The day

I was nineteen. By day I was the stage manager at the Ross Perot Theatre in Texarkana; every other waking hour I was training, or on the road doing BMX vert shows across Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana with a trick team that promoted Haro bicycles. I had raced since I was seven and ridden freestyle since fourteen, and I was good — good enough that the Ward Brothers stunt team wanted to fly me to LA in two weeks for TV work. This show was the biggest we had ever booked: a water park in Shreveport, more than three hundred people, and our video crew coming with two cameras to film it. I kept telling everyone it was my day.

The night before, moving into a new apartment, I lost my keys. At one in the morning I was searching the side of the highway where we had stopped to keep a mattress from flying off, with a state trooper’s help, and then a storage unit fifty miles away, and found nothing. On the drive back I fell asleep at the wheel, drifted toward a ditch and swerved to get back on the road. We slept in the truck.

My bike was locked in the basement of the old courthouse that housed the arts council — bars on every window, and everyone with a key gone for the holiday weekend. A vert bike is built to fit one rider, the way a suit is; mine was custom fit to me. I stood at the door with my hands against the glass and looked at it.

Seventy miles later, with the show already under way, I put on my pads and took a bike off the team trailer: a stock Haro, off a showroom floor the day before. It rode like a school bus. I was making mistakes on it from the first trick — slipped off a 360, over-rotated a one-hander and landed hard — and I knew better, and I kept going, because more than three hundred people were watching and it was my day.

The big trick was a pass over a teammate: he would do a 360-Tailwhip on the deck while I went up and over him. I cleared him and drifted a little too far back. Coming down from about fifteen feet, my rear tire clipped the coping. The bike stopped and I did not. The front end whipped in, hit the ramp, and threw me over the bars head first into the concrete with my hands still on the grips. My chin was driven into my chest, and the fourth cervical vertebra crushed. The bike came down on top of me.

I had been hurt plenty of times before — concussions, a broken jaw, scars on most of the joints. This was different. I lay on my back and felt nothing at all. The video crew was still filming. A park nurse was already there, holding my helmet and my neck still, with a look I did not yet understand. An EMT knelt at my feet, took the pin from his badge, and pressed it to my foot: “Can you feel this?” Then higher, then higher, asking “How about now?” each time, and each time trading a glance with the nurse instead of an answer with me. They had seen this before. My left lung was collapsing, and it felt like someone was standing on my chest.

They boarded and strapped and braced me, lifted me into the ambulance, and drove me away from the life I knew.

That was the day. What came after it — a computer two years later, a company, twenty years at Autodesk, and this site — is on the About page.