Man, that kid was flying.
When I was a kid myself, I used to have these little fantasies involving me as a cop or soldier fighting the bad guys. I’d even entertain my own demise, sometimes as a result of a huge gunfight with a dozen robbers where I would single-handedly bring them to heel with my revolver that never seemed to run out of bullets despite it being a six-shooter and the math of the situation not looking good. And yes, sometimes bad stuff happens, even in the imagination of a child. One of those bad guys would get a lucky shot in, it would kill me, and I’d immediately go into visuals of my state funeral with throngs of weeping citizens lining the street on both side, not a dry eye anywhere. And all of this before my mom called me in for lunch.
So, like any kid, I visualized myself as a hero, and in this particular case a dead one, with all society grinding to a halt at the loss. Man, I still get teary-eyed just thinking about it.
What I never envisioned was me being dead in a heap in the ditch just outside the fence of Queen Elizabeth Public School here in Renfrew, rather unceremoniously smoked after a fearful collision between myself and some jerk on an e-scooter. And collision might be a bit off the mark, because I was standing still and Scooter Boy was doing maybe 50-60 km/hour. A pretty one-sided collision, but there it is.
I walk everyday or most everyday. I don’t wear earbuds or headphones while I walk, nor do I read a magazine or catch up on the Toronto Star. I like to keep my wits about me because I’m out there to experience life on the ground while I walk, meeting people, saying hello, watching police vehicles screaming by with lights and sirens blazing. There’s no podcast or musical artist I want to listen to enough that I’d risk losing these basic, simple experiences.
Plus I’m not cool enough for earplugs.
I also prefer to be vigilant, as my trust in my fellow beings doing the right or responsible thing has eroded dangerously. And when it comes to my own life and limb, I want to not just notice traffic but to be wary of it.
As I walk I constantly check behind me for bikes, disability scooters, and those intimidating women who can power through town with their baby strollers and still moving far faster than I do, which is no small feat, because I can still motor.
In front of Queen Elizabeth, the sight-lines are open and long, a good kilometre in one direction and almost as far in the other. Nobody is going to be sneaking up on me unawares unless they drop out of the sky, like an eagle, and I like to think I have that covered too.
There I was late last week when I broke a cardinal rule of mine, that being the act of responding to a text.
I don’t walk or drive or do much of anything with my eyes down as I need those eyes to be looking front and back, up and around, always judging, always assessing. It’s the closest thing I have to radar, and yet I broke my own rule .
A text came in. For whatever reason, I interacted with it, and to do this I felt I had to stop, albeit I did step on to the grass at the sidewalk’s edge. I looked back towards the Beer Store and ahead to Confusion Corner and saw nothing threatening, in fact I saw nothing at all.
I started texting back, completed the text, and was in the act of returning my phone to its holster when I saw this rush of presence all of a sudden on top of me.
I mean it was that fast.
Before I could appreciate what was going on, it was over, that hurtling mass of whatever past me now, just like that, blasting along the sidewalk at the speed of motor vehicle traffic.
One false move, one step into that sidewalk space at the wrong time, and it would be ditch duty over at Queen E. There is absolutely no way a collision of that sort would end any better than death, and if not death, life-altering injury. The guy on the scooter would have been okay because those idiots are too stupid to get hurt, since God looks out for kids, drunks, and fools, and none of those applied to me. Well, maybe one. Okay fine, maybe two. But that kid might have had all three going for him.
A silent and catastrophic death at the hands of some math-skipping doofus on a mission to get to McDonald’s on his lunch hour. I wonder if he went through the drive-thru to save even more time. Maybe he needed to get back to school for a smoke before he skipped classes for the afternoon to play the role of Electric Man about town.
On his scooter.
I’d tell you that these e-scooters are fast, but they’re not. What they are is FAAAAST, and even more threatening, absolutely silent as well. You can’t even see your own death coming at you, it’s on you so quick. You can’t put them on the road and you can’t put them on a sidewalk, so where the hell do we put vehicles like this? The sidewalk I was on has some bicycle traffic, but nothing approaching the rate of speed of this yahoo.
I swear to God, I checked both directions before I stopped. My time on-text was maybe 10 seconds. Yet he was on me like that.
I can’t describe it any better, he was on me like that. One second not appearing on radar, and the next flashing by at an extraordinary speed for a sidewalk. The snap of a finger is all it took for him to come out of the extreme range of my sightline and close on me, again in absolute silence.
I don’t want to come across as just another old guy complaining about everything, so I won’t. I’d rather come across as an old guy complaining about this, because now I’m convinced that these bloody things represent an existential threat to others when in the hands of guys like this one. I didn’t even get a look at him he was past me so fast, with his hair flying behind him being my only memory.
After a close call like that I’ll be on the lookout more actively.
If I were to encounter him again, the temptation to clothesline the little prick as he whizzed by would come to mind, although doing that would likely have me checking out the specials in the prison cafeteria.
What to do with these things?
If one of these things can catch me totally by surprise, it makes me worry about all those other sidewalk travellers out there, particularly the elderly ones, younger ones, and ones all plugged into their ear pods.
Because one false move and you’ll find yourself dead in a ditch with school custodians scrambling to clean up the mess before morning recess.
Nothing like how I imagined it as a kid.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 