The Accidental Age
by Sebastian Schwelm
The first accident I can remember is also one of the funniest. Like many small boys on rainy days, my brother and I enjoyed banging pots and pans together until our mother screamed. One such rainy day, we were in mid-ritual, just working up to a final crescendo (where Mom’s part comes in at triple fortissimo) when a funny thing happened. In my apparent joy I had lost my t-shirt – a soon to be vital mistake. With a clash worthy of Davies Symphony Hall the two pot lids came together, pinching the very apex of my stomach and taking a small patch of skin clear off. I was shocked, to say the least. A quick look down confirmed what I felt, and I let loose a howl worthy of a semi-truck out of brake fluid.
Accidents have a way of sneaking up on you like that. You’re just going along, minding your own business, banging pot lids together, and WHAM! Whadya know. The best part of an accident is the quick time lapse between the actual event, and the feeling of the event. That one second, where time freezes and your mind has but one thing to say: “Oh shit.” I stapled my thumb once, and that was the longest time lapse I’ve ever experienced. Staple, then wait five seconds. Hold up hand. Examine the staple, the entry point and neat lack of blood. Think: Hey, this should start hurti… WHAM! And it’s over.
Sometimes, the accident is so shocking you never really feel the pain. I remember when my baby teeth were falling out, a drawn out process that I HATED because it curbed my eating. My brother and I got into a regular skirmish on the couch – he seated and fending me off with futile kicks as I tried to smother him with a blanket. He got lucky, and landed one of those kicks right on my jaw. I was stunned: since when does the little brother land a shot? We never saw the tooth again. Lost to the dust under the couch, or perhaps swallowed by yours truly, I didn’t really care. My jaw twinged, but I was too happy that the tooth was out. Or the time I tripped while running down a cement walkway: my t-shirt flung up into my face and the sandpaper-like cushioning scraped me from waist to neck. Talk about shocking. It hurt to laugh for a week.
As I grew older and ventured beyond the dangers of our small San Francisco apartment, new obstacles confronted me. The bicycle accidents could fill a novel in themselves – rollerblades a close second in sheer volume. At this point I was a pretty big kid, second tallest only to a girl who never passed her 5th grade height of 5’6”. I wore “husky” sized pants, the euphemism of the times for slightly-overweight-but-definitely-not-fat as my mother tried to convince me in spite of my rail-thin brother’s comments. But I took no notice, didn’t care that I was the second slowest runner in the class (again, only to the girl of 5’ 6”), and didn’t let it stop me from regularly getting into quite foreseeable accidents.
My best friend was named Matthew, a son of separated parents. His father was a raucous middle-aged Australian who enjoyed pub food, country music, and Burning Man. His mother was the opposite – quiet, orderly, and sensible, she was the voice of reason in my stays at Matt’s house. Not that we listened to her, but no one can fault her for trying.
One summer camp afternoon my friend Matt and I decided it would be fun to play chicken with him on a bike, and me on my rollerblades. It worked a few times; I chickened out (who wouldn’t against a bike… come on), and we were happy. Well, he was happy. I realized I didn’t really like how things were working out, and decided that he was would be chicken the next time. Well, he wasn’t, and with my proficiency on rollerblades I ended up face first into the outside wall of the school’s auditorium. I richoched backwards off the strangely prickly stone wall and crashed down hard on my rear. Shock, la-di-dah, then the wham, and MAN, THIS ONE F*&#ING HURTS! My eyes teared up, and as I quickly tried to blink them away, a drop of water rolled down my cheek. Jose, a witness to the accident, took one look at my bloody knees (eh, no biggie) and then focused on my face. “Look, the big man cries!”
One of the few other times I remember crying was when I dislocated my left elbow. Never a broken bone in my body (knock on wood), this accident was the worst of the worst. Too young to be interested in skiing and snowboarding just yet, our family chose a spot right across the street from Donner Ski Ranch (named after a somewhat accident prone family) to sled and play around in the snow. The site was apparently a storage area for construction and snow removal vehicles, and the powder was mashed flat into snow-covered roads where the mechanical beasts had traveled. Perfect, we thought, for a sled run. We successfully traversed the course several times on our big orange toboggan with all three boys at once (my dad, myself and my brother). Too slow I decided, and grabbed the toboggan for myself and raced back up the hill. With a running start I blazed off head-first. The sharp right curve at the bottom, previously not an issue because of lower speed, loomed ahead of me. Up and over the edge of the road I bounced, a bit surprised, but for some reason I didn’t find it necessary to jump off at this point. No, instead I held on as the sled aimed directly between two tree wells. I remember thinking all right, I’ll make it right through there! Yeah right buddy. When have you ever been that lucky? At the last second the sled dipped down to the right and slammed me into the trunk of a very pretty, very snow-covered, and very sturdy pine-tree.
Either I blacked out for a second, or I had clenched my eyes shut so tightly I couldn’t hear, but when I opened them someone was screaming. It took another second to realize that it was me. I lay in the toboggan face up as they dragged me back to the car, each jolt causing a weak scream of pain amidst constant sobbing. The minute it took to drive across the street seemed like ages.
We all prepare ourselves for moments like this, assure ourselves of bravery and fearlessness, of a cool head in the heat of the moment. But at a point I realized, after a few ski injuries, that mental preparation only does so much, especially for a kid in elementary school. Physical preparation is what will really get you through the day. Grab a helmet, bust out kneepads, hell, strap foam to your butt if that’s all you’ve got. It won’t look too cool, but neither will you after a nice pad-less scrape.
Another dubious idea involved Matt, a small bike, and a steep hill ending in a T intersection. It didn’t involve a helmet, or kneepads, or gloves, or common sense, that’s for sure. The plot was to try and ride the bike down the hill and yank a sharp right before hitting the parked cars, a simple enough idea if the bike’s brakes had been normal hand brakes. No, this little bike had back-pedal brakes, meaning that to stop the thing you had to have both feet on the pedals holding them back. We had both successfully performed the maneuver from lower down on the hill, easily making the turn without even worrying about the brakes.
So here comes stupid (me). I take the bike and start walking uphill. And up, and up, until we’re about nearly at the top. I straddle the bike and sit on the seat, feeling gravity pull the bike away from me, thinking that somehow I’ll be able to get my feet on the pedals and slow down before the turn. Wrong. As I take off, my right hand instinctually grabs for the back wheel brake level. Hmm, doesn’t exist. In that split second the pedals speed up to a blur, impossible for me to try and get a foot on. It’s looking like this is going to end just like the sled accident, but wait, I’ve learned something! As the parked BMW (why do I remember that?) looms closer, inspiration strikes. So I jump right off the back of the bike.
Matt’s mother, who saw me come speeding down, let loose a yelp from half a block away. I incurred a rather peculiar scrape from this one: a right knee, both palms, some elbow, all common, but then somehow I skinned off a fist sized section of the inside of my left thigh. Weirdest thing ever.
As I left elementary school bike accidents behind me, middle school presented new ways to injure myself. My family moved to Berkeley, and I attended a small private school in North Berkeley for string musicians, a seemingly safe environment. I made a new friend: Luke was probably the only kid more accident prone than me. He had suffered at least three concussions before I met him, one by running into a soccer goal in the heat of the game, and I swear I once saw him hurl himself headfirst into a wall in a game of dodgeball. He was competitive to the point of death, but somehow managed to escape without serious harm. His only long-term injuries were his knees – pained by growth spurts just like my own. We hobbled through middle school together, and amassed a large number of sprained wrists, ankles and fingers in the process.
Like any good middle school story, my favorite ski anecdote involves a girl. Our 7th grade ski trip was later dubbed the ski trip of death, causing no less than two broken noses (on the same person, two consecutive days), a case of whiplash, a fractured lower leg, a sprained wrist and a contusion under the scalp (the last two belonging to me). By the end of the first day, our poor history teacher was on a first name basis with the Sugarbowl ski patrol. But back to the girl. She skied crazy, as if her strawberry blond hair was on fire, or rather, as if she was slightly suicidal. I was fast too, and managed to keep up as her best friend went down (fractured leg), my friend went down (whiplash from an attempted backflip), Luke’s knees gave up, and others slowly skied off to saner groups. Around 2:30, the witching hour for a ski day (tired legs, tired minds), bumps had started to build up on many of the black runs and I was having trouble keeping up. I had to focus on keeping my skis together, using my knees over the moguls, every once and a while glancing up to see how far ahead they were. They hit an open groomer, and sped off as I picked my way through the last bumps.
Sweaty in my warm clothes, I hit the groomed slope and relaxed. I stood up straight and arced a clean line across the blue square, shaking my head as if this was easy as cake. I was going fast, my mind speeding far ahead with the red haired girl, too busy looking cool as I tried to catch up. Next thing I knew, my ski tips had crossed. Let us pause for a second, and remember those two, precious words: “Oh shit.” To give a non-skier an idea of what has just occurred, crossing tips is somewhat like slamming on the front brake of a bike speeding downhill. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my pride was not only going for a fall, but planning on taking me right down with it.
My vision useless as the world spun by me at mach 3, my left hand touched the snow first, bending my wrist awkwardly as my head slammed down, followed shortly by the rest of my body. I sat up slowly and winced. My hearing turned back on suddenly, and everyone was yelling, mostly a variant of “You okay kid?” I looked around, quickly giving a nod to the guy who radioed Ski Patrol, and tried to scramble up to find my poles and skis. Dizziness hit me like a brick, and I sat back down. Ok, lets just hold on a second. Worried bystanders regaled me later with stories of multiple flips, somersaults and cartwheels I managed to pull off before smashing back to earth. I don’t know anything about that, but the resounding crack my skull made when it hit the snow still scares me.
My 7th grade picture shows me with pink and black contraption on my left wrist, smiling like a goofball. And the red haired girl? It turned out her hair was naturally brown. Unfair, I know, to pique your curiosity like that, but I’ll sum it up for you: this ski accident vignette could serve as a good extended metaphor for the few relationships I did have in middle school.
So now I start a ski day like this: Ok, Sebastian, in all likelihood you WILL bite it bad today. Strap on my helmet (original a Mom mandate, but I’ve come to appreciate it), check the bindings on my skis, and watch out. I bring snacks with me so I don’t get low blood sugar and space out, a camelbak so I won’t dehydrate. I still crash, but this way I can usually jump up with a smile on my face. Sometimes, an accident can even be fun.
A beautiful powder day in early December found our ski group standing above a lip in the snow, a slight drop-off that made an excellent jump. The three skiers in the group stood, skis perpendicular to the slope, while the two snowboarders sat in the snow, contemplating the lip. Tomek claimed that he’d 180 it, so he set off first on his board, beelining it right to the edge where he speed checked and feebly dribbled off the jump, barely pulling the 180 and landing unbalanced. My brother and I heckled him from up above as he lay in the snow - he waved it off and offered a challenge. Yeah, I thought, I CAN do better, just watch this. So I swung my skis parallel to the slope, and headed for the lip. I was determined not to speed check as Tomek had, so I tucked my skis together and made like a bullet. When I hit the edge, one ski got bumped up by a patch of powder, and I flew off all lopsided, one knee bent up, one ski about two feet higher than the other. Oh shit. I flew, in my ungainly way, past Tomek and directly into the snow.
Both skis popped off immediately, and I faceplanted into the powder. Luckily, it was about two feet deep and my poor helmeted head had a soft landing, but my goggles didn’t fare as well. I had put a crack right down the center of them, a blemish I failed to notice until someone pointed it out much later simply because it was right between my eyes – effectively out of my range of vision. As I tried to dig myself out of my cartoon-like snow mold, the rush of adrenaline washed over me and I just couldn’t stop laughing over the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
The accident is a byproduct of growing up. “Live and learn,” as they say. “Learn, but try not to kill yourself in the process,” might sum it up better, though I admit it just isn’t as catchy. Some people would say that an accident is pure chance: some people get lucky while others don’t. I’d give luck about 20% in the whole matter. Hindsight is 20/20 and most of the causes of my mishaps come in crystal clear. Rule Number 1: Don’t play chicken on rollerblades. Rule Number 2: Don’t stay on a sled headed for a tree. Rule Number 3: Don’t think about impressing girls while doing anything that may require concentration. Rule Number Anything: Don’t be stupid. But what is 90% of growing up? Doing stupid things. Guess what happens?
In truth, I’ll miss this accidental age. When else in life can you make horrible decisions and simply slap on a band-aid to fix it up? Now that I’m nearing my 18th birthday, the word accident has even changed meaning, becoming more grim and less funny. “Accident” now means specifically a car accident, inciting James Bond-like images of flaming overturned cars, broken glass, ambulance sirens. Even the same old accidents carry bigger weight: a dislocated elbow nowadays would cause me to miss months of running, violin, and driving, maybe even altering the “all-important” college application. As I grow older, I lose the risk-taking ability and retreat to safety in my busy world of schedules and deadlines. Innocence is lost, playtime is over, life (with a fanfare of withering, off-key trumpets) has begun.
I miss childhood already.