Stunt Woman
A cause of many accidents was my bike. I grew up when helmets and pads were not a requirement, but I don’t think would have helped me much anyway. I always had a knack for falling on things other than my elbows and knees (though occasionally I would scrape them too.)
One of the strangest accidents has to be the time I was riding my bike down my street and suddenly I found myself sitting on the street with the bike leaning up against my back. The thing was I didn’t remember even falling. I didn’t have any scrapes, bumps or busies. It was almost as if the bike decided it wanted to ride me and switched places. Puzzling over what exactly had happened; I got up and got back on my bike. I road it around the block and about half way through it happened again. Still puzzled I got back up and got on my bike. I rode it home and put the bike away for the day. If I was the one being ridden then I didn’t want be out there I decided.
Another day, several years later, I was riding bikes with my friend. We rode all the way to the park that afternoon and to the girl-scout house hill. As we followed the road down and around we noticed that they had pulled up the top layer of pavement in order to repave the road. This was a little rough, but not too bad. What was bad was the difference between the road and the bridge ahead. The bridge was made of stone and crossed over a small creek in the park. There was a stone wall, a sidewalk, another stone wall and then the bridge for the road. When I saw the bump ahead I steered toward the sidewalk, thinking that that bump might be smaller. I was wrong, it was bigger. I steered back toward the road bridge. Too late. I was heading straight toward the stone wall in between the two. I might have had time to steer away from the wall, I don’t know. Instead of steering away from the wall I simply jumped off my bike.
My friend, who was behind me watching the whole thing, said it looked like I decided that I didn’t need the bike any longer and was going to fly. And that is what I did, I flew off the bike. Amazingly enough I landed on my feet. The inertia caused me to stumble, but I did not fall. The bike crashed into the wall and fell to the ground. If I had been on it I probably would have gone right over the handlebars and kissed the wall. I could have been hurt seriously, but I avoided it.
Though I never got hurt doing so, I used to pretend that I was a warrior on horseback on my back. I would strap my bow and arrow over my back and take off on my bike. Once I was going fast enough I would take the bow from my back, fit the arrow into it and then shoot it (not at anyone though.) Then, as a part of my made-up action sequence, I would toss the bow over into a near by yard and jump off the bike. I would land on feet, while the bike crashed just a few feet away from the bow. Once I was off the bike I pursue whoever I was pretending to chase on foot.
Sometimes I would choreograph other scenes. I would plan out sword fights with broomsticks and hand-to-hand combat scenes on top of my neighbor’s garage roof. For awhile I thought it would be cool to be a stuntwoman in the movies, but it was never anything that I pursued.
carilynn27 