Day at the Construction Site

When I was in elementary school I used to ride my bike constantly. Every day I would ride up to the grocery store and spend fifteen or twenty minutes browsing the candy aisle, deciding whether or not I wanted Starburst or Twix. I also loved feeding spare change into the vending machines outside of Giant Food to get a bag of chips or a pack of gum. One of my favorite places to ride however, had to be the bike path that went around the Sports Pavilion pond in the community, which was about a 10 minute bike ride to go all the way around. Sometimes I would even ride up to Blockbuster and play the Nintendo 64 in the showcase for hours on end.

At the time, the town I grew up in was swiftly becoming a cross hybrid of the days of old and the modern suburbia that now exists in place of it, so of course the construction crews were always building new houses and digging up land. This led me to ride my bike to areas that weren't necessarily the safest places to be when I was away from home. In fact, one of the spots that I used to ride in was littered with frames of new houses still under construction and gigantic mounds of dirt that seemed to stretch up to the sky. My friends and I would ride or walk through the construction sites while the crews were away and investigate the houses long before anyone had even moved in.

One weekend when I had nobody to hang out with, I rode my bike to this construction mound and sat at the top, rolling rocks down into the dirt. Boredom was a consistent factor which made me do stupid things as a young kid and more often than not I would throw rocks at butterflies or park my bike and run around with cap guns pretending I was a cowboy in the Wild West. It turns out I would unknowingly end up creating my bike's demise one Saturday morning after about an hour of hanging out on the mound.

I remember getting a message on my pager from my parents telling me to come home, and at the time pagers were like their way of saying get home now or you are grounded for a week. Since I had no way to call, you can bet I immediately climbed on my bike and prepared to start riding. Now the trick was getting down, which normally was a thrill and a half! Since I was being pressured to get home however, I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking for the best way to attack the path down the side of this giant dirt mound I was posted up on.

I hopped up on my bicycle seat as I had done so many times before and went down the steepest side of the hill I could find. Now it took me a couple seconds to realize this probably wasn't the best idea as it hit me that this was the side of the hill that I had been rolling rocks down earlier in the day. After a quick jolt of adrenaline, my front tire smacked into a big rock and catapulted my bike and my regrettably shocked small body up into the air, after which I did two forward front flips like something straight out of BMX and landed on my back. My busted up bike then fell about 5 feet away, narrowly avoiding landing on me.

I probably lied there for about three to five minutes before I collected myself and slowly climbed to my feet. I pondered how exactly I was going to get my bike home considering the front tire was flat and it was too mangled to ride at this point. Well I walked and I walked some more. I was scraped up pretty good but at least nobody had been around to see it.

When I got back I told my parents about the whole incident and ended up having to get rid of my favorite bike. Needless to say, I wasn't too happy, but it turned out to be another learning experience. From that day on I never revisited the construction site where I wrecked my bike, but I ended up getting a brand new bike and continued my joy riding around the pond. The trips to the candy aisle also continued to be a routine and eventually I discovered my new found hobby of fishing!