I should not be here. Not after fifty five miles an hour, head on. By all the usual math, I should be a roadside memorial and a fading anecdote, a name in a police report and a line in a spreadsheet. I am a statistical anomaly, the kind of outlier you do not plan for when you design roads or write policy. Instead I am still upright, still breathing, and still loud enough to make people uncomfortable. That is why I do not shut up. Not just about cyclists, but about policies, enforcement, and laws. About the ways we pretend the road is neutral when it is rigged from the start. This is not a crash story. It is a story about what happens after, and what you do with the wreckage.
There is a question I get more than any other. Why I cannot shut up about cyclist rights. Why I keep making noise about respect, accountability, safe streets. Why I started Ride Redding, and later Ride Broomfield. People think it is some midlife campaign, a hobby turned into a cause. They have no idea what it does to you when you have already died once on the road and somehow walked away anyway.
A few months before the crash, I am at the top of my game, on and off the bike. I ride with a crew four days a week, the kind of group that slices through the wind like a single organism, each rider holding the line because no one wants to be the one who cracks. We do the Solvang Century in four hours twenty two minutes, a blur of motion and effort where the world narrows to cadence and breath and the satisfaction of knowing you belong out there. On campus at Brooks Institute of Photography, I am a production and creativity machine, helping other students, tutoring, working with instructors as everyone scrambles to figure out this new digital workflow. I am the guy people come to when they are stuck. I still graduate magna cum laude. From the outside, it looks like everything is dialed.
I am in my last year at Brooks in Santa Barbara. The days are long, split between classroom light and darkroom silence. I head home on my bike after class, thinking about light ratios, shutter speeds, the next assignment, the next ride. I have one small errand to run, dropping off my new health insurance paperwork at FedEx. A chore so boring it barely counts as a thought.
It is a perfect California afternoon. Clear air, that soft golden light that makes every mile of road look like a postcard. Then, in one breath, it all ends.
A woman coming the other way drops her phone while using it. Head below the steering wheel. She crosses the double yellow center line and drives straight into me at fifty five miles an hour, head on.
There is a moment when the brain stops screaming. It just starts recording. Every sound, every flicker of light, every fragment of chaos gets etched into you. The crunch of metal. The empty, echoing thud of impact. I remember a violent, bone rattling silence that launches me into the sky. They say I fly forty five feet up and forty five back. A little girl in the car behind asks her mother, “Why is that man falling out of the trees.” From a distance, that is what it looks like. A man falling out of the sky.
I remember the eucalyptus branches. The slow, haunting spin of the world. Sky, road, sky, road. The car crosses the line. I am in the air. The trees are spinning. I have enough time midair to think two things. “This is going to hurt,” and “If I can wiggle my toes when I stop, I will be fine.” That is the kind of bargain you make with yourself when the universe has you by the throat.
When I hit the pavement, I land sitting. My back against the bumper of her Land Rover. Inches from being run over. I close my eyes, try my toes. They move. For one second, I feel grateful. Alive. Shredded, but alive. Then reality comes back like a siren in your ear.
She stumbles out of the car, shaking, words spilling everywhere. “Oh my God, I am so sorry, I know Lance Armstrong.” As if name dropping a stranger could absolve anything. She drops her phone again. The California Highway Patrol does not cite her. Does not arrest her. Does not even treat it like what it is. They send her home, the woman who has just crossed a double yellow at full speed and put me through a windshield. Good work, CHP.
The paramedics scrape me off the asphalt. My knee is shattered. I am loaded into an ambulance and hauled under fluorescent lights. In the ER, a nurse asks for my insurance. I do not have any. “So your parents will be paying?” she asks. No. The temperature in the room seems to drop ten degrees. I am no longer a patient. I am a problem.
They patch me together in surgery and hand me anti inflammatories and a pack of ice. “This should do,” another nurse says when I ask for pain relief. As if that kind of impact could be smoothed over with pills from a sample drawer and a bag of frozen water. Hours later, screaming and sleepless, a different nurse finally hands me the button. I press it like it is the last mercy left in the world. When I wake up, someone tells me it is time to leave. Less than a day after being hit head on by a two ton machine, I am being shown the door.
I try standing. My shattered knee folds under me. I grab the toilet seat to brace myself, leg straight out, lungs choking on the pain. That moment sears itself into every nerve I still have. Pain beyond language. But to them, I am a charity case with no coverage, and that means I do not belong in recovery.
I am uninsured for exactly two weeks of my life. Two weeks. Because of that gap, the ER does the absolute minimum. No scans. No imaging. No CT. No MRI. No one checks for a traumatic brain injury. They fix what they can see and send me home with the rest. Years later, the bill for that decision comes due. I start having seizures. Not subtle skips in time, but grand mal convulsions that hijack your body, throw you to the ground, and leave you wrung out and empty. The kind that rip control out of your hands and make witnesses step back with that look that mixes fear and pity. Once, I come to on the floor of my basement, tongue bitten, muscles on fire, staring at a concrete wall like it might answer a question I do not remember asking. The impact to my head has left damage no one bothered to look for. Because I do not have insurance, no one looks. Because they do not look, I am never treated. This is pre ACA, before the country pretends to tidy up the edges. It is not just a bad day. It is a blueprint for how the system treats people without money, without a safety net, without a name that opens doors. The road is not an accident. It is policy made visible. Someone wrote this.
The court case starts while I am still limping through my final semester. Days divided between lectures and legal strategy. Lawyers argue over medical codes while I try to remember which side of the camera I am supposed to be on. The woman who hit me walks into court surrounded by suits, the physical embodiment of a twenty million dollar trust fund. She dodges her deposition nine times. Her lawyers argue that my pain and my future should be valued not by what they actually cost me, but by what they would have cost if I had insurance. They turn my life into a spreadsheet, then hit the discount button. That is what policy looks like up close. Not language in a bill, but a stranger’s lawyer explaining why what happened to you is not worth very much. Nice to know my existence can be rounded down for efficiency.
An Olympic cyclist testifies on my behalf. He sits there in a suit, explaining my body to a room of strangers. He tells the jury who I had been before the crash. The strength. The discipline. The kind of conditioning you only get after thousands of miles fought against gravity and headwinds. He explains how a cyclist lives in their body, how balance, power, reaction time, that sense of absolute control at speed, are not hobbies. They are identity. He tells them what I have lost. Not just a little speed. Not just a handful of personal records. An entire athletic future. The long rides I will never take in the same way. The races that evaporated. The simple trust between mind, muscle, and machine that has been broken. Listening to that is like hearing a eulogy for a version of myself that died on that road while my pulse kept going.
Then there are the deadlines. The graduation paperwork. The final projects. I finish that last year at Brooks on crutches, dragging myself through classes on adrenaline and denial. Nights belong to court documents, not creativity. My classmates are building portfolios. I am building a case. I show up to critiques with my leg throbbing and my head wrapped in fog, pretending everything is fine. It is not.
Graduation should have been a reset, a clean break into the life I thought I was earning. I launch my photography career and point my lens at life instead of the wreckage behind me. I never forget gear on shoots. I never lose files. The work itself, the images, the creativity, they hold the line. What does not hold is everything around them. The business side starts to fray. Invoices slip. Emails sit too long before I answer them. The organization, the follow through, the mental overhead of running a one person operation take the hits my photos never show.
It is not just me. The bike industry has a way of confusing passion with structure. People show up because they love it, not because there are systems in place. That lack of professionalism gets treated like culture. Quirky. Authentic. But if you are the one trying to make a living in the middle of that chaos, the cracks open wider. You fall into them faster.
Being self employed means no sick days, no backup plan, no pause button. I do a shoot with a one hundred four degree fever because there is no one else to send, no safety net if I stay home. I am a professional photographer and an entrepreneur, wrestling a business into existence while my brain occasionally short circuits. My main client almost never has a creative meeting or preproduction call. I get a message the afternoon before a shoot four or five hours away. No brief. No plan. Just, “Be there, be ready for anything.” It is nerve racking. Stack that on top of an untreated TBI, and growing a client list starts to feel like climbing a mountain with missing steps. But I always show up. I always deliver what is asked. The cost just comes due somewhere else.
The seizures do not start with a bang. They creep in. A second gone here, a missing moment there. Time skipping like a damaged tape. Then the grand mals, the full body betrayals, make it impossible to pretend this is just stress or exhaustion. Once, I come to in my own living room with broken glass on the floor and no idea what has happened in the last half minute, muscles aching like I have been in a fight I cannot remember. At first you lie to yourself. You say you are tired, overworked, stretched thin. Eventually, the gaps get bigger, the violence harder to ignore. A neurologist finally gives it a name and, with it, the verdict that I have been walking around for years with an untreated traumatic brain injury. My brain has been rewired without my consent. Memory. Balance. Patience. Mood. Some days, it feels like I am narrating my own life from a few seconds behind.
Before the crash, I have plans. I am going to keep racing after school, go deeper into cycling culture, live in that world where people mark time in miles and meters climbed. I keep riding because quitting never feels like an option. But out on the road, something has shifted. Drivers grow more aggressive, more distracted. Their eyes are on their screens, not the street. Their addiction to smartphones turns every ride into a coin toss. The roads become a zero trust environment. You assume no one sees you. You ride like every car is already drifting toward you. That is why I do not just talk about bike lanes. I talk about enforcement. About distracted driving. About hit and runs that get treated like weather instead of crime. Every close call, every hit and run, is not just bad luck. It is the result of choices written into law and ignored in practice.
Moving back home to Redding, I see a different kind of gap. People want more bike infrastructure, on the road and off. There is hunger for it. Energy. But the follow through is missing. No one is connecting the dots between desire and reality. That gap bothers me. So I step into it. With Ride Redding, we push. We help the city secure roughly twenty million dollars in projects, real money turning into actual pavement, lanes, and paths. Protected lanes. New trails. Real concrete and dirt where there used to be nothing. We model something that feels almost radical in this country, backing city hall when they get it right instead of only showing up to scream when they get it wrong. In any community, your values are written in your budget. You can say you care about safety all you want, but if the money never makes it to the street, it is just noise.
As a cycling culture incubator, we do not just shout into the void. We help other things grow. We help incubate the Redding Trail Alliance, a crew of locals who build, maintain, and advocate for trails, bike parks, and singletrack around the region, working with land managers instead of just complaining about them. We help incubate the Redding Composite Mountain Bike Team, a coed youth squad for sixth through twelfth graders that races in the NorCal league, giving kids coaching, structure, and a way to belong to something that does not end in a parking lot. Those efforts take root. They keep going. They change the shape of what riding in Redding looks like for the people coming up behind us.
Now the city itself leans into the idea that Redding can be a place where you live, work, and play by bicycle, not just drive through on your way to somewhere else. New bikeways, trail connections, and hubs are knitting neighborhoods, transit, and trailheads together. Three mile trips by bike are starting to look normal instead of reckless. That does not happen by magic. It happens because people refuse to shut up and go home. Because people are willing to sit in meetings, read the policy, learn the codes, push for the right language, and hold enforcement to a higher standard.
If you zoom out, my story is not special. A driver looks down at a phone and goes home. A young person without insurance gets stitched up and pushed out the door. A court discounts a life because an imaginary insurance company might have shaved a few dollars off a bill. A brain gets injured and nobody checks, because checking costs money. This is not a glitch. It is the operating system. The policies, the laws, the way they are enforced or ignored, all of it adds up to the same quiet message. Some lives are optional. You learn quickly which ones.
A decade later, the wreckage is still with me. My back shifts at night like the bones are whispering to each other. My knee swells after long rides, a reminder that the road gives, but it also takes. My hand locks up when the weather turns. I manage it with therapy, with deep tissue, with the most basic form of endurance there is, the human kind. The kind that just keeps going because there is no alternative.
I never really walk away from that crash. It rides with me, every day, like a ghost in my slipstream. I know I sound angry. I am. You do not get hit at fifty five and come back as a well adjusted optimist. Maybe that is why I keep speaking up. Not because I think I am noble. Not because I am looking for applause. But because I know exactly what silence costs. I know what it is to be treated as collateral damage on a sunny California afternoon. I know what it is to still be alive when, by all rights, you should not be.
That kind of knowledge changes you. It teaches you that the road, like life, does not care if you are careful or deserving. It just keeps moving. You can lie down and let it roll over you. Or you can get up, drag your scars along with you, and build something out of them.
That is why I started Ride Redding. Why I started Ride Broomfield. Because when you have fallen out of the trees and slammed back into Earth, you owe the world more than silence.