What's the scariest thing that's happened to you on your bike?

Photography: Amy Walker

Gretchen Elsner (and Julian)

I was riding my bicycle with my son. We had one of those fancy European bicycle seats for children that sit on the cross bar so that they can look around. While we were riding (about as slow as a chicken would walk down Alexander Street) he just took his foot out of the little holster and shoved it right into the spokes of the front wheel and the whole thing did a 180-degree flip. He landed on my abdomen and he was screaming and I saw his foot twisted more than backwards around into this bicycle tire. So I extricated him from the bike and we sort of pulled ourselves over to the side of the road and called an ambulance for him, and they put him in a neck restraint. He was four. They said, “He’s fine,” and then they looked at me and said, you’re just as white as a ghost, and they took my blood pressure and it had plummeted so they called an ambulance for me and whistled off to another hospital. It turned out that my liver had exploded and Julian had broken his leg. The best part about the scariest time on my bicycle was the four-day vacation I had in the hospital afterwards. I sat in my bed and I made a pop-up book and I got to eat all the ice cream I wanted.

Kyla Kinzel

It’s one of those things that could have been much scarier, depending on location, but luckily I was on the bike path and all of a sudden I came to an absolute halt unexpectedly as my shoelace had wrapped around the pedal and tied me to the bike and stopped the bike from moving, and therefore I was tied to the bike and falling over; I unfortunately fell onto the side where the shoe was attached to the pedal. It meant that I could only land on my hand and the side of my body. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been but if I’d fallen into traffic it could have been worse. As it was it felt bad. Scary. It happened to me again and that time it felt stupid. You should always tie your shoelaces!

Terry Ray Brown

I was busting down Main Street at full speed, between the parked cars and the traffic. I was worried about cars and doors opening and suddenly a car just, like, jerked in. Didn’t stop and back in, just went in head-first. He went right in front of me and I went “Holy shit!” and I went over his hood on my side and I slid on my thigh on his hood, slipped down his hood and landed on my wheels and kept going. He yelled at me, and I yelled at him as I kept going. I think he was scared too. I almost died.

Lana Fox

I was 12 years old and on my neighbour’s big red ten-speed, going to the mushroom farm – a regular ride I would do every night, five miles there and five miles back – down this great big hill. So I was going down this giant hill and I got the first nosebleed of my conscious life. I couldn’t remember ever getting a nosebleed before. All of a sudden my hands and my arms and my chest were all covered in blood and I had no idea what had happened. I’m on this ten-speed that’s way too big for me: I can’t even sit on the seat and pedal, and I’m covered in blood. That was freaky. The scariest thing that ever happened to me on my bike was a driver leaving his car in the middle of the intersection at Granville and Pender and chasing me to the bike rack and running at me. A 200-pound man running at me full-on and running up to my bike and kicking the wheel, and busting out the spokes and bending the derailleur. I chased him back to his car and he turned and faced me, and at that point my friend Steve Chase, a big guy, came up and said, “What’s going on here?” and he jumped back in his car and drove away. He left his car running in the middle of the intersection. A company vehicle. I called the company and they did absolutely nothing.

Ifny Lachance

I was in a wedding dress in which I had spent the entire weekend. It was the last leg of my journey home and it was very early in the morning. As I approached the street that I live on, there was a brown convertible, and he was not very happy with the fact that I kept passing him at the light. He was in the right-hand lane, and he pulled up close to the curb so that I couldn’t pass him. There was a bus in the other lane and I prepared myself to go in between them. And as I rode through he put his arm straight out so that I couldn’t pass. I went right through his arm and as I rode through he started pulling at my wedding dress, plucking at it and trying to grab me! Eeeuww!

Chaz Romalis

I was going down the Lions Gate Bridge and caught my handlebar and I went over the front of the bars and over the railing of the bridge and grabbed it with my arm and pulled myself back in. It was about a 500 ft drop. That was a big boy. That was a pretty wild one. I’ve got lots…. Probably this was the scariest one: I was in Australia, riding from Cairns on the Cape Kennedy Highway to another hostel in Cape Tribulation, and I started at six in the morning, hammered up to the little ferry across a river and it was already six o’clock at night and this guy on the ferry looks at me and says, “You’re travelling kind of light.” And I go, “Oh yeah, I’m used to riding in the dark, no problem.” He couldn’t believe that I was going to ride another 50 kilometres though the jungle on a dirt road in the dark. I hit one river and it’s about a foot deep. I ride through and it’s midnight, and it’s starting to rain and I’m going, “Fuck man!” ‘cause it just floods there – it’s in Queensland, in the tropics. I go through another river and it’s about up to my knees and I cruise through that. At the next one and I had to carry the bike through. There was one last river I had to make it across. I was within two kilometres of the hostel and I’d ridden almost 24 hours straight. I started going through this last river and I’m holding my bike above my head and I hear these wild noises of animals sliding down the bank into the river and I turn around and I go “What the fuck was that? Some kind of huge fish?” and I ran back out. I cruised back to where the road came near the beach and I lay there for about two hours until it was just barely light. I got back up on my bike and I thought, “I’ve just gotta fuckin’ make it, I’m so hungry, I’m dying!” So I went back to the river and I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were crocodiles in this river. There was a sign that said, “Warning inhabited by crocks,” so I turned around and got the fuck out of there. I rode back to the highway covered in red clay, and this roadie comes along and he said, “Where you coming from? “ and I said “I started in Cairns and I almost made it to Cape Trib and I’m on my way back.” He just looks at me and he says, “Bullshit!” because it was about 400 kilometres. I got back and I was watching the news and that weekend there was a couple killed by crocs in that same river. It’s a deadly place, loaded with crocodiles.

Lori Kessler

Truthfully the scariest time on my bike was when I was hit by a car, landed on the hood. It’s scary that so many cyclists have variations to this story! A more unusual scary story: I was touring though Yellowstone and came across a giant buffalo in the road, with his buffalo buddies close by. He stared at me, all 1,500 stinky hairy pounds, head down, horns pointed at skinny-assed me. Bison are among the most dangerous animals encountered by visitors, and will attack humans if provoked. They can run as fast as 45 mph. Bison also have the unexpected ability to leap over a standard barbed-wire fence. So what did I do? Well, I stood nervously with heart pounding, trying to refrain from looking at him as this was “potentially aggressive” eye-contact. I waited for a truck to come along, with camera-wielding passengers, more intent on taking photos of my situation than in assessing the stand-off. I explained that I needed them to drive slowly while I rode beside them: they agreed, the bison reluntantly withdrew, and I rode away – victoriously!! A bison in the road is different for bikers than for drivers...”

Peter Purdy (and Oscar)

The last thing I want to do is be a nag. But … last night at around 11pm I was driving home down East Pender – and thank goodness I was only doing 20 clicks because I had to go over the speed bumps – because a cyclist came right out in front of me wearing a black helmet, a black hoodie, black pants, riding a black bike with no reflectors. It scared the daylights out of me because I could have hit him. Thank god I was only going a very slow speed. I find it amusing that the person’s wearing a helmet, but not any reflectors or lights at 11 at night. That’s very frightening.