we had any late-night shenanigans.

The only remotely scandalous thing occurred at the end of Tuesday night’s campfire devotional with the girls when one of the 12-year-old boys set about relieving himself on a nearby tree. The suggestion that maybe he not do that right there was met with a genuinely quizzical facial expression that seemed to ask, where else am I going to do it? I love 12 year olds and it’s entirely possible (likely, even) that he was unaware of the bathroom a short distance away.

I particularly enjoyed having Grace around and generally had a nice time despite being reminded yet again that there is virtually nothing about camping that appeals to me. The fact that I like the people I go camping with makes it tolerable, but the boyish idiosyncrasies that I find charming on Monday inevitably start getting on my nerves by Thursday. And I’m fairly certain that most people feel exactly the same way about me. It sometimes makes me wonder why we put ourselves through all this, but at least the weather was nice.

Grace continues to lifeguard at Forest Knolls Pool and also has recently begun teaching swimming lessons to little kids there. [Begin old man voice] In my day, at Sunnybrook (where I lifeguarded in high school), I had to become a certified Red Cross Water Safety Instructor before I could teach swimming lessons. At Forest Knolls, you apparently just need to be charming and a member of the swim team [End old man voice]. Fortunately Grace qualifies on both counts. When she’s not working at the pool, you can usually find her hanging out at the pool — often with friends in the guard office.

Grace thinks I’m awesome because, as she learned this month, I grew up with Lincoln Hoppe. Who is Lincoln Hoppe, you ask? He’s an actor, possibly among the 20 funniest people ever to graduate from BYU (I’m not sure how official these rankings are — I just made this one up) and he has narrated some audiobooks that Grace likes. She’s a big fan and veritably swooned when I told her that not only did I used to know Lincoln, I even slept over at his house a bunch of times. It’s possible we haven’t spoken since high school, but that’s good enough for me to score high in Grace’s book.

Sophie’s missionary training has transitioned almost entirely to Russian, which sounds hard to me, but she claims to enjoy it. One of the ways the MTC has changed since my day is that the Church now hires actors for the missionaries to practice on. (We trained by role-playing with other missionaries back in the day, which was about as interesting and worked about as well as you’d think.)

If I understand it right (and I probably don’t) Sophie sometimes teaches actors and sometimes teaches legitimately interested individuals who are not members of the Church and for some reason have consented to let missionaries-in-training practice on them. Sophie is not supposed to know (or ask) whether she is dealing with a genuinely interested person or just a Russian-speaking actor, but when they inevitably connect on social media and the person has listed their occupation as “Actor,” she usually has a pretty good idea.

We have her here for one more month. On August 25th, she’ll be heading off somewhere. Whether it’s directly to Ukraine or first to some intermediate place in the United States will depend largely on the timing of visas. Whichever it is, the days are racing by far too quickly for my liking.

I hope you are making the best of your days.

Love, Tim

1. It’s only $6 if you have a Maryland E-Z Pass, but you’re paying full freight if your E-Z pass is from Pa., N.J., Del. or some other foreign state
2. If you watched any of the Olympic triathlon this week, those were not triathlon bikes. Unlike most triathlons, the one at the Olympics is draft-legal and, for all the reasons above, triathlon bikes are not conducive to pacelines and pelotons.