Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 16, 1994                   TAG: 9405190007
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WIPEOUT FEELING THE PAIN OF THE CYCLIST WHO CRASHED

Those were the days before children were required to wear helmets when they rode their bikes. And so I zipped brazenly up and down our driveway, circling and circling and circling, with the wind in my hair. I thought I was traveling 80 miles an hour.

Mine was, of course, only the first bike in the family. And so before long, we kids - siblings, cousins and friends - were riding all over Fincastle in our own peloton. (Of course, we'd never heard that word then.)

Fincastle is a town of hills, as anyone who's ever visited its fall festival knows. Between the house in which I grew up (on the east edge of town) and U.S. 220 (which marked the town's west boundary for us kids), there's one long hill down, one steep climb up, and another even steeper descent. Almost all of the town's east-to-west streets roll down, up, down.

We didn't call our youthful bike rides "mountain time trials," but we could have.

One bright summer morning, I took steep Carper Street, by Breckenridge School, faster than I'd ever dared take it before. Near the hill's foot, I leaned into the sharp left curve onto Monroe Street - our usual route back to Main - and caught a patch of gravel. Down I went.

I thought I was dead.

I think the neighbors, too, thought I was dead, or dying at least, on account of the way I carried on.

Also, I had a teeny-tiny little cut on my forehead that bled the way head cuts always bleed: profusely.

Understand, Fincastle was the kind of town then in which I could have wrecked my bike anywhere and still have been inside the realm of ready aid. As it happened, this wreck occurred right in front of my second-grade teacher's home. She took me onto her porch, comforted me and stopped the bleeding while someone went for Mama.

She was just up the street at my aunt's house getting a permanent. So my most vivid memory of that day is of Mama running down Monroe Street with her hair half-way rolled up and a towel flapping around her shoulders.

A week ago, when Australian cyclist Brett Dennis wrecked on Mount Chestnut during Stage 5 of the Tour DuPont, this is what I thought of: the gravel patch on Monroe and Carper streets, my second-grade teacher's friendly solicitude, and Mama running.

My wreck was merely one tiny mishap in a perfectly ordinary childhood. Dennis, a world-class athlete, suffered a dislocated hip and could, quite easily, have been killed. His wreck was a disaster in a promising career.

But the connection remains. I have a deeper sympathy for the man than I might otherwise have had because I, too, have sailed over my handlebars.

We need, I think, to look for these connective experiences in our lives, however frail they seem. For it is on such fine threads of subtle connection that all compassion is strung.

Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.