Young daredevil risks it all for a photo op
There has always been a tendency in my family to let the cameras continue to roll as situations devolve toward chaos. As genius is said to be akin to insanity, art is sometimes born at the edge of disaster. I can claim a good bit of history with the “art and disaster” piece.
An example that comes to mind is a time when inspired by the work of professional daredevil Evel Knievel, I concocted a plan to jump my Schwinn Stingray off a ramp and over the muddy brown waters of our neighborhood wallow, Miller’s Pond. And while a great deal of discussion took place about approach speed, trajectory and downrange conditions (terms familiar to any boy growing up in the Walter Cronkite-narrated Apollo moon mission era) neither I nor my trusted crew of neighborhood urchins gave the slightest consideration to what might happen after the launch. Even today — given there was no way I was going to make it to the other side — it seems a glaring omission to have not thought about what would happen when both boy and bicycle hit the water.
With a keen eye toward capturing the moment for posterity one of my buddies was positioned near the launch site with my mother’s pocket instamatic camera locked and loaded. Mom had no idea that I had “borrowed” her camera, of course, for to have sought permission would have exposed our plans and the mission would have most absolutely been scuttled.
Mother actually learned about the whole thing weeks later when she found three mysterious images among the package of summertime snapshots she’d just carried home from the drug store photo lab. The first was of a rough wooden plank propped at a steep angle upon a pair of stacked cinderblocks. The second was a blur roughly resembling the carcass of a young boy flung through the air with a bicycle between his legs. The third was the smoking gun. It was a shot of me dripping with mud, wincing in pain and struggling to raise an arm in victory having survived a handlebar to the gut and the catastrophic collision of tubular steel with parts of me that felt as if they’d been removed and reinstalled inside out.
A mission debrief, held on the shore while I writhed about weeping and gasping, noted that the run-up had been outstanding and the ramp design proved spot-on. Furthermore, the team agreed that the launch was a scene for the ages. That I hadn’t quite stuck the landing was a minor detail since I’d never actually lost consciousness and surfaced rather quickly.
My own blurred memory of the event is limited to a single moment of clarity when, just before I hit the water, I realized that all the hard and pointed parts of the bicycle seemed to align with the most squishy and vulnerable parts of my anatomy. Details are sketchy beyond that.
Once the launch vehicle had been retrieved from the murky depths, the boys had propped me on the bike for the money shot then limped me toward home as a hero, agreeing that we’d tell my mom only that I’d crashed my bike, thus sparing her the heroic details — and earning me an even harsher punishment once the truth was revealed.
I remain certain that Evel Knievel would have been proud.
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write: Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627 or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.