When I was a kid, I was adventurous to a fault. I was particularly legendary for the bike wrecks I used to get into.
While I and my friends lived in the flatlands of Richmond, the El Cerrito Hills were available for more adventurous biking fun about a mile or so east of my neighborhood.
There were many steep streets in the El Cerrito hills, but there was one particular street that surpassed them all in the scope of its reputation among bike-riding kids: *Moeser Lane, which was the Hill of Legend for every kid that had a bike and lived within a few miles of it.
Moeser Lane begins at Arlington Boulevard, at the crest of the ridgeline of the hills. There are a couple of gentle curves near the top, and then Moeser straightens into a mile-long plunge of almost a thousand feet of elevation, perfect for reaching highly imprudent speeds on a Schwinn bike in 1972. A kid on a typical bike of that period could reach speeds well over 50 miles per hour on Moeser – and remember, this was long before the days when bicycle helmets were mandatory gear. In fact, I don’t remember any kid ever wearing a helmet back in those days.
One summer day in that long-ago year, my friend Ray and I were biking around the hills of El Cerrito. Actually, I was on the back of Ray’s bike, since my bike was in bad repair, presumably from the previous week’s spectacular crash. I spent the time goading Ray – who was by far the more prudent of us two – to take more risks and live a little. His bike’s brakes were out, so we kept having to hop off and walk the bike down the steeper hills.
A time came when we were at the top of a long, steep, curvy street (not, fortunately, Moeser Lane but about a mile or so north of it) that ended in a “T” intersection. I was sick of walking down hills when we seemed to have two perfectly good wheels to go down a whole lot quicker, and the lack of any means to stop seemed like an awfully abstract problem to my impulsive, 10-year-old brain.
Ray, knowing what was coming, immediately said, “Aw, no Matt. You’ve made me do some crazy stuff, but this is too much. My mom will kill me if I get killed because of you. I’m not even supposed to be playin’ with you, man…”
15 minutes of teasing, goading, and calling him “chicken” later, he agreed to go down the hill. The plan was, he’d control our speed by putting his sneaker on the back of the front tire as a sort of provisional brake, so we would not get going too fast.
About 15 seconds into our journey, we were going, oh, probably 35 or 40 miles per hour, and his sneaker was decidedly not up to the task of stopped 130 pounds of kids and their bike. That’s when Ray started screaming, and when I had perhaps my first sensible thought of the day – that maybe this had been a Bad Idea.
About two thirds of the way to the bottom of the hill, Ray raised himself slightly from the seat, and put his sneaker-clad foot down on the front tire with all his might.
This, to put it mildly, turned out to be a poor strategy.
His foot rode up the back of the tire, and directly into the front forks where it lodged firmly, which stopped the front tire – instantly. At 40 miles an hour. The entire bike then began cartwheeling, Ray attached, launching me high into the air over Ray and the bike, and I heard him and the bike impact the side of a parked car with a dull, metallic thud. I actually flew over the car that Ray was impacting, and remember thinking with startling, detached lucidity, “When I land, this is really, really going to hurt…” just before I crunched to a stop thanks to some lady’s rose bushes.
I lay sprawled on my back for a moment, stunned, and then gingerly moved my extremities, making sure nothing was broken. Suddenly remembering Ray, I rolled over and got to my feet, and then limped around the car that Ray had hit, praying that he wasn’t dead, and if he was, that his Mom would never learn the truth.
It tuned out that Ray was very much alive. He didn’t even break any bones, and as I helped him to his feet – wham! – he punched me in the mouth. I was so relieved that he was alive that I didn’t even hit him back. He made me give him my tee shirt to absorb the blood from a cut lip, and I also had to carry the twisted remains of his bike home for him. When I got home, my mom blanched, and said I looked like I’d gone ashore at Normandy with the Army on D-Day.
Mom is a somewhat haunted looking woman who lives up on M Street. The remains of my old bike are still in her garage.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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