I also rode a lot while I was there. From my house to the nearest train station was about half an hour whether I rode my bicycle or took the bus, and the bicycle had the advantage that I controlled the schedule and didn’t have to pay anything. It worked out pretty well for me–my Japanese lesson was just opposite that train station, and enforcing a minimum of two hours of riding a week helped counterbalance my dietary habits and keep me fit.

However, things didn’t always work out perfectly. It was early November, and I had been making the same bicycle commute twice a week for months now. I had things pretty well figured out, and it was my habit at the time to ride for long stretches without touching the handlebars. It was pointless, but it helped keep me amused. That day, as I was riding along a relatively barren stretch of road with rice fields to each side, I accidentally swerved just a little, but it sent my front tire into the little unpaved area surrounding an ornamental tree. That, in turn, completely upset my equilibrium, and I couldn’t recover in time.

All in all, it was a rather spectacular wipeout. I was lunging forward to get positive control of the handlebars before the front wheel went into the depression, but the slight jump of the handles as they twisted when the wheel went in was enough to cause me to miss on the first attempt. It was kind of interesting that gyroscopic forces helped me stay upright for about 20 more feet before my oscillations passed a critical point and the front wheel snapped perpendicular to the direction of travel. I went over the handlebars and took most of the force of landing with my hands and elbows. My bicycle skidded to a stop next to me, paused a second with wheels still spinning, then gently fell over the edge of the road into the rice paddy a meter below.

I wasn’t much interested in moving for a while there, but it wasn’t too long before I tried to move even if only to find out which parts still worked. The interesting thing about trauma like a spill from a bicycle is that there is initially very little pain; you have to determine experimentally the extent of the damage. I was lucky; aside from some bruising and some missing skin on my hands and arms, I was uninjured.

Until I started trying to find out, though, I was terrified: if I had broken a limb, I would have been in big trouble. It went far beyond not having health insurance at the time: I was alone in a foreign country, without anyone who knew exactly where I was, and I was injured. If I had a broken arm, I would have had a rough time figuring out the hospital system, but things would be pretty much ok. Much scarier was the possibility that I had a broken leg. The road I was on had moderate vehicular traffic, but almost no pedestrians; any serious injury could have been very difficult to recover from. My only way out, even with such minor injuries as I actually had, was to limp home and patch myself up. The prospect of not having that option was horrifying. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that except resolve to fall less often when riding.

In the meantime, I actually had to deal with patching myself up. It’s a simple process, normally: buy some antibiotic cream and some bandaids, and apply as necessary. The only difficulty was that I owned none of those things, my dictionary didn’t even include the word ‘antibiotic’, and the one reliable thing about shopping in a nation whose language you aren’t fluent in is that you are highly likely to buy the wrong thing the first time or two you try. In this case, I was a lot less willing to tolerate amusing mistakes of that sort than I normally was. In the end, I just went to the pharmacy–it was the store with the logo which looked exactly like the powerup that lets Mario shoot fireballs–pointed at my injuries, and asked for help. It worked; they figured out almost immediately what I was looking for.

There is really nothing at all like the experience of standing at your kitchen sink, extracting gravel and trimming off dead skin from your hands, and realizing with absolute certainty that this was about the best possible outcome. Really, all I lost from that accident was the cost of one Japanese lesson that I had to skip and some hit points. It seems almost silly, remembering how shaken I was by the incident, but all I could think about at the time was how very far away from everybody I was. I was well enough to go to work that afternoon, but had I fallen just a bit harder or tangled a bit more awkwardly, I might have spent that time lying on the side of the road trying to attract someone’s attention. There’s normally a pretty wide spacing between an inconvenience and a catastrophe, but that day it felt like the two were nearly touching, and that I had escaped as well off as I had through sheer luck.

Actually, there was a hidden benefit to the whole episode: the kids absolutely loved the new vocabulary that day; Beginners learned words like ‘band-aid’ and ‘injury’ and ‘ouch!’; older ones get to tell stories about one time when they hurt themselves. If there’s one thing I know about teaching English to small children, it’s that you have to capitalize on absolutely everything that engages their attention. Somehow, making a game out of things helped with the pain a bit, too.